I rub any excess cream onto my hands and then onto a towel, chiding myself that I shouldn’t use the towel, but instead wash the cream off my hands, but that would mean trespassing through the halls, treading on old floorboards to the bathroom and running the water through the old pipes that make noise, even at the faucets, merely turning them, no matter how studied my effort, and waking the two women near me on the floor. Across the floor, at the opposite end, there are two more people, a man and a woman, who sleep separately, but who also may not, and whom I never see in the house, and I don’t believe I wake them. I carefully wipe off most of the cream onto a towel, which I’m not required to launder, since I’m not responsible for washing my sheets and towels while I’m here, but I also rub off the cream carefully, because I don’t want to ruin the pages of the books I’m reading and because I dislike the feeling of grease on my face and body. The cream might prevent my skin from breathing, and I could feel suffocated, but I try to do what I’m told is good for me, though often it is contradictory.
I don’t want to think about the two young women or the Polish woman, whom I hardly know, but who has made as strong an impression upon me as people I know better and see more. The Polish woman plays a part in my life, unimportant to anyone but me, one of many unacknowledged relationships of which I never speak, since the relationship between the person who gives you a facial and yourself is assumed to be insignificant and would not become an account I would offer people, even close friends, who have busy lives. Everyone has a busy life, and generally I don’t want to make others listen to me. People don’t usually want to listen, and often only wait for their opportunity to speak, generally about themselves, and most don’t know how to listen, especially about matters that to them are insignificant and about which they will silently protest, Why did he or she mention something of no interest to me. To me, the importance of the Polish woman is clear. No one else applies cream to my face or tells me how sensitive my skin is, no one else regularly admonishes me and appears to worry about my skin, and, when I am with the Polish woman, I experience feelings that are remarkably different from feelings I have with anyone else. I feel entirely relaxed and comforted, and have thoughts I don’t often have elsewhere, like thinking that she, a Polish woman, is there to serve me, though she is unhappy, and her unhappiness has to be masked in order to serve me properly. She tends to my skin and me, a woman of Jewish origin, a faith in which I have no faith and feel no spiritual kinship, but into which I was born, and tells me how sensitive my skin is, when not many years ago Polish people, possibly her parents or grandparents, might have made skin like mine into lampshades, and it is the only time I ever have that particular, almost wry thought, which occurs fleetingly in the cramped, dingy salon.
I entertain that abhorrent and impermissible idea wholly for myself, amusing myself with its horror, as she goes about her work. She cares for my skin, having different thoughts from those required by the job she is doing, her hands performing routine actions which leave her mind free, and she may not want anyone, especially her clients, to know what she is thinking, maybe about the glowering man waiting outside this small room for her, wanting to date and fuck her, or she may be reliving carnal scenes in which she dominates the strong man, sits astride him, her well-tended skin glistening with sweat, or she may be concocting a plan for her future, since people often desire a future different from their present, which may be painful or lackluster. It’s better not to complain in many situations, servants know this, and everyone is sometimes a servant, even the very wealthy can become servants, insecure in love and fearful of rejection. Louis-Ferdinand Celine said that ten percent of galley slaves were volunteers, because people want masters, since existence is painful, though no one wants to die, or very few want to die, and it’s often better not to say anything at all. I don’t remember mentioning my dread and anxiety of the gray camp and bunk to my counselors, though I might have after lunch, when I tried but couldn’t nap on the rough brown woolen blanket, which irritated my skin, desperately waiting for the amnesia of sleep, sorrowfully longing for mail from my mother, who didn’t write, because she expected letters from me first. I had learned to write but had no familiarity with the protocols of correspondence and didn’t answer her initial letter, and I didn’t think about it, or I can’t remember what I thought, since I didn’t know what to think, and didn’t know the dangers of unawareness. But when I was asked to steal the bowling pin of the enemy team on the last day of Color War by the head counselor of the team to which I was assigned and which, like my family, religion, and sex I didn’t choose, having heard that anyone who is captured in enemy territory will be thrown into jail, I dropped to the ground and wailed, No, please, I don’t want to go to jail, please don’t make me, please. The head counselor suddenly, and only then, comprehended my chronic, active distress and said, to quiet me, that she’d ask my cousin, the one I haven’t seen since my favorite uncle died, to do it. Soon my cousin sneaked across enemy territory, risking capture and jail, and succeeded, making her the hero and me the coward. But her cowardly, brutal older brother didn’t go into the textile business, as mine didn’t, and I didn’t, though I often wish I had, because I would like to be around fabrics, examine patterns, and study threads rather than be around many other things, in an endeavor at which my uncle and father were successes, then they weren’t, and which compounded my father’s sense of innate failure and made it nearly perfect. I can remember my uncle trying to cheer him up, urging him to accompany him on vacations, to lose himself far away from the bolts of beautiful fabrics of their own design that increasingly lay unsold on the deep shelves in their stockroom. The stockboy, Junior, whose skin was a deep brown, who was muscular and short, shorter than my father—my father often rested his arm around Junior’s shoulders—had taken the bolts off the truck, unpacked and set them on the long, deep shelves in the stockroom, and when potential customers visited, when business was good, a phrase I heard often, a few words belying their heft—business is good—Junior stalwartly carried the bolts to the showroom, and my father would sometimes slap him on the back and joke with him, but I don’t know where Junior went after the business failed. I remember him, indistinctly and distinctly, especially that he was called a stockboy, had an impressively compact body, a round, brown face, a seemingly cheerful demeanor, and wore colorful shirts, maybe of my father’s material, when he was not wearing a T-shirt, denim jeans, or some other uniform for manual labor. I wondered what he thought of my father, his boss, when I was young, but I never asked, and then he disappeared, so I suspected my father and uncle of giving him away, like our cat and dog, but instead my father said, We had to let Junior go, because business is bad.
In Tutankhamen’s tomb, there was a linen shirt, which is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I lived briefly during a period when I was also among strangers, though some of them became friends, lovers, or enemies, but I don’t know what happened to most of them. I had no cat in London, but in Amsterdam, where I stayed longer, I found a stray, and then found homes for her and her sole surviving kitten when I left for the place I call home. The earliest textiles had pictures of animals on them; there are images of animals being tamed on Byzantine silks of the 6th or 7th century, and they are not sentimental, though today animals on clothes would be considered sentimental, any animal on a shirt, cup or postcard is in some way sentimental, though everyone loves their animals and their farts. If I were to tell the story of my dog, how she was adopted from a shelter when she was pregnant, how my father disliked her—my mother demanded we keep her anyway—how he came to love her, because of a special feat she performed, how we found homes for every one of her puppies, if my story included the dog’s many exceptional acts, or a description of her tail twirling in gleeful circles as she ran toward me on the grass, it might seem a sentimental story. But I feel worse about the fate of my dog than about anything else in my life over which I had some control, however puny, since most of the significant
things in life can’t be controlled, and about them I had no choice, though in retelling them, I could also be accused of sentimentality, and I expect such accusations. Still, I never wear clothes that have pictures of animals on them.
Altobasseo was a special, luxurious velvet, made by the Genoese, who also developed a way of crimping the threads of the pile, and used gold thread, too. Velvet has varying heights of pile and touching it is pleasurable, though I haven’t worn it with much pleasure since I was a child, when a black velvet dress and jacket, with white lace trim at the neck and sleeves, felt urgent to buy and wear. I was aware, then, that the design of the dress was old-fashioned, but I wanted it anyway, since it might announce to my circumscribed world that I wasn’t of it but another one, which others couldn’t inhabit or touch. Since then, I have kept small pieces of doth cut from cotton T-shirts and other favorite clothes I wore as a child that shredded from wear and tear and nearly fell off me, evidencing the demise of their function, but which I never wanted to stop wearing or throw away. Similarly, I regretted losing a tan, when I didn’t worry about the damage the sun could do, cancer, aging, or have much concern about my skin, except for the many heat rashes and irritations that flared from being clothed in rough wool sweaters or leggings during the winter. The redness and the stickiness caused by one moist inner thigh clinging to its twin was awful, and I don’t now know why this torture, which is how I experienced it, continued day after cold day, and why I was unable to convince my mother of my discomfort, when its effect, the unsightly rashes, should have been apparent to her naked eye.
WHEN I AWAKEN, I ANTICIPATE, often with foreboding, the others at breakfast, like the demanding man, in front of whom I might say the wrong thing, declaim vociferously, and for no reason expose a passion I don’t necessarily feel but which is born in opposition to the presence or even the undeniable fact of the existence of someone like the demanding man, who calls forth in me adamant, unwanted feelings, or I might also let out a malodorous fart. If something slid off my tongue or from my body that shouldn’t have, which I felt I had to say or about which it appeared I had no choice, especially when I have just awakened—I once heard that the French don’t prosecute people who commit crimes of passion twenty minutes after waking—I would be embarrassed, so I malinger in bed, listening to the radio, which can be turned on and off. I often turn it on and off, simply because shutting off those voices, disposing of the news and others’ incessant opinions, is pleasant. On occasion, I have missed breakfast, malingering maliciously, turning on and off the radio many times, but breakfast is regularly the best meal of the day, and if I remain in bed, if I haven’t merely overslept, I ruminate anxiously about how I will pass the time until lunch and whether I will become hungry and regret my decision. Time passes, quickly or slowly, but always independently of me, while I turn over and over in bed, caught in my sheets, my pillow a triumph of regrets, as I fret about avoiding people, missing breakfast, and the consequent long, hungry aftermath until lunch. I may also be checked up on. But I like breakfast best and can also feel touched by the inevitable presence of other people who, like me, have traversed a night of deep sleep, wakefulness, ecstatic or conflicted dreams.
I may be the cause of waking some of them, but no one says anything, to me, at least, though lately I learned, to my piquant chagrin, that a man who was here briefly, whose face I can’t remember, whom I never again thought about and who in a sense didn’t exist for me, took exception to my telling him that his early morning showers woke me, which surprised me, since I was, then, entirely unaware that my complaining, with a dull annoyance, probably, that his showering at 6:30 a.m. in the bathroom next to which I slept, the old pipes rattling like thunder, was the cause of his abrupt departure.
Sometimes in the morning the cook is in a talkative mood, and her smile and her moderately stained teeth both disquiet and cheer me, so I might stay awhile in her kitchen, its odors reminiscent of other times, many of which were probably unhappy, but whose smells are still redolent, the ordinary aromas saturate remote or vivid events bittersweetly. I wait for her to describe her life, but she is usually circumspect, having worked many years for other people, and probably she knows it’s often better not to say anything, especially statements that admit to or betray dissatisfaction, that risk exposing her to censure, ridicule, or disrepute, especially comments that reek of bitterness, like a fart, though some might anyway nurse their foulness and be profligate with their bitter complaints. But an enemy’s bitterness is never foul, an enemy’s complaints are revelatory. Inadvertently, I’ve marched into enemy territory, unprotected on a street, encountering persons I hate who hate me, but I fought the instinct to run into a doorway or collapse onto the sidewalk, to pretend I was faint or about to vomit, and kept walking, as if I were fearless, which I’m not. Once, I strode past two treacherous dissemblers and waved, pretending there wasn’t a great, mysterious enmity—enduring hatred runs like water, elusive in its origins, as Chekhov shows, more mysterious than its opposite, since in love we love ourselves, while a hater’s chiasmatic relationship to the despised one and to herself or himself is not precisely self-hatred and more difficult to plumb. Between the dissemblers and myself, there grew a steep, eternal divide, which has a kind of magnificence, specifically, its venerability, and which, if we could have, if it were appropriate, if we lived in a different place among different people, we might fight about, physically, or go to war to settle, though it wouldn’t ever be settled. Sometimes there is nothing to do other than resist or fight, but some people are locked inside their own wreckage and can’t do either. Sometimes an individual must fight or flee, if able and not already irrevocably ruined or paralyzed by a past that can’t be recovered, because there is no other possibility to survive than to fight, in some way, for what’s needed or wanted, though some people would never fight or don’t ever feel personally threatened, but when they do, when an ominous threat occurs, they might take up arms in some sense. And in some, these fears or emotions might be considered skin deep, for which they could find treatment. But skin lets us know that a surface often isn’t superficial. Dermatologic diseases recognize no national or hemispheric boundaries, doctors confront a global dermatology, since an exotic disease might appear in the Congo and Los Angeles. There are resurgences, of syphilis, for one, and a peculiar diagnostic sign of unilateral congenital syphilis—called Higoumenakis’ sign, discovered by its eponymous Greek doctor—is a raised or protruding collarbone. Serologic tests for syphilis can reveal an individual’s immunologic condition, but not whether he or she is currently infected. Other conditions that indicate congenital syphilis are the saddle nose and Hutchinson’s teeth, or peg-shaped upper incisors that are centrally notched. These teeth never occur outside of congenital syphilis. It was a Dr. Hutchinson who also noted opacities of the cornea and eighth nerve deafness that, together with the teeth, form the diagnostic Hutchinson triad. Less dramatic skin eruptions can become violently infected—around a cuticle, say, but there is no stigma attached to it, unless it goes untreated. A bad tooth, untreated, its infection appearing first as an inflamed gum, might descend farther under the gum into the jaw and ultimately infect the brain and cause death. Many people died of tooth decay before the 20th century particularly and still do. Skin is not what it appears to an untrained eye, and for this I appreciate my dermatologist, who carries within him, after much training and research, an ability to read texts I can’t. Skin is a parchment for the body. He can spot something inimical to me when I can’t and what appears benign may also be harmless for a time, but then a small spot on the cheek can grow into a murderous melanoma.
The intransigent enemy is often a friend who wordlessly turns, embroidering insult upon insult and calumny upon calumny within himself or herself, while the other is unaware of these rank occurrences, and so the former, though still-present friend, an incipient enemy, acts against the unknowing one, cannily, all the while pretending to friendship but causing damage and havoc, and only in retrospect, w
hich is dumb wisdom, does the friend realize the existence of an enemy, whose enmity lasts a lifetime but which has come about slowly and stealthily in the darkly benign nights of supposed friendship. I have had several episodes in which I wandered, without presence of mind, into enemy territory, imagining I was among friends, and sometimes it was I who may have provoked or caused the rift, without knowing I did, and sometimes whoever I am or was was not the cause of the hatred, since its origin belonged within the friend, to whom I, the other, am nothing more than a suitable object. One such friend, someone I liked but didn’t know long, to whom I was indifferent for a period of time, unaware of her growing anguish in a time of my own trouble, disappeared, not only from my view but from others’, and when I searched for her, but could not locate her, but then finally did, she would have nothing to do with me. I expect I am an enemy of hers now, while she will always be someone I like whom I may have hurt inadvertently, and those are the saddest enemies to have. Although, since I didn’t know her well, she may be a shallow, thick-skinned, insensitive character, an opportunist or someone so damaged as to be incapable of love and compassion. The saddest enemy is her kind, and I don’t want to dwell on it, so I never mention her, because for one thing she was never vital to my life, and also it’s usually better not to say anything, especially about subjects plagued by illegibility.
American Genius Page 5