Some tragic cases relate their stories with verve, though their accounts are no less sad than others’ boring recitations, but they are compellingly told, and often these people draw others to them, no matter what story they tell. There are terrible stories set, especially, in hospitals and jails, and I realize it is inevitable that one day, for one illness or another before I die, a hospital will claim me, but I’ve never done time in jail, and I don’t want to, ever. According to Contesa, whose occupation was social work and who initiated and ran the Center for Urban Peasantry, which endeared her to me further, but whose preoccupation is Franz Kafka, his writing, his loves, particularly Felice Bauer, Jean Genet, whom, it turned out, Gardner—the Count—had met in Paris, claimed he didn’t care about Kafka’s writing, because it was infused with the terror of going to jail, a middle-class person’s fear of public shame and humiliation, and because he, Genet, had been to jail and didn’t fear it, Kafka’s writing didn’t interest him at all. I thought, at first, since cleverness resides in glossy surfaces over which even thoughtful characters glide like skaters, that Genet’s was a reasonable, even apt observation, but with more attention I decided that Genet’s imaginative powers were as limited by his having been to jail, which allowed him assumptions about Kafka, as Kafka’s fear of it, so if I’m not interested in people who have gone to jail, I’m not interested in Genet’s writing.
Some of the acts I’ve committed have been illegal. When I was five, I stole candy inadvertently from the candy store several blocks from my house, on a main road, in the suburb where I grew up, because its sign said, Take One, and later I stole lipstick from the town five and dime, and then shoplifted clothes from department stores, packing a skirt into the voluminous shoulder of a ratty fur coat, and purchased small amounts of cocaine, all relatively mild infractions of the law. Other people, who have scant education, less economic or skin privilege, might have been arrested, convicted, and sent upstate for the same relatively harmless but illegal acts, and other people have records against them that are public, so that anyone can find out what these people have done wrong, and while I have no record of crimes against property or person, nothing that would show up on police blotters or computers, nothing that I am aware of, or that might hurt me, though I am not aware of everything that might hurt me, I have committed illegal acts that have gone undetected, but I know what I have done, and I know what was wrong and illegal. Legally, I am sane.
Contesa asserts that, without desiring it and unacknowledged to Kafka or maybe in unconscious enjoyment of his cruel but limited power, he tested Felice Bauer, as he did himself—she was twice his fiancée—and dangled her from a rope of ambivalence until the possibility for a marriage he thought he should have, because she was the woman he should have loved but couldn’t, snapped, but then, Contesa also contends, he wasn’t equipped for a middle-class life, not capable of it, or of marriage, since he wasn’t inclined to its petty rigors, and he wasn’t physically well. I wondered if Contesa were talking about the Count, or herself, since, as she put it, she’d fled for her life from her upper-middle-class Negro family of doctors and lawyers, in Mount Vernon, New York, one of whose ancestors had received his freedom early, making his fortune farming in New Hampshire, because the black bourgeoisie was as boring as the white, and, after being forced to debut in a cotillion, she sailed to Paris, where she met the Count, and where, she said, we Negroes were appreciated, Josephine Baker, le hot jazz, it was a philonegro thing, she declared, amused by her neologism. She’d sooner take that over its American version, negrophobia. She added, with irony, that Kafka dangled Felice from his elegant hands, and why wouldn’t he, she was free to object and leave him, and the Count and she nodded, barely concealing their mutual satisfaction, and I didn’t contest her, though I believe that about most things we usually don’t have a choice, yet in love there seems to be some liberty, but that may be a very necessary illusion.
Like Kafka, the Count, and Contesa, if the analogy is sensible, many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated but they struggle on, the disconsolate woman who has psoriasis and is anorexic, a female radio announcer and musician with chronic fatigue syndrome, the young married man, who pretends nothing afflicts him, the sodden, demanding man who consumes a fifth of vodka every night and is an irritant to my skin, like scratchy fabric, and others. Each has a story and a sphere of complaints, with some hope of improvement, each soldiers on, which is how my father would put it, they keep going, right or wrong in their thinking, my father said many people had wrong thinking, and books of philosophy lay resolutely on his bedside night table, but then he’d shake his head, since wrongness, his own especially, was sad to contemplate. I blush furiously when I have done something wrong and been discovered, or might have been observed in the act of doing wrong, exposing me to threat, derision, or disgust. Drinking wine flushes my skin, I pinken like a schoolgirl, some people’s necks engorge with blood when they drink alcohol, a common, easily obtainable psychoactive drug; but I have not turned red, when alone, because of a thought I have had that might be incorrect or indecent, lying on the bed, reading, although that may not be the case since I can’t see myself. Before others, I have colored, flushed, reddened, just as people darker than myself, so-called black people, those whose epidermis and dermis contain more melanin than that of Caucasians or Asians, have burnished with embarrassment, their cheeks have turned, in my presence, a bluish purple, their skin intensifying in color, the way a bright red rose turns purple when it dries, or when shocked or embarrassed, their skin has lost color, become pale or ashen, graying subtly from fright or shock. I have also blanched, just before I fainted, color draining from my cheeks, I’ve been told. My skin has a yellow cast. When a colorist analyzes it, in order that she, usually, might sell me products to keep it moist and free of wrinkles, whose presence connotes worry and age, though once or twice a man has sold me lipstick, enthusiastically, and also tinted moisturizer at a store dedicated to cosmetics that are for sensitive skin and people and uses only organic materials, she or he tells me that my complexion has a yellowish tone, or sometimes olive, which isn’t apparent except when I have walked about without sun block, which would dishearten my dermatologist, or because I haven’t slept well, but often I do, often I sleep too long.
Without a record, which enforces the reality that I haven’t done anything very wrong, which is incorrect, I can appear blameless. Sensitive people need to feel blameless. To me, it’s worse to have performed harsh acts than minor illegal ones, and it is for those I feel guilty, not infractions of the law that are nowhere indicated or recorded but the improprieties and everyday cruelties of which I am the agent. These ruffle any contentment or peace I might seek or even deserve, though no one deserves anything, good or bad. Leslie Van Houten’s acts were illegal, violent, vicious, colloquially heartless, incomprehensible, except that she followed a charismatic leader, people need leaders and are easily led, or enjoy being led, people want leaders, political and spiritual ones, like a Charlie Manson, the way she did, though she was less committed to him than the other girls who were convicted with her. People enjoy devotion to a cause, which makes life seem worthwhile, and for her devotion to Manson’s cause, to helter skelter, to the manufacture of a race war that, Manson declared, would proclaim the dark-skinned race victorious, Leslie was imprisoned in California in a women’s facility, where she might remain all her life, or until she is very old and will not, upon leaving that institution, have much life ahead of her, or even much of a life to lead, since having been jailed for the great majority of her years, she knows hardly any other life than it, except for the six months that she was on parole in 1977. Leslie might never be forgiven, except by a few, nuns and priests, for instance, who are hell-bent on forgiveness, but not for baby killers, as they prefer to call doctors who perform abortions, and maybe even by the victim’s family. She stabbed Mrs. Rosemary LaBianca maybe nineteen of the forty-one times she was stabbed, though Leslie believes she st
abbed Mrs. LaBianca only after she died. The coroners can tell which wounds come after death, because the skin doesn’t pinken as much, since, after death, less or no blood rushes to the wound. The LaBianca family might forgive her someday, but having been a member of Charles Manson’s family, into which Leslie wasn’t born, about which membership she had a choice, it is unlikely most people who still remember those events will forgive her, though 1969 is many years ago. When she was nineteen, she wrote her parents that she would be let out of prison in seven years. Leslie Van Houten will most likely never be completely or generally forgiven or even released from jail, or let out only when she is very old, and every day she must suffer the consequences of vicious acts she committed when she was nineteen.
I’m guilty of infractions of the law as well as bad or misguided acts, but I don’t want people to know I am guilty, of what infractions of the law, or in what way I may have hurt others, since what I do with my secrets, my past, or what I apply to my skin or where I place my desk in my apartment or what couch or chair I have or what kind of cat sleeps on my bed is no one’s business. Most people wouldn’t want to listen, most people want to talk, everyone’s busy, though my young cat is not busy, he’s never busy in the way that people vacuously insist they are busy. My cat likes to sleep on my favorite chair, he sleeps a lot of the time, probably he is bored, and he digs his claws into it, ruining the chair I’m partial to, because he is a little wild, not affectionate and may never be, but if no one enters my apartment, I won’t have to worry about his becoming vicious, badly clawing a friend, who might view my cat and me in a chilling light and then exhort me to have my cat killed. In order not to lose the friend, to appease the friend, I might have to kill my beautiful, slightly wild cat, but I won’t want to, and I will begrudge the friend this act, because I love my cat, probably more than the friend who’d ask me to have him killed, and while I would like my young cat to sit on my lap as I read the books whose pages I worry about dirtying with face cream and other grease, like chocolate, which I occasionally eat when I read, because it helps me sleep, when finally I decide it is time to fall asleep, I can accept for the time being that he is still a young cat who is not ready to be affectionate or to stop clawing the chair, which I bought to sit on and read, but do not. I love my cat so much I want another, one who would lie contentedly on my lap when I sit in my favorite chair or lie on the bed, reading, though I know it’s better for the disposition of the spine to sit in a chair with lower back support when reading.
WHEN THE DEMANDING MAN CONCLUDED the recitation of his dream, in which he reported coming under attack from a few characters who might now be at the table, he stared haughtily and aggressively at the relative newcomer—the tall balding man—who responded to the obvious insult. Provoked, he threw down his napkin and rose quickly from the table. At this moment the tall balding man’s stature was nearly magnificent, though generally he slumped. Across the room, the disconsolate woman whose psoriasis had again flared, but fortunately not on her face, also rose. Oddly, she was in her pajamas, and they had small blue flowers on them, a cotton flannel, and, now standing, her inappropriate costume was apprehended by all. The two signaled a message that none of us was supposed to receive, but by their secretiveness its romantic content was revealed, and the other disconsolate woman, who was lactose intolerant and had asthma, glanced at her half-eaten scrambled eggs, probably not to acknowledge the palpable intrigue of which we were all informed and that thrust itself upon her, too, in the cozy dining room, where we residents were now drawn into a burgeoning affair. They were involved, a term which carries little of the resonance of love affair or the attenuated drama implied in a relationship, so it’s a word used too easily, though involvements don’t register neutrally to those involved, even when most will be temporary and insignificant, but even so I shy away here from involvements with others, though the tarot card reader told me that against my will I’d be taken into one—of which kind he couldn’t prophesize—and from which I might not easily be disengaged.
Intrigue at breakfast is a diversion, and I brightened at this unexpected occurrence, whose effect relegated my own adventures and misalliances, to a temporary amnesia. “How we need the comedy of other people,” I heard Contesa, whose dark glasses sat on top of her head, say to herself, or maybe to the demanding man, who anyway heaved a fat sigh, as if everything that he’d been prey to or a captive of had escaped. It was his dream. He was aggrieved, since the older woman should have been, but wasn’t, tending scrupulously to him as she sometimes did, the way his mother did, who hovered over him, he often asserted, doing everything for him, everything, and then he’d throw his arms out to take in the big world around him. Now, once more the demanding man realized he had lost a potential love partner, this one spirited off by a tall balding, slump-shouldered man, who, the demanding one must have acknowledged, in a flash of terrible knowledge, he now hated resolutely. But he was helpless, affixed to his chair like a crab on its back, a burden to anyone nearby, because his growing despair was sharp and bitter, he could probably taste it, though I hated to imagine his tongue coated with bitterness over the brown slime of nicotine and sour vodka. Contesa leaned over to me and quoted Langston Hughes, who wrote in a letter to Carl Van Vechten of “the weariness of the world moving always in the same circle.” Here people talk about being in or out of certain circles.
Tension rifled the dining room, while the long-legged male kitchen helper collected our dirty plates, as the demanding man realized his surroundings, rudely shaken awake, when he saw what occurred when the tall man had risen; also that Contesa was again ignoring his many silent entreaties for counsel and sympathy, and that across the room a moderately attractive woman was being courted and responding to another man, and that she was already involved with the other, when he hadn’t even guessed at their mutual interest, but he was always loved by his mother. His oily skin darkened, further stained by the stress of feeling, acutely, the poignant aggravation of being unchosen, his jacketed eyes became crevasses for seeing. He was blind, not literally sightless, as an actual sightless man here once exhorted was the correct language, his guide dog by his side, his bravado a daily comfort and whip to me, but like him the demanding man never saw what was in front of him, as his sense of himself demanded another picture or scene, one in alignment with the elevated treatment and position his mother had given him the right to expect, so the demanding man reminded me not only of the sightless man with the seeing-eye dog he treated better than a lover, but another who was faraway, out of sight for years, dead to me though not literally dead, with whom I had sat, on other occasions, and to whose stories I was attuned as to a radio whose frequency I alone heard. He had been severely nearsighted, with a tendency to squint even when it wasn’t sunny, an effect or affectation that painted his face with the gravity and concentration it otherwise lacked, since he was perennially, genetically boyish, even with gray skin that erupted in rosy florets and brown, puffy circles under his jet-black eyes. He needed to be regarded as serious, he taught 19th-century European history, and he wanted to have been born at an earlier time—the Enlightenment—because he believed he knew how people thought and felt then, a mistaken notion much loved by people who can’t stomach their present and whose fantasies of the past won’t indict them, never make them accountable, or guilty. He was phlegmatic, relatively thick-skinned but he bruised easily, since he suffered from a blood deficiency, and often there were purple welts on his legs and arms, which, though I knew he was susceptible to bruising, shocked me, since violence appeared to have been done to his body. In some ways he longed to be physically hurt or in pain, since he never felt alive, a feeling I understood when I listened to him. Other things, like his sly treacheries and useless manipulations, I didn’t perceive. The demanding man lacks perceptiveness, for he expects and wants our attention, but paradoxically, fearing he won’t get it, he installs his computer on the breakfast table, in front of his plate, partially obscuring his face as he sends and receive
s messages or watches news on it. All the while he is waiting and hoping for attention from us, who, seeing him behind his computer, are even less likely to show it; but still he waits for the moment when he might narrate the events of his beleaguered life.
I HOPE, AFTER BREAKFAST, TO leave the dining room quickly, even invisibly, regularly planning my getaway, deliberating when is the right time, though the right time for me isn’t for another resident, and sometimes I have become invisible, on occasions when it appeared risky to be present, for a number of reasons, not only because of the arrival of police, although that has occurred, the police have arrived and I have vanished, brushing past them as if I were a spirit, but I don’t yet have a criminal record. I leave fast especially if there is peace and contentment, when nothing aberrant has happened, believing superstitiously that malingering might provoke the furies, or I leave fast if the conversation has upset or altered my mood, affected my humor, especially in a direction I didn’t want it changed, though I anticipate alteration around people, which is why I malinger in bed, switching on and off the radio, not sanguine about being subjected to what is uncontrollable, which may be the reason some claim the table’s attention and don’t allow others to speak, since any control might protect them. If in a discussion about history or politics, the residents parrot TV and radio commentators, or an argument ensues that is older than its speakers and as intransigent, I’m disheartened or discouraged, and all at the table might leave it disgruntled, whether they ate cereal, eggs, or blueberry pancakes. If a newcomer who, just the night before, told a beguiling tale that entranced me, but then the stranger proclaims a dim conviction at breakfast, what he or she said previously is revamped by this dimness and I lose interest. If I have recently enjoyed a stranger’s tales, because the narration was vivid, delivered with an awareness of its listeners, though the stranger may have told the story many times before, I can prefer that person’s company to that of long-standing friends, since I am curious about how people live and why, and, in some respects, I’m a xenophile, but in order for my love of a stranger to sustain itself, strangeness must be sustained, and the foreign body mustn’t reveal too much. I want the stranger to remain untouched, which contradicts my other desire to know more than I should, yet some things I never want to know, fearing disillusionment, while a friend, someone I have known for a long time or who knows me, may be excused or rather understood for the same opinion. This is unfair, but that doesn’t matter, because to achieve fairness requires work, equanimity requires effort, a position comes from a sense of place, and if you lose yours, you also can’t maintain a position and continue to believe in it, you can’t be fair. I don’t want to exert myself, especially in the mornings, which is usually why I don’t want to go to breakfast, except that I’m hungry. More and more, I want the freedom to be arbitrary.
American Genius Page 7