American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  My vanity isn't merely useless when it makes me glad, though it does gladly waste my days. The circumspect widow's vanity mostly didn't make her glad, since it allowed her to marry a man who humiliated her and about which she said nothing, so she also cohabited with heartbreak and worry, believing that it's better not to say anything. Leslie Van Houten vainly insisted during the penalty phase of her trial that LSD did not make her follow Manson's orders to murder, to helter skelter, to stab Mrs. LaBianca, or to wipe off her own fingerprints, which, if she hadn't done, might have earned her a lighter sentence, because destroying any evidence, erasing traces of venal acts, though Mrs. LaBianca might have already been dead when she stabbed her, indicated Leslie knew what she was doing was wrong, and that alone distinguishes a person who is legally sane from one who is not. It wasn't LSD, Leslie avowed, "it was the war in Vietnam and TV." Leslie Van Houten's history includes mine, the town's is also mine, since I'm an American, and outside, the kitchen helper's bicycle lies on the ground in front of the cafe, so I could discover what makes him tick, young, gawky, full of piss, longing, and very pretty, and he might be interesting no matter what he says, but I never used to think that everyone young was pretty, but lately I do, and so was I, once. After JFK was assassinated, hippies appeared, and young myself, I observed them, startled, since they came out of nowhere, kids on the street, run aways, they'd left newly broken homes, colleges, jobs, the girls with long, straggling hair, flowers in it, who wore long, cotton dresses, boys with thin, wavy hair, in blue jeans and sprouting ragged tufts of beard, everyone like rag dolls, and I was so very young and pretty then, too, unaware and untouched, bewildered and removed. The girls let hair grow on their legs and carried flowers some days, daffodils, the boys appeared stretched to their limits, so long and skinny, new to sex and redfaced under their uncertain facial hair, awkward, they all were, dumb and eager about life, and everyone was pretty in an insipid, unmenacing way, the way the kitchen helper is now, as youth seems now, when years ago, at that age, I would have noticed their imperfections, and mine, the way I still do. But their flaws don't matter, because like kittens and puppies, the young are adorable, which can protect them from predators, though children and their predators is a vast subject, and also it's debatable what a child is. Kennedy's was the common death of the common father, and after it, the cortege snaking its way home to a national graveyard, the children went wild, loose and suddenly orphaned, wandered around the streets, talking about peace and love, or, in squalid, urban tenements that their parents had fled years before, they stirred tasteless, watery soup in communal pots, and everyone young was for rock music and sex, against war, straining for pleasure, wanting a hit of strange. Everywhere was disarray. I dreamed JFK was my father, my father was an anxious man, he especially feared rats and heights, and years later I still remember the dream vividly, along with my shock at discovering I was JFK's daughter, but now I think I was in some way. Memory is motivated, while the uncontrollable stories people tell themselves during REM sleep reveal unbidden messages experienced with scant awareness of their warnings. Awake, sense memories, like some friendships and all snowflakes, dissolve.

  In my version of history in which all are renegade children, I confound memory and dream, or nightmare, the minute with the monumental, private and public. I heard about Malcolm X's murder on the radio. I heard a TV newsman announce that Martin Luther King had been shot. I ran to the set and kneeled in front of it. I watched TV reruns of Robert Kennedy's murder. I wasn't involved in demonstrations or protest marches, I was engaged in a singular battle with the world, and the world kept intruding and winning. I witnessed events and was often sleepwalking, but anyway I opened the door wide, and many singular, deranged people entered, and I thought they were angels. Manson told Leslie he was God, a stranger named Mel told me he was, but I didn't fall under his spell, while others flew into his godlike arms, like my childhood friend Johnny and a girlfriend called Buckle, whose mother had painted abstractions in the suburbs, who was different from other mothers and whose daughter was haughty and knowing, but anyway Buckle fell to Mel and disappeared, while Leslie succumbed to Manson, not totally or not as much as the other girls, who were older, but even though less submissive to him, she has been imprisoned for life. Three years after Buckle and Johnny's god died, possibly murdered by a distraught follower, his band dispersed throughout the land, and I don't know what happened to them, though I wonder, since Johnny and I went to grade school, when everyone was pretty, and he was one of my little boyfriends, with thick, black hair, clear, pink skin that turned scarlet in blushes, and a timorousness about life I could see even when we were twelve. I remember him, small and already wary, hiding behind a tree, but I didn't foresee he'd search for a messiah. I walked out of his life and Buckle's, my brother walked out of mine, and when something I suspected might annihilate me rose to the surface like scum, I vanished or disappeared inside myself, since I thought I knew what could destroy me and, actually, I'd mandated myself to protect my mind, but I didn't know what to do with my body, didn't want to obey its laws, blood, curves, holes, and I didn't care about it, was profligate with it, and still nothing of it could be forgotten, nothing.

  The cafe is steamy, its brown wood walls suffocatingly close and similar to most establishments' here, except when their walls are painted glossy white to cover wear and rot. There was hardly any light when I opened the squeaky door with a bell whose annoying tinkle announces all newcomers, but I quickly spotted the kitchen helper and his two buddies and instantly regretted my decision to enter. Yet I enter, having chosen this adventure or outing, and he calls out, embarrassed, "Want to join us?" and I do that also. The TV is radiating like a fire in one corner of the room, the cafe owner, also dressed in 18th century costume with a wide leather belt and clunky, metal buckle pressing comically into his round belly, is in the other, but his traditional vest, adorned with several contemporary metal buttons, announces his green and other tastes. Residents of the eclectic community of strangers I represent, even fleetingly, amuse the local townspeople, who view us as special, obnoxious, or queer, and some desire our business or conversation, which might be why the kitchen helper has beckoned me to his table, to meet his friends, and where, surprisingly, I'm confronted by a comparatively small, light-wood chair, with an oak frame, a seat and back of birch veneer designed by jean Prouve in 1945. It's a chair I love, since it looks and feels right, and I concur with Peter Smithson that "it could be said that when we design a chair we make a society and city in miniature." It's a cozy proposition I also nestle into when I sit on this chair, akin to a school chair, and I'm with schoolboys. Its molded hack holds mine, the way the Eames chairs at home did, so I settle into it with familiarity and smile expectantly at the cafe owner in his historical gear, order an American coffee, and ready myself to listen to the kitchen helper and his two friends, who are, like him, awkward, but one is fat, the other skinny, and their thighs and asses are lost in vast stretches of heavy cotton or denim that swim around their worried bodies. Each drums his foot on the floor. The skinny one's pockmarked face is lean and pointed, arresting in its intensity, while the fat one's is a fiery red presumably from a heat treatment or way too much B6, or niacin, and they're talking about papers and tests, a local band called Killer Crank, and a buddy busted for weed. I watch the pearly face of the kitchen helper whose eyes fasten on mine, half-smiles shyly but inquisitively, but then I withdraw my eyes to gaze upon the warm screen in the corner, since TV is a friendly face, though many frown upon it. Every resident could watch it in a small lounge, off the third floor, in the library, if they desired, though most didn't, or, alone, they could listen to the radio, if the speakers' broadcast-worthy voices didn't become cloying to them as they do me, but everywhere TV can make life more bearable, since it's always the same, and when conditions are not of your making, and there may not even be the appearance of choice, though TV doesn't offer abundant choices, especially if you receive only network programs, a sad or silly probl
em on the box lets an evening pass in relative tranquility. When I was a child, looking at TV, even as my parents argued about which programs I should watch, I felt invincible, because I threw myself into my mind as if it were a place of protection, and believed it didn't matter what TV programs I watched, and also felt I could visit other bodies or be many people, like those in books, movies, or on TV, mostly female, sometimes male, though from that pretense I was dissuaded by the shadowy presence of my brother, as well as others who encouraged and discouraged me. When my brother vanished, there was nothing to say, I suppose my parents whispered interpretations in their bedroom, where my father's dresser stood on one wall, his coins and cigar humidor on it, taller than my mother's, which spread across another wall of the spacious room, her sewing machine near my father's dresser, there were white cotton and linen shades on the four windows, white fustian, or cotton and linen, curtains, also, but I was too young to understand my brother, they said, and they didn't, either, but this old story of irrationality underwrites any tale of love or hate, since men and women are great, illegible subjects for each other, along with their families, cats and dogs, all of which reach an end, anyway.

  Unfinished as these boys beside me are, they are sufficient, just like the boys I knew as a girl, though in the present we're divided by period or time or generation and age, but it also doesn't matter what has separated us when I listen to them and watch the TV in its cozy, habitual corner, and yet don't hear much, either. I'm seriously considering inquiring of the cafe owner if I can buy the chair I'm sitting on, a precious, valuable misfit in this bizarre room, with its chaotic accumulation of chairs, more like a scattering of mismatched shoes, where everything is helter skelter. The boys' sincere discussion of their college friends in trouble with the law, or some dropouts like them, or kids broken by excoriating love, instigates blurred snapshots of fast cars on stoned streets, greasy-haired girls and bearded, hunky guys, and I say, "When she was young, Leslie Van Houten supposedly beat her adopted younger sister with a shoe," and the kitchen helper asks who Leslie Van Houten is, and I realize, or acknowledge, that I have reached the age when I have to tell everything I know.

  There was still less light in the room, and the mild darkness incited the past to recur as a sequence of sepia-tinted slides on the room's brown walls, and the faces of the boys melted into those warm walls. I warmed to my subject, my skin rosy with passion and heat, and explained: "Some Americans think it was Manson who ended the 1960s, along with a rock concert at Altamont, where the Rolling Stones sang and the Hell's Angels acted as cops, and they stabbed to death a black man right in front of the stage. Everyone who hated the protests against the war"-"which war," the skinny boy asks; "Vietnam," I say-"and civil rights, women's rights, sexual liberation"-at this they all leaned toward me-"just lots of people think Manson's gang and those murders, their murder spree, sum it up, that's what the Sixties were. So because of that, Leslie Van Houten will probably never get out of jail. Even though people who murder, and she was just an accomplice, usually get out in seven years. She looks like a secretary now, she's had a lot of sun. She's in jail in California, and you can tell from her skin, she doesn't protect it, not that I would either, probably, in jail for life, except for a fear of skin cancer. She's been up for parole at least fourteen times. Most recently the judge tried to help her, but she'll never be forgiven."

  It's not just history to me the way it is to them, but they listen with some curiosity, their bodies ever restless, shifting with nowhere to go, but now my coffee cup is empty, and I might also be finished, while the kitchen helper's presence has turned as insubstantial as a leaf fallen on the ground. I believe I'll soon leave his long, strong legs and beguiling vulnerability, since even desire can't keep me, though I'd like it to, because what then keeps me anywhere, except duty or obligation, though I'm not sure to what, but when I watch him, I don't feel the lust I want, and instead rise to ask the cafe owner about the Prouve chair. Bemused, he says he'll think about it, that I should return, but I bet he won't let me buy it because he's cunning and knows it's worth a lot. The kitchen helper looks at me, confused and muted with abstract longing, and I could rent a room in an historic inn, where I might stumble upon the Polish aesthetician and her friends, and invite him into it, to disappear with me for a time, and he might, he would, and now I think it's either the chair or him, since both could provide comfort or be a distraction from what I believe I must accomplish. Near the bar, where the cafe owner looms over the cozy, light-deprived room, in his 18th century gear, a frail woman with red ridges on her thin face, which mark it like rings on a tree trunk, remarks adamantly to her balefully attentive female companion, "If I had the money, I'd have my entire face planed." Her skin shouts of that rough adolescence my dermatologist explicated, her teenaged years spent buying pimple concealers to cover unsightly red bumps and holes, picked at with furious hands and nails raking the skin, and her sobbing in a bedroom in a modest two-story house near here.

  Opening the cafe door brought me to near-collision with the odd inquisitive woman from the residents' library, who was, like the kitchen helper, on a bicycle, but hers was rickety, as she herself might be described, and when she was forced to slow down and jump off it, rolled her bike near to me, and I became aware of the blotchiness of her skin against the dove-gray sky. She, flustered from her sudden stop, declared:

  -Some people are full of hate. Have you thought about it?

  -1 think about hate, I say.

  -What do you think?

  -I don't know, I don't know you. Or, are you also still talking about men?

  -You're waiting for what kind of other information about people?

  -There are other subjects than men, but the way you put it the other day, men are important. Some people are filled with hate. I've known some.

  -Yes, they are. Listen, you don't know what's what. I can see that right off. Look at the sky!

  A motorcycle roared by, I looked up, I wasn't sure what she pointed to, the sky high up was a pale blue, so pale it was thin, a few cumulus clouds, and her words were garbled by the sound of the engine. But I heard her say, "The people you believe are your friends aren't . . ." Then I couldn't hear her, as the bike roared again. Next I heard: "But you have to stop thinking there's more to life than what's right here before you. Look, you're at a crossroads." She pointed at the ground beneath us and smiled at herself, me, her words, I don't know, and then it was, "Goodbye, I'll see you again soon enough."

  The odd inquisitive woman clamped her lips together, climbed onto her hike, and rode off, which was when I noticed she was wearing jeans from The Limited, baggy ones, incongruous on her as a tuxedo, and I wondered if they might have been a son's or nephew's; whether she bought all her clothes at secondhand stores or church sales, or if she stole. I looked around, to see what's what, and discovered that she and I were at what might be considered a crossroads in this small, quaint, early American town, where the main road shot off in two directions, which struck me as funny, also what she pronounced about me, and even if it was presumptuous, I couldn't entirely dismiss it, since I'd been stung by the card reader's prediction and because I like to hear advice and warning, and have often asked people to tell me something I don't know, tell me what to do, or, more urgently I ask, what would you do in my place, though I may not do it, but tell me anyway, because I'm curious. Occasionally people declare this eccentric or think I'm lazy and unimaginative, but I appreciate arbitrary direction, since mostly I have no choice, not about where I was born or to whom, into what skin or sex or town, and another person's vision presents an alternative to which I could say no, or it might be an option entirely unusual for me, one I'd never think of. Some of my friends might not be my friends, this has happened, but is that an obstacle, unless the friend is an enemy, who actively works against me, to thwart my progress or freedom to advance in life, to the extent anyone can, as a rejected suitor did by blocking me from tenure in our department, with his lies to the chair, but it is histor
y, and I have left the field. Another friend manipulated me, wanted things from me, and, when she had them, she worked against me. She is most likely a pathological liar, whose cover was to complain that everyone else lied about her. Some people steal and lie all the time. The skin doesn't lie, my dermatologist says, and chronic and acute pain also don't, though they may have no organic basis. Acne comes and goes in a sufferer's life, though it sometimes can be cured, but still its depressions, pits, and holes leave traces and last, and like an eerie memento can remind others of what the person endured during adolescence. My dermatologist insisted twice, rare for him, because he's economical, that acne was the single greatest cause of neurosis in teenagers, but I haven't inquired if that's in comparison with having been beaten or molested, or demeaned habitually, but now I look at the pitted and scarred faces of adults with keen interest, consider their teenaged years, and picture them withering from the shitty glances of snotty kids in the popular or fast crowds. Their acne humiliates them as they skulk from class to class in the hollow halls of high school, anxious corridors in most Americans' histories. My dermatologist, whose skin is unblemished and who is also an oncologist, can tell at a glance, having looked for years at many varieties of skin problems, though he's particularly sensitive to a young person's outbreaks, if a mole is cancerous, and I have wondered how he feels when he spots a mark that could be fatal, or how he would proceed if at gatherings where people who aren't his patients come into view, he notices, without thinking, an abnormal mole on a neck or cheek, and, if he or any doctor, like an off-duty cop, would be required ethically or as professionals to act. I like my dermatologist and have a good relationship with him. I am not sure what a good relationship with a doctor means, except that people want to be taken care of and be cared for, and that it can occur with a professional, with a modicum of good will, even with a cosmetologist, like the Polish woman who has given me facials for years, but whom my dermatologist doesn't know, though they both care for my skin, but I trust him not to damage me, so that might make a good relationship. It was he who years ago cautioned me about the deadly effects of the sun, prescribing sun blocks and offering me samples of protective lotions, and told me never to go out in the sun without protecting my skin, to wear lotion or a hat, preferably both. I rarely wear hats, because I look silly or bad in them and, even if wearing a hat meant saving my life, I might not, in company especially, because I'm vain, just as I don't go into the ocean, though I love the beach and the ocean more than many sights, places, and people I go to regularly, because I would have to expose too much of my body, not just to the virulent rays of the sun, though that is always a danger, but also to society's gaze which is immediately worse, though I am not apanthropic, since my attachment to solitude is divided, and have an erratic aversion to human society, whose opinion matters less the longer I am here and the older I become, so that, when I approach death, it might he a matter of indifference whom I leave behind, since I won't care about living or dying, though my mother's longevity indicates I might be here longer than I can stand. My dermatologist is cautious; he does not want to scar my skin when he performs a procedure. It is possible he has noticed the cherry birthmark on the back of my thigh, but he's never mentioned it. If I had one on my face, if it covered half of my face as I've seen on other people, my dermatologist and I would talk about it frequently and doubtless he would suggest methods and means, if they were available, to handle or ameliorate its effects.