American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  On each chair in the Rotunda Room, Contesa has provided a typescript of her one-acter or spectacle, I have it in my hands when she announces that the performance will soon start, explains that she has never done this, that her way is not necessarily ours, though she hopes it will entertain and enlighten us, and she rebukes only herself for what disagrees with us. "You may not like my cuisine," she says pointedly. The head cook may be here, and I watch Contesa's mouth, it sets decisively. The Rotunda Room, which dates from 1838, is painted rustic gold, or sienna, features a high-domed ceiling, and oval windows that are inset around its perimeter, there's some echo in the wood and plaster room, but its black wooden chairs have sensibly curved backs, so that, like a chair by the Eameses, they respond to the lower back, providing lumbar support. Their flat, svelte cushions are covered in thick, tufted dark-green velvet, a gift, no doubt, of the Green Lady, who is known to appreciate theater. The seats are comfortable. During the late 1860s, after the Civil War, a local history book records, seances and sessions of spirit photography occurred in this room, and back then William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley, both abolitionists, attended seances, as did William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper, and some might have been in the Rotunda Room. Spirit photography's early practitioners were often women, who were usually mediums and who manufactured miracles in which dead people shimmered as palimpsests pressed onto glossy surfaces, chemical ghosts invaded the present, all of which people want, against reason, and probably Contesa elected this space for its redolent, spiritladen past with which she may feel connected or in which she feels she can better contact the numinous world.

  The room is full, its thirty chairs with our bodies on them absorb oxygen and noise, and also we make sounds, I hear inharmonious wheezing, coughing, and some shortness of breath. Contesa leaves the podium, the lights dim, and, to my shock, from the wings, the odd inquisitive woman wanders onstage, looking about in all directions as if lost, replacing Contesa behind the podium. The odd inquisitive woman holds herself erect in her tatty skirt, a black pullover sweater, while her unruly hair is tucked under a brown suede beret. She would see me soon enough, she said to me in town, I remember that now. She stares at the audience and projects a strength and purpose that is impressive; there is something almost magnificent about her bearing. I cast my eyes quickly over the cover sheet of the typescript: Four Players-The Narrator, Franz Kafka, Felice Bauer, Max Brod-written by Violet.

  The Narrator: This is a work in collaboration with the letters of Franz Kafka and the spirit of Felice Bauer. Her letters are lost. So I will take liberties. The Saints preserve pariahs like me. Please touch the hand of the persons beside you, please touch their hands.

  The Count and Spike are beside me, and there is an awkward touch from the Count, who once embraced me, but nothing more, and I hold his hand for a second, and, from Spike a rhythmic pat or two, she is usually affectionate, and behind me I sniff the sodden odor of the demanding man, but can't know if he's touching anyone or being touched.

  The Narrator: Kafka wrote to Felice, "He who belongs to you keeps wandering about in the distance." In the present, Kafka's and Felice's souls, they will mingle. Here comes Kafka.

  The inquisitive woman, the narrator, points stage right, and, augmenting my surprise, the tall balding man walks on, his shoulders a pair of parentheses around his body, which is stiff as an exclamation mark, and I wonder what J and JJ will think of his truculent carriage. He's wearing a black suit and black derby, like an undertaker. He removes the hat and takes a chair, he is himself and not himself, and I recall that he played Kafka in my dream some time ago, and, now his secret lover, the disconsolate woman, enters, stage left, and I feel my stomach contract, while the demanding man groans, Spike chortles with muted pleasure, and the Count sinks into his chair. The tall balding man, or Kafka, waves to her, his Felice, feebly. She nods, and the disconsolate woman, or Felice, faces the audience. She's staring above our heads, toward the rear of the Rotunda Room.

  Kafka: "There are times when impossibility swamps possbility like a wave."

  Felice: He whips himself for us.

  Kafka: Never. I'm no Christ, but I am a Jew.

  Kafka looks aghast, then sad, then he breaks up at his own preposterousness, and I contain my laughter, but some suffocated or constricted noises come out. The tall balding man is so expressive onstage, he exaggeratedly throws back his arms, demonstrative in a way he never is, so watching him act, I'm nervous. His flesh confronts me, he even appears to have an aura or charisma, and, spotlighted, he becomes an object whose every deficiency is on exhibition, people exhibiting themselves can produce some embarrassment. I anticipate that, even shame, but not guilt, thankfully. The other bodies around me stretch their legs, their asses shift on the tufted dark-green velvet cushions, their mouths smack, and noses snort, a being-human chorus.

  Kafka: "But how could my writing to you, however firm my hand, achieve everything I want to achieve: To convince you that my two requests are equally serious: `Go on loving me' and `Hate me!" Felice: My heart, I have no answer.

  Felice seems to speak from her heart, since she has no technique for walking, standing, or acting, and whatever merit there is in her acting comes from her inability to conceal herself, so she is herself, or an exaggeration of herself, and I'm following, with distractions, people I've had breakfast, dinner, and drinks with, if they are allowed to drink, as they transform into characters like or unlike themselves. I can spy unguardedly. The disconsolate woman, Felice, sits down and pretends to write, but then she looks again at the audience, now directing herself to the Count, I think, it's hard to say, it could be to the demanding man, whose odor penetrates. The inquisitive woman shuffles to the lectern, once again as if she's lost, it's deliberate then, and she's wearing purple lipstick, I'd missed that before.

  The Narrator: Kafka wrote that in 1913. He started it all, Franz began writing Felice in 1912. They were engaged twice and Kafka broke it off permanently in 1917. By then Kafka coughed blood. But from the beginning, he created her. Kafka enchanted her, and she was his enchantment.

  Kafka strides to the side of the stage and looks longingly at Felice.

  Kafka: "I'm afraid that soon I shall no longer be able to write you, for to be able to write to someone (I must give you all sorts of names, so for once you must be called 'someone') one has to have an idea of the face one is addressing ..."

  Felice plucks a hand mirror from behind or under her chair and looks at herself, the disconsolate woman's psoriasis has flared, reddened slightly, she's not my image of Felice, though it's sly of Contesa to have cast her, but she must have wanted the role. I appreciate Contesa's discretion, how she kept this a secret, I appreciate this and also some forms of deviousness, but the disclosure of secrets can alarm and be destructive, especially if they expose a long-kept masquerade with intricate roots, whose undoing rips foundations, because change has unknowable effects. I know several people whose fathers had second families they kept hidden, who performed as double husbands and fathers, in elaborate hoaxes, for years and years, making the task seem easier to perform than it is, or it is people's necessary gullibility, their desire not to see what might hurt them, that permits such inestimable deception. I have a friend a part of whose life may be secret, but by now I don't want him to reveal it, because there are things I don't want to know and whose exposure might destroy our relationship. He may or may not have a married lover, whose husband is ill, I've often considered he does, and that when he departs on a journey, for he often travels, he's not going anywhere but to his furtive mistress, and for some reason he wants even his closest friends to think he has, as he says, no one to love, and this possibility fascinates me, so I'd be disappointed if it weren't the case, but also I don't want to know absolutely it is, because then it would change our relationship.

  The Narrator: Max Brod, Kafka's best friend, interpreted Kafka for Felice. First Felice wrote to him. Brod wrote back to her. Later, he disobeyed Kafka's will. He didn't
destroy Kafka's unpublished work, his letters or diaries. Kafka trusted Brod, but he also had invoked chance. Or, did he know what Brod would do?

  Arthur saunters onstage, the fourth player, he is Max Brod, a jaunty figure, and his partner, Henry, sits in the first row beaming, looking around, human beings want approval, even their approval approved. Arthur's thick, long hair is tied in a chunky ponytail, and he too is in a black suit, but no hat, and sports a cravat and monocle, and, because of the style, I sense another time, as style marks periods, even years, with its date stamp, or maybe it's because I know too little yet about Arthur, since he communicates mostly to his partner, and this allows me to enter the period better, though Max Brod was Jewish, like Kafka, and Caucasian, but there are also black or African Jews.

  Kafka: "I have always looked upon my parents as persecutors."

  Brod (to Felice): Franz was furious when his mother read your letter to him. But "Franz, thank God, is gratifyingly stubborn and sticks precisely to what is good for him. His parents just will not see that an exceptional man like Franz needs exceptional conditions to prevent his sensitive spirit from withering . . ."

  Brod walks downstage and sits on the edge of the stage, while around me the dour man snorts, the Count squirms, Spike restlessly taps her foot, but I don't see the Turkish poet, though he must be here, exultant with these confabulations before us. My beloved father was a persecutor and a pleaser. One night he took me out to dinner, and, after he paid the bill, he looked sad, I asked him why, and he said it wasn't good enough, he'd wanted to take me for a very good meal, he was sorry it wasn't better, he repeated downcast, as if everything had depended upon this dinner, which I remember now, but don't know why.

  Felice: I love my garden. I want to grow roses for you. Roses are ancient. They are Aphrodite's tears and Adonis's blood. I want you to be happy. I will sit beside you, nurse you. But each letter upsets me, each of your thoughts undoes the previous one. My mother grows increasingly upset, too. When will we marry, she asks. I am weary sometimes. I don't want to be a burden.

  Kafka: "You know, there are wonderful sanitoria in this wide world."

  The Narrator: Do not laugh at a blind man nor tease a dwarf nor injure the affairs of the lame, Kafka.

  Kafka: I? Never. Aren't I afflicted, too?

  Brod points his index finger at the narrator, scolding her, then she puts her script aside, and, with mirth, points her index fingers at the audience. Saint Rita harumphs loudly to the Frenchman beside her who courts and esteems evil and smiles with glee, then Rita's mouth screws shut in a universal sign of disgust, while next to the Frenchman, the Magician appears rapt. Where is Contesa sitting or hidden, I wonder, she's quoted the Count about the lame, from his "Dead Hand Notes" lecture. My skin seethes with vermiculations, which promiscuously derange my body, and now the Count encloses my warm hand inside his icy one, and I jump at the surprise.

  The Narrator: To Kafka, a bourgeois marriage was a strangulation. According to his friends, he was humorous. He was full of fun, a barrel of laughs. But for him marriage wasn't funny, and he feared he'd become a fat bourgeois.

  Kafka: (walking quickly from side to side onstage) There was a very religious man who never doubted God's existence. One day a flood came, and he went to the top of his house and sat on the roof. People passed by in a boat and offered to row him to safety. No, he said, I'm waiting for God to stop the flood and deliver me. A second boat came by, filled with people, and then a third. Each time the religious man said he was waiting for God's deliverance. Finally, his house collapsed, and he drowned. The man went to heaven where he beseeched God: Why did you fail me? God said: I sent three boats.

  Kafka holds his sides and laughs demonically, Felice isn't laughing, standing at the edge of the stage, and will she jump off in a symbolic suicide? Just now she reminds me of my sleeping-pill-addicted friend, whose infuriated neediness could only be quieted with barbiturates, and maybe she enters because it was in a theater when I last spotted this former friend, but because she'd had plastic surgery and looked similar to herself at the age when we met, I couldn't tell if it was really her or someone who looked like her, but younger, and I didn't say hello, because it's often better not to say anything. The person I thought she was could have been her daughter, or it simply may not have been her, but whoever it was was crying.

  Brod: She hoped that the mordant man, who abhorred violence, would be the right one for her. A good husband. He explained to her he couldn't be. But Felice was a slave to her love.

  The Frenchman applauds inappropriately, I don't know precisely why, though he may cherish enslavement, and Saint Rita moves farther from him. Is there a way to avoid such metaphors? I can take apart a chair, even a beloved chair, because it can be taken apart and is only a chair, and slavery is also slavery. I'm tense, preparing for a decisive event, or wishing for it, because, without a complement of elements cresting conclusively, I may not feel satisfied, fulfilled, or able to rest. Where will things go? Where will these images and words go when we've left here? I like to place objects where they should be, in the right containers, to avoid mess and spills, and, at the end of the day, dirty dishes in the sink are sometimes maddening. Yet the trivial, broken, and incomplete are dearer to me, more precious, since what can't be spliced together, cleaned up, and unanimously credited propels novelty, as an antic irrelevance may also parent art and science. I want contentment and satisfaction, things falling into place, not apart, which is incongruent with my impulse to take apart and leave things in pieces on the floor. But, generally, I would prefer to be indifferent to every outcome.

  Felice: I might soar if I were not stuck to the ground by his exceptions and rebukes. His strange writing! I am lost to it. I never see him, he never visits, he breaks our appointments. He writes me every day, twice a day. I should leave him. But his words are life to me now, and he loves me. He needs me.

  The Narrator: Woman, beware your needs!

  Brod: Ach, ach ...

  Kafka: "The first evening we met ... what a lot has happened between that evening and now, and since to blush is to admit, your blushes on that occasion . . . implied the following: `Yes, he loves me, but for me it is a great misfortune. For he thinks that because he loves me, he is free to torment me ... He always talks in riddles.' Dearest Speaker: I would give my life for you, but I cannot give up tormenting you."

  Felice's and Kafka's torment is that his love is a torment, so agitated when I'm supposed to be calm, I turn from the picture onstage to the picture window that frames the dark forest beyond the Rotunda Room, whose jumpy spirits may be quivering, fornicating with abandon, or sleeping, though they don't need to rest. Beyond the window lies the beauty of the world, I tell myself, not believing in spirits or the world's beauty, yet the ideas aid me, pull me off Kafka's words, and soothe me like a subtle emollient on the skin or a lovely description of a facial, and I wantonly reckon the possibility of there existing a magic that has the power to console, and, if so, how it might trick me, if it hasn't already.

  Some believe cats are magical creatures, I don't, but I have a limited idea of magic, I like illusion, and don't need to believe it, but cats have the power to console. An affectionate cat lying on your chest, as it purrs, is a consolation for the horrors of the world, though its being in no way alters the plight of the world, apart from fostering your sense of well-being in a reclusive, evanescent moment. A cat can sense when you're unhappy, even my wild cat once lay on my back when I cried, he didn't lie on it for long, but since it was the only time he did, and I was crying, I believe he knew I was unhappy and he was trying to help me. He may be purring now, keeping my mother company, if her old cat permits, as she and her brain age, I know of a dog who lies on the beds of dying people in hospitals, he always knows when a person will die, he senses death coming, and he's always right, or my cat could be in a corner, lonely for me, which I doubt, but in some way I'd like him to miss me though not be miserable. Actually, I want to be surrounded by many cats, hundreds
, if I didn't have to take care of them all the time and be responsible for cleaning their litter boxes, because when looking at them, at their sleek coats, their serene indifference, their implacable calm, unless they've gone mad like my cat who stalked and attacked me, the world's horror leaves temporarily.