Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak my mind freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian, have absolute faith, research the first humans and how they knew food from poison and learn their early, even fatal mistakes. The first people, Bushmen, ate raw food that must have carried inedible matter as well as microbes, but then there was the discovery of fire, and cooked meat and maybe grasses, but I might find out when bread made its first appearance and how; I once read a book about pizza, flat bread with cheese is ancient in origin. It is difficult to comprehend a world without the discoveries that are commonplace, but I'd like to. More, I'd like especially to research failure, the dustbin of human effort, upon which our world is also based. Sometimes images and sensational ideas come to me in torrents, but they may actually be worthless or insubstantial, or answers arrive to questions, or some thoughts arrive with remarkable clarity, but they may not be what I need, or they may be parts of wholes and not capable of conclusion, like a scientific experiment just before it's completed. A friend had a stroke, and he could barely form words, his brain a frustration to him when it was ordinarily a boon, giving him ease in speaking effortlessly and precisely, but he was now without words, and felt deficient, so his skin erupted in a red sea. He pointed to a wastepaper basket of basic design but ugly material, wanting me to toss trash into it, and said, with great effort, "Throw it into the waiting for forgetfulness." His ability to read was never affected, and language returned to him, but his naming a wastepaper basket "waiting for forgetfulness" was, with his recovery, lost to him. He has lived in the same house for years, not far from where I first ate Indian food, which I instantly liked, whose spices and smells were new to me then, as was the man I first ate it with, whom I fell in love with for a short time, but Indian food is no longer new, though I still appreciate its tastes and smells, and that friend's house is also near the beauty salon where I first had my legs waxed. The salon's chairs mocked I8th century French design, and its walls were flecked with gold, to invoke that other, supposedly golden era, one of abundance and elegance for a relatively few people, while its beauticians, in street clothes of varying, inconsistent style, provided ordinary care and treatment, haircuts and dye-jobs, as well as leg, arm, and lip waxes, sometimes roughly given, on the worn scarlet silk chairs, and a client such as myself, uncomfortable in this discordant atmosphere, could not relax.

If the colors of the room were blue and green rather than gold and scarlet, I might have relaxed. They are soothing colors, but reds and yellows are exciting, it says in How to Sleep and Rest Better, a 1937 manual in the community's small library, whose blue cover attests to its psychologist author's belief that readers can free themselves from the day's worries, with soothing colors, in order to succumb to a blissful unconsciousness. It is important, the manual claims, to calm down in the evening, to prepare for sleep as you would for any other activity, to slow down thinking, forget serious or exciting things, to make the mind blank. The moron, the author says, does not have to make his mind a blank before going to bed since it is blank day and night. Mental patients are given hot baths and hydrotherapy to calm them, but the manual says people should have sufficient control to calm down at will, they should be superior to their environment, but anyway color schemes should be carefully administered, the author says. To relax the body for sleep, the poor sleeper must develop a different mental attitude, to regard sleep as a peaceful sanctuary, when a person sets aside all worries, resentments, and fears, and learns to relax, but a person must be relaxed about learning itself, otherwise the body will become a taut, keyed-up machine. There is something called "progressive relaxation" in which with each successive minute the sleeper relaxes more. Truly beautiful women, the author says, know the secrets of relaxation and beauty naps. I am waiting for forgetfulness.

For years, I shaved my legs, then decided to have them waxed, and now there is barely any hair on them. The woman who first ripped hair from my legs was born in Mexico, and appeared, when I met her, healthy and without problems, while she served me in a spacious salon, where I, along with other women, was catered to adequately and sometimes courteously or lavishly. Every two months I visited the salon, until one day the Mexican woman, whose skin was several shades darker than my own and oily, asked me if I would come instead to her apartment, so she could keep the entire fee, and where, I discovered, she lived with her husband, her son, and her father. Her daughter had left home, and there was enmity between them. Her husband, who'd hurt his back doing factory labor, was usually at home, staring out of the window, a wide, leather belt around his waist and lower back for support. I rarely saw her son, since when I was having my legs waxed, she set me on his bed in his bedroom. But I have my legs waxed now by the Polish woman, who has degrees and certificates in several of the cosmetic arts displayed prominently on the semi-transparent plastic wall of the small room in which she also waxes legs, for which a license is required, and I can't remember all the reasons why I didn't want, after a while, to return to the apartment of the other and first leg waxer, to whom I thought I should have been loyal but wasn't.

The Polish woman has almost no hair on her body, or hardly any that's visible, except for light blond fuzz above her upper lip, so fair as to be negligible, though she might wax her lip and legs weekly, but now little grows back, which is what happens when hair's waxed from the body repeatedly and diligently, it dies, except the most stubborn kind, which on my body is at the outer sides of my ankles, where cold probably most affects or touches it. But it is at my throat and neck that I feel cold most, and I have never had hair there, and the neck is also, next to the nipples, a place that, when kissed, licked, sucked, or, in most ways, touched, arouses me most quickly, and none of these parts, so quick to arousal, have hair on them. I don't remember my nipples ever feeling cold. Hair is of little functional value to people, but hair does alter appearance, its amount, its curl, its thickness, its fineness, and hair products for men and women multiply dizzyingly on drugstore shelves. Male-pattern baldness, though, is especially curious, since it's common to some extent to all men, even those who live in extremely cold climates, where it would seem necessary for protection. But human hair must be primarily for sexual attraction, and only second to indicate illness, since hair loss in men and loss and hirsutism in women are controlled by the steroid sex hormones; an abnormal appearance may also be a symptom of diseases produced by vitamin deficiencies-protein starvation, inadequate iron, or reactions to cytotoxic drugs, for instance, those used in chemotherapy. The Polish woman probably waxes her underarms, which sickens me, since waxing in tender areas, like the upper, inner thigh near the pubis, is painful, but the underarm must be worse, yet the Polish woman does it, as do many other women whose bodies I've noticed at the beach, where men and women, driven by hormones, desire, and social mores, cluster and expose themselves to the dangerous rays of the sun and to each other; women also, in changing rooms in stores, undress, and the exposed underarm, though hairless, is somewhat darker in hue than the rest of the skin of the body, as if indelibly stained or dyed.