Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

People who once ate in restaurants and drank at bars with smokers now refuse to or can't-they claim to be allergic to smoke and subject to pulmonary distress as well as skin irritations-when not long ago, few were allergic to cigarettes, although a rise in asthma and emphysema might have been the harbingers of this new allergy. My skin doctor told me that in the 1960s he treated three cases of a disease, purpura, which afflicted young women only, but he has never seen a case since. The phenomenon was that blood pooled at parts of their bodies, typically at their extremities, so that great purple swollen blotches formed at their lower forearms, and though the women were tested in every conceivable way, there was no organic basis found for the occurrence, and the disease crippled them when it commenced. Just before the onset of an episode, they would have a premonitory sensation, a tingling which always preceded, by five minutes, the appearance of the purple blotches. It was characteristic of this Autoerythrocyte Sensitization Syndrome, whose diagnostic feature was that if you spun down a sample of the sufferer's blood and injected the red blood cells, characteristic hemorrhagic or bleeding lesions developed. One young woman was hospitalized, and every test given, and after some of her symptoms were alleviated and upon being told she would be released, since they could do no more for her and she'd improved, marginally, at that very instant, she became paralyzed, as her mind and body were likely stymied by this turn of events and found another route to manifest her relentless distress, and for the first and only time in my dermatologist's career, he called in a hypnotist, who put the woman in a trance during which the hypnotist suggested that she could walk, that when she awoke from the trance, she would walk, and, that very day, when she awoke, she was no longer paralyzed and walked out of the hospital. My dermatologist has never heard of her again, and has not seen a case like it since the I960s, so the disease or condition has disappeared, just as it appeared, suddenly, to represent some question or challenge, a neurosis, that a very few young women manifested in their bodies, since the mind is part of the body and changes frequently. I change my mind often, too many times to count, deciding I must walk to town, or read the history of the Empire State Building, listen restlessly to music, dance, doodle a design for a metal teapot, memorize some Zulu words, or sometimes I dwell on the faces of friends who have died or on conversations that were conclusive, ending friendships or sealing them, robbing the of certainty or teaching me trust, inconclusive and eternally titillating, the way romance is, especially an unfulfilled one, which may be why I can't concentrate as much as I want, to make headway, though the tarot card reader assured me I will overcome something that has been insurmountable, which I haven't yet recognized and that taunts me daily. When I'm in love, I am hard put to think about anything else, but I'm not in love now, in that way, though it can be said I have loved and may love again. Still, lunch is often a lonely affair, though generally I'm glad to eat it by myself, not pestered by the demanding man, whose great appetite for attention expands like a stomach, whether it's fed or empty, and if he could he'd gobble up and devour everyone's time in a banquet for himself.

If lunch includes a salad, romaine lettuce and tomato, shredded carrots and sliced cucumber, to stave off eating it, I toss the ingredients into an ugly, plastic howl and make a dressing for it in a plain water glass, but often I don't have what's necessary for a good dressing, like mustard, and then I must decide if I want to walk to the main house, barge into the kitchen, bother the kitchen helpers, especially the young man who likes to glance slyly at me, the girl who transgressed the rules, or the cook or assistant cook, who may or may not be there, and ask for the missing ingredient. I will be considered bothersome, a pest, too picky, and difficult. But to he picky necessitates putting on shoes, a jacket and scarf, switching off all the lights, and making sure the fire is out, so often I can't decide, annoyed at myself for not having remembered what I would need from the kitchen while at breakfast, but then I'm not thinking about lunch when I rush away from the bustling, often tension-ridden dining room as quickly as possible, to avoid trouble.

Yesterday, after a midday meal of tunafish, pickles and low-fat vichyssoise, I walked to the library. Everyone here can use the library, which is a simple, four-story brick building, with four large, similar rooms, three of which have chairs, benches, and tables, and one, a piano, lutes, two acoustic guitars, and chess sets. There is an empty birdcage in each room, a golf set and tennis racquets in one, a few sweaters near the fireplaces in all four, where mementos from former residents dot the rooms, and in three of the rooms, dark wood shelves are crammed with forgotten novels and poetry, an abundance of manuals, especially on fly fishing, cookbooks, how-to books, outdated encyclopedias, and musty dictionaries. Some people from the nearby town are permitted, if they have been issued visitors' cards, to use the library, though most don't, and occasionally I have run into one when I have gone in search of a hook that might help me. Yesterday, a disheveled, elderly woman emerged from the library's bathroom and inquired, brusquely, "Are you a teacher?" I told her I had taught American history and furniture and interior design occasionally, and then she asked, inserting herself into my day, "That's good, but do you have a man?" Quickly, I had to decide whether I'd answer her impertinent question, but then I wanted to, if only to see what might transpire, because I'm curious, lunch hadn't been exciting, pickles and tunafish are laughable, and I hope for novelty. I restrained myself from asking, Can you have a man? and instead answered:

— I did, recently.

— Dumb women don't have men.

— You really think that?

— Well, sometimes it's smart women who don't have men-

— How can you tell anyway?

— I'm not a mind reader.

— That's a relief.

— But I read. All my books burned in a fire, so I come here. I have good eyes. I can see what other people don't. Don't let that scare you.

Now the odd woman smiled, brushed off her tatty skirt and straightened her shoulders, all of which was appealing, because she had found a necessity to relate to me, another character, with some severity, and the encounter drew something from her, so she looked at me solemnly and announced:

— You have to use your time wisely, and then there's always chance.

— Yes, chance, you're right, there's always chance. And hope.

— Not hope, chance. People don't know when chance comes knocking. Mostly they're looking with blinders on…

She trailed off. When I said hope, I wasn't sure why, except that I wanted to hear what she'd say. The odd inquisitive woman scrutinized me again and rushed to the massive library door, opened it, the door yawning loudly, which it always does, no matter who opens it or how carefully, and turned:

— But what other subjects do you have than men?

With this question, she ran off, though I'm still pondering her and it, marrow in the bones, since how many subjects does a person have, she must know I have more, she reads, she seems worldly, but from a different world, and if you are a woman or a man, about which you have no choice, unless you elect surgery at a suitable age, but still you have to spend at least your adolescence and some of early adulthood in the sexed body into which you were born, you will undoubtedly spend some or much of your life absorbed in men or women, who are in a sense your subject, a singular and important one, no matter how general, no matter how you decide to dispense with it or them, if you feel you have a choice. There have been thousands of years of swamp-like argument about sex and the sexes, to which most succumb, since, for one thing, sex is often adventitious, taken on the run, and, to include it in the day, when it often isn't, some fold it between a hit of ordinary conversation during which the body is normally excluded, except for talk about illness, but then some experience sex as an illness or a rare occurrence like an acute disease, but anyway worthy to report about their day, or for some it's a healthy or perverse pleasure. Some here relish the flavors and smells of bodies, yet describe flesh with weak or pallid language, or dwell mostly on specific parts of bodies, breasts, penises, earlobes, necks, feet, toes; and I have conversed about sexual matters, about men and women, so, to be honest, the way a daughter of time must, I'd agree that men have been and remain a vast subject, which is also boring, especially when you have talked and listened for years, with an evermore rapid sense of the subject's inexhaustibility and futility, for everyone repeats the subject and their own behavior, too. Occasionally a person's sexual habits are unusual, such as Spike's, whose taste runs to much older men and has since she was twelve, when she attempted to seduce her sixty-year-old piano teacher, and, she says, wryly, she's the opposite of a pedophile, whose activity is illicit, while her disposition isn't, so she could work in an old-age home and prey upon the elderly. Instead, she, a math prodigy, born into a family of scientists, pursued mathematics, first, imaginary numbers and set theory, then the more abstract versions of the discipline, which include, she tells me, formulae elegant as drawings and so graceful the terms soar in the air before they disappear. She particularly follows the work of Frege and Abraham. Spike's affliction or desire, I must tell her, according to the Medical Sex Dictionary in the library, is gerontophilia. There is no equivalent for a deflowering mania, of a man or woman with hymen fever. Spike is not an arithomaniac, whose morbid obsession is to count constantly, she doesn't betray a hint of this, being, I suppose, well past real numbers. One day I will tell her I see numbers as colors and vice versa, she has already explained that sex is no substitute for mathematics, but mathematics does compensate during rare periods of celibacy, though sex is better for dinner talk, since few people understand abstract mathematics.