Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

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 history, 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.