Unknown - The Genius

TRAVEL AND ITS ATTENDANT STRESSES provide a good litmus test for the viability of a relationship, and so I suppose it’s no surprise that shortly after we got back from Dublin, Samantha and I split up. Apparently my narcissism finally wore her down. Among other things, she told me that I was lost and that I needed to get ahold of who I was.

When my anger subsided I saw that she was on to something. My life had grown somewhat diffuse, aside from our relationship and the case. When both of those had gone I was left with work and little else.

I struggled to get back in the game. For a long time I’d been inventing excuses to stay away, with the result that all my artists were now furious with me. After Jocko’s defection several more had followed suit. I couldn’t recruit new ones, because the best steered clear of me, having been warned that I could and would desert them at a moment’s notice. I spent hours on the phone and over expensive meals trying to restore my hobbled reputation, but by New Year’s 2006 I was down to a roster of seven, and quite honestly not my best.

If I learned one thing in my years selling art—if Marilyn taught me nothing else—it’s that there’s no time like the present. Real estate having caught fire, the price I could get for my space bordered on obscene. I helped Ruby and Nat find new jobs; then I paid them each a year’s salary plus bonus and put out the word that I was leaving the business.

“To do what?” people asked. I didn’t have an answer for them. I tried to be philosophical. I said that I had run a gallery for nearly five years; my time was up; without knowing what I meant, I told people that I was moving on. I didn’t want to reflect. Other than money in the bank, I had a hard time saying what I had to show for myself. I suppose that’s something. Marilyn might say that it’s everything. You can’t argue with her. Anyone can see how happy she is.

I’LL END AS I BEGAN: with a confession: I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, a genius. Odds are, neither are you. I feel obligated to point this out, both because it has taken me a while to understand my own limitations and because these days we’ve gotten the idea into our heads that every person has infinite potential. The briefest spell of sober reflection reveals this to be a gentle lie, designed to cradle those with low self-esteem.

Ordinariness is nothing to be ashamed of. It carries no moral weight. I don’t believe that geniuses are worth more in some cosmic Blue Book. They are worthy of more attention, of course, because they’re so rare—one in a million, or rarer. What that means for the rest of us is that someone has to be the first of the remaining 999,999 souls; and the higher up you are, the closer you come to genius’s vantage point.

To pursue that—to clamber up—to stretch out fingertips in the hopes of grazing the surface—can you imagine a more uniquely modern aspiration? A better metaphor for our oversaturated era than the desire to be president of the fan club? The hero for the age is Boswell.

I was not exempt. I was a devotee of genius; I was drawn to it; and if I had a talent, it was that I could pick genius out of a pile. I built a career out of that talent, and in doing so I came to believe that I might myself achieve genius. I believed that, whether genius lives well or poorly, it lives more deeply. That was what I saw in Victor Cracke’s art. That was what I desired. That was what I sought by proxy, what I thought I could have, what I never will.

I NEVER FOUND HIM. Before we ended, Samantha suggested that I continue looking, and with time on my hands, I began to toy with the idea. But I didn’t follow up. I left the drawings in storage until the fees started to seem onerous. With nowhere else to put them, I had them delivered back to Muller Courts, telling myself that this was a stopgap, and that I didn’t intend to pay the rent on his apartment indefinitely. But I might. I might leave them just the way they are.

At an age when most Manhattan boys of a certain class were primarily interested in lobbing water balloons from the balconies of their parents’ high-rise apartments, David Muller could be found most afternoons sitting in the capacious living room of the house on Fifth, quietly reading The Wall Street Journal and jogging his ankle triple time to a ticking clock. He didn’t have mischievous urges, or at least, he had nobody to scheme with. If you discounted the maids and the manservants, the violin teacher and the French tutor, the barber and the tailor and the elocutionist—and you would have to discount them; they weren’t paid to throw water balloons—then he was alone, all the time. He has always been alone. That solitude made him the man he is today.

His parents’ decision (it was his mother’s decision, strictly speaking) to homeschool him until fourteen has never seemed to him wrong, not per se, although it depends on what you mean by wrong. His education was indisputably top-notch: a physicist to teach him physics; figure-drawing from the dean of the National Academy. If the goal of education is to educate, then Bertha chose wisely, as proven by the fact that by the time he began formal schooling, he was far enough ahead of his peers to skip not one or two but three grades, high school beginning and ending with his senior year. They might have been better off not sending him at all, as that year proved a miserable one, full of solitary walks between classrooms, lunchtimes spent reading. What did his mother suppose would happen? Did she suppose he would emerge with a stable of friends? Fourteen and eighteen are lifetimes apart; and boys are not like girls. Girls form friendships readily and discard them as conditions require. The friendship of boys is slow, suspicious, and eternal. By the time David arrived on the scene, everybody knew everybody, who they could trust and who was a gyp, who was good for a dollar and who would put the make on your girl. With all roles taken, none remained for the small, shy interloper who came to school in a limousine—not even that of dedicated outcast. He was invisible.

Perhaps she meant in her strange way to teach him a lesson, one that few people learn, and then only on their deathbeds: you can be surrounded by people and still be alone. Loneliness is man’s fundamental state. Created alone, he dies alone; and what comes between is at best a palliative. If her instruction was cruel, we cannot fault her; she taught from experience and believed in her own lessons. Rather than rage against what can’t be changed, David has chosen to see his childhood as the crucible that gave him strength.

At Harvard he did not do much better. For much of his freshman year, he spoke to no one. He spoke to professors and to deans, yes; but were professors and deans going to shoot pool with him or punch him for the Porc? No. Roommates might have helped but he had none. The building he lived in, named for his family, had a suite on the third floor that belonged entirely to him. His parents seemed to think that having one’s own room was a luxury, but David hated it. He hated, too, the “man” they sent to mind him. The man’s name was Gilbert, and he lived in the second bedroom, in what should have been David’s roommate’s room. Gilbert accompanied David everywhere: to class, where he would slouch unobtrusively at the back of the room; to the dining hall, where he would carry David’s tray for him. Normal conversation was impossible, even at the Widener checkout desk, where the clerk’s eyes would drift over David’s shoulder to gawk at the silent shadow with the fedora.

The first winter nearly killed him. Mummified in cashmere, he shuttled to and from class, hoping Gilbert would magically evaporate. Desperate for human contact, terrified of it all the same, David took to strolling Mount Auburn in the evenings, pausing outside the finals clubs to listen to their jazz and laughter.