American Genius

  THE TOWN IS TWO MILES away, a reasonable distance for a walk, and it is also an oasis or a distraction, so I’m not trapped here, except with myself or by encounters with, for instance, the two young women, who have made my entering the main hall a problem; the staff, who subtly inquire if I’m making progress, did I enjoy the meeting, lecture, or session I attended, or the tall balding man, who, when he is alone, might expound on his malaise, after he has run ten miles and smells rank, but is unaware of this, while his palms pool with sweat, the effect of primary palmar hyperhidrosis, which may be genetic, and causes its sufferers great anxiety. I don’t want him to hold my hand, the way he likes, while employing his neurosis as efficiently and seductively as he can. But if I don’t enter the main hall, I’m not deterred from my walk. Still, I’m often drawn there, as if a voice called me to it, and, like dousing a fire, when I tell myself I shouldn’t and instead to think about the consequences, I do enter the spacious, dark wood room, whose corners are sometimes decorated with one or two residents gazing at photographs of lakes, deer, and birds, or the director and staff taking a break; but I’m eager for excitement or surprise, and there may await something unexpected, though usually here, and elsewhere, what is unexpected isn’t. I know the Count is sleeping and Contesa rarely shows her face before dinner, needing all the solitude she can get after breakfast; Spike, with the ready laugh, is in her cabin, talking on her cell phone or studying and writing formulae; the inventor, whose restless innovations may be the result of prostalgia, is joining lengths of copper tubing together; the demanding man is sulking, though he might even be in the main hall, waiting for attention, and yesterday I attempted to avoid it but walked in, anyway, which I can’t explain, even to myself, except that I’d scheduled a therapeutic massage later and had only time to kill, since that’s all there is.

  When I’m in the place I call home, where I have a young, wild cat and an old, frail mother who may or may not miss me, I see a Japanese therapeutic masseuse, whose attitude toward the body is vastly different from the Polish cosmetician’s, who twice has massaged me with gentle strength and kneaded my body respectfully, though she may not respect it or me. The Japanese masseuse acts against my body, she forces it to comply, as if trouncing a truculent enemy, and I can see her wringing her hands and canvassing my legs before moving toward them, to exact revenge. She prods my lower back with her sharp knees, jabs my taut shoulders with tight rabbit punches, and thrusts hammer thumbs into tense, blood-deprived muscles. When she punishes my body sufficiently, after throttling it mercilessly, it might come around, resign itself, or relax. With her I am not a sensitive character, my body is physical matter, a noncompliant, even unwilling, agent, in which I, her client, am trapped or by which I am possessed. She hopes to free me with a method that produces majestic pain during a session, when I yell and grunt, but after a session, I experience some release. It’s true that I have a body about which I had no choice, but with which I can choose to wrestle by volunteering for a painful massage, though I don’t believe in absolute evil or the devil as a Frenchman here does and who claims he accepts and even courts its presence within him.

  There are guest scholars, philosophers, scientists, spiritualists, and mental health and community activists, who, on some days, both before and after dinner, speak on their subjects, since it is said to be a tonic which cleanses the mind, or that it helps the mind to encounter new ideas, or to fill ourselves with others than we have, and sometimes there are surprises. A resident can’t avoid attending at least some talks, because the administration looks askance and concludes that you are not trying hard enough in your endeavor, whatever it is, and that you may not, through no fault of theirs and only yours, make progress. I skipped “Against Renaissance Perspective,” “Spin Control Is Out of Control,” “Live Food, Raw Food,” “My Life in Accounting,” “Beyond Repair or Damaged Forever,” and “The Lures of Fly Fishing.” On occasion the lecture committee brings in theater groups, whose plays and presentations are supposed to be thought-provoking but not so provocative as to disturb a resident’s peace of mind. I heard a talk by a local member of the Audubon Society: “What is a voice to a bird?” as well as a carnival historian on “The Life of Frieda Pushnik, Armless and Legless Wonder,” a forensic anthropologist on “The Natural Fear of Death,” and a local minister on “Banish Misfortune.” Occasionally residents present, and the Count gratified me and some of the residents, including the tall balding man, Contesa, J and JJ, and their squarejawed midwestern sidekick, on an evening after dinner, which was his late morning. It lasted precisely ten minutes, the span of time he had decided was reasonable and appropriate, not to waste a minute of our lives, or his, every second was precious, and placed his gold pocketwatch on the table, noting its movement periodically.

  “These are some offhand remarks,” the Count started, characterizing them as his “Dead Hand” notes. “I will not be discussing my collection of clocks and timepieces, as you may have imagined. I will talk about other esoterica I have collected. Timepieces are my love and vocation. What follows are pieces from an avocational endeavor.

  “Human beings were once covered with the same material our fingernails are made of, instead of skin. Adam and Eve were originally formed from this. When expelled from the Garden of Eden, their original covering shrank to the tips of their fingers and toes. For this reason we still resemble the gecko, whose nails twinkle like tiny crystals in the night.

  “During the reign of King Ramses the Third, who lived from 1198 to 1167 BC, laborers went on strike for cosmetics.” Hired hands in the Theban necropolis refused to work because the food was lousy, the Count put it, they had no ointment, and it was the first strike in history.

  “Fourteen hundred years later, Clement pronounced anathema against the cosmological theories of the Greek philosophers, labeling them astrology, not astronomy.”

  Contesa snort-laughed, she followed her astrological chart, but the Count persevered, he knew his former lover’s objections.

  “Clement of Alexandria stated that cosmology spawned a swarm of bestialities. This he published during the childhood of Heliogabalus, but copies never reached Emesa. It was the Syrian desert city where Heliogabulus received the training that earned him the title ‘King Catamite.’ It also made him the greatest ruler the West has ever known. He ruled from age fourteen until assassinated at age nineteen in AD 219. Had Heliogabulus taken proper cognizance of the Christian Zombie boom, the course of history would have been reversed. His contempt for Christianity’s potential for bad magic was his only serious political error. Like Pythagoras and Allah, ‘he’ was one of his many names. Emesa—then a sort of Syrian equivalent of Lhasa—no longer exists. It was swallowed up by the earth in the year 1219, exactly on the one thousandth anniversary of Heliogabulus’s death.”

  The Count wished us a good evening and a peaceful rest.

  “But I exhort you,” he urged in an afterthought, “remember the ancient Egyptian proverb: ‘Do not laugh at a blind man nor tease a dwarf nor injure the affairs of the lame.’”

  He would take our questions now, he said.

  THERE WERE NONE. CONTESA AROSE, haughtily, and she alone would have words with the Count in private, but rumors flew that a devout Christian was upset by the Count’s casual reference to Christianity and the Zombie boom. The Count didn’t concern himself with sacred cows or interdiction, he cherished sacrilege, his rational mind insisted on it. I’d never heard of the boom and now thought about Zombies differently, but no one dared interrogate the Count or confront him, except Contesa, who knew him well, too well, she occasionally implied, since he was formidable, removed, and entirely in his own time. His unusual lecture, though short, I believe encouraged his former lover in respects and in a way that I couldn’t have predicted, but which contained surprises for me and others and which arrived soon enough to be, in a sense, useful.

  I am allowed to attend all of the lectures, which are held at 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., but I prefer those scheduled aft
er dinner, when the day is over, and others may inject into it what they wish, with less damage to me. Massages are available but not facials, because massages, like hot baths, soothe the mind and tend the body, and a massage can have a salutary effect upon a tense body and fraught mind. Yesterday, after I saw the deer, I underwent a therapeutic massage during which tissue was manipulated, the resident therapist pressing on and into invisible fibers of my body, to release knots, and, as my tension released and fibers unknotted, I felt the painful pleasure I trust. There are some who can’t bear being touched, even by a mate, to whom a massage would be torture, and it is said, though this may be apocryphal, that George Washington, a formal man, an American aristocrat, who wore a powdered wig, read little, according to his vice president, Adams, and kept hundreds of slaves, couldn’t bear to be touched, even a hand briefly on his shoulder provoked his presidential ire, and in some this sensitiveness is extreme and extensive—most sounds, fabrics, voices, foods, and smells disturb them—and their new condition bears the name Sensory Defensiveness. The vexed head cook finds it almost impossible to feed them, since these characters are typically both sensation seeking and sensation avoiding. With the resident massage therapist, I may also talk, though not with the Japanese masseuse, who greets my exclamations of pain with silence, but the resident masseuse encourages me to explain where my pain is, with what feeling or event it may be associated, to what other part of my body it may have fled, or where it may have come from, historically, then her fingers follow the line I draw with words to the spot, and invariably she locates the source of the trouble. Her skin is translucent, like alabaster, unclouded by worry lines, peerless and unscathed, and, with her, I feel attended to. Her hands are softer than the Polish woman’s, though strong, too, and both of them tell me I have sensitive skin, but the resident massage therapist listens closely to every word I utter or every sound my body emits, while the Polish woman doesn’t. She is invariably absorbed in her own life, which she relates indirectly in our many encounters, so that I experience or sense her increasing discontent in the place she works, because when she rushes for the ringing telephone and expels a sigh, it is more exhausted and bigger, like a diva’s intake of breath before hitting the highest note in her range, and then I fear she may not return to me, in all senses, though I was never abandoned as a child, only forgotten or neglected in ordinary ways. On one visit, when the telephone rang, she set my head and face over the steaming chamomile brew and left, and I heard her speaking in Polish, but this time vociferously, and my regular twenty minutes of steam turned into forty-five, so my back hurt as I bent forward in an awkward position, wanting to lift my head but fearing I’d anger her and lose the benefits of the treatment, and when she returned, she said only, “That was my mother,” and I surmised hastily, without having much reason, that the glowering man had no chance with her. She had been married once, she admitted during my next visit, which now came in three-week intervals, since it was winter, and my skin was perniciously dry, my hands chapped so that two fingers bled as if I had stigmata, and white flaky skin dusted my cheeks and forehead, so sometimes it was hard to smile, because my tight lips cracked and bled. She’d married when she was a teenager, she told me like closing a book, and I told her I’d been married, also, to encourage her further, but even so she didn’t say more, and neither did I. Some women want nothing to do with men ever, some quit intercourse only after abysmal episodes with them, some say they can’t be bothered anymore, or don’t want to be what they become with men, some lose any desire. I’ve had one marriage, several serious involvements and lust-filled relationships, many light affairs of the heart, and other playful as well as potent nonaffairs, or romantic friendships, and sometimes it was I who withdrew, often I didn’t know what I wanted or if I wanted anything, or what or who could make a difference. I wasn’t sure about the Polish woman, suspecting that, at the age of thirty-eight or forty, she had left them behind, though her studied appearance, even in a synthetic white cloth uniform, seemed staged for the advent of the right man. I admired her appearance, which could never be mine, because her eyebrows never had a stray hair that needed plucking, the eyebrow pencil she applied with a firm, sure hand created neat, thin lines that never went farther than they should, and drew two light brown half-moons on her forehead, so her face had a look of expectation, when otherwise it might appear vacant, her full lips were painted with a lipstick that didn’t smear or fade, her nails, shaped modestly, were never too long, otherwise she couldn’t give facials or massages without clawing or gouging a client’s skin, and her nail polish, blush pink, orange pearl, or sunny tangerine, never chipped. I once wore black nail polish to the cramped salon, and, though she said nothing, I could sense the Polish woman’s disapproval, but I don’t think it was on the day she abandoned me for more than forty-five minutes with my face over the steaming chamomile potion. The doorbell also rings from time to time, and she must answer it, since she’s the only one there, except on weekends when her boss shows up and they banter in Polish, but the ringing doorbell is a less frequent interruption than the telephone. I have learned a little about her former husband, her mother liked him and he was also Polish, but each time I visit I hope she’ll divulge more, but then she never asks me anything much, except about my skin, which I don’t moisturize enough, because I don’t like cream on my skin at night, when it might suffocate it and me, and she asks perfunctorily about my various jobs, but since she’s not interested in these various projects, I tell her enough to be polite. She never inquires about my friends or enemies, my cat, my aging mother, and her discretion sculpts our routine conversations, which are social but impersonal, though her work supplies a tenderness that most friendships don’t.

  In another place I lived for some months, in the South, near to former thriving plantations on which cotton was picked by enslaved Africans, there was a florid-faced man who’d been a farmer, and in his late sixties, after retirement, decided to learn massage therapy, so he went to school and once a week offered his novice services free to everyone in the small town. I offered myself regularly to him. His farmer’s hands were rough and big as hams, he read the Bible daily, he moved fastidiously, he kept the room very warm, and every time he worked on me, also very slowly, I melted into the professional table he brought with him, and under his rough-skinned, gentle hands and fresh sheets smelling of wildflowers his wife laundered, I let my mind wander as far as it could, since I mean always to untether it from its ordinary course, but habits were established early, in the neural routes of the brain, about which I had no choice. The apprentice masseur spent hours on me practicing his trade, and his efforts tired me, but also I had hardly a care in the world by the time he finished, and the big, tender man was also exhausted, when darkness had fallen in the place where wildflowers sprouted, bloomed in abundance, and the air smelled sweeter than the freshly laundered sheets, and no more was expected of either of us. I could return to my home, careful to avoid a man who, because I refused his seduction, would later take revenge, though I didn’t know that then, when my fate was, in some way, enjoined to his unfulfilled, temporary desire. I remember the masseur’s hulk, his benign face and large frame, I can assemble the sweet infinitude of those long nights in that overheated room where he practiced on me, where his tender concern and his religious convictions showed themselves, by acknowledging, in long, stroking motions and studious pummeling, his belief that the body was holy.

  TODAY I’M DETERMINED TO WALK briskly and avoid the main house and to keep to the road. I wonder if facing the traffic, when it rounds the bend, or having my back to it, is safer, as I also watch for deer, birds, squirrels, and wild turkeys. If it is 3 p.m., the yellow schoolbus will wind around the road and drop off children, big and little, in a familiar scene that verges on a gluttonous, almost pornographic sentimentalism, so I hope to make my way to town before its nostalgic appearance. It is probably 2:00, not even, and there is hardly a car that passes and only a few trucks, and by the side of the road beer
cans and used condoms are strewn, but not too many, and sometimes from the thick forest a hidden animal moans or a bird sings or screeches, or the trees and branches, some bare, shake from a sudden breeze, but it is mostly remarkably quiet. I can hear my heart beat and my second heart contract, and also hear my breathing, which I adjust to my steps, in, step; out, step; in, step; out, step, and while I try not to worry, only to breathe in and out, to think, what a day, since it is a beautiful day, but I do worry, also about how well I’m breathing. I keep up a pace but am passed by two women jogging who wave exuberantly; by the tall balding man running even faster, with his mouth hanging open, so he looks vulnerable and stupid, when he is neither; then the kitchen helper, who whizzes by on his bicycle, hits the brakes, turns to look at me, gets off, and stops to talk. Now I remember that I appear to be something.