The Genius (34 page)

The man with the Afro counseled me to wait around. “He’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“He has to lock up.”

I waited. One by one the rest of the players drifted out. From the window I watched them humping up the sidewalk through the snow or scrambling after the Q36. Two stuck around, playing additional games until eleven thirty, at which point I was left alone among the tables and chairs, listening to the fluorescent lights buzz and staring at a torn, crumby package of Lorna Doone shortbreads.

It was after midnight before Joe returned. He had to come back. I knew this not only because the man with the Afro had told me but because no true genius would ever leave the object of his obsession in disarray. I heard the key rattle in the gate below, heard him huffing and puffing to the top of the stairs. He walked into the room as though I wasn’t there and began stacking chairs. I got up to help him. We worked in silence. He handed me a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle and we wiped down the table-tops.

“I saw you in the paper,” he said finally. “You’re the one put up the show.” He tied off a trash bag with an elaborate knot. “Am I right?”

“That’s partly why I want to talk to Victor. I have money that belongs to him.”

“Partly why else.”

“What?”

“What’s the other reason you want to talk to him.”

“I want to make sure he’s okay.”

“That’s very nice of you,” he said.

I said nothing.

“How much money?” he asked.

“A fair amount.”

“How much is a fair amount?”

“Enough.”

“Any reason you’re not answering me?”

“At least I’m not lying to you.”

He smiled. He transferred the garbage bag from his right to his left hand; his body likewise slumped. He had terrible posture, and a tendency to lapse into a grimace when not speaking, the look of someone whose basal state is discomfort.

Outside, snow had again begun to fall. Joe tossed the bag into the alley and walked toward the bus stop. His limp seemed worse, his gait almost spastic. He also looked larger than before, as if he’d grown a layer of blubber. A breeze opened his coat, revealing a second coat, and protruding from its collar, the collar of a third.

“Do you want a ride?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“I’m going to call myself a car,” I said. “I can have it drop you wherever you need to go.”

In the distance the bus turned the corner. He looked back at it, then at me, and he said, “What I really am is hungry. You hungry?”

WE WENT TO AN ALL-NIGHT DINER. All I wanted was a cup of decaf, but when I said I was paying, he ordered fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a milkshake. Listening to him gave me heartburn. The waitress started to walk away, and he called her back to add onion rings and a green salad.

“Gotta get all the food groups,” he said.

He ate slowly, giving everything about fifty chews, until I couldn’t imagine he was tasting much more than mush and his own saliva. Long gulps of milkshake followed, his face stuck so far forward into the glass that his nose reemerged tipped with froth. He would then wipe his face on a napkin, crumple it, and drop it on the floor. All the while his eyes kept up a nervous hopscotch, to the door, to the counter, to me, the table, the waitress, the jukebox; his fingertips red and feathery with hangnails.

He asked when I had last played checkers.

“Probably twenty-five years ago.”

“I could tell.”

“I never claimed to be any good.”

“Victor’s a good checkers player. He’d be better if he slowed down a bit.” This tidbit intrigued me, as for some reason I’d always pictured Victor as contemplative, at least when not drawing. I mentioned to Joe that the art had a strong gridlike feel to it, especially when assembled as a whole. He shrugged, either in disagreement or out of apathy, and went back to eating.

“You live around here?” I asked.

“Sure. Sometimes.”

I didn’t understand, and then I did, and when he saw that I’d caught on, he started to laugh.

“I could have you over sometime. We’ll have a sleepover. You like the great outdoors? Har har har.”

I smiled politely, which made him laugh even harder.

“You know what you look like,” he said, “you look like I just took a dump on your living-room rug and you’re trying to ignore it. Hell, I’m just messing. I don’t really live outside.… Feel better now?”

"No.”

"Why not? Don’t believe me?”

“I—”

“Yes I do, then. I sleep in the park. Har har har. No I don’t. Yes I do. No I don’t. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled, kicked back the last of his milkshake, and waved the empty glass at the waitress. “Chocolate, please.”

There were still a couple of onion rings left, as well as the entire untouched salad. With his new drink he resumed the process—chew chew chew chew swallow gulp gulp wipe—and I got the impression that he was obeying some weird ritual, that he needed to finish his food and drink at the same time. I had a vision of us sitting there until sunrise, ordering and reordering until a happy coincidence gave him permission to stop.

Either that or he was just really, really hungry.

He said, “You see that?”

His chocolate-tipped nose pointed across the street to an unlit church.

“They got a shelter,” he said. “Doors close at nine, though, so on game nights we finish too late.”

I didn’t need to ask why he chose checkers over a bed. It would have been insulting for me to ask. Instead I said, “Where did you learn to play?”

He wiped his face with a revoltingly soiled napkin. I handed him another and he wiped, crumpled, dropped. “The nuthouse.”

Again, I smiled politely, or tried to.

“Har har har, dump on the rug, har har har.” He forked his salad and held the dripping leaves up to the light before popping them in his mouth. “I love me some greens,” he said, chewing.

“When were you there?”

“Seventy-two to seventy-six. You can learn to do anything in there. Lots of time, you know? It’s like the best college in the world. I got my four-year degree, har har har. If you weren’t nuts before they put you in there, you’d go nuts from boredom.” He laughed and drank and coughed out some milkshake and wiped his chin.

“Sal told me you used to be world champion.”

“Coulda beena contendah. Har har har. Yeah, I won some fucking money. Not much money in checkers. They got a computer now that can’t be beat. The human being is obsolete.” He sat back, patted his stomach. It was hard to tell where all the food had gone. All that remained on the table was three fingers of milkshake, which he eyed spitefully. “You want to know something about Victor, buy me dessert.”

I flagged the waitress. Joe asked for coconut cream pie.

“We don’t have it.”

He looked at me. “I want some coconut cream pie.”

“What about strawberry,” I offered.

“Does that sound like an adequate substitute?” he asked.

“Well—”

“How bout some hair pie,” he asked the waitress. She looked at him, looked at me, shook her head, and walked away.

“Whatever happened to
service
,” Joe shouted at her. He looked at me. “I’ll have a brownie sundae.”

I got up and went after the waitress.

Joe stared sullenly at the tabletop until his dessert came. When it did, he didn’t touch it. He said, “Victor was in the nuthouse, too.”

“With you?”

“No.” He snickered. “You never met him, huh?”

“No.”

“He’s a lot older than me. We didn’t meet until he started coming to the club.”

“And when was that.”

“Right after I started advertising the tourney. So, 83. I used to make fliers and stick em up on telephone poles. He shows up, one of the fliers in his hand, like it was his ticket. I remember that night, there were only three of us, me, Victor, and Raul, who kicked it in a couple of years back. He and I played all the time cause nobody else showed on a regular basis. I knew Victor was decent cause he clobbered Raul.”

“Did he beat you?” I asked.

He began shoveling in the ice cream. “I said he was
good
.”

I apologized.

“
I
don’t care. But if you’re trying to get the facts, then that’s the fucking facts.”

“Did he ever mention where he was institutionalized?”

“Someplace upstate.”

“Did he mention the name?”

“That’s privileged information,” he said.

He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished his sundae, scraping his spoon along the inside of the bowl to gather the last threads of chocolate sauce. Then he grunted and took a deep breath and said, “The New York School for Training and Rehabilitation. That’s what it’s called.”

I wrote it down.

“It’s near Albany,” he added.

“Thank you.”

He nodded, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin on the floor as the waitress passed. She hissed at him and he blew her a kiss. Then he sighed and said, “Pardon me while I drain the main vein.”

I paid the check and sat waiting for him to return. He never did. He went out the back door, and by the time I figured it out, his footprints were already filling up.

Bertha lies on the top floor of a private hospital on the east side of Manhattan. Well-wishers have filled her room with bouquets, but as she prefers the dark, the nurses have left the shades drawn and the flowers have all begun to die, producing a cloying stench that gets into one’s clothes. Nevertheless she will not consent to have the vases removed. She is impervious; she has tubes up her nose; and the comfort that the flowers provide means more to her than the momentary comfort of her visitors. Visitors come and go, but she is stuck; and if the room smells like a compost pile, that’s nobody business but hers. Who are these visitors, that they should have an opinion? Not her friends. Not the committees and boards of directors who have sent the flowers. Those people are not allowed in. She does not want to be seen in a state of decay. Only with the greatest of reluctance did she agree to come to the hospital in the first place. She wanted to stay at the house on Fifth. David prevailed upon her: she could not remain at home; she would die if she did not get proper care, in a proper setting. And what, exactly, was wrong with that? Louis had died at home. But David argued that if she went to the hospital she might live
longer
, and wasn’t that the idea? To stay alive—to clutch at life—to dig fingernails into its greasy surface?

Lying here, she isn’t so sure.

Hospital or no hospital, she’s dying all the same. Her body is a city and the tumors that riddle it little insulting middle-class suburban outposts of disease, springing up overnight in her liver, her lungs, her stomach, her spleen, her spine. They have tried one treatment; they have tried another. Nothing helps. Better to go in a favorite bed, with a favorite view, surrounded by people she has known and trusted. Not these men with clipboards. Not these women with needles and white hats. Not lost in an artificial jungle of sympathy. Where is her son? He brought her here. Where is he, that son of hers? She calls his name.

“Yes, Mother.”

“I want to go home.”

She cannot see his reaction—he sits slightly behind her, where he knows she cannot turn to see him—but she knows what he’s doing: tugging on his earlobes. His father did the same thing.

“You can’t go home, Mother.”

“I can and I will.”

He says nothing.

“David.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“If the child is a girl I don’t want you to name her for me. That’s morbid.”

“It’s a boy, Mother. We’re going to name him Lawrence. You already know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort. What kind of a name is Lawrence?”

He sighs. “We’ve talked about this already.”

“When.”

“Several times.”

“When.”

“Weeks ago. Several times. In fact, you asked me the day before yesterday.”

“I asked no such thing.”

He says nothing.

“When are the children coming to visit.”

“They were here, Mother.”

“When.”

He says nothing.

“When were they here,” she says, afraid to hear the answer.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“That’s a lie.” She grips the bedsheets, terrified. Why is it that she can remember events and faces and stories and whole conversations from thirty years ago—and yet she cannot remember her grandchildren, yesterday? That shouldn’t be possible. Her memory is impressionistic; the closer she gets, the less she can resolve. Her nose to the canvas and all she gets are dots and smudges. And her mind has worse tricks than that up its sleeve, much worse. Old memories keep springing up where they do not belong; at times she calls David by his father’s name. She overhears David and the doctor discussing the president, and she expresses her opinion about Roosevelt and the two men look at her and David says, “It’s Kennedy, Mother.” The doctor is a young Jew named Waldenberg or Waldenstein or Steinbergwald or Bergswaldstein. He is bald and joyless and she doesn’t trust him. She asks David for Dr. Fetchett and is informed that he has been dead since 1957. That is nonsense; Fetchett has been in the room. He comes in daily to take her temperature. He stands at the foot of her bed, commiserating. Dear Bertha, you look so pale. Would you like a glass of whiskey? A kind of second sight has taken hold of her; before her illness, she never would have been able to see him so clearly. The forehead filigreed with blue veins and the enormous pores and moist nostrils, like a cow’s. Not a handsome man, Dr. Fetchett… And yet she sees the wilting flowers and cannot remember who sent them; demands over and over to know why she cannot go home.

Worse than the loosening of her mind still is her awareness of that loosening. She had expected that one of senility’s few comforts would be its self-negation; she might be confused, but she wouldn’t know she was confused. But she sees how people talk to her. They use soothing tones meant for animals and children. They push food upon her. They ask her to sign documents relinquishing her authority. They coax and wheedle and she sends them away. They don’t have her best interests in mind. She won’t deal with them, not as long as they continue to patronize her. Still they come, these lawyers with their pens and notaries and contracts and wills and lawsuits and mortgages. She refers them to David and still they come. They are crafty. They wait for him to leave and then they sneak in. It’s enough to drive a lesser woman up the wall.