The Genius (46 page)

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.

Once in a fit of madness he decided to knock. As the door opened, before he could run away, he suddenly understood the humiliation he was about to bring on himself. He saw for a brief and clear and terrible instant what the person on the other side of the threshold would see: a barely pubescent boy in a necktie, and some creepy son of a bitch standing right behind him. They would think he was somebody’s little brother. They would think he was a Boy Scout selling commemorative stamps. He wanted to flee but the light came spilling out and he caught a glimpse of all that he could not have: a room with plush furniture and a half-dozen undergraduates with their jackets off and their sleeves pushed back and another five of them playing poker and cigar smoke and powdery Radcliffe coeds draped over the sofas and girlish peals of delight and a whirling phonograph and paintings of old ships hung askew and glasses of beer and shoes kicked off and carpets rolled up and steps that led to somewhere mysterious and dark and off-limits even to his imagination.

The fellow who answered the door seemed less concerned with David than with Gilbert, whom he evidently took for a police officer or a member of the administration. He began to ask what the idea was, every time they tried to have a good time somebody had to come trample all over it, wasn’t there any such thing as a private party anymore. At the sound of his voice, David snapped to and walked away, drawing Gilbert like a duckling and leaving the boy in the middle of his tirade, which came to an abrupt conclusion with a shout of, “That’s right.”

Without math he might have been a goner. He was good at it; its clarity redeemed and soothed him. Plus, all the other students were the tiniest bit off, enough to assure him that he was far from the college’s most outstanding freak. He discovered that he wasn’t the only one his age. In Introduction to Higher Geometry there was a boy named, bizarrely, Gilbert—no relation—who had a lisp and who lived with his parents, commuting from Newton on the bus. In Potential Theory there was a heavy-lidded boy in horn-rimmed glasses who was, by all appearances, on his own. He and David orbited each other for most of the semester, a formal introduction coming in April when the boy plopped down in the next seat and offered David peanuts from a small wax-paper pack. He said his name was Tony.

THANK GOD FOR HORMONES. His voice leveled out by the middle of his sophomore year; he put on his father’s inches and his great-uncle’s muscles; his beard started to come in—more heavily than he liked; it became something of a pain in the neck—and, importantly, Gilbert got the boot. David and Tony got thick as thieves, both of them taking up squash, Tony eventually rising to become captain of the Lowell House team. David played with a chamber orchestra and Tony would come sit in the front row. They huddled together at the Game; they ate together in the dining hall. Eventually they did get punched: David by both the Porc and the Fly, Tony by the Fly alone, which effectively made David’s decision for him. They even had a few dates. Like finals clubs, once girls figured out that David Muller was David Muller of
those
Mullers, they warmed up to him pretty fast. He tested their mettle by insisting that they bring along someone for Tony. That cleared out roughly half the potential applicants: after learning that they would have to convince some poor girlfriend to spend the evening making conversation with a not-especially-rich eighteen-year-old math-prodigy Jew, a lot of girls found themselves busy with unanticipated homework.

Ironic, because when those double dates did come off, it was not unusual for both girls to end up talking to Tony. He was a natural-born charmer. David, on the other hand, preferred to sit back and reap the fringe benefits.

After graduation Tony went off to Princeton for his Ph.D. David went back to New York to work for his father. Before parting, David asked if Tony didn’t eventually want to come back to the city. The Wexlers lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she kept house and he was an actuary. One of the first things the boys had learned about each other was that they’d grown up less than three miles apart.

“We’ll see,” said Tony. He wanted to be a professor. And why not? He had all the makings of a young academic; his senior tutor had referred to him as “one of the finest minds of our century.” Even David couldn’t keep up. He had to work problems out, whereas Tony would look down at the page and hear the answer shouting at him.

They wrote a few times a week. David wanted to know what Princeton was like; had Tony met Einstein? Tony replied that there were trees and that his general impression of the great man was that he needed a haircut. They saw each other when Tony came home to visit, which happened less frequently as he sank further into his research. Once David took the train out and they had a weekend like old times. Tony said that girls were easier when you were a graduate student; too bad there weren’t more of them around. Campus could feel like a monastery.

David withheld comment. In those days, he had no shortage of social engagements. His mother, apparently panicked that she had starved him for friends, had been throwing parties virtually every weekend in an effort to find him a wife. This, he had come to understand, was his mother’s fatal flaw, her belief in the quick fix. Ignorant of history, heedless of consequences, she could see nothing but the problem currently occupying her mind; and the smaller that problem was, the more it grew to fill her obsession. David knew from observing his father that the best course of action was silent assent. If she wanted him to be out and about, so be it.

In 1951 Tony received a tenure-track appointment; that same year he served as best man at David’s first wedding, a role he would play at the next one, six years later. The third time around, David told Tony that he was bad luck, and besides, little Edgar was nine years old and man enough to do the job.

TONY SAID, “I WANT OUT.”

“Just like that.”

“It’s a terrible life. Susan is going out of her mind. All she does is read magazines, and she’s going bonkers for kids.”

"Then have a kid.”

"You say that like that hasn’t occurred to me.”

“You could adopt.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What, then.”

“Give me a job.” Tony sat back in the big leather armchair, crossed his legs, laced his fingers across his stomach. The waiter came by and deposited their drinks, both of which sat untouched, melting ice ruining perfectly good scotch.

Tony said, “I’ve been passed over twice now.”

“You’re thirty-two.”

Tony shook his head. “Trust me, David. Not gonna happen. Not for me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I got it from someone who got it from Tucker.”

David said nothing.

“I’m not about to pick up and move to Wisconsin or Texas,” Tony said. “It’s enough already. You’ve been asking me for years when I was going to come back to New York. Well, here I am. The only thing standing between me there and me here is a job.”

David thought about what it would mean to have Tony working for him. For him? With him. He couldn’t expect him to start at the bottom. “I’ll see if—”

“You’ll see? Come on, David. Just give me a goddamned job.” He bolted down his scotch. “I’ve already tendered my resignation.”

David was surprised. “That’s a hell of a bold thing to do.”

“Well, you’re a hell of a friend,” said Tony.

HE EXPECTED TONY to be bored, but on the contrary: his role as fixer and right-hand man seemed to appeal to a primal part of him, the same cheerful and deferential boy who would concede squash matches to David when total slaughter loomed evident. His assistant professor’s salary no longer a source of frustration, Tony bought a thirteenth-floor triplex apartment on Park, a quarter-mile from the house on Fifth; with their wives, the two of them went to Miami and to Paris. There was a time, after Tony’s divorce and before David met Nadine, when they were both bachelors again, and they spent some exciting weekends in Atlantic City, weekends that left them wrung out and soberly aware of their age.

Gradually Tony assumed responsibility for all the parts of David’s job that David didn’t enjoy doing; and then he came to do the same for the rest of David’s life. It was Tony who did the hiring and the firing. It was Tony who managed the press; it was Tony who picked out a present for Bertha on her sixty-fifth birthday. It was Tony who stood by the graveside when David buried her, and when the terrible surprise came, it was Tony who went to Albany to fetch the secret.