I wanted a sensible chair, since I don't like too much ornamentation, but I can like some, though what kind is changing, which is why I remember the Eames chairs, as they were sleek, bare of decoration, and they should have been more comfortable than they were, though they were not uncomfortable, especially for short people, like children, or medium-sized people like my parents. My mother is shrinking, though she doesn't have osteoporosis, and I must be shrinking, too, though I don't feel it and don't want to be measured, since there are some things I don't want to know. But other things I really want to know, such as, what is going on in the mind of the cryptic, balding man when he notices the psoriasis on the hands of the young woman, who clearly is affected just by his touch, but does he want to touch her. Some things are easy to learn, since if you are interested in why people do or think what they do, which may be foolhardy, impulsive, self-defeating, or unworthy, people will usually answer your questions and tell their stories, if your interest isn't merely self-serving or salacious, since mostly everyone likes to talk about themselves and would usually rather speak than listen. Most people will divulge more than you want to know. People often want to recite the tragic events that have deformed their lives, offering up their pasts as a series of tableaus of deceptions, or unspeakable insults, since people blame others endlessly, and these assaults and imprecations clutter, like a dog's defecations on the street, their lives and stories. What is said is often unremarkable, though sometimes horrible, but it's still easy to feel the tiresomeness of another's life, as well as your own, since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, because human beings are interested in themselves and in ways of survival. All stories are somehow survival stories, with had or good fortunes.
Some tragic cases relate their stories with verve, though their accounts are no less sad than others' boring recitations, but they are compellingly told, and often these people draw others to them, no matter what story they tell. There are terrible stories set, especially, in hospitals and jails, and I realize it is inevitable that one day, for one illness or another before I die, a hospital will claim me, but I've never done time in jail, and I don't want to, ever. According to Contesa, whose occupation was social work and who initiated and ran the Center for Urban Peasantry, which endeared her to me further, but whose preoccupation is Franz Kafka, his writing, his loves, particularly Felice Bauer, Jean Genet, whom, it turned out, Gardner-the Count-had met in Paris, claimed he didn't care about Kafka's writing, because it was infused with the terror of going to jail, a middle-class person's fear of public shame and humiliation, and because he, Genet, had been to jail and didn't fear it, Kafkas writing didn't interest him at all. I thought, at first, since cleverness resides in glossy surfaces over which even thoughtful characters glide like skaters, that Genet's was a reasonable, even apt observation, but with more attention I decided that Genet's imaginative powers were as limited by his having been to jail, which allowed him assumptions about Kafka, as Kafka's fear of it, so if I'm not interested in people who have gone to jail, I'm not interested in Genet's writing.
Some of the acts I've committed have been illegal. When I was five, I stole candy inadvertently from the candy store several blocks from my house, on a main road, in the suburb where I grew up, because its sign said, Take One, and later I stole lipstick from the town five and dime, and then shoplifted clothes from department stores, packing a skirt into the voluminous shoulder of a ratty fur coat, and purchased small amounts of cocaine, all relatively mild infractions of the law. Other people, who have scant education, less economic or skin privilege, might have been arrested, convicted, and sent upstate for the same relatively harmless but illegal acts, and other people have records against them that are public, so that anyone can find out what these people have done wrong, and while I have no record of crimes against property or person, nothing that would show up on police blotters or computers, nothing that I am aware of, or that might hurt me, though I am not aware of everything that might hurt me, I have committed illegal acts that have gone undetected, but I know what I have done, and I know what was wrong and illegal. Legally, I am sane.
Contesa asserts that, without desiring it and unacknowledged to Kafka or maybe in unconscious enjoyment of his cruel but limited power, he tested Felice Bauer, as he did himself-she was twice his fiancee-and dangled her from a rope of ambivalence until the possibility for a marriage he thought he should have, because she was the woman he should have loved but couldn't, snapped, but then, Contesa also contends, he wasn't equipped for a middle-class life, not capable of it, or of marriage, since he wasn't inclined to its petty rigors, and he wasn't physically well. I wondered if Contesa were talking about the Count, or herself, since, as she put it, she'd fled for her life from her upper-middle-class Negro family of doctors and lawyers, in Mount Vernon, New York, one of whose ancestors had received his freedom early, making his fortune farming in New Hampshire, because the black bourgeoisie was as boring as the white, and, after being forced to debut in a cotillion, she sailed to Paris, where she met the Count and where, she said, we Negroes were appreciated, Josephine Baker, le hot jazz, it was a philonegro thing, she declared, amused by her neologism. She'd sooner take that over its American version, negrophobia. She added, with irony, that Kafka dangled Felice from his elegant hands, and why wouldn't he, she was free to object and leave him, and the Count and she nodded, barely concealing their mutual satisfaction, and I didn't contest her, though I believe that about most things we usually don't have a choice, yet in love there seems to be some liberty, but that may be a very necessary illusion.
Like Kafka, the Count and Contesa, if the analogy is sensible, many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated but they struggle on, the disconsolate woman who has psoriasis and is anorectic, a female radio announcer and musician with chronic fatigue syndrome, the young married man, who pretends nothing afflicts him, the sodden, demanding man who consumes a fifth of vodka every night and is an irritant to my skin, like scratchy fabric, and others. Each has a story and a sphere of complaints, with some hope of improvement, each soldiers on, which is how my father would put it, they keep going, right or wrong in their thinking, my father said many people had wrong thinking, and books of philosophy lay resolutely on his bedside night table, but then he'd shake his head, since wrongness, his own especially, was sad to contemplate. I blush furiously when I have done something wrong and been discovered, or might have been observed in the act of doing wrong, exposing me to threat, derision, or disgust. Drinking wine flushes my skin, I pinken like a schoolgirl, some people's necks engorge with blood when they drink alcohol, a common, easily obtainable psychoactive drug; but I have not turned red, when alone, because of a thought I have had that might be incorrect or indecent, lying on the bed, reading, although that may not be the case since I can't see myself. Before others, I have colored, flushed, reddened, just as people darker than myself, so-called black people, those whose epidermis and dermis contain more melanin than that of Caucasians or Asians, have burnished with embarrassment, their checks have turned, in my presence, a bluishpurple, their skin intensifying in color, the way a bright red rose turns purple when it dries, or when shocked or embarrassed, their skin has lost color, become pale or ashen, graying subtly from fright or shock. I have also blanched, just before I fainted, color draining from my cheeks, I've been told. My skin has a yellow cast. When a colorist analyzes it, in order that she, usually, might sell me products to keep it moist and free of wrinkles, whose presence connotes worry and age, though once or twice a man has sold me lipstick, enthusiastically, and also tinted moisturizer at a store dedicated to cosmetics that are for sensitive skin and people and uses only organic materials, she or he tells me that my complexion has a yellowish tone, or sometimes olive, which isn't apparent except when I have walked about without sun block, which would dishearten my dermatologist, or because I haven't slept well, but often I do, often I sleep too long.