“The Genius”

Judith Wilding

Jean Genet, illustration by Edward Kinsella

Word Count 1230

From the La-Z-Boy in my Granny’s house, my dad turned to me and said, “Don’t squander your gifts. You are a genius.”

Being an altogether unremarkable seventh grader, I didn’t feel like a genius, but who wants to argue with a genius who calls you a genius? So I nodded.

“The thing about geniuses is that they aren’t understood in their time. Everyone thinks they should be banished or burned alive.” He hunched forward on the chair with a toothpick in his right hand, intermittently picking at his teeth. “All great artists are tortured by life or at the least, deeply misunderstood.”

From my place on the sagging couch beside him, this seemed true. I thought of my mother, who sang through her illnesses, my aunt who painted but was deeply depressed, Emily Dickinson dying alone and unpublished, George Gershwin with his fatal brain tumor at thirty-eight, and William Butler Yeats loving an actress who never loved him back. And then there was my father, who said he was an artist but his addictions kept him from the pen and paper. It seemed clear that choosing an artistic life essentially doomed a person to unhappiness. And yet, couldn’t an ordinary life be wonderful, too? Weren’t Granny and Charles getting food from McDonald’s right now? Wouldn’t eating with them be much more pleasant than sitting alone with my father?

Things were different before uncle Charles and dad moved in. Throughout elementary school, I visited Granny for sacred weekends of painting cats’ faces on rocks we found, slurping up bowls of strawberry ice cream, and putting together 500-piece puzzles of pastoral scenes. Sometimes she let me count her pennies, roll them up in stacks of fifty, and trade them for quarters at the bank. Even going to church with her was fun; her volunteer group gave me grape juice, Christian crackers, and hugs. When Charles moved in to get sober a couple years before, it wasn’t so bad. Charles made us soup and dozed in the rocking chair by the TV. He gardened in the backyard and smoked on the front porch. Charles didn’t interrupt my conversations with Granny other than interjecting a non-sequitur. But when my mother kicked my father out of our house, dad had nowhere else to go. He moved in like a tropical thunderstorm quickly darkening the sky, claiming the La-Z-Boy, the back room, and shelves for his books. 

“Does your mom have a boyfriend?” Dad asked, the light green of his eyes flashing under his gold wire frames.

My shoulders shrunk forward. I looked at the dusty rug.

“You can tell me the truth. Don’t be afraid.”

“No. She isn’t seeing anyone.” My throat squeezed on itself like a blood pressure machine tightening on a bicep. Bzz, bzz, bzz. I was being choked.

“Let your mom know that I can take care of her. She needs someone to take care of her, and I still love her. With all her health problems, who else will love her?”

I kicked at a brown spot in the carpet that turned out to be a design.“She has lots of appointments to check things out.”

He gave me a look that should have been loving but felt like a glare.

“Let her know I’m ready to come home. I can make things better for all of you.”

“Can you turn the volume up?”

On TV was a French movie called Farinelli that Dad and I had already watched together. The plot centers around an older brother who castrates his younger brother, Farinelli, in order to maintain the beauty and range of Farinelli’s voice.

Dad and I leaned closer to the TV to hear this voice that seemed more female than male and more angel than human. He let out a low whistle.

“The cost of art-making can be steep. But could you imagine that man’s life if he hadn’t got his balls cut off and his voice had dropped to a normal range? He would have been ordinary and we surely wouldn’t be watching a movie depicting his life.”

“I never want to be ordinary.” I said.

 Dad pulled the lever on the recliner to hinge upwards.

“Then I have a special gift for you.”

He went to his room. I hoped Granny and Charles would return soon. Being around my father made me feel like a kite: sometimes floating on a warm breeze and sometimes skidding hard against the concrete.

I heard footsteps coming towards me and then a “shit” as my dad bumped into the coat rack. He was clumsy, frequently adorned with dark bruises on his arms and legs. He sat beside me with a purple cloth-covered book.

“Judith, get ready to be exposed to the best modernist literature of the 20th century. This book will help you understand so much more of life, beyond the bourgeois context of Northern Virginia.

I read the title aloud: “Our Lady of the Flowers—that sounds like a sweet book.”

My dad laughed, throaty and loud. “I suppose Jean Genet’s writing is sweet; in its way. The characters are queens who whip each other and stick their wieners in each others’ bottoms. They’re also criminals, kind of like your dear old pop. The author is telling this story from prison and gets off on his own story. It’s absurd; it should make you laugh.”

On the inside cover, I saw my dad’s name and phone number. there was an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, who I recognized from dad’s speeches as someone who thought life was meaningless. It seemed that most geniuses found life dull and hopeless.

“Sartre! This must be a great book.”

My dad put his hand on my forearm. “If you like this, you have great taste.”

Gravel crackled as Charles’ truck rolled up on the driveway. I put the book in my backpack and let my shoulders relax back into the couch.

“One more thing.” He walked towards the front door. “Don’t show the book to your mom or teachers. It’s erotic, but its messages about human cruelty and forgiveness will help you understand the way your dear father has been marginalized and degraded.”

“Of course.” My spine stretched a bit taller.

Charles appeared at the screen door, his long wavy brown hair swinging as he sang: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun." He gave my dad a high five and sauntered to the dining room table. He set down the greasy bags and turned to the TV where women were congratulating Farinelli by rubbing his upper thighs. Charles flung back his hair. “Whoa, looks like a far-out film.”

Granny, five foot four and shrinking, walked in and gave me a hug. She always seemed to know when I needed one, which was most of the time. She glanced at the screen and said, “Turn that thing off.”

My father grabbed the remote, and the screen went to black, the moment ending as if it had never happened, as if the images of a man being castrated hadn’t already been burned into memory, as if I wouldn’t soon read the book and wonder why a prisoner would masturbate onto a jail-cell wall, as if my father was one of those dads who preferred playing golf to reading about people whipping each other, as if I weren’t someone who yearned with every fiber of my being to be special to my father, no matter what it cost me.

​Judith’s essays and interviews have been published in Writer’s Chronicle, Brevity, Los Angeles Review, Water~Stone Review, and Under the Gum Tree. Her piece “On the Death of A Difficult Parent” was recognized as a notable essay in The Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses 2017. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is writing a memoir about an opera singer’s daughter who loses both her mother and artistic ambitions, and has no choice but to discover who she is on her own.