The Genius by Jesse Kellerman Page A

like the American that I am.”
    Isaac Merritt Singer, he of the libido and the fortune and the belly and the laugh, that laugh like a bellowing shiphorn, the siren song of America—he laughed and hammered his friend on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry, old man. Round here, you are what you say you are.”
     
     
     

• 4 •
     
     
    These days, the idea of an “opening” has become something of a farce; usually all the work on display has been presold. I decided to buck the trend by refusing to allow any previews or advance sales, and by midsummer I had begun receiving anxious phone calls from collectors and consultants, all of whom I put at ease with assurances that
nobody
was getting preferential treatment. They’d all have to come discover Victor Cracke for themselves.
    Marilyn thought I was making a terrible mistake. She told me so at lunch, the week before I opened.
    “You want to
sell
them, don’t you?”
    “Of course,” I said. And I did, not for the money so much as for the legitimacy: by convincing other people to literally invest in my vision of genius, I made my act of creativity a matter of public record. A closely related part of me, however, wanted to keep the drawings all to myself. I always felt pangs letting go of a favored piece, but I’d never felt the possessive impulse as strongly as I did toward Victor—largely because I considered myself his collaborator rather than his sales representative.
    I said, “Whether I sell them now or after the show, they’re sold.”
    “Sell them now,” Marilyn said, “and they’re sold
now
.”
    People had a hard time understanding my relationship with Marilyn. To begin with, there was the question of age: she is twenty-one years older than I am. Come to think of it, that part might not be so hard for women in their fifties to understand.
    My less discreet friends, though, tended, when drunk, to point out the peculiarity of my situation.
    Newsflash!
    She’s old enough to be your mother.
    Not quite. Were my mother still around, she would be four years older than Marilyn. But thank you; thanks very much. I hadn’t noticed that similarity at all, not until you brought it to my attention. I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.
    These same friends were usually careful to add (I guess as a means of breaking the hard news to me more gently)
She looks good. I’ll grant you that
.
    Thanks again. I hadn’t noticed that, either.
    Marilyn
does
look good, and not just for her age: objectively, she is a beautiful woman and always has been. True, she’s had work done. Who around here hasn’t? At least she comes by her beauty honestly: Ironton High School Homecoming Queen, 1969. What you see is the result of maintenance rather than a complete fiction.
    The southernmost city in Ohio, Ironton bequeathed to its fairest daughter a ferocious ambition and, when she is annoyed, a hint of northern Kentucky drawl, useful both for feigning innocence and for dropping the sledgehammer of Southern condescension. You do not want to make Marilyn mad.
    Today her haircuts cost as much as her first car. She has phone numbers for people who don’t have phone numbers. I strongly suspect that when she walks into Barneys they press a special button to mobilize the sales force. But any true New Yorker knows that the real measure of success is real estate and what you do with it. Marilyn has succeeded. In the dining room of her West Village town house hangs a de Kooning worth ten times as much as her parents made, cumulatively, in fifty years of honest labor. Her uptown apartment on Fifth and Seventy-fifth affords a generous view of Central Park; and when the sun sets across the island, silhouetting the Dakota and the San Remo, flooding the living room with sweet orange light, you feel as though you are floating on the surface of a star.
    You can’t take the Ironton out of the girl. She still gets up at four thirty A.M. to exercise.
    Her rise on the scene is the stuff of