Love in Infant Monkeys - Lydia Millet (cool books to read txt) 📗

are ashamed of this. They want the love to seem as small as a hobby so no one will have to feel sorry for them. Tesla was not ashamed. He was never ashamed. People did not understand that, and they called him perverted.

Pia loved Tesla like he loved the pigeon.

Since I knew Pia, sometimes I have thought: I would have liked to know that love.

She thought he was as good as a saint—a saint or even more. She had her own problems. One of them was a harelip. Tesla had so much knowledge, she said, that it was as though he were God himself. And like God, he could not pretend he was human. This was why he failed despite all his ideas, why other men lived in comfort with wives to serve their needs and he was alone and poor.

Why God sent His son down to die for our sins, said Pia, was He could not come down Himself. He would not have known how to talk to regular people, she said. Pia was part Catholic and part something else, a religion from her parents’ village in Cyprus. I was brought up Methodist and didn’t know much about it.

In my church we had God, of course. We also had God in my church. But He was all downy feathers and none of the dark blood.

How the dust gathered!—on the dark file cabinets, the cupboard, the large safe in the corner and the desk. Tesla forgot the surfaces of things. He didn’t need to write down his ideas for inventions, he said, because he could keep them in his head. He did use paper, though; he liked to draw pictures of places he dreamed about. The pages had a few words, as well as drawings, but hardly any math on them. I didn’t know much back then, but I had seen an equation or two in high school and I was pretty sure you would need math to invent a Death Beam.

He called me “Mees.” He called all the maids that.

Every day he went to feed the pigeons outside the library. He went with duty and an aspect of hope. If he was sick and could not feed the birds, he had a boy do it for him, a boy named Charles who raised racing pigeons. He walked with a cane by the time I met him, because he had been hit by a car two blocks away. His first thought when he got back to his room, with three ribs broken, was that someone had to do the day’s feeding for him. He sent out a bellhop with his bag of seed.

Anyone else might have gone to the hospital but Tesla had no truck with doctors.

When I first cleaned his rooms I thought the birds were disgusting. I would avoid the rooms whenever I could and leave them to Pia. She was a harder worker and didn’t turn up her nose at anything. But after a while Tesla began to talk to me. He told me how smart some pigeons are, how they see ultraviolet light and remember things for years. He told me homing pigeons were carrying messages for the Army and saving the lives of soldiers, how vast flocks of passenger pigeons had been shot out of the sky for the pleasure of shooting, and five billion had turned to none. He said it was a little boy who shot down the last of the passenger pigeons.

Tesla told me that he chose not to marry. He said love could be all right for working people, and maybe also for poets and artists, but not for inventors like him, who had to use all their passion for invention. He was friends with Mark Twain, who was devoted to his own wife. I think maybe that’s why he said writers could get married and still do good work: He didn’t want to hurt Mark Twain’s feelings.

Pia said he was chaste, and that was why he was not interested in women. Never once did I see a woman in his suite, except for Pia cleaning. Her husband beat her so badly she went deaf in one ear; her left eyelid drooped from when he flicked it half off with a knife tip.

Women could not tempt Tesla, she said.

One time Pia came in to work after a bad night and Tesla asked if she would go out and feed the pigeons with him. She was limping from a kick to the knee. Marco was handsome and slept with girls he met in bars; sometimes he brought one home and made Pia sleep on the couch while he took the girl into their bedroom. Then Pia would have to listen to them. I was very fond of Pia, but no one would have called her a good-looking woman. Mostly it was the harelip, since otherwise she was fine, warm brown eyes and a nice figure. I think that’s why Marco picked her, because he knew she would feel lucky to have a man at all and he figured he needed someone who would work for her keep and would never leave him.

Tesla seemed to believe her stories, how she fell down the stairs, etc. One time she claimed her nose was broken by a children’s ball that burst through her kitchen window. I heard her tell him this because we were doing his rooms together. He nodded politely. But I happened to know her kitchen had no windows.

Tesla had close women friends, though none were his girlfriends. He believed women were as smart as men and that one day they would be just as educated and maybe even more so. Back then, in 1943, it was rare to hear anyone say such a thing. He also said that one day people would all carry little telephones in their pockets, telephones without wires.

Anyway, the morning Pia was limping, Tesla invited her to go feed the pigeons with him. She said she