The Genius by Jesse Kellerman

during those years, friends I still keep in touch with and see whenever I travel abroad for work—which I do more often than I need to, just to catch up. In certain ways I feel like my real life is still over there.
    It was Amelia who first stoked my interest in art. Her husband is a lord, and while he spends his time drafting legislation in defense of fox hunting, she spends his money in support of radical aesthetics. During my time abroad she took me to openings and parties at the Tate; I was the charming younger brother, the tousle-haired, devil-may-care Yank. I loved the pageantry, the snobbery, the love and loathing that infused every conversation. People cared—or seemed to, anyway, which is what mattered to me at that age. After living with my father, legendary for his stoniness, my time in London felt like a beautiful, melodramatic dream.
    Amelia taught me how to see not through my eyes but through the eyes of the artist, how to accept a piece on its own terms, a skill that enabled me both to understand contemporary art and to explain it to others. With her guidance I used my own savings—money that accrued to me from my mother’s bequest when I turned eighteen—to buy my first piece, a Cy Twombly drawing that I took with me when I returned to the United States to attend Harvard, where I lived in a dormitory that had been occupied by my half-brothers and my father and my grandfather and great-uncles before me, and that made people laugh when they learned my name.
You live in Muller Hall
?
    Without Amelia standing guard, I slipped back into my old ways. My next five-year period consisted of me drinking vodka, breathing cocaine, having sex, taking enforced “time off,” and flunking out.
    You have no idea how difficult it is to flunk out of Harvard. They will do anything to rid themselves of the stink of failure. I finally succeeded by getting into a brawl with one of my professors in the middle of a seminar room, whom I drunkenly—but correctly, mind you—declared a “knownothing yeast infection.” Even then, I had to throw the first punch.
    After retrieving me from Cambridge, Tony Wexler sat me down and told me that unless I got a job I would be cut off.
    It obviously hurt him to have to threaten me, and though we both knew that he wasn’t giving the orders, I despised him for carrying them out. I used my last thousand dollars to get on the next flight to London, where I showed up at Amelia’s door, virtually flammable from the countless Tanqueray-and-tonics I’d ingested on the way over.
    She took me right in. She never asked how long I planned on staying, never asked what had happened. She fed me and let me sleep and never judged me, perhaps knowing that I would come to judge myself harshest of all.
    With nothing to do except sit in the garden and read, I began to understand what a mess I’d made of my life, a realization that left me sad and lonely but most of all angry. I remember sitting on a bench at the end of the arbor, listening to the birds and feeling jittery after two days without a drink or drugs. I got up and went to the cabinet where Amelia’s husband kept his single malts, fully expecting it to be locked. Tony had probably called ahead and told her to clear out the cupboards. I resented her in advance for pretending to like me, for being no better than the rest of them, just another one of my father’s minions.
    The cabinet was open. Burning with shame, I closed it and slunk from the room.
    The breaking point came a few days later, when Amelia asked in passing what had become of my Twombly, the one we’d bought together and that I’d loved.
    Only then did I realize that I’d left it at Harvard. My departure had been so abrupt, so hazy, so filled with lawyers and ultimatums, that I’d forgotten to take it. As far as I knew it was still there.
    I called up a friend from the Fly and asked him to go over my room. The Twombly hung above my bed, where it attracted the immediate attention