Dissident Gardens (10 page)

“One game, a draw.” Lenny’s boiling eyes consulted Miriam’s. “You told him?”

“I’m sure you can imagine that it was Rose who mentioned Fischer to him,” said Miriam. “I’ll let you explain it.”

“Under a tented canopy, Fischer against twenty at once. Opponents seated, he stalking among us, glancing at the boards, selecting his moves carelessly. Like a man brushing ants from a picnic table, that’s how the captured pieces flew. He savaged us. I think he forgot a pawn on my board, maybe something got stuck in his eye, who knows, it was a windy day. I was the last alive, my position tenable. Yet when he turned full attention to me I deposited a small portion of diarrhea into my pants. I offered a draw and he took it. Who knows, maybe in his contract it said he shouldn’t have humiliated every last man but rather leave a figure of identification for the common rabble to root for. Maybe he wanted to be done with it, maybe wanted a sandwich. In any event, I in my shitted Fruit of the Looms recorded a drawn match against Bobby Fischer. Coney Island, May 1964.”

The roomful of players deferred to Lenny, whether out of respect or wearied aggravation you couldn’t say. A table was cleared by the window overlooking MacDougal, the glass of tea placed in Lenny’s hands. “Play white,” he commanded, seating himself at the black pieces.

“He doesn’t need to be indulged,” said Miriam.

“I’m not indulging, believe me. I want to see his attacking game. If he doesn’t have one, he’s nowhere. I can see by his outfit he’s a front-runner, he likes winners. So let him show me he knows how to win.”

“If you want to understand my cousin Lenny,” Miriam explained, “begin with the fact that he’s the one human occupant of Queens who couldn’t allow himself to enjoy the Miracle Mets.”

“Hah! The Mets are the opiate of the masses. Make her tell you, kid, how your team represents the abortion of Socialist baseball in America.”

“Lenny knew Bill Shea,” Miriam explained, obscurely. “Shea like the stadium. The guy who brought the Mets. Lenny had another idea.”

“Never speak the running dog’s name aloud. Have her tell you, when I’m out of hearing distance. The death of the Sunnyside Proletarians. Your team’s a crime scene, kid. No hard feelings.”

“Play chess,” said Miriam. “Unless you’re afraid of him.”

“He’s playing white, Mim. I await the wunderkind’s debut.”

Miriam stole one of the bentwood chairs from another table and placed herself beside Cicero, as if she’d be playing for his side. Cicero pushed king’s pawn. He needed to pee, said nothing. Lenny, grunting, unhooked a forefinger from his ear long enough to shove a pawn to mirror Cicero’s. Then out flopped knights. Cicero centered himself, within this vale of discomfort and disgust, on the possible actions of the pieces, while the large second-story window steamed with pipe-smoke exhalations, burps, and farts. Miriam, not watching the board, waved at the street below, apparently someone she knew, a musician kicking along with a giant case containing either an upright bass or a million dollars’ worth of hashish. Outside, the world had colors, and likely sounds other than the lung-rattle of opponents not yet informed of their deaths at some earlier date, possibly in the late 1950s. The interior of the chess shop, apart from Cousin Lenny’s improbable sash, was in black and white. Outside, 1970 was more than a possibility, it was a likelihood just weeks off. In here, rumors of
Sputnik
might still have been rash. The present was a gelled substance, like hair pomade, bottled behind this glass. Cicero couldn’t navigate it with his knights. In fact, Cousin Lenny now shocked him by trapping one and removing it from the board.

“You’re going to lose this game. You like coins, kid?”

“I never thought about them.”

“You should discover coins. Numismatics presents a world of fascination and value. Because this, frankly, is going nowhere for you.”

“Play the game, Lenny,” said Miriam.

“I can play and talk, especially your protégé here. He’s got no attack to speak of.”

“You know after six moves?”

“You’re not even watching. We’ve played sixteen. I’ve seen enough. You’re a civilian, so you want to see bloodshed. If you demand that I checkmate him, I’ll do it for you, but the kid’s smart enough to resign already.”

Cicero glanced at Miriam, then back at the board. If he didn’t study Lenny’s decrepitude, only listened to them flicking insults, he could believe they were cousins. Lenny paid as little attention as Miriam. Cicero was left alone to study the position of the pieces, unless you counted the steady gaze, amused and skeptical, of Groucho Marx from Miriam’s T-shirt. Cicero thought he still had a prayer. He’d noticed a seam of vulnerability for his surviving knight to explore. But, advancing the knight in this cause, he felt an instantaneous knowledge, spreading like a blush of shame across his whole front, that Lenny had been waiting for him to overreach this last and fatal time. No sooner had the piece landed than Lenny’s hand flicked out to push the bishop’s pawn a square forward, inflicting on Cicero’s ranks three simultaneous disasters. They both knew it. The question was who’d inform Miriam.

“Likely you have a terrific defensive game,” said Cousin Lenny. His red, hoary fingertips and weird nubby thumbs scrabbled at remote outposts in his beard, including the beard on top of his head and the beard growing above his eyes and from within his ears, as if something scurried underneath and the fingers chased it. “Flop the pieces from side to side, letting your adversary defeat himself. Playing impatient thirteen-year-olds, this is a consummate strategy. You prefer black, don’t you? I spotted this when I first laid eyes on you.”

Incredibly, Cousin Lenny seemed to include no innuendo or shame in this remark, but meant it as a cold statement of fact. It was one. Cicero nodded.

“Of course you do. As it happens, this is how I stayed in against
Fischer: circled the wagons, bored him to death. You think you’ve been playing chess, but you’ve been playing your opponents, not the pieces. Miriam, the child is a prodigious listener, a watcher of his fellow human animals. I’d be terrified of what information he’s gathered on you to this point, as I’m already terrified of him myself. If we can ascertain his sympathies he may prove highly useful to the cause of the workers’ revolution. But he’ll go nowhere in chess. Now, Mim, tell me, when are you leaving your goyish singer so that we can commence the life for which we were intended? He must be losing his looks by now, and in this I have the advantage, having had no looks to begin with.”

“The day you quit jerking off, Lenny, is the day I leave him. You know I’ve always promised this. But just remember, I can see into your bedroom.”

Lenny put his hands over the Woodstock bird, and his own heart. Then he cupped the fingers of his right hand, placed them lower down, and shook them as if they held a pair of dice. “You who’ve robbed me of my heart’s desire since the day you sprouted a bosom, you’ll take even this from me?”

“Discipline, Lenny.”

He shrugged, arched his Fuller Brushes, beckoned heaven with an upraised palm, evoking the full worldliness of a Yiddish stage ham’s rendition of Hamlet or Oedipus. “Then I’ll have to jerk in the foyer, where you can’t see.”

Miriam flipped him the bird. “We’ve got a date with an astrologer, Lenny. I’ll see you another time.”

“Wait.” With the same hand that had phantom-jerked, he now, horrifyingly, dug in his pants pocket. “Here.” He pressed something cool into Cicero’s hand. A zinc U.S. penny. Rose’s almighty Lincoln, rendered in tinfoil. Cousin Lenny lowered his voice. “Study that coin. If you persist you’ll find in it the whole secret law of history. The death of the United States of America rests there in your hand, kid. You can listen to it whisper if you hold your head close.”

“I need to use the restroom,” said Cicero.

Miriam took Cicero downstairs to the toilet, and then out of the chess shop, that library of souls, that grave of time. Onto the sidewalks of Greenwich Village, where 1969 was permitted to reassert
itself, resume its animation and flow. Though as much a confabulation, surely, as that thickened portion of time trapped behind the chess mezzanine’s window, the present had the advantage of being still open to negotiation. Cicero had heard that all sorts of people lived in Greenwich Village. The thirteen-year-old secret faggot was ready to meet them.

“I hope you weren’t scandalized by that jackass.”

Cicero said nothing. Did scandalized include how, in the chess shop’s tragic minuscule restroom, his dick was surprisingly hard before he drained it? Crummy, scummy Cousin Lenny—a subject for his fixations? Maybe just the matter-of-fact mimicry Lenny had performed with his hand. Maybe the way he’d wrenched Cicero from his hiding place of chess, reinstalling him in the perplexity of the adult world. That of filthy Lenny and gorgeous Miriam and their unstable relation, and that of Miriam’s expectations for Cicero, this day in her Manhattan precincts, this day of something unseen coming.
Nowhere in chess
, that was the phrase Lenin Angrush used, in an action with a result as sudden as pressing a James Bond ejection-seat button. Cicero knew plenty of nowhere, on Queens Boulevard, on Skillman or Jackson or Greenpoint Avenue, in Rose’s company or surrounded by streaming schoolchildren, or alone, which added up to the same thing. Nowhere, nothing, nohow: Cicero was still at home only in himself. There, barely. To Lenny’s verdict, Cicero now added a vow: Black pieces or white, he’d never touch chessmen again. He fingered the zinc penny, deep in his pocket. American money was a lie. The Mets, a crime scene. Lenny thrilled Cicero by his allusions to secret knowledge, history as a drama of lies. Perhaps it was this that had bestowed Cicero’s hard-on.

Miriam’s missionary zeal was hardly damaged: her fortune-teller would uncork Cicero’s destiny. He’d been born on January 20, 1956, at 1:22 in the morning, a fact inscribed on his birth certificate, the double-folded black photostat that Miriam had instructed Cicero to bring along and which that morning he’d palmed into his pants pocket, after slipping it from his mother’s drawer of baby keepsakes,
rather than try to explain to Diane Lookins her son’s multiple errands this day. As they’d gone up the dusty loft-building stairwell to be welcomed inside by Sylvia de Grace, Miriam’s heavily perfumed, wizened, and silk-scarfed French (or, possibly, “French”) astrologer, both he and Miriam believed Cicero to be an Aquarius. Now came the day’s second shock of refusal: When Sylvia de Grace presented Cicero’s chart accurately drawn, he was revealed as nothing more than a flat-out Capricorn.

“Still, isn’t he on the cusp?” Miriam demanded of Sylvia de Grace, reluctant to surrender the Aquarian delusion on Cicero’s behalf. Here in the hot, radiator-clanking loft, Miriam had removed her coat, revealing her hippie garb in full. That costume of hers, as much as Sylvia de Grace’s, seemed to argue for a belief in talismans, hoodoo, sacred monsters.
Being on the cusp
might be even more special, Miriam quickly explained, seeing as how it would combine aspects of two adjoining signs—Cicero’s would be a stealth sign, then, a spy in the nation of destiny.

But the astrologer only rattled her own elaborate jade earrings and stole Miriam’s hopes. Cusps, she explained, were a phenomenon popular with amateurs; for serious astrologers like herself they didn’t exist. Worse: Not only was Cicero a dull earth sign rather than one of those transcendent slippery Aquarians, whose age the planet was now entering, but all his subsidiary details were, so far as Cicero could follow them, disheartening: planetary rulerships in disarray, each in houses that signified, according to the increasingly severe Madame de Grace, only to that planet’s detriment. “Nothing dignified anywhere?” pleaded Miriam on Cicero’s behalf. The word
dignified
apparently held special value here. But Sylvia shook her head. “Not well dignified, no. His moon’s in Cancer, but in the twelfth house. We call that
accidental dignity
.”

“Accidental dignity?” repeated Miriam anxiously.

“Placement within this house circumscribes the moon’s opportunities to express its benevolence.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

To Miriam these facts were important, perhaps even dire; to Cicero not particularly so. Cicero knew his obvious features defined him absolutely in others’ eyes. Further definitions—limitations on
the moon’s benevolence, say—were fictions imposed from without. Definitions unmistakably in error but with which he saw no strategic reason (as yet) to differ. Cicero was still in the information-gathering phase of his life on this planet. Thus everything Miriam revealed to him was good information. The chess shop, Lenny’s cipher allusions and black and gold molars, had been good information, even at the price of Cicero’s chess vanity. This fake-Frenchwoman’s salon, squirreled into the brick warehouse full of painters’ lofts, was full of good information, a cavern of exotica, patchouli pretenses of sophisticated adulthood he could use to fill in the picture he would eventually be fitting himself into. No hurry, though.

Anyway, and more simply, Cicero had never been able to take any mystical shit like astrology seriously for a second. This was true for Cicero even before Rose’s influence had reached him. Rose’s materialist worldview, against which he supposed Miriam’s gestures in the faintly pagan direction of astrology were directed as protest. Cicero felt he’d been
born under a bad sign
having nothing to do with any rams or fish or bearers of water. He didn’t need another layer to his identity.