Dissident Gardens (34 page)

Yes, Cicero studied his mother—once he located the pleasure in study, Cicero studied
everything
. And yes, Diane Lookins in fact had a language of her own, had, even, appetites. Even after she was sick. Cicero discerned this in eavesdropped phone calls, the sultry pleasure of her gossip, items picked up and savored in slavish delight. The sex lives of others. The
deaths
of others, which confirmed that she still lived. Cicero discerned this too in her use of newspapers and magazines, the nature of those she brought into the house, the care with which she read certain sordid items of confabulated scandal. She didn’t want to hear what her husband dealt with on a daily basis, but so long as the crimes were committed by film stars, Diane Lookins
enjoyed
crimes.

What Cicero didn’t and couldn’t do was give one single indication to Diane that she was visible to him. Not that he studied her, or that he registered what he studied, or that it touched him. Instead he put up a mask of boyish obliviousness to his mother’s dimensions—to do otherwise would have been too costly. He studied her in mute glances, while wolfing a sandwich and letting her scrape the crusts, while needing to be ordered to wash his hands and ordered to mutter thank you, while dropping his schoolbooks with only a grunt to say he’d handled his homework already during recess, then left the family home, went to Rose Zimmer’s to study the art of opening his mouth.

Today, though, Cicero wanted to think just for once not of Rose, always and endlessly Rose, but of Diane Lookins, the woman cut to drift in the vacuum silence of her distress. Today, with Sergius Gogan
here at his side petitioning for more of the dynamism and strife of Rose, more of Rose and Miriam, please, than Sergius had been allotted, a larger share if you will, sir, kindly surrogate grandson—Cicero wanted to say, no, motherfucker,
no
. No more Rose. Diane instead. Cicero wished he were teaching an entire course on Diane Lookins, stuffing the invisible Negress down their throats, except he was too complicit in making her invisible himself, he knew.

Anyway, Cicero kidded himself. Rose had helped him comprehend Diane Lookins, too. For in demonstrating to Cicero the nature and enormity of his father’s appetite, Rose had caused Cicero to understand that Diane Lookins relied on the policeman’s lover—unknown, unseen, unnamed—to drain off this unruly surplus. By fucking Douglas, Rose acted in concert with Diane Lookins and her hospital necessities, her program of pacification. Someone had to tear Douglas down that way from time to time, to catalyze with Diane’s steaming platefuls of food and color television and shushing, to free him to pass out on the couch. The women handled Douglas Lookins in tandem. And Diane Lookins didn’t need to be told to know her tag-team partner existed.

There was just one time, so far as Cicero knew, that the three, Diane, Douglas, and Rose, had been in the same room. Even then it was a large public hall, and Cicero had no evidence that they’d come within direct sight of each other, let alone spoken. The Guardians Association Scholarship Award gala, the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem, June 1973. Less than two years later Cicero’s mother would be dead. This ceremonial banquet was the last time he’d see Diane Lookins out in any public setting, short of the dayroom of Mount Sinai Medical, where she passed, or the open coffin at her funeral.

A night of firsts and lasts, then. For it was also the first and last time he’d see Douglas Lookins amid the mythic Guardians, who’d swelled in Cicero’s imagination to some kind of Harlem Mafia,
The French Connection
remade as blaxploitation. Imagine his surprise at discovering the homey, aspirational clan of patrolmen’s families filling the hall, filtering through the lobby clasping one another in a hubbub of reunion, policemen’s medals tangling in rhinestone brooches to great laughter, drinking sweet wine and flipping open wallets to show off graduation pictures, until needing to be urged to go in and
be seated, as if at a wedding, around floral-display banquet rounds. Piped through speakers with no low end, the Delfonics and Donny Hathaway. Lining the room, long tables bearing framed photographs of uniformed association members, their reward for being killed in the line of duty during the previous year to be dwarfed by a florist’s masterpieces even more garish than those covering the rounds. An emeritus association officer, accompanied by his withered-apple wife, hobbled on two canes to the lip of the riser, wanting to personally shake hands with the new crop of college scholarship winners, the dweebish, oversize, Department of Health–tortoiseshell-eyeglass-wearing threesome among whom Cicero Lookins himself stood foremost, the top winner, and already accepted at Princeton, too. The runners-up (one of each sex, and destined one for Howard, the other for SUNY Purchase) flanked him like the silver and bronze winners on a pyramidal stairstep—Cicero considered suggesting they conspire in a fist-clenched Black Power salute, but thought better of it quickly. So this was the garrulous, familial Guardians’ world, the black cop’s utopia of solidarity, that Douglas Lookins’s naming of names had barred them from, exiling them to Queens.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps if he’d tempered his pride Douglas Lookins would have been readily forgiven. One of their own after all, a decorated top cop who’d appeared in that pic with Mayor Wagner, and, yo, any brother know what it takes to make lieutenant’s stripes in a stone racist system. Perhaps dozens of these men had at some point chosen rank over race and named a few names, played a little ball with Internal Affairs, and only Douglas Lookins had made a federal case of it. No way for Cicero to know what sealed his family’s exile destiny, really. For, look now: The Guardians had welcomed Douglas Lookins back, they’d given his son the top scholarship. So why couldn’t the Lookinses have stayed?

Well, if they’d stayed, who knew where Cicero might be standing instead of atop this pyramid. It was Rose, waiting for them in Queens, who’d pushed Cicero up onto this riser to receive the Guardians’ check. Not merely in some general sense, egging Cicero to his school record of excellence, but specifically, by demanding he go around his father’s objections and write in for the application form that put him up for the Guardians’ scholarship. Rose filled out the paperwork and Diane
signed it, her silence an assent to son that was also a mutiny against husband, as well as another remote collaboration with her husband’s lover. Douglas, if he even saw the papers going out in the mail, said nothing. Maybe Rose had discussed this with him. Except he didn’t see a whole lot of Rose these days.

Now they sat, while Cicero stood gazing out, facing all three from the riser. Douglas and Diane Lookins grim and rigid up at the front, at a table with the parents of the runners-up and a couple of members of the Guardians’ board. All dressed to the nines, yet their table seemed laminated in gloom, the shade cast by Douglas Lookins’s indignation at being dragged back here by, of all things, his effete boy being given a handout. What a trap they’d set for him! What a trap his whole existence had become: dying wife, Queens political machine proving as depraved with ethnic nepotism as anything he’d met in Harlem, and his know-it-all ex-lover, to whom he’d ceded sponsorship of the child only to have confirmed any suspicion he’d harbored as to the incurably queer underbelly of Communist belief. He’d said
Help him find the chess books
and been handed back a boy who if you put him in great seats behind home plate and tried to settle in to enjoy a game began asking if you’d read
James Baldwin
. Diane and Douglas and the rest of their table, as still and glazed as Dutch burghers by contrast to the jubilance and funk all around them.

In the back of the room, unmissable as one of three white faces scattered around, Rose Zimmer. She wasn’t going to be denied the chance to see the triumph of her workings, and so had called in some civic favor, pulled one of her innumerable strings—for a woman as lonely and reviled as Douglas Lookins might take Rose Zimmer to be, as much frozen like Mrs. Havisham in her 1956 betrayals, Rose sure had a lot of strings to pull, a regularly updated Rolodex of the Obliged. No doubt had beaten out some how-do-you-do on her cursive typewriter and gained access. (
White
access it was, too. Imagine some negroid Mysterious Lady trying to crash the Irish or Jewish equivalent of this clan’s affair.) So there she sat, making God-knew-what small talk at her table, emanating loud-silent waves of surrogate proprietary esteem in Cicero’s direction. Could Douglas and Diane judge the plane of Cicero’s gaze, to know for certain that he looked over their heads to see Rose applaud? Through his Department of
Health spectacles, not likely so. Did they know she was back there? Undoubtedly. How not to?

Day of firsts and lasts. It was the last day Cicero Lookins, on the verge of making his prodigal, seventeen-year-old, grade-skipper’s departure to the Ivy League, could kid himself that his father’s congratulations for this or any subsequent achievement were anything but a tissue-thin disguise on revulsion. For Cicero, seeing his father bilious with rage, understood that it was not only at being forced to congregate with the Guardians. Cicero understood that in his body and person, he, Cicero, was
disgusting
to his father. Could never be other than. Cicero’s intelligence, his achievements, the embrace of this scholarship, and his acceptance to a college to which his white classmates wouldn’t have dared even apply—none of this mitigated his father’s disgust. All of this made it worse instead. Cicero’s brilliance, the dawning boldness of his inquiry and his skepticism, all ensured that Douglas Lookins would be forced to confront his son’s deviance not as some facet of a subnormality, one pitiable aspect of the pitiable spectacle of a boy who’d sadly not come out right, but rather as something akin to, and borne upward by, the intellectual brashness Cicero’d begun to demonstrate. The queerness would be part and parcel of an
assertion
, coming from a fifth column of Douglas Lookins’s own paternity, of shit Douglas Lookins simply did not want asserted.

Cicero knew he also disgusted his mother. In the months before she fled this vale, in the grip of the late mercies of the wolf, Diane Lookins had begun to falter in her pretenses to herself and to Cicero. She couldn’t veil her own revulsion with her son, attained by proxy. She was disgusted with Cicero for disgusting his father, as, axiomatically, she’d been disappointed in Cicero for disappointing Douglas, disgraced by him for disgracing Douglas, et al.—even as she had once been delighted in her child
because
he had been, long ago and too briefly, delightful to his father. Douglas Lookins’s word might not be law—in practice his words were a conflagration to be doused—but his emotional weathers were the Ten Commandments.

If they numbered even ten. Cicero wasn’t sure he could name that many.

Firsts: Cicero Lookins had gotten his tongue around its first dick
just six weeks earlier. This miracle, manifest in a onetime act of perfect, double-blind secrecy, Cicero nevertheless felt certain must be worn on his face, as evident as his blackness, as arresting as his mother’s cheeks’ florid lupus rash. So some part of him accorded with his father, looked out from Douglas Lookins’s eyes upon the stage and was revolted, too, to see what Cicero’d suddenly and irreversibly become: one who not only wanted what he wanted but might risk
having
it. A much greater portion of him, however, dwelling as it did in the subterranean ethical sense of the appetites, was delighted and righteous and at this very instant sailed free of the Guardians’ ballroom stage, oblivious of time and space (racing well beyond a terrified virginal first two years at Princeton, in which time he’d not get hold of any dick again beside his own), into a future where no aging policeman’s censure could damage it even faintly.

Wear your love like heaven
.

Meanwhile, Rose Zimmer beamed on him from her place in the back of the ballroom, rising from her chair now to holler with the black folks, streaming undiluted pride, like she’d built the pyramidal stand and the riser with her own hammer and sickle, like she’d picked every flower in the room with her teeth, like she’d signed a proclamation and freed the slaves.

The creak and scuffle of the last exits from the seminar room left Cicero where he’d not wished to find himself again: at sea with Sergius Gogan. No one to blame but himself for extending the invitation to witness the detonation of the three-hundred-pound African American neutron bomb. Even on a good day, Cicero’s clientele filed out under a funereal canopy of hush—it wasn’t like he awaited applause. A strange thing, the professor’s art, the esoteric transaction at the heart of the whole bureaucracy of curriculums and committees: to decant yourself before them, to dare them to wade into the bog of your thinking, what was called your “pedagogy.” Colleagues arrayed along a department’s corridor like rival churches on a Main Street, no two alike in their ritual methods and occult origins. Yet the students,
entering the churches, weren’t like congregants. They browsed like shoppers at a mall.