Dissident Gardens (54 page)

Though from this point he would now be open, at Princeton and while teaching at Rutgers, and while in the company of visiting scholars or at conferences by himself, to encountering further iterations of David Ianoletti—and sometimes did—and though he soon learned to drive, Cicero became for a couple of years a regular denizen of the trucks.

He wasn’t in any way ashamed of the dark face. It was merely that it remained dark, even to Cicero while he visited it. An obverse nature defined it: Wear your love like heaven, yes, but what constituted your love might be more than was visible or imaginable from earth. Yet that it was
one
moon with two faces he explored—that was the point. If Cicero’s sunlight pursuit was to think with critical acuity, to read literature and philosophy as the record of a species attempting to know itself, what did that represent but an effort to give names to the bewilderments represented by his dark-side glimpses of true human freedom? What was theory, his insatiable sorting through successive frameworks of Nietzsche, Barthes, Lacan, all the others, if not an attempt to hurl the net of language over the splendid other life, that of bodies grappling toward and through their incommensurable desires?

All this had waited for Cicero to be ready, as he could never have been until he’d escaped Sunnyside, public school, the gravitational field of Diane and Douglas Lookins’s home. It was only after, place secured in the sun, that Cicero could afford to slip back to the nether surface, to detail the variegations, the craters and outcroppings, the
pebbles strewn there to be known only in the dark. That’s to say, whether he wanted to think it or not,
he had Rose to thank
! For Princeton, yes, and Nietzsche, but also for David Ianoletti. For the trucks at the West Side piers. He had Rose to thank, and Miriam, only Miriam wasn’t around for Cicero to do any return favors.

So now this, what repayment might entail. The social worker called. Rose was sensible again, enough anyway that she badly needed a visitor. A familiar face as a peg on which to hang her remaining self. The social worker made Cicero understand that by turning up in person, by signing those forms, he’d placed himself in the sights of the Foucauldian social services machine. Rose Angrush Zimmer, or this ghost that had replaced her, needed that lifeline in the human world. Fair enough. Cicero would be her lifeline. He’d jaunt to Queens, where he’d thought he’d never need set foot again, on some kind of regular basis, why not? He took the train into the city periodically anyhow. And so his visits to Rose, in the garden of her decline, became enclosed in the dark face of his moon, that part of Cicero’s life unknown at Princeton. The convergence was natural, for among his peers and mentors, the various gray Casaubons of his dissertation committee, one would have been as incongruous an explanation as the other.

“You see, there are these trucks, they’re left open to no purpose, the men come from all over and no one organizes what happens there … for example the other night I was lifted off my feet by a group of strangers, yes, just raised aloft for the strange sensation of entrusting myself to their hands, while another man sucked my penis—”

“Well, there’s this old woman in Queens … you’d call her Jewish but don’t let her hear you say it. She was my father’s lover for nearly a decade—”

In Cicero’s fantasy interrogation, his dark-side orals exam, the interlocutor continued:

“What’s your devotion to this old Jewish or not-Jewish woman—a matter of a certain unaccountable love?”

“No more that than a certain unaccountable hatred.”

“You feel obligated, then?”

“My father didn’t have a lot to teach me, apart from I was obligated to no man.”

“Obligation’s the wrong word, then. Sheer guilt?”

“Maybe.”

His first task was to visit the basement of Rose’s house and sort what remained of her stuff. He bagged the portion of clothing that might still be useful—nightgowns, undergarments, flat shoes, the least ornate of the polyester pantsuits that had in her last years overtaken any other manner of dress. He gathered all papers, the contents of her card file of addresses, a scattering of keepsakes, photographs, and ephemera, a World War Two ration book—the whole compilation more scant than he’d have imagined. He found one school photograph of himself, sixth or seventh grade, teeth cinched in a false smile, shanghaied in a tie his mother had knotted. Not one item gave evidence of his father. No love letters of any kind. Rose’s books had been reduced by some unseen helping hand—“a neighbor,” explained the uninterested manager who’d already rented the apartment—the preponderance donated, with her classical LPs, to a local thrift shop. Nothing remained of her political books, her Engels and Lenin and Earl Browder, nor of her Lincoln shrine, only five or six volumes someone had decided might be essential: a moldering Jewish prayer book, three novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Howe’s
World of Our Fathers
—the Singer and Howe, he assumed, each unrequested gifts from her sisters, only why saved when the rest was gone? Had they been by the bedside? Had she been
reading
them? Or did this express some Jew’s editorial hand? He found, too, Moses Maimonides’s
Guide for the Perplexed
; it would be too much to credit this last as the selector’s joke on Rose’s present dementia. Cicero packed the books and other paltry leavings, along with the clothes, into the back of a taxicab, to decorate her new life. The furniture, the massive television, and the cabinet stereo, all useless, and in any case forbidden in the nursing home, he abandoned. When she asked, he knew to lie and say he’d taken the television and stereo himself, rather than offering them as he had to the Polish family that occupied her old rooms, to spare himself her excoriation.

For his first visits they formed an eating club of the most abject variety. At the encouragement of the nurses he always walked into her room carrying two lunch trays.
She won’t come to the dining hall
, they told him.
It confuses her
. Maybe, he thought but didn’t say, confusion wasn’t the primary issue.
We bring trays to her room, but we can’t sit and put the fork to her mouth. The trays come out full. Maybe she’ll eat with you
. Maybe so; he was willing to try. He’d take the trays in, to where she’d been helped to a seat beside her bed, where she waited fully dressed, hair brushed, eyes glistening with anticipation and shame at his visit. He’d unwrap the day’s fare, egg salad on white bread, pasta spirals in Parmesan cream. Take the paper cover off the apple juice, tell her the rice pudding wasn’t bad. She’d sample a bite or two, squinting at him, every resource of skepticism and censure still agitating in her smile. The gaze with which she’d cut down American brownshirts, or landlord-corrupted police captains attempting to execute eviction notices, she now levied against Cicero’s slight oversell of the rice pudding.

Rose had regained her senses. She recognized Cicero when he came. Rose Angrush Zimmer now mounted a comeback, from the bed of her infirmity—yet you can only come back so far as where you left off. She recovered spite, she recovered disenchantment, she recovered paranoia. Except the milieu and personae that had once organized her reactions were mostly scattered to the winds now. She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it. Ronald Reagan was president, history had toppled into absurdity. She’d kissed the century farewell too long ago. Sunnyside? Malnutrition and derangement having destroyed her block-watcher’s authority, she patrolled memories instead, tried to incite against former neighbors and comrades—against her betrayers on the library board, against a misguided Zionist grocer who died in 1973, against a Real’s Radish & Pickle shop steward who’d Redbaited her in 1957.

Rose’s only daughter was dead. That no one should have to live through the death of a child was a tempting motif, yet so generic that it plainly left her unsatisfied even as she bewailed it. Soon enough, she let it go. After all, who were you accusing in such a circumstance? God? In whom you didn’t believe? She was insatiable in search of a
better enemy than old nonexistent Yahweh; for instance, the Jamaican nurses. They’d imprisoned her here, they’d stolen cash from her bedside table, they coveted her clothes. Between interrogations of these women who merely changed her sheets and gave her sponge baths and sometimes forced her to move her limbs to spare her bedsores, Rose resorted to ancient archetypes of enmity. She rediscovered Trotskyites: Cicero, when he tried to explain to her the slant of his studies, turned out to be one. And Nazis. In fact, her hunger strike might be against Nazis.

“What I wouldn’t give for a braunschweiger on good black rye,” she told him, in the course of refusing an ice-cream-scoopered mound of tuna on shredded iceberg.

“You want me to get you one?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t eaten German liverwurst since 1932. Not that they don’t make the finest of everything—if I close my eyes I can still taste it.”

“Maybe if I hunt a little I can find you a U.S.-made liverwurst sandwich.”

She waved her hand. The conversation was defunct. When he arrived next, it was with a liverwurst sandwich. Not German, he assured her.

“What did you pay for this?” she said after one bite.

“Who cares, Rose?”

“Whatever you paid, you were robbed. Only the German is any good.”

“But you wouldn’t eat the German.”

“I’d spit on it.”

Nonetheless, the liverwurst went in her. So their eating club was alleviated of the burden of the trays. He ferried in lasagna and borscht and pierogis and pastrami, all according to her whims; he imported cheesecake and licorice and Orange Crush, and everything they demolished together while she complained of its inadequacy to the food of her memory and of Cicero’s unthriftiness, his foolish inability to locate a bargain. Given the lousiness of the food, the prices were ludicrous, a crime he’d paid so much!

Cicero recalled her munificence when as a child she’d insist he eat three, four slices of pizza, plunking a ten-dollar bill on the counter,
then sending him home to Diane with what change remained from it jangling guiltily in his pocket. He’d never realized what a coupon-clipper she’d eventually become, eking out her years alone after quitting the pickle factory. Now, in this world of shrunken battlefronts, Cicero’s perceived extravagance was an enemy at her gate. Like all enemies, it demanded to be shamed into submission. Fair enough. Cicero enjoyed feeling extravagant in her eyes, though his forms of luxury had nothing to do with an outlay of $3.99 for a not-terrible pastrami on rye.

Paranoia, thrift, denunciation—as the backdrop of her recollections paled, these irrational essences took the foreground. She’d spent her life poring over Real’s double-entry books, after all; maybe what was left behind wasn’t the Communist but the managerial accountant. One day he arrived to discover her in a fury, claiming the staff had stolen a pair of slippers, ones he’d presented on his previous visit. She needed them, had begun walking, making scouting forays to the dayroom. His mistake was to have purchased a pretty nice pair.

Cicero looked. The slippers were beneath her bed. He pointed them out.

“No, no, no, listen to me, they
took
them.” Her voice was full of real terror. “The moment my back was turned. They’ll take anything, I don’t dare sleep.”

“Those are the slippers I bought you.”

She barely glanced, was derailed for not a second. “They resemble them, yes. They replaced yours with this pair of fakes, thinking I wouldn’t know the difference.”

“That’s pretty … elaborate.”

“They switched them in the night. I gather they found these at some ninety-nine-cent store. Where else would they shop?”

“The slippers look exactly the same to me.”

She arched an eyebrow, as if having sprung a trap. “They
are
the same, only made of cheaper materials.”

“You’ve worn them?”

“What choice do I have?”

“Well, then. Despite being surrounded by enemies, you’ve got slippers.”