“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“I never suggested you did,” said Cicero. “But it’s not incumbent on me to have my brain picked by the ass-end leavings of your posterity.”
You could tell she relished at least this part of what her protégé had become.
“You’re a teacher, reputedly. So teach him.”
“You playing Jiminy Fucking Cricket with me now?”
Rose ignored him. “Here’s what I suggest. You say what you know and I don’t.”
“Meaning what?”
She shrugged. What this signified, beyond Cicero letting his brain be picked, she wouldn’t elaborate. If he didn’t know, she’d wash her hands of the matter.
“Now finish your malted, I need a smoke.”
Rose’s words flung him back into his body in the sea.
Well. He’d finished talking. Somewhere during his time-travel reverie, Cicero had ended the nostril-sputtering saltwater monologue. Let Sergius negotiate it. That she whom he professed to despise was his goddamn involuntary spirit animal Cicero wouldn’t let on.
“That’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for,” Sergius said. “The Communist stuff especially, Rose’s life in the party. I think it would be terrific, actually, to write some songs about that.”
“Oh, songs were written on the subject, Sergius. Your father wrote a few.” Cicero began some backstrokes again, his horny feet pointed to the shore. Could he lure Sergius farther out, to where they’d lose sight of land? Could he perhaps abandon the fool there? Cicero beat with fat choppy strokes another distance toward the barrier islands. His house and the others of the cove, their porticoes and sliding glass doors, their decks bearing gas-cartridge grills and thousand-dollar telescopes, were barely visible now. But Sergius, the poor sonovabitch whom Cicero now recalled had been named for Norman Mailer’s character from “The Time of Her Time”—did Sergius even know this self-trivia?—Sergius, despite his concave chest and scrawny arms, his scrawny ass, kept pace. His beseeching made him a swimmer Cicero couldn’t lose. Sergius had that much of Rose’s tenacity in him, perhaps, despite his Irish coloration and Quaker politesse. And so Rose was out here with the two of them. She’d gotten into Cicero’s medicine, like a moth, musty creature of the night, plopping into a glass of good water in broad daylight.
“Your mother’s friend Stella Kim once told me you had no memories of Tommy and Miriam,” Cicero said to him.
“I know, it seems impossible. I was eight when they died. But they’d been away.”
“And you can’t remember Lenny Angrush.”
“No. Just stories.”
“Well, your uncle Lenny was the species of motherfucker who’d gratuitously snuff out the chess career of a thirteen-year-old black kid, a kid with very little else in his life to cling to at the time.” Cicero was aware he’d concocted this grievance. A reverse sour-grapes maneuver: to inflate the value of that which had been taken from you, merely because it had been taken.
Sergius blinked. “I—I heard he was killed by the mob.”
“Sure. Only this wasn’t the Martin Scorsese mob you’re thinking of. Lenny wasn’t involved with the French Connection. He had to find a mob on his own level to get killed by—boneheads from Queens. Stella mentioned this?”
“No.”
“You don’t know jack about any of the Angrushes.”
“You can tell me.”
“If I felt like it.”
Sergius opened his mouth but said nothing.
“Be free of them,” Cicero commanded him. He was out of breath now. But Sergius only stared, helpless to accept this command, his shadow-body wavering beneath his strawberry-hued, bewildered head: a forked radish in aspic, a jellyfish. Maybe Cicero should have attacked Sergius, wrestled his shorts off, attempted to molest the forty-something child who’d entrusted himself to him. The Angrushes had once made a black boy their pet—Rose, and Miriam too. So, for revenge, make Sergius his pet now. Thinking it, Cicero understood that by drawing Sergius out here he’d evaded nothing at all. They were not disembodied heads, no, not free to drift away. Rather, they were heads anchored in a medium. Two American heads barely surfaced from a memory sea, seeking not to be drowned in it, limbs crawling, clawing for life. The sun above for a hammer, beating at fleshed skulls as they stared and blinked in the salt glare. No escape.
4 Accidental Dignity
When he was thirteen years old Cicero Lookins was told, for the first and only time, that Rose Zimmer had once shoved her daughter’s head into an oven. Miriam Gogan told him one cool November afternoon, a day unforgettable in any number of arresting specifics.
It began with chess. Cicero had lately been savaging all comers at I.S. 125’s chess club, so Miriam, on Rose’s counsel, had proposed to bring him to call on Cousin Lenny at the chess store on MacDougal, there to play and have measured whether he might be a prodigy, a wunderkind. Afterward, Miriam promised, she’d shepherd Cicero to a loft on Grand Street, to have his astrological chart professionally drawn for him. So this would be a day of futures foretold.
Though thanks to Rose and Cicero’s father’s improbably durable affair she might be considered Cicero’s de facto older sister, Miriam had artfully ignored Cicero until sweeping him up this day. She’d come and seized him from Rose’s apartment, from Rose’s grip, and with very little ceremony in the exchange. As though it were graduation day. Miriam in her flyaway hair and long houndstooth coat, hypnotic pattern of the black-and-white squares like some devilishly blurred chessboard, but one you couldn’t play on, couldn’t see in its entirety at once, because it wrapped around her—Cicero should have known at that moment that Miriam was here to foster revolutions in him, to demonstrate that the chessboard, like the world, wasn’t flat but round.
Cicero had been to that point Rose’s Negro boy. So, Cicero supposed, Miriam planned now to put some check on that dynamic, to insert in Cicero’s mind a little healthy skepticism as to Rose’s high ideals. Cicero’s obedient silences would have suggested the need for such intervention. Outwardly, he was obedient, in the extreme. He’d have appeared to Miriam to be conforming absolutely to Rose’s Abraham Lincoln fantasies of the good and proper result of her patient patronage, to her obsession with book-learning the Negro policeman’s child by feeding him the novels of Howard Fast, the poetry of Carl Sandburg, and by making him sit, as Miriam herself had had to sit, through repeated listenings to Beethoven’s Eroica, overlaid with Rose’s paeans to its greatness in alternation with her teeth-clenched weeping.
In point of fact, Cicero at thirteen was already a monster of skepticism.
Yet he believed in chess, a secret garden of rational absolutes. On the squares, things swooped or swerved according to their hard-and-fast scripts, bishops and rooks thus, pawns durably plodding, black and white unmistakable foes. Knights, like Cicero himself, had secrets. They played at brazen invisibility, at walking through walls. Apparently looking in one direction, knights killed you in a side glance from another. If you employed them just so, all other pieces seemed earth-mired, sluggish as pawns. To that day, Cicero had been tempted to believe that if you got good enough at a first thing you might never need a second.
Cicero believed in chess, and so though Miriam interested him as a fellow endurer of Rose, one with an advantage of years, when Miriam escorted Cicero into the tiny chess store he forgot about both women. The store, air mucked with pipe smoke, smeared glass cabinets exhibiting exotic sets, and, in the ice-cold mezzanine, the gray obsessive figures, barely human, their coats not even shed, hunched over gnarled endgames. The pale twitchy hands that darted forth from sleeves to clop the wooden pieces forcefully to new squares, and flicked out to punch the dull brass button on the time clocks, then to retract—those hands might have had a life of their own, no relation to the rolling eyes and bunching brows and pursing lips above. You might have no idea, looking only at the faces, which of them was connected to the hands that had made the newest moves. This might be Cicero’s first glimps
e, really, of an authentically academic setting, the destination toward which his life was pitched: a miniaturized world craven with self-regard, unimpressive except to those who read the palace codes, and sublimely oblivious to the outside. And Cicero was here not only to meet, at last, Cousin Lenny, who’d played Fischer once; he was here to play him.
Lenin Angrush bustled upstairs a moment after. “A glass of tea!” he said before greeting Miriam, slapping his palm in mock outrage on the small counter, where the proprietor only lifted his eyebrows slightly. Then the bearded fist of Cousin Lenny’s face unclenched, his smile revealing a trace relation to Rose in the gap of his teeth. Behind them, his molars were a disaster area of black and gold. “Bubbelah!” He clutched Miriam in her houndstooth coat, her purse trapped in his embrace, his limbs encasing her like sausage. Then released her to the vigilance of his gaze, which mingled scorn, worship, and guilt. The black hair everywhere on his head was clipped to a weirdly identical length, his Fuller Brushes of eyebrow, his lip-smothering beard, the hair on top the same as that shooting from around his ears, as though he’d been mowed. His spinal curvature tended toward the rabbinical, his eyes toward the heretic. That beneath his stinking black coat he wore some insignias of the hippie—a worn-thin Woodstock T-shirt, bird perched on guitar’s neck, a frayed woven sash of rainbow wool for a belt on his stained suit-bottom pants—did nothing to counter the impression of a figure heaved painfully and against steep odds into the present, out of the rank and degraded past.
Miriam’s own outfit, once her coat was at last loosened, struck Cicero as a kind of costume, rather than ingenuous clothing: a yellow silk-screened Groucho Marx T-shirt, worn braless beneath her white denim jacket, peace-sign earrings, and tiny, purple-tinted John Lennon shades. Cicero sometimes wondered: Were hippies serious?
Anyway, Cousin Lenny clocked her nipples like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, a distraction that ought to provide Cicero with an advantage in the coming chess match. Really, though, cousin? A horny, tragic uncle, that’s what Cicero thought now, as he stood with his fists dug into the pockets of his Tom Seaver #41 Mets warm-up jacket, staring. Rose had implied Lenny was Miriam’s contemporary; he seemed twenty years older, at least. Lenny still hadn’t glanced at Cicero, so far as Cicero could tell. When he did, Cicero felt caught, lulled into making a full, slack-brained examination, as though Lenin Angrush was a movie projected on a screen, not a person who could look back.
“So why did nobody mention the black Fischer was a man-mountain?”
Cicero was at thirteen already accustomed to being presented, by Rose, to those who’d shamelessly exclaim over him. There were only so many things they could exclaim. Ready for man-mountain, for black, for Fischer, he picked out only what interested him. “You really had a match with Fischer?”
“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, h
oary 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?”
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