Dissident Gardens (11 page)

Astrology fell into the class of a
fake lie
, one many of its own exponents actively disbelieved—not only Miriam, obviously, but most likely Sylvia de Grace herself—and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero’s capacities were reserved for the lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was as yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people
needed
to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, to decry and destroy. Only, not yet.

Lies of that kind were strewn everywhere. Cicero had strewn a few himself, like adopting the Mets warm-up jacket. For, if a grown-up hippie in 1969 had to care what their sign was, a minimally functional verging-on-teenage male at Sunnyside Intermediate, whether black or white, had to choose from two other constellations of gods. Quick: Who was your favorite Met? And who your favorite Apollo astronaut? Cicero had his answers ready, even if they were for the wrong reasons. Tom Seaver had beautiful thighs and an oversize ass, for a white man. In Cicero’s study, starting pitchers often had the proportions he relished. The fetishy analysis of a pitcher’s windup and delivery justified
many hours of active lascivious fantasy on Cicero’s part, hidden in the plain sight of the consideration of his father’s
Herald Tribune
sports pages, or the exchange of baseball cards with his classmates, or the viewing of Tom Terrific’s starts on Rose’s prize color television. Seaver was celebrated for the length of his stride, the dip of his knee to the dirt at his delivery’s utmost point, the mound-smudged clue left behind on his uniform. Cicero liked to imagine himself in place of the mound when the pitcher’s thighs bowed earthward.

Though their costumes were not nearly so flattering, Cicero’s taste in astronauts—Buzz Aldrin—oriented along similar lines.

“Screw it, let’s go get your fortune told the
right
way,” said Miriam, once they’d delivered themselves from the patchouli fog of disappointment and stood in the hustle of the midday Chinatown sidewalk. “Anyway, I’m starving—you like dim sum?”

“Sure,” Cicero lied. Whatever global doubts the secretive boy entertained, Cicero felt seduced into awe and gratitude at Miriam Gogan’s attentions. “What’s the right way?”

“By means of
chicken
. C’mon. But first we’ll eat.”

Miriam yanked Cicero by the hand into Chinatown, splendidly impatient to move him like a pawn across the mental chessboard of her city. The operation wasn’t so different from Rose’s, dragging her chubby black ward through her block-watcher’s rounds in Sunnyside. Mother and daughter each made a version of Carroll’s Red Queen, running to stay in place. Each marked urban spaces like a pinball bouncing under glass, trying to light every bumper before gravity drew them into the trap waiting below. Only Miriam’s rounds were animated by exultation, the outer-borough kid’s connoisseurship of a Greenwich Village culture that was her inheritance if she demanded it be. Rose, paranoia her precinct, stalked Sunnyside like it was a zoo’s cage. Rose kept score. Burned grudges for fuel.

Cicero was already a connoisseur, too, of styles of female power.

Dim sum, at least as Miriam unveiled it to Cicero this afternoon, was merely Chinese soul food. Miriam passed over the trays full of the fussier-looking delicacies, pink pods like saltwater taffy, shrimp in glistening translucent wrappers, in favor of a grease-stained white bag loaded with what turned out to be shreds of pork barbecue, hidden in doughy white buns the size and tenderness and deliciousness of
Cicero’s mother’s own biscuits. Each bun also concealed a delicious squirt of barbecue sauce, secret incentive to gobble it entire; this was barbecue such as the Apollo astronauts might carry on their voyage. Together, reaching into the white bag again and again as if it might be bottomless, Miriam and Cicero threaded sidewalks narrowed by vendors’ stands full of unrecognizable vegetables and cross-eyed fish in tanks, sidestepped the Tom Thumb women with carts. Miriam chewed and talked. Cicero chewed and listened. When they’d emptied the bag, gummed their back molars with dough and threads of pork, Miriam located a dusty Jewish deli hidden somehow in the midst of the exotica and purchased two Orange Crushes in beaded bottles so they could rinse it all down.

Somewhere in this feasting, the dam broke, the last of Cicero’s reserve swept away. He fell in love. Cicero didn’t find women sexy, but Miriam was the exception, not for her bodily self but for her appetite: She devoured the ripe fruit of the world. He fell in love with the efflorescence of Miriam’s details. Cicero’s sudden idol had a knack for making what he’d never heard of until that instant sound exactly like the life he craved for himself:
dignified planet, Che Guevara, McSorley’s, falafel, Eldridge Cleaver, hashish, the Fugs, Ramblin’ Jack, dim sum
.

The chicken was, in fact, a chicken. On Mott Street, in the confusion of the entrance to something called the Chinatown Museum—an indoor court of attractions as decrepit and uninviting as the worst Coney Island parlor, ominous even in daylight—a dirty white hen strutted and pecked in a decorated vitrine that had been wheeled from the shadows to the edge of the sidewalk. “This is Clara,” said Miriam. “She’s going to tell your fortune. Hell of a lot cheaper than Sylvia de Grace.” Miriam purchased a token from Clara’s mute keeper, a Tom Thumb man this time, and shoved it into the slot. A winsome jingle played and Clara the chicken began a spinning dance, then pecked at one of several tabs on the interior of the cage, releasing a few grains of corn to the floor of her captivity, and a card with Chinese symbols and English words into Miriam’s waiting fingers. “Here you go,” said Miriam. “You want me to read it to you?”

Did she think he couldn’t read, after all? Cicero, so watchful and adept in the secret chambers of his self, so committed to the path
of invisibility, could nonetheless be amazed at how unilaterally his disguise as a fat black boy really worked:
Really?
You think I’m not watching and judging and desiring, not scheming to realize my desires? In certain eyes, Cicero felt granted no more sway in the human scheme than a bulldog leashed to a lamppost or a passing cloud that briefly took an amusing shape. But no. He caught his breath. This wasn’t that. What Miriam proposed was that she play oracle, take Sylvia de Grace’s place in the thwarted plan to hear Cicero’s destiny unveiled today.

“Yes,” he said. “Read it to me.”

She slipped it into her pocket. “I will, but not here. I’ve got another idea. You ever had a Dave’s vanilla?”

The answer, this time, was actually
yes
. Rose had once taken him to the Canal Street egg cream mecca. Not everything in Manhattan was Miriam’s invention. Yet Cicero strategically lied, shook his head, cocked his eyebrows, waiting for her to explain what he already knew. As with letting Miriam narrate the chicken’s fortune-telling, Cicero chose to let her believe in his susceptibility to her wonders, his gullibility, even where he wasn’t susceptible or gullible. The form Cicero’s devotion still took, with Rose, with Miriam, with his own mother, was an
unwillingness to disillusion
.

This would change.

Miriam and Cicero perched together on stools at the counter of Dave’s fountain, another timeless zone of men in dented fedoras slurping coffee under Depression-era signage, of glasses cleaned and dried with checkered cloths that were neither clean nor dry. They put their backs to the purring chaos of the intersection at Canal and Broadway and at her suggestion each sampled both a chocolate
and
a vanilla. The white-aproned counterman was only twentyish and had already seen it all in his day, didn’t blink at fizzing up four egg creams for a black kid and a hippie chick, never even quit whistling. Beneath the apron the counterman’s robin’s-egg-blue shirt was rolled midway up his forearms, the sinews and muscles of which thrummed hypnotically as he stirred syrup from the bottoms of their glasses with a long spoon. Miriam held Clara the chicken’s fortune-telling card up and then scowled for the sake of drama. “You ready? Hey, Cicero, you paying attention?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a biggie, I’m telling you.”

“What?” Cicero recognized the sound of himself completely taking the bait, felt seven or eight years old and schoolyard-teased instead of the crafty double-digit sophisticate he’d become.

“You have been sent among men to foment revolution and blow manifold minds.”

“It doesn’t say that.” He reached for the card, she lifted it away.

“Sure it does—in Chinese. Let me finish. Boy, this is one freaky chicken.
All roads lead nowhere, choose one with heart. Never look back, something might be gaining on you. She said, Who put all those things in your head
—hey, Cicero, you like the Beatles?”

“What’s it really say?” Miriam’s evasiveness had now sold him on the urgency of the chicken’s censored wisdom.

“Who’s your favorite Beatle?”

That was easy:
Paul
. “Ringo. What’s the card say?”

Miriam frisbeed the chicken’s fortune through Dave’s wide opening to the street, onto Canal’s sidewalk, underfoot the passersby. “Screw it, it wasn’t that great. You know what Rose told me when I played her
Sgt. Pepper’s
?”

“What?”

“
I won’t listen until they stop screaming
. That’s an exact quote.”

“Huh.”

“You don’t think that’s funny, that she’s placed herself at the head of the anti-screaming brigade? Listen, what’s it like with you and her?”

Cicero might or might not have understood the question. “It’s okay.”

“You can tell me anything, kid.”

“Anything like what?”

“Give me a for instance. The single worst thing she ever did in your presence. Go ahead—I’d believe the worst lie you can think of.” Miriam drained her vanilla, straw squawking at foam dregs.

Were Miriam’s conversational swerves even swerves, or were they explosions? She danced in her own minefield, it seemed to Cicero. Anyway, the worst thing Rose Zimmer had done was done out of Cicero’s sight: her possession, and serial repossession, of his father. Worst thing? That Rose existed for Cicero in the first place. Yet this
affront was impossible to examine usefully, being the founding astonishment of Cicero’s life, the dawning of his understanding that he was born into a world of liars, rather than being born the world’s first.

What did Miriam know of the situation? The start of Rose and Douglas’s affair, according to Cicero’s calculations, matched to Miriam’s start of putting Sunnyside behind her in favor of MacDougal Street. Even if Miriam had noticed the disaster, at what point would she have noticed an infant dragged in the disaster’s wake? The Sunnyside Citizens’ Patrol was founded in 1955; Cicero had been in utero when his father met Rose Zimmer.

“Cat got your tongue? Let me get you started.” That’s when Miriam mentioned her voyage into Rose’s kitchen stove. Her description was accompanied with a bit of convulsive, perhaps involuntary reenactment, fingers seizing Cicero’s shoulders to demonstrate Rose’s force and suddenness. She nearly jostled herself and Cicero from their stools, arousing the curiosity of the soda jerk.

Cicero, then, in his bafflement at all that had transpired, might or might not have let his eyes again relish those sinewy forearms beneath the rolled sleeves. Something in Miriam’s awareness registered this possibility, even as she recovered her poise, the demon impersonation of Rose eclipsed again in her expression. Perhaps it had occurred to her, too late, that nothing Cicero could supply would be any match for what Miriam had revealed: The game was over before it began. She changed the subject, though without declaring what the new subject was, exactly.

“I forgot, there’s something else that Chinese chicken wanted me to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“Wear your love like heaven.”
Her eyes flickered to the man behind the counter, even as the sullenly handsome youth had become bored with them again, resumed running his grubby cloth along the silver swan’s neck of a syrup faucet.

That’s how simply, over what could be regarded as merely a piss-thin milk shake, time could be halted, a life hinged in the middle. Cicero’s, specifically. Miriam had seen him for who he was. Unlike the older boys who jeered “homo” at Cicero and a dozen other younger boys in the Sunnyside Intermediate locker rooms, those whom Cicero
had no need to fool because they didn’t understand what the word meant nor bother to distinguish among those at whom they hurled it. Unlike, too, the haunted, despondent, hungry men, four or five of whom in the past year, passing on a sidewalk, had auditioned Cicero with speculating glances. From those, men he wouldn’t care to know, Cicero had no reason to hide. Only glance defiantly back and gather a scrap of knowledge marked for the file on what he’d prefer not to become. Miriam was different. He’d hidden from her, as he hid from his parents, and from Rose, as he’d hidden from those few solicitous teachers who’d noticed his intelligence. Miriam had seen him anyway.

Then, just as wildly, she steered him in yet another direction. Later Cicero would figure she’d meant to spare his embarrassment at being spotted as what was still called, however sympathetically, an
invert
—despite that the soda jerk at Dave’s
did
have glorious arms, well worth a lascivious glance between two who’d noticed. The effect, though, was to deepen rather than alleviate his bewilderment. Had the former moment even actually occurred, or was he inventing it? Or, weirdly, did Miriam somehow relate the two thunderbolts? The second of these came when she patted her stomach, stretching Groucho’s face with her knuckles as she made circles beneath the T-shirt.

“You know why I craved two egg creams on top of all that dim sum, don’t you?”

For an instant Cicero thought she taunted his weight.
Fat faggot
. Then, just as quickly, he landed on the obvious truth. As though she’d flashed on Cicero’s thinking of himself in his mother’s womb at the start of Rose and Douglas’s affair. As though Miriam read his mind and wanted to draw a line through all of it,
I’m pregnant you’re homosexual we’re linked in thrilling disobedience to Rose who might put your head in an oven too if she knew the truth
. Though Miriam was married to the folksinger and there should be no reason for her pregnancy to seem illegitimate or sinister, Cicero was sure he’d been handed a dangerous secret.