Dissident Gardens (8 page)

“What’s this?” The tones rehearsed
betrayal, betrayal
, but with none of the previous vigor.

“If you want me to go to college, first tell me where he is and buy me a ticket to visit.”

“It’s too much,” Rose attempted. But stopped. The black oven was not so far away, odor still trickling through the apartment. Miriam saw that without conceiving it in advance—two souls can enter a passage like this one, a night and morning like this one, without a plan!—she’d begun extracting from Rose the full and exact price of never mentioning this episode between them again.

“Germany to see him and then I start school in the spring.”

“Too much,” Rose whispered now.

“No, it’s time I had a look at him. You even want me to, so I can tell you what I find.”

“You could go get it from your
omi
, from Alma. Anytime you’d wanted, you could have asked your grandmother for that bastard’s address.”

“Maybe so. But I want it from
you
.”

“Leave me alone.” The woman on the high bed refroze herself into the carved decoration atop a tomb.

So it was that at last, at the end, Miriam set herself on her own sheets and mattress, still in the fresh dress that she’d worn for her brief headfirst expedition into the oven, the bedcovers, from within which she’d momentarily tugged at Porter’s uncircumcised, squirting prick, still flung aside into the corner where she’d discarded them after wriggling into her panties and hose, and lay there, eyes exhausted but wide to the ceiling, and merely breathed. The two of them in their rooms, as ever and always, breathing. The ceaseless arrangement of mother and daughter coiled in fury at each other yet still bulwarked together inside this apartment against the prospect of anything and anyone else outside. Temple and tomb of childhood, armory of Rose’s defiance. Before sleep enfolded her, Miriam sensed Rose’s fingertip bruises along her soft upper arms. She could nearly count them, eight fingers and two thumbs, where they throbbed. In the next days they’d bloom and fade through purple, blue, banana-yellow, before vanishing.

It had been a trick question, a paradox beyond even Aesop’s devising. How could you possibly learn the identity of the Grey Goose
by asking the Grey Goose
? For, after everything, this was at last unmistakable: The Grey Goose—inedible, adamantine, undead, warping any implement that dared glance in its direction, let alone that dared to attack—was none other than Rose Zimmer.

“Do you want to know what I really think?”

The speaker was Cicero Lookins. Or, rather, his head. One of two heads, bobbing in valleys and crests of seawater that refracted in the weighty silent air like a sunstruck chandelier. The atmosphere was noon-luminous, heat-immense. The bowl of sky enclosing the two heads scarcely cloud-daubed, blue almost friable where it pressured the rim of pines the swimmers had left behind. Third week of September and hotter than the hottest day in August, hotter than Cicero felt Maine ought to be, or need be to invite ocean-swimming. Cicero floated vertically, a three-hundred-pound bowling pin barely able to stay below, his toes straining toward those chilled deeper layers.

A fact you knew, if you got in the ocean: The world was getting hotter.

Could get hotter still.

The second head, named Sergius Gogan, had no way to shield its whiteness from noon’s blaze, whereas Cicero sheltered under his irregular self-generated umbrella, his lumpy, going-gray helicopter blades of dreadlock. Unmerciful of Cicero, taking Sergius out here. He’d read somewhere that pure redheads like Sergius and his late father went on freckling their whole lives, a one-way progress of melanin from birth to grave, so every sunning niggered their countenances. Sergius wasn’t, in Cicero’s view, as eye-catching as his dad. He now resembled
a helpless pink balloon adrift atop gibbous squiggles of its own reflection. Cicero could hardly convince himself a body extended below.

Sergius Gogan, sad fortyish orphan, had come to Cicero in a rental Prius, after flying up from Philadelphia, in a project of research on the topic of Sunnyside Gardens. Research to what ends? Sergius hadn’t said. Fair enough, Cicero knew all those people of whom Sergius spoke. Yet why, pray, should it be Cicero’s duty to navigate Sergius through matters of his own blood and kinship, legacies that were, despite all happenstance,
not Cicero’s own
? Cicero Lookins didn’t want this talk. Being Baginstock College’s miraculous triple token, gay, black, and overweight, Cicero usually relied on his ominous aspect to keep the numbers down in his classes and office hours. If only he could take all his office hours in the ocean! But the prospect of immersion hadn’t shaken Sergius Gogan.

“Yes,” said Sergius now, snorting and gasping in the salt. “Yes. Tell me what you really think. Of course.”

“Forget about Sunnyside Gardens,” Cicero said. “There’s no book in that subject or someone’d have written it already. If they had, nobody’d want to read it.”

“I wasn’t thinking of a book. I plan to write a cycle of songs. About the Gardens, about Rose and Miriam, and Tommy. About his career, too.”

“Ah. Taking after your father.” Cicero knew Sergius Gogan taught music to children, at the Pennsylvania Quaker boarding school, the same where he’d been sent when his parents went to Nicaragua, and stayed after they died there. Cicero supposed he’d distantly heard that Sergius’s instrument was guitar, like Tommy Gogan’s. That Sergius might also compose folk songs was unfortunate to consider.

“I’m trying.”

“Concept albums run in the blood, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Well, your father had nothing to do with the Gardens, so far as I knew. Anyway, your father didn’t interest me.” Cicero let the distinction creep in unannounced: that between
familiarity
and
interest
. It was time to become obnoxious.

“Why not?”

“Tommy was sincere in his commitments to you and your mother,
and to nuclear disarmament and Salvador Allende. He also struck me as a cold fish. I didn’t dig his music, what I heard.”

“I’d been hoping you’d tell me about Rose and my mother,” Sergius said, now exiling his request in an indefinite past, wilting at Cicero’s obstinacy as had any number of young aspirants before him. “And Cousin Lenny.”

“Ah.” Listen, Cicero wanted to tell Sergius: Cicero Lookins has his own parents and grandparents and cousins, his own dead to get maudlin over, and not one is Jewish or Irish or anything-
ish
. They’re black. You, receding-red-haired ghost, with accent blandly neutral, not even tinged with New Yorkese, you are free to melt into the Caucasian Nothing, so why don’t you? Cicero’s path of grace in life had been to distinguish the saddles he could buck off from the hide beneath and the brands and scars thereupon, those emblems he’d be forced to bear forever. Sunnyside and the whole of Queens, Rose and Miriam Zimmer, disappointed Reds, Lenny Angrush and his various madnesses—enough. These were saddles. Cicero had put them aside. At fifty-six he deserved to.

Why should Cicero Lookins choose to be Sergius Gogan’s magical Negro, his Bagger Vance, his Obama to entice him through a “teachable moment”? Well, Cicero was everyone’s, he supposed. A career magical Negro. That was his franchise here at Baginstock College, as it had been at Princeton to begin with. A compass for the soul journeys of the straight white folks. Cicero was an expert at pointing the compass’s needle where he wanted, knew just how often to use the forbidden word to keep them scandalized and when merely to titillate them with
Negro
or
negritude
instead.

Once upon a time, Cicero Lookins had fled the world Sergius now asked after. Fled from Sergius’s grandmother, Rose Zimmer. After high school he’d slipped Rose’s clutches, escaped like her daughter, Miriam—Sergius’s mom—did before him. Ran from New York City to Princeton, to academia. His scholastic excellence was an offering to gratify Rose: She’d produced a marvel! A black brain! But it also got Cicero away from her, freed him to produce his own marvels to dismay and aggrieve her, perversions of sexuality and theory. One of his minor revenges: Rose’s Marxism quit at Marx. When Cicero’d one time popped a little Deleuze and Guattari on her ass, she’d balked.

After grad school, Cicero ran west, to the University of Oregon, propelling himself far from Jews, far from Harlem and negritude, to a place where he could be sheerly non sequitur, an alien emissary on the frontier. The Weirdest Fish in any Small Pond. Then to Bloomington, Indiana, a better gig. Indiana was a little Ku-Kluxian for Cicero, though. He could smell old nooses rotting in the barn eaves. Soon Baginstock College rode to the rescue, offering a lighter teaching load in exchange for being the town of Cumbow’s tame bear. Coastal Maine recalled what he liked best in Oregon, that stony libertarian spaciness, the submission of human life to the landscape. So Cicero ran to the town’s edge, bought the most expensive house on Cumbow Cove he could persuade the Realtors to show him, to be a fuck-you blight on the neighboring trophy homes. And here, as often as possible, he escaped to the sea. Once, out with him on the waters, a colleague mentioned that in a certain Native American language the word for ocean translated as
the medicine
. Cicero had never wished to look into the authenticity of this fact, he liked it too much.

Now here, immersed in his medicine, off the coast of everything, Rose Zimmer’s grandson had come to bother him.

“I hate her,” blurted Cicero’s smoldering charcoal of a head.

“Who?”

“Rose.”

“She’s dead.” Sergius spoke as if he thought Cicero had led them this distance to sea for fear Rose would overhear them on the shore, and he wanted to reassure Cicero this was impossible.

“Hated, then.”

“You were with her to the end.”

With
her? The word, however seemingly neutral, suggested a certain agency. Cicero’d known people who’d been
with
Rose Zimmer, notably his own father, a choice Cicero might never forgive. Cicero himself was under Rose and endured Rose. With Rose in the sense that the earth was with its weather.

And that was when Cicero heard himself begin to rant.

“It isn’t just me, Sergius. All Sunnyside hated Rose. No one could confront her in the smallest regard except your mother. But your mother’s confrontations died in Rose’s silences, they died before the receiver was back in its cradle. Meeting her as a defenseless child, my
tongue was bitten to pieces before I understood it was for speaking. I had to get away to learn to open my mouth, yet if she was in front of me now I’d probably fail to speak truth to power. For don’t kid yourself, Rose was
all
about power. The power of resentment, of guilt, of unwritten injunctions against everything, against life itself. Rose was into death, Sergius! That’s what she dug about Lincoln, though she’d never admit it. He emancipated our black asses and died! Rose championed freedom only with a side order of death. In Rose’s heart she was a tundra wolf, a Darwin creature, surviving on treachery and scraps. Every room contained enemies, every home was half spies, or more than half. If you mentioned a name she’d never heard, she’d rattle out like a Gatling gun:
‘Who?’
Meaning, if they were valuable to know, why weren’t they
already
part of her operation? If they weren’t, why trust them? Why even mention them? She wanted to free the world, but she enslaved any motherfucker she got in her clutches. Now go back to Philly and write yourself a song cycle about
that
.”

The trouble with his rant was that time, like a grape blistered by the sun, seemed to Cicero to peel away its organizing skin during the interval of his delivery. The
now
, so oppressively reliable, dissolved. Cicero had become too much the master of this art in the classroom, of unspooling his anger to filibuster any other voice, letting extemporaneous phrases give birth to one another in a kind of generative storm, while his mind voyaged elsewhere.

In this case, what was left of the grape when the skin peeled away was a heartbeat of somatic memory, a moment that had never stopped reenacting itself in some part of Cicero’s body: a titanically willful woman of forty-something years clutching the hand of a round-faced, baffled African American child, perhaps just six or seven years old that first of the seeming hundred times she dragged him along on her rounds. Rose Zimmer, his father’s lover. She powered with him along the sidewalks of Sunnyside—Greenpoint Avenue, Queens Boulevard, Skillman Avenue—as she made her way spying, gossiping, interrogating, whispering asides, projecting the grid of invisible importances in her brain over the network of streets, onto the apparently innocuous
array of semipopulated park benches and barbershops, onto human beings with shopping carts moving so slowly along the pavement that they may as well have been frozen. The boy coming to consciousness from within this disordered moral map, which had overwritten any other. His being granted access to Rose’s confidences, her ready faith that he could be the repository for them: first inkling of his own complexity. The fact that she reveled in the dismay and indignation generated by his presence at her side, the outlandish enlistment of the black boy as the righteous Commie-Jew divorcée’s right hand: first inkling of his own brazenness. The two of them set Sunnyside aflame, and then visited her favorite soda fountain—whose shopmen and regulars loathed Rose as violently as anywhere else—and soothed themselves with chocolate malteds. Then, having loaded up on comic books and Pall Malls, she delivered him home.