I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.
Once he got her to say yes, they'd be able to spend untrammeled time remembering together.
He'd tipped the man nicely. What do you tip a man who risks his life when he answers a call? Nick was confident he'd tipped him nicely, handsomely, but not ridiculously, not in a way that would have exposed him as a stranger here.
He looked at the TV screen, where the tape was nearing the point when the driver waves, the crisp wave from the top of the steering wheel, and he waited for room service to knock on the door.
6
When Matty was real small and his brother used to sit on the pot and read comics to a peewee audience, neighbor kids ages four and five supposedly being minded by a grown-up somewhere near, with Matty in the doorway ready to shout out chickie, which was the warning word, and there's Nick on the pot reading to them from Captain Marvel or the Targeteers, his pants hanging limp from his kneecaps, and he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women and an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars cornering tightly in the night, scaring the kids at times with his intensity of manner, then pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature, sending a happy awe across the faces of his listeners-it was the creepiest delight of all, better than anything he might deliver from the paneled pages.
Matt walked through the neighborhood to see the old building, number 611, and wondered idly who lived in their third-floor apartment, what language spoken, how many grinding lives, but mainly he thought of nine-year-old Nicky asquat the glory seat. Who else would read the comics to them, acting out those vibrant dramas of crime fiends and bounding heroes?
He went to see Bronzini, his old chess mentor, a sweet-natured man and not-so-willing drillmaster. Living now in a sad building with an entranceway marked by specimens of urban spoor-spray paint, piss, saliva, dapples of dark stuff that was probably blood. The elevator was not working and Matt made his way up five flights. A child's sandal on the landing. He knocked and waited. He sensed an eyeball on the other side of the peephole and he thought of his own street and house and the life of the computer suburb, those huddled enclaves off the turnpike, situated to discourage entry, and the corner store that sells eleven kinds of croissants and twenty-seven coffees, which are somehow never enough, and the life he led before this, the weapons he studied and helped perfect, the desert experience, so completely unconnected to root reality, compared to this man, he thought, on the other side of the peephole, who watches the ruin build around him on the actual planet where he was born.
The man's smile was in his eyes, a warm fizz that had an eagerness in it, a desire to know. This is what remained, his curiosity. He looked too old, too spare, his face a boxy outline, an underdrawing of the original likeness, the fleshed-out and tinted-in Bronzini. A couple of days of gray stubble surrounded his untrimmed mustache and Matt thought the man had seized upon old age, embraced it with a kind of reckless assent.
"Please, no misters. It's Albert now. And you look well. Robust, I'm surprised. I remember a matchstick. A matchstick with a fiery head."
Evidently the man had forgotten more recent meetings. They sat at a table near the window and drank brewed tea. Bronzini lived with his sister now, who'd never married, who sat in her room and spoke in chants, he said, of reduced informational range. Such compression. But once he'd learned to be patient with her repetitions and attenuations he began to find her presence a source of enormous comfort. A rest, he said, from his own internal rant.
He said, "Sometimes I take the train downtown. There's a chess club that's also a coffeehouse, in the Village, and I play a game or two. I lose but I don't get embarrassed. Or I play down there, in the playground, with a neighbor. We share a bench. They leave us alone, the kids."
"I don't play," Matt said in a voice emptied of any shading.
"I used to wonder about your father. He taught you the moves but was he a serious player, I used to wonder. I didn't know him well enough to bring up the subject, any subject. He was not a man who encouraged, shall we say, inquiries."
The eyes fizzed like carbonated water.
"He taught me quite a bit. We practiced openings and played many games. We played speed chess for fun. He called it rapid transit."
When his father went out for cigarettes Matty was finishing first grade. He found a book of chess problems Jimmy had kept in a bureau. It was a major discovery and he worked his way through the book and sat in front of the board, squares and pieces, pushing wood. His brother used to walk into the room and knock the pieces off the board and walk out of the room without a word. Matty picked up the pieces and set them on the board exactly as positioned earlier. He'd study black's defense. His brother would walk into the room, knock the pieces off the board and walk out again.
"Your mother petitioned me. But you were a problem," Bronzini said. "I needed help to deal with you."
"Hard to handle."
"Volatile, yes, and very quick to dismiss my advice. Of course you saw things I did not. You had remarkable skills and insights. It was exhilarating for me but also humbling. I lacked the deep feel of the master player."
"As a team we were maybe a little shaky. But we managed to last a few years. We tasted a little glory, Albert. I can tell you I don't like that little boy. I don't like thinking about him."
"I study theory now and then. I read a little in the history of the game. The personality of the game. This is a game of enormous hostility."
"I came to hate the language," Matt said. "You crush your opponent. It's not a question of win or lose. You crush him. You annihilate him. You strip him of dignity, manhood, womanhood, you destroy him, you expose him publicly as an inferior being. And then you gloat in his face. All the things that gave me such naked pleasure, I began to hate."
"Because you began to lose," Albert said.
It was true of course and Matt laughed. All that concentrated power, the implosive life of the board, black and white, the autocratic beauty of winning, what a chestful of undisguisable pride-he defeated men, boys, the old and wise, the vigorous and quick, the bohemian cafe poets, friendly and smelly. But then at ten or eleven he saw his edge begin to muddy and he took some losses, suffered consistent reversals that made him sick and limp.
"The competition changed. We found better opponents for you to play."
"And I slowed down."
"Your development hit a wall. Not a wall. But it no longer grew exponentially."
Matt looked out at the playground, surprised at the desolation, the basketball court potholed and empty, only one backboard still standing. Directly below him the old boccie court grown over with weeds. Everything empty. Up on the second level the softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved-he didn't think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.
He said, "IVe been walking around. It's a complicated thing. I find myself trying to resist the standard response."
"You don't want to be shocked. You're reluctant to blame anyone. But you went to the old streets."
"Yes."
"Irbu saw your building. The squalor around it. The empty lot with the razor wire."
"Yes."
"The men. Who are they, standing around doing nothing? Poor people. They're very shocking."