The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 6

My hydroponics garden stands out now in green against the gray of Belson’s surface, alive against that bleak obsidian. It is remarkable what Fomalhaut can do to power a vegetable, more remarkable that plants bred to the light of Sol flourish under this blue star. They do it with chemical fertilizers recycled, and recycled water. Part of the fertilizers are recycled through me; I defecate into a hopper that feeds the system, and then add potash; I eat the same rearranged molecules over and over. Orbach would love it; it fits his thesis that my personality requires self-nourishment.

I find deep pleasure in seeing those lettuces and carrots and beets and asparagus growing in their plastic troughs. They cover a half acre of surface that for billions of years has been lifeless. I walk down the rows, encouraging my plants, rubbing their wet leaves tenderly, muttering to them sometimes, sometimes pulling a leaf of lettuce or spinach and eating it there in the rows, warmed by blue Fomalhaut, alone and happy with my vegetable companions.

Since there are no seasons here, every season is growing season; I am already on my second crop and am improving the breed. Why can’t you just let things alone? Anna would say at times in anger. Well I can’t. I don’t want to. So I save the best plants for seed, sensing that the new spectrum of Fomalhaut is an evolutionary spur and that some of my varieties will thrive on the short day-night cycle. Luther Burbank Belson, prodding his bush beans into stardom. It has worked, especially with the carrots; I’ve never seen such big, firm, orange carrots. I had Annie pull out one of the nuclear cooking coils from the Isabel’s galley, and I cook my vegetables on that. It requires twenty minutes at Belson air pressure to produce a carrot al dente—neither crisp nor mushy. They are superb with Java pepper.

I remember now the pattern of sliced carrots on Isabel’s white floor the day I cooked the leg of lamb.

It was the first time I had ever roasted a leg of lamb, but I hadn’t told Isabel that. My career as a cook had begun for all practical purposes in her apartment; I knew how to scramble eggs and make a grilled cheddar sandwich when I moved in, but that was it. I started taking over the kitchen at Isabel’s when I felt I had to create something for her and me, something elemental and sensual. For one orifice if not the other. Orbach pursed his lips when I told him that, but he didn’t look convinced. “Hell,” I said, “I’ve got to do something. I can’t fuck, and I’m bored with making money.”

“Benjamin,” Orbach said, “cooking is a fine and creative thing to do. But it wouldn’t be wise for you to pretend you are a woman when you’re having difficulty being a man.”

“Come on!” I said. “I’m not pretending I’m a woman. My mother opened canned spaghetti for supper. And complained about it. She spent more time in the kitchen drinking screwdrivers than she did at the stove.”

“Maybe you want to teach her to be domestic,” Orbach said.

“Isabel?” I said.

Orbach frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said.

“I’m not sure of anything,” I said, “except that I love to bring her coffee in the mornings and drink it with her.”

“Bring her coffee?” Orbach said. “Who?”

“Isabel, goddamn it!” I said. “If it was Mother, I’d bring her a martini.”

Orbach smiled wanly at that. “Benjamin,” he said, “as a child you had to nourish yourself, because there was little other nourishment around.”

I lay on the couch and looked at the water stain on Orbach’s ceiling. “I get tired sometimes,” I said. “I get damned tired of the whole fucking weight.”

“Clearly,” Orbach said, with sympathy. “I’d like to use chemical recall with you for the rest of our session today. I’d like to give you sorbate and take you back to your infancy and see if we can find out what you were thinking.”

I felt myself sweating. I hadn’t used chemicals in therapy for several years. They scared me. “Those pills pack a terrible hangover,” I said. “I need a clear head for…”

“For what?”

“For cooking supper tonight,” I said.

Orbach shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps some other time.”

The supper of which I’d spoken was the leg of lamb. I’d noticed it on sale that morning at thirty dollars a pound and bought it impulsively. I then wound up carrying it around with me while I spent a couple of hours with my lawyers, who were too polite to ask what in heaven’s name I was doing with a leg of lamb in a plastic bag.

It took me awhile that evening to figure out the controls on Isabel’s oven, but I managed. The combination of those electronic gadgets and a heat source of hickory wood has always seemed disorderly to me. It was a Wednesday and there would be no evening performance of Isabel’s play, so I had plenty of time. I cut slits in the fat and pushed in slivers of garlic, then rubbed the whole phallic thing with rosemary and coarse pepper. I had it in the oven by the time Isabel came home from her matinee; she gave me a quick kiss and a pat and went off to take a bath. I was beginning to feel very professional about this meal. I peeled away at my carrots, happy as a clam. Since the bathroom of that little apartment was only a few yards from the stove, I could hear Isabel splashing away merrily.

After a while the cats started nosing around at my ankles and looking pushy. It was time for their supper and I should have fed them, but I didn’t. The black one, as heavy-looking as a bag of cement, began meowing in his choked way. The brown-and-white, shyer, looked at me reproachfully. Get out of my way, you dumb bastards, I thought at them, viciously, not wanting to say it aloud in Isabel’s hearing. The black one croaked at me louder. I wanted to tell him to go back to cat school and learn to meow properly. I began to think I should open a can of food just to shut them up. I looked at them again, at their pushy, imploring faces, at their insistence, and thought, Fuck you, boys. Your lady friend can feed you when she gets out of the bath. They looked at me as though they shared an I.Q. of 3 between them. I grabbed a saucepan and threatened them with it. They slinked away.

A minute afterward, Isabel came out of the bathroom stark naked. I wanted to take her right there, but I restrained myself. Isabel could be testy about sexual advances that led nowhere. My balls had begun to tingle at the sight of her and I really wanted to drop to my knees for a while and let the lamb be well done if need be. But I pulled back from the tingle and cut it off somehow. That, I should have known by then, is how you get blue balls. That’s how you get into fights over whatever is handy—like carving a leg of lamb. I should have gone ahead with Isabel and let her decide whether she liked it or not; it would have saved a lot of grief.

Instead, I started fussing with the peas and managed to spill a third of them down into the wood fire, where they hissed at me in derision. I could feel the inanimate world gathering itself for one of its attacks on my person. I began to feel like hunting down the black cat and strangling him. I reached for the oven door and burned my hand. Instead of shouting, I gritted my teeth. Stoicism. It gives you blue balls in the soul.

But I did manage to control myself enough to get the peas into a bowl and then to get the lamb out of the stove and onto a big plate for cooling. It looked terrific. Very professional. I felt a lot better. I spooned out the carrots and circled the leg of lamb with them. It was shaping up like a sculpture. I was cheerful again despite the tight feeling in my stomach. I remembered we had fresh parsley in the bin. I got some and put it at one end of the plate. Voilà.

Isabel had pulled on a pair of jeans and set the table by the window. I was standing by my masterwork, waiting for praise.

And then my stomach sank. Somebody had to carve this fucker, and I’d never carved anything in my life. When I was a kid my mother managed to roast a turkey once a year, on Thanksgiving, with a kind of cold, hungover resentment. She always carved it herself, while my father sat around looking bored. I think that, down deep, I was waiting for Isabel to get up and carve, like Mother. She came into the kitchen, in fact, and I felt a sigh of relief in myself. But what she did was exclaim over how beautiful the lamb was. And then she said, “Hurry up and carve it, Ben. I’m hungry!”

Jesus, did I want to throttle a cat just then! If I could have just done it—or just kicked a cat around the living room for a minute, I could have sliced up that roast the way an orchestra leader slices air with his baton. With a pinky sticking out as the slices fell with gentle plops on the serving platter, arranging themselves prettily between disks of carrot. But what did I do? I gritted my teeth, stuck a fork into the roast, took a big kitchen knife and started slicing as though the lamb were a loaf of bread. Immediately I hit a bone. I tried the other end. Another bone. I slipped the lamb, greasy now and still too fucking hot, over on its side in the plate, which was now filling with juice, soaking about half the carrots and giving them the color of wet orange socks. Burning grease was sticking to my fingers. I shook it off. Some of it landed in the peas. I began slicing at the first end of the roast, but from a different angle. There was another bone. How could a white, furry lamb walk around with so many goddamned bones in its legs? How could the bones be coming from so many different directions? My cheeks were burning as though rubbed with Brillo; Isabel was watching every move in tactful silence.

And then, as I stood ready to turn my knife against anything that lived, there was an abrupt, loud plop, as though someone had dropped a fish on the kitchen counter. It was William, the normally shy cat. He must have jumped down off an overhead shelf where he’d been hiding since I’d scared him away with the saucepan. I stood frozen, staring. During my carving I had managed to get loose a piece of lamb the size of a poker chip. William took that piece demurely between his teeth, leaped to the floor and scampered across the room. I gripped my Sabatier, visualizing the mess in the apartment from feline decapitation. William huddled with his find in the corner, under Isabel’s bronze urn of pussywillows. The black cat slinked over to join him. Clearly a coconspirator. I picked up the roast, plate and carrots and all, held it over my head the way King Kong would hold a subway car, and threw it at them with all my strength. It whammed into the bronze pot with a thud that enriched my soul with relief. The plate-Isabel’s best Delft—flew apart like a comic-strip firecracker. And the carrots spread themselves over the white floor like abstract expressionism. Like the perfectly placed rocks in a Japanese garden.

But Isabel! The poor dear woman. She stared at me in terror, and then she began to cry great rolling tears of grief. “My cats!” she sobbed. “My Delft platter.” She ran into the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. I stood motionless, staring at the carrots on the floor, at the chips of china. The cats had disappeared. I shrugged, got a can of cat food from a shelf and opened it.

We were civil with one another after that one, walking on eggshells for about three days. Once, for no apparent reason, Isabel began to cry while reading her Hamlet. The air of the little apartment was thick with grief; I had no idea how to cut through it. On the fourth day I told Isabel I was going to move to the Pierre. She smiled faintly and said, “That might be best.”

It was early May when I moved out, packing up all I had lived with during the winter into one Synlon bag, paying off a few of Isabel’s major bills—her rent, the telephone bill, the winter assessment—before I left. She was at a rehearsal at the time. When I signed the checks my hand shook and I cursed at it for shaking. Another goddamned unreliable member. I looked around the place, nodded with controlled civility to the sleeping cats, bent down to pick up a two-dollar piece I had dropped on the floor probably a week before, sighed melodramatically, and left.

It was a surprisingly warm day and I had my heavy mackinaw unbuttoned as I walked up Park Avenue. There was a nice sense of life and bustle, with a lot of horses and a few methane taxis in the streets and people bicycling happily. My spirits picked up. I began to whistle.

Half the people on the street were Chinese. By midsummer New York always seems to be a Chinese city, a kind of cultural suburb of Peking. The Russians are ahead of everybody else at heavy industry; the art comes from Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro; the political life in Aberdeen and Hangchow is far more lively than New York’s; and if you want to make a really big business arrangement you go to Peking, the world’s richest city. But New York is still New York, even with its elevators not working and a total of one hundred fifty taxis permitted to operate (Peking has thousands, they are electric powered and have leather upholstery). But Peking is still a stodgy businessman’s city, with all the old China erased from its neoclassical architecture. The Chinese come to New York for the civilized life. New York is the major city of a second-rank power, of a country whose time is slipping away; but it still has a bounce you don’t find anywhere else. There are restaurants with white tablecloths, with waiters in tuxedos that look like they came from the last century, and, however they beer-feed and hand-rub their fat old steers in Japan, the Kansas City steak served in a New York restaurant, with the dim lights and the polished wooden bar and the tuxedoed waiters, is still one of the delights of the world. And New York theater is the only theater to hold anybody’s interest for long; American music is the most sophisticated in the world. The Chinese are still, behind those stuffy facades, the greatest gamblers on earth and the trickiest businessmen; they’ve accommodated their ideology and their asceticism of the last century to their present wealth with the ease of the Renaissance Popes; they are Communists the way Cesare Borgia was a Christian. And they love New York.

The Pierre is a grand place and I know its people well. I moved in there first when I was twenty-three and working on downhill mergers; the same man still tends bar in the afternoons and he calls me Ben. His name’s Dennis. I always ask about his kids. He has a son in the wood business in North Carolina; his daughter runs the office at the Jane Fonda Theatre. The manager says they’re going to name my suite the Belson Suite someday and I tell him I’m all for it, that it’ll make it easier to get my mail if there’s a plaque on the door. They always have fresh flowers for me when I move in. What the hell, something deep in me likes to live in hotels, to be ready to check out at any time. To live by the day and pay by the day.

I had an appointment that afternoon with Orbach, up on Eightieth Street. I looked over the suite, smelled the flowers, called Henri Bendel’s to order my cooking pots, and decided to walk to Orbach’s and pick up a few cookbooks on the way. Maybe there would be spring vegetables in, from the South, if the Mafia wasn’t in disarray from its quarrels. I called a couple of lawyers and gave them my phone number and left.

Walking up Third Avenue, I found myself looking in store windows, not at cookbooks but at clocks. I was doing that a lot these days, developing a fascination with timepieces, with the passing of time. I noticed birthdays as I never had, would remember trivial things that had happened on a given day a year before. This started when I turned fifty. I was becoming aware that my days are numbered, that I am going to die and rot like everybody else and that I’d better get my ass in gear if I want to live my life as Ben Belson and not as some fucked-over replica of my father. I know I’ve made a lot of money and fame for myself, have traveled everywhere, have bedded a lot of women and eaten a lot of the world’s best food, and my father did none of those things. But for twenty years something in my soul has been on HOLD, waiting, going through the motions of having a filled and good life but inside feeling morose and sullen. And there, looking at clocks in yet another Third Avenue window, I was waiting for the time to run out, waiting to join my father in the underground brigade—to terminate, with the smell of wet earth.

And, realizing that, or some of it, I was seized with anger of a kind I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted to rush into the store and smash every clock in the place. Instead, I went in and bought a Chinese wristwatch. I’m wearing it now, here on Belson. I am an eccentric in many small ways; this watch is the first I’ve ever owned. Now that I have time to reckon with.

A voice in me cries desperately, Hurry, Ben!

Looking back on it, I can see that picnic on Juno was a turning point for me. I have become even more of a hermit now than ever before; but something happened there on Juno that moved a big chunk of the gray old glacier inside. In college I never sat around and drank with my classmates; if I were with two or more people at a time something became stiff in my soul. I did not hate people; I never have. But there was a coldness in me that would, to my despair at times, cut me off from my fellows. Somehow it dropped from me at that picnic and I felt an easy comfort in the presence of the crew that I had never felt before. Mimi sang “Downtown” and “Michigan Water Blues,” and I drank red wine from a passed-around bottle and lay back on that moist grass in the grape-flavored air; I would look at the faces of the crew and silently beam. Sometimes between songs everybody would be silent, listening to the quiet, papery sounds of those extraterrestrial leaves blowing in that fruity breeze, feeling the rich, oxygen-laden air on our cheeks. I thought from time to time of Juno herself, the original Juno who slept on hay and whose massive nostrils exhaled steamed horse breath into the Ohio night air at my side, and some of the deep old fondness I felt for her was transferred to this new and generous planet and to the people, mostly young, who lay about on its spongy and inviting surface with me.

Yet here I am alone on Belson.

Still, I have my vegetables. And my morphine. The rings are out. It’s time to shut off the computer that is typing this, collect the morphine from the synthesizer, and shoot up. I wish I could masturbate right now, here alone under the rings of my own namesake planet.

I first came to New York in 2025. I was thirteen. Aunt Myra had suggested I spend one of my high-school summers with her on the Upper East Side. I’d never met her. My parents sent me off on a Greyhound bus, telling me the city would help in my education. I bought my own ticket, and what Aunt Myra didn’t pay for in New York I paid for myself. I had a large coal route in those days in Athens. Burning coal in home stoves was still legal, and I pulled a child’s wagon around the poorer parts of town selling it by the lump: two dollars for the small ones and four for the large. My markup was 40 percent. I hauled that damned wagon up and down hills about eleven miles every day after school and my shoulders would ache from it for hours afterward, but I wound up, at fifteen, with a 5 percent interest in the mine it came out of. By the time I was thirty-five I owned most of the coal in America that the Mafia didn’t. I can picture myself now on that bus in my white shirt and tie and with a half-dozen hundred-dollar bills folded up and safety-pinned inside my shirt pocket. Half a fried chicken and two hard-boiled eggs in a paper sack beside me on the seat until I had a chance to throw them away. A fresh haircut. That may have been the last time in my life I wore a necktie. Except for my wedding.

The bus was a coal-burner and there was something wrong with the boiler; we kept losing power on hills. The trip took almost three days. I ate soy protein-and-gravy sandwiches at bus stops all along the way, and in men’s rooms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey read graffiti of the rankest kind I have ever seen. I knew almost nothing about sex except that it had something to do with social class and that people like my parents were alarmed by it; those graffiti shone in my brain like neon. Many of them were illustrated, with low draftsmanship but high energy. It was for me a connection, however disquieting, with an outside world in which things went on I had thought went on only in my own head. A couple of those drawings are still in my memory; they can still send a wicked thrill into my balls.

For several hours between towns in Pennsylvania an amply built young woman with glasses and dark nylons sat beside me. For a while she made bland comments on the scenery and on her job as a small-town video librarian; then she slept. As her body adjusted itself in sleep her skirt inched up her thighs. Oh Jesus, I remember those thighs! Those cheap dark stockings, the white flesh above them! She snored lightly, with her lips parted. At the first sidelong sight of inner thigh my joint rose with the mindless alacrity of a Marine’s salute. The smell of her Woolworth perfume intensified in my nostrils. I had become so sensitive, so alert, that I could even smell her flesh in its genteel sweatiness from my circumspect position sitting erectly beside her. Erectly. I could have driven nails with it. I pretended to be reading a book.

It was midafternoon; there were few others on the bus. If I were on that bus now I would reach my hand out toward her open lap rather than my own closed one. But what did I know then? I looked around and saw that no one was looking. I allowed myself to turn my head slightly, enough to see what was now a dark hiatus between her thighs, parted and inclined toward me. I let my hand fall gently in my lap and in that moment discovered self-abuse. My palm, touching myself, was instantly wet. My blood circulation had become disorderly; I felt faint. The pleasure had been momentary but so intense as to open a door in my spirit that has never closed. I saw in a flash that my parents were fools and that the world had punch.

An hour later I slipped my right hand into my pants pocket and did it again, more slowly. It was ecstasy. To hell with my undershorts. I would throw them away.

I would have given my soul to slip myself inside what that pink margin hid from view, to have felt it grip my adolescent member. It did not occur to me she might have liked it too. She had said she was on vacation for a week. I could have taken her to a Holiday Inn in some Pennsylvania coal town and we could have fucked ourselves silly. Oh Christ!

My Circe aroused herself from sleep, blushingly pulled down her skirt, and got off at New Hope, Penn. I never learned her name, nor what town she lived in.

Aunt Myra was my father’s older sister and had always been a shadowy black sheep of the Belsons’. I had not met her before that summer of my thirteenth year. Myra had clearly been around. I knew she’d gone to Duke with President Garvey, had played bridge with Kronstadt the demon poet, had written the lyrics for an operetta, was rumored to have had a baby by her chauffeur, and had been the mistress of three different millionaires. The last of these had left her a small fortune in cash and an apartment hotel in the East Eighties. She had lost the cash in the depression of 2004. Myra, my mother said in icy reflection over a martini, had taken her financial advice from Arab astrologers and Roman Catholic choirboys. She had lost the apartment hotel but managed to hang on to the twelve rooms of its penthouse for her lifetime. She owned nothing else.

Aunt Myra was about sixty-five that summer. She wore faded bib overalls and walked barefoot around her apartment, smoked Black Russian cigarettes and wore gold-rimmed glasses over which she peered at me in a kind of bemusement. She popped vitamin pills continuously and laughed a lot. She was a bit under five feet tall—I towered over her, even at thirteen—and despite crow’s-feet, gray hair and gray tee-shirts under her overall bibs, she looked youthful. I had never seen anyone like her. I arrived at her place about suppertime, having adjusted my tie a half-dozen times in the elevator. I was carrying my cheap suitcase. I felt awkward as hell. When I knocked on the elegant gold-and-white doorway of her penthouse I expected to be greeted by some kind of sagging debauchee with dewlaps and a gown. What met me was this pretty little person in overalls and bare feet.

“For Christ’s sake. Come on in,” she said, peering up at me over the gold rims of her glasses. She held out a tiny unmanicured hand and I shook it. It felt cool and friendly and as small as a child’s.

“How do you do?” I said in the reserved way I had learned from Mother.

“Let’s have something to eat,” she said, and led me through a big empty hallway to a cluttered living room. But what clutter! One wall was covered with paintings and watercolors; there must have been twenty of them. Bright as an African stamp collection. Oriental rugs all over too. A black corduroy sofa. A half-dozen tables. Cats—six or seven cats. There were four cats on the window ledge, below high windows overlooking Central Park. It was a park filled with trees in those days. We passed through this astonishing room and into the kitchen. It was done in a spare way—Hungarian peasant, a turn-of-the-century style in rich people’s kitchens. Crude ceramic tiles, blue and white, on the walls. A grass rug on the wooden floor. Oak countertops. A terra-cotta stove. But she had a refrigerator, the first I’d seen. In Athens we used iceboxes. When Aunt Myra opened the door of her big brown refrigerator I saw shelves with bright jars and bottles, fruits and vegetables, like a picture in an old magazine. What she fixed me for dinner that night was a thick slab of pâté de foie on Bibb lettuce, a dozen tiny cornichons and a glass of Polish lager. I’d never eaten that eccentrically before. Dessert was chocolate mousse. It was delicious. I’ve been eating it ever since, in extended tribute to Aunt Myra and her liberation of the spirit.

She handed me a cracked Haviland plate with the lettuce and pâté on it and then the beer in a crystal pilsner glass and I stood there stupidly holding it while she fixed herself the same. Then I followed her out of the kitchen, and it took me a minute to realize that we weren’t going to sit down; this would be a peripatetic supper. I worked up the nerve eventually to set my beer glass down after one sip of the bitter stuff—it was my first taste of beer—and started eating the pate with my fingers. Myra led me around the apartment. She had four bedrooms, three of them empty and from which I could pick the one I wanted. I chose the one with the most windows. Its furnishings were all gray and white, and it had a little Corot on one wall—two old men at a table.

While we walked around she talked from time to time in a pleasant voice about the apartment and about her cats. She asked me about my father in a kind of offhand way, and when I said he was doing okay she sniffed and said, “I never could figure out that boy. He was always so goddamned calm.” It was strange to hear that and to realize that Aunt Myra was fifteen years older than my father and, from the tone of her voice, didn’t care about him much. She was nothing like my father or mother, nothing like any adult I’d known. She may have been the last person I loved—and it was love at first sight.

That summer with Aunt Myra gave me a sense of the possibilities of a city that has never substantially diminished. I have forgotten the plays and ballets we saw, but I remember the marble floors, the high-ceilinged lobbies, the soft lighting at the bars between acts, and the expansive feeling to be in New York City at the theater. We saw holo shows and two museum openings and sky music concerts in Central Park. I remember elevators, before the Energy Acts outlawed them. I remember the lights in the upper floors of skyscrapers at night. And most of all, I remember walking down quiet streets on the East Side between rows of old brownstones, looking into the windows of brightly lit apartments, wanting to live in one more than I’d ever wanted anything before. I became a spiritual New Yorker while walking the East Seventies between Park and Second Avenue at the age of thirteen.

I also learned about eating from Aunt Myra—salads and desserts, arugula and chocolate mousse. My diet is a tribute to her memory. Myra taught me another thing—chess. After a week of shows and concerts, she announced that we were going to spend a night at home and entertain ourselves. “Do you play chess?” she asked me, looking up over her glasses. In her hand was a plastic packet the size of a billfold.

“No,” I said. “I play Monopoly.”

“Well, you can play that too with this thing. This electronic marvel,” she said. “But a smart young man should know chess.”

I started to say that no one played chess anymore, for the same reason no one ever did arithmetic: human effort had long been outclassed at that kind of thing. Luck games were what my generation played. But Aunt Myra was no dummy; she might have a point. “Okay,” I said, “will you teach me?”

“I’m going to roast a duck,” she said, “and then change for dinner.” She had just come home from shopping and was wearing her striped coveralls. “This will teach you the game. Learn it and we’ll play during supper.” She handed me the thing. “Unfold it on a table somewhere and press the red spot.” Then she went into the kitchen.

It was made of some kind of rough old plastic and it looked well-worn. I took it into one of the living rooms where a walnut refectory table sat by a window, pushed a few ginger jars, paperweights and African violets aside to create a space, and then unfolded it. It turned out to be a big white square about the size of a Monopoly board with a red dot at the lower left-hand corner. I pulled up a chair, seated myself in front of the board, and pressed the dot.

The surface was immediately covered with print, like a menu. Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Go, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Bridge, Poker, Canasta, Casino and so on, were listed down the left side, with a red dot to the left of each. On the right, in capital letters, were three options: 1. RULES AND INSTRUCTIONS, 2. PLAY, and 3. OPPONENT PLAY (CHOOSE LEVEL). This last was followed by the numbers one through twelve. At the bottom right-hand corner, in gold letters, was written MYRA BELSON.

I pressed “Chess” and “Rules and Instructions.” The print vanished and was replaced by a large chessboard, with green and ivory squares. A soft voice from the board said, “Voici le Jeu d’Échecs…”

“English,” I said, aloud.

“Yes,” the board said. “This is the game of chess, invented in India and modeled on warfare. It is played with thirty-two pieces, or men, as follows: Here is a pawn…” and the silhouette of a pawn appeared in the middle of the board. “Each player has eight pawns, placed on what is called the second rank.” The pawns appeared, black and white, in their starting positions.

I began to get interested. I could hear Aunt Myra banging pans around in the kitchen. I got up and went to get a beer before continuing. She had the duck in a pan and was slicing an orange for the sauce. I’d never eaten duck before. “What do you think of chess?” she said.

“Looks interesting.”.

“No sex and laser rays,” she said. She was referring to the kinds of pocket games people generally played, with 3-D visuals and all the screams and curses.

“That’s all right with me.” I took a liter of Nairobi beer from the refrigerator and a glass from a cabinet.

“Enjoy it, then,” she said. “But go easy on beer. You’re young.”

“I’ll never be an alcoholic,” I said, thinking of Mother.

“That’s good,” Aunt Myra said, putting her sliced orange around the duck. “Addiction is a pain for everyone concerned. I understand your mother is a lush.”

I’d never heard anyone talk that way before. “She drinks a lot of martinis,” I said.

“Mmm,” Aunt Myra said. She took down a mixing bowl and began making some kind of dressing in it. “I advise you to stay away from home as much as you can. Your father’s a cold fish and your mother drinks.”

“I work a lot,” I said.

“Do you like money?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s a start. You need a love affair.”

“Maybe.” I didn’t say I was terrified of girls. Terrified. I also didn’t say I’d discovered sex on the bus coming to New York.

I took my beer back to the table and went on with the lesson. Outside the window late sunlight shone on the facades of old mansions across the street. I thought for a while about sex and money and what Aunt Myra had said about staying away from home. I wished she would invite me to live with her; I was crazy about Aunt Myra and crazy about New York. I drank down a long glass of beer, feeling the spiritual warmth it gave my belly, and went on with chess. You moved the pieces by touching the silhouette with your finger; the piece vanished and reappeared on the square you touched next. The opponent’s pieces moved on their own. The voice gave instructions and recommendations, and after a couple of practice games where it showed me what I’d done wrong, I told it to be quiet and played against the board in silence. I was using the first level of the board’s flexible computer—built, I suppose, into the molecular structure of the plastic—and on the third game I beat it by queening a pawn. I was playing at level two when Aunt Myra brought in her blue Spode platter with a golden duck a l’orange on it. We ate with our fingers and played chess. Myra beat me thoroughly, and gave me some advice that was a lot more helpful than the machine’s. We played fast games until two or three o’clock in the morning; she won them all. It turned out Myra was a rated player and had won tournaments when young. I was hooked on chess.

I stayed with Myra six weeks that summer, and it was the finest time of my life. She was the zippiest person I’d ever met. I adored her. I could have cried when I left, even though she invited me back for the next summer. She gave me the chess set as a going-away gift, and I played against the computer at level four all the way back home. I never showed the set to my parents; they never knew I had taken up the game. As if it would have mattered.

I never saw Aunt Myra again. The following winter was the first New York was to undergo with no oil for heating. In February the temperature dropped to fourteen below zero, and Aunt Myra died of pneumonia, along with thousands of others. The world was getting grimmer.