The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  I went on talking about how a new pet doesn’t have to replace an old one, but Valantin didn’t seem to be listening anymore. When I finished talking, she said, “I’m surprised you worked with Avo and yet you didn’t learn Armenian history. It was a central concern of his. For his language project with me, he was translating eyewitness accounts by survivors of the genocide. You know the genocide, at least—1915, yes? Over a million Armenians dead? My own grandparents included. Hitler’s blueprint, he wrote in journals. You didn’t know?”

  When my mother used to tell me and Gil to finish our food, she’d tell us to think of the starving Armenians. That’s what I knew of them before The Brow Beater. Still, he only ever told me a few stories from home. Once, drunk after a match, he told me about the celebrity he’d earned as a junior wrestler back in Armenia. The way he told it, he’d been a spry future Olympian with a grown man’s strength in his abnormally large hands, able to apply holds even the coaches couldn’t escape. A Soviet hero in the making, and the athletics committee in Moscow had taken notice: they’d sent a gift to Avo’s parents after a successful tournament, a rare vinyl recording of Tchaikovsky’s voice, recorded on an Edison phonograph cylinder in 1890. The record was one of maybe a dozen copies, priceless, and his parents—who apparently adored Tchaikovsky’s music above all other art—could say they owned it. Because of him. Because Avo had earned it for them. He was proud, telling me this story. It was the proudest I ever saw him.

  He went on to say his size—what had caught my attention in Los Angeles—was what had ruined him back home. With his growth spurt came new vulnerabilities on the wrestling mat. His enormous legs became practice dummies for beginners to wrap up, and his new girth turned his speed into an erratic exercise in losing balance. In order to maintain any control at all over his new body, he had to lumber this way and that as though underwater. By the time he was thirteen, his coaches had stopped sending him to tournaments. The committee sent an officer to retrieve the ghostly recording of Tchaikovsky’s voice.

  Now I asked if Valantin kept in touch with Avo, but she said no. Apparently, he’d stopped meeting with her for English lessons in 1978, which was when I’d stolen him away from The Gutshot, a piece of information I decided not to share.

  “I like to think he’s out there someplace translating poems,” she said.

  “Poems?”

  “That language project—those eyewitness accounts from the genocide?—that was his second choice. Originally, he wanted to translate the poems of Tumanyan—our national poet, who survived the genocide himself—into English. I told him it was an honorable goal but that poetry was a different language altogether. We’d better start with something simpler, I told him. He agreed, but only grudgingly.”

  “Poems,” I said. “How long were you his teacher, anyway?”

  “Oh, a few years. I got him in ’75, it must’ve been, not long after he landed in this country. Some of his neighbors were students of mine, and soon he was my student, too. We made a lot of progress. He knew zero English when we began. A funny story—the Armenian word for Armenian is hay, like hello. So one of our first meetings, he had this look of concern and paranoia on his face. He asked me, ‘How does everyone in this country know I’m Armenian?’ I had to explain to him that people were just saying hello to him on the street. He was taking every greeting from a stranger as an accusation.” She laughed. “By the time I got him that job at the bar, he was pretty advanced, except for a few bad habits he picked up here and there.”

  I knew she meant his use of the word bro. He’d picked it up, I later learned, from another regular of Longtin’s, the son of a Pentecostal minister who’d called everyone Brother this and Sister that. Somehow or other, the word had been chopped and delivered to him, The Brow Beater, and that little half-word metastasized into his own English. Soon thereafter and forevermore, he was using it like punctuation: Where’s the next show, bro? Or: I like this part of your country, bro, up here with more horses than people. Or: Tell me more, bro, about your brother, bro. It was funny at first, and then functionally undetectable, until finally, looking back, I now find it kind of touching. There’s no way to quantify these things, but I’d bet no paperwork, no meal, no music or film or manner of dress, no number of miles on this country’s split-foot roads—nothing, nothing in The Brow Beater’s time here, helped him feel like an American more than those three letters: B. R. O.

  Valantin sighed. “The Gutshot—God, I miss it. I’d drive Daria all the way there for a walk so I could stop in. A quirk of mine I miss, having a secret bar.”

  “It’s changed a lot,” I said. “Pink hair, all that.”

  “It’s all changing,” she said, “because we’re old. It’s funny, I spent too many afternoons in that place. When Longtin left, no one would let Daria into the bar, so I had to stop going.”

  “Valantin,” I said, “the guys at The Gutshot mentioned a short man in a suit. Was he a student of yours, too?”

  A platter of cookies shaped like seashells rested between us. She pinched one and lifted it to her mouth. “Are you a cop or what?”

  I laughed. “Do I look like one?”

  “I figured you’d ask me about him, because he came here looking for Avo in the exact opposite direction you’re coming from. I pointed him to The Gutshot.” She swallowed a bite of the cookie. “But I told him I had no idea if Avo was still working there, because by then I hadn’t seen him in over a year, maybe two. My guess is Avo went back to Armenia. Not everyone is suited for this country, especially coming from the Soviet Union during the age of the shopping mall. And his cousin—that’s who the man was, the man in the suit—was very kind, not too concerned-seeming, as if he was just trying to reunite with family he hadn’t seen in a while. He was sitting where you’re sitting now, wearing a chambray suit, orange in color, with a silken blue vest and tie, and he politely asked that I keep Daria from jumping on his lap. Indeed, the suit was impeccably cut, which was particularly vital on a man of his smaller stature. Otherwise he could have looked like a boy lost in his father’s wardrobe. It was funny to think of him and Avo coming from the same genetic pool. He came and sat exactly where you’re sitting now, and we talked for a little while. His English was fine, if not a little mannered. When I told him about Avo’s hopes to translate Tumanyan, he agreed it was probably what Avo was doing, wherever he went. Something gentle like that. Avo was a big young man, but he was gentle. Once, when he was translating the eyewitness accounts, he brought in a passage from a boy who’d watched in terror from a tree as a Turk cut off his father’s head in the streets. I would’ve translated the verb just like that—cut off, or chopped, or sliced—but Avo had brought in the word plucked. I told him, pluck is what we do with flowers and fruits. But he knew that. He was just gentle, is what I’m saying. Even down to his language. I talk about that with my students all the time. Out there in our cheaper display cases, the labels say cubic zirconium, not diamond-like, you understand? When I talk with you, I say genocide, which feels, to me, academic. But when I talk to my aunt, we say jart. The shattering. Different, right? They change everything, the words we use.”

  I was thinking of the language I taught Avo to speak, the language of wrestling. I showed him how to tell a story with his body, to home in on every sinew he could imagine: his facial expressions, the way he spread his fingers and his lips when he was taunting or grandstanding, the way he chose a specific member of the audience to privilege with his attention. Even the number of straps he wore on his singlet—one, over the left shoulder, until his finishing move, when he stripped free of the strap altogether. I wanted him to enter the ring differently, to avoid the way everyone steps between the ropes. He was big enough to scale over the top rope to emphasize his size. I showed him ways to pin an opponent he respected, and how to pin a jabroni using nothing but the bottom of his boot. I told him to no-sell a chop, to let the smaller guy oversell, deflecting off him like a bike in a collision with a semi. I taught him to take not one, n
ot two, but three double ax handles before falling to a knee, to catch a cross-body in the middle of the ring to end the babyface’s momentum, to taunt the crowd after slamming the babyface down. I taught him tempo, how to draw out the feeling of hopelessness in the fans, the way to make it seem absolutely impossible that the babyface could come back to win over him, the heel. I taught him to cheat, and to cheat better—to rake his opponent’s eyes in clear sight of the crowd while keeping the referee oblivious, to lie and to bask in the glory of indignation when accused of wrongdoing. I taught him—when the babyface finally did make his comeback, when he took The Brow Beater down to the mat in a submission hold—to store all of his strength in that one outstretched, quivering hand he’d use to reach for the bottom rope, reaching and reaching for a break in the hold, for relief. I said his thumb should twitch with every closing centimeter like a dying but dangerous snake, so that when he finally submitted, when the good guy won, the audience didn’t feel only satisfied, they felt safe. “You’re a storyteller in that ring,” I told him, “and your body’s your language. Those people paying to see you, they don’t want stories of real life. They want justice. We’re in the business of delaying and delivering justice, for maximum effect. You understand?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

  I’d only ever heard the word sure used sarcastically, or to show indifference, but The Brow Beater used it only when he believed something with a real and urgent charge. Once, outside a diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, we stood before a stone archway where he spent an hour examining the stones. He was convinced the stonemason who’d done the work was an Armenian like him. “Sure,” he said, low and long, fingering the cornice only he could reach.

  “Looks like any old cookie-cutter archway to me,” I said. “You really think you can tell the difference?”

  “Sure, sure,” he said, almost indignant. He was using the word, I realized, the way sure could mean certain. It didn’t work that way, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t explain why.

  Now Valantin took another seashell cookie. “She only lets me eat these when we have guests,” she said, “but your cat seems to be warming her up.” Her aunt had taken Fuji into her arms and was walking him through the store like a baby on an airplane.

  “Avo’s cousin,” I said. “You remember his name?”

  Valantin had taken an enormous bite and bobbed her head this way and that as she chewed, to let me know that, as soon as she could speak again, she’d have an answer for me. In the meantime, I pocketed a few cookies myself.

  “He had the same first name as my husband,” she said, finishing her cookie. “Ruben. But my husband went by Rob his whole life. Not this Ruben. I think his last name was—Petrosian?”

  Fuji darted into the back room, almost knocking our coffees off the table. For the first time since I’d come inside, the old lady was speaking, and this time I could actually understand what she was saying.

  “Ruben Petrosian?” she said. “Ruben Petrosian?”

  9

  Les notes du tournoi de backgammon international

  Chantilly, France, 23 au 25 août 1974

  Ce journal appartient à: Mina Bagossian

  Équipe: Soviet Armenia

  Jour un

  My mother always told me the West was free, but I never expected the complimentary meal on the flight, or this complimentary notebook from the organizers of the tournament to keep track of the matches. To be honest, I don’t care very much about remembering every detail of the tournament. When Tigran died, my interest in backgammon died, too. I wouldn’t be writing any of this down if I had someone to talk to about it, but I don’t speak French, my Russian is elementary, and the only other Armenian around is the dourest boy in the world. Do you know how many questions Ruben asked me on the flight? Zero. Not one. Neither one of us had been on a plane before. I’d always hoped the tops of clouds looked different than the bottoms, radically different, but they look more or less the same. Really the magic of flying is that you can see the subtle curve of the horizon. Of course I knew the world was round, but seeing its roundness for the first time got me thinking. That the world is round makes me hope that time is round, too, and that maybe I’ll loop to the start one day, and I’ll be able to see Tigran again.

  Zero questions—otherwise I wouldn’t write a word of this down.

  The flyers for this tournament said we’d be in Paris. They even featured a drawing of the Eiffel Tower. But we’re in Chantilly, almost an hour’s train ride from Paris, and although the town is beautiful, I’m slightly disappointed that we won’t be seeing the “city of love.” If Tigran were here with me, I would have insisted that we go. I always told people that I loved Tigran like an uncle, but that’s not completely true. It wasn’t a physical attraction but a kind of partnership I fell into with him. I used to dream that his wife would pull me aside one day and say, “I’m old, I have no energy, and he needs someone who can keep up with him. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth, and you’re the only young woman I approve to take my place.” It was a shameful daydream when I was younger, but now, full of missing him, I remember it sweetly. Who knows how I’ll remember it in the future?

  And who knows where I’ll be remembering it from? Moscow, maybe? Or Paris—or Chantilly—though I doubt I’ll find out if I belong here or not in only three days. Especially with the company I have. Can you imagine going to Paris with Ruben Petrosian? Joyless boy in a joyous place. Since the horrible accident with Tigran, we’ve had nothing but good luck. And yet Ruben is still a little brat. He’s eighteen years old but looks ten and acts a hundred. That his papers went through at the last minute without a problem so he could replace Tigran as my guardian and coach on this trip—it was a miracle. But when the news came, Ruben hardly smiled. It’s not that he’s always thinking of something else—who isn’t thinking of multiple things at once?—it’s that he believes what’s in his head is more important than what’s in anyone else’s. That’s why he never asks questions, I think. He doesn’t think there’s a chance that what’s going on in my mind might surprise or delight him.

  But here’s what’s going on in my mind now, day one, as Ruben has retired to his room across the hall in this beautiful hotel, and as I keep this diary of my time in almost-Paris: I miss Tigran, and I miss home. My whole life I romanticized the West, I always wanted to leave Armenia, but now I miss Kirovakan. Who cares that new movies and music take so long to trickle into the country? That my father has to run his business in secret? Who cares that he has to travel to Yerevan three times a month to play poker and schmooze with informants, that he has to bribe them all in order to keep his business from the government? Who cares that when we have visitors, my sister and I have to hurry and hide the mannequins and measuring tapes? Paris—this hotel in Chantilly, anyway—is full of fast-moving, fast-talking people who smell like chocolate, and everything is free here, and yet I miss home. Nothing seems real here. I miss the smell of rain. I miss my cat, who never minds getting wet, seems to crave being wet, in fact. Refuses to come indoors when it’s pouring, and we had to board up all the nearby wells so she wouldn’t dive into them again. Nothing here is as real as that. Maybe I’m just lonely. It’s been a long day with a boy who won’t ask a single question of me. Maybe I just miss Tigran, who would’ve made this trip so lovely. He would have joked about the smell of chocolates. I don’t care about backgammon anymore. I want to go home.

  Jour deux

  I woke up feeling just as sorry for myself as I did last night, when I wrote that entry. How embarrassing. But everything changed during breakfast this morning, before the matches began. The hotel has a large dining room with intricate crystal chandeliers overhead, and maybe forty or so large round tables for the guests of the tournament. Ruben and I were seated at a table with six other coaches and players from Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine. The Russian coach, Anton, had known Tigran in their early playing days. He told me that Tigran used to collect a die from each backgammon set on which h
e won a game. I said I’d love to see that collection, and Anton said he bet Tigran’s widow had it lying around somewhere back at the house in Kirovakan. Just the thought of those dice safe at home connected me again to Tigran and put me finally at ease, and in this new comfort I leaned to the Russian coach and thanked him. When breakfast was over, Anton leaned back to me and said, “You know that Ruben boy is so sullen only because he’s jealous of your talents.” And suddenly, as if Tigran himself had returned, I cared again about winning the tournament.

  My first match came shortly thereafter. It was against the player from East Germany, who happened to be the only other girl in the tournament. We played, and although I won easily, she was a good sport and shook my hand afterward. I think she understood, as I did, that they’d pitted us against each other in order to get rid of one of the girls as quickly as possible.

  They’re having a harder time getting rid of me, though! It took eight hours and twenty-seven minutes for me to win all five of my matches today (against East Germany, Canada, Israel, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia), setting me up for tomorrow’s final three rounds, which will likely go just as long. It’s amazing to meet people from all over the world. They each look so different, and yet they throw the dice exactly the same way. My first match tomorrow will be against the host country’s representative, and I’m looking forward to spoiling their celebration.

  Something strange happened today, too, besides all my winning. While I was playing the matches, Ruben watched from behind the Soviet Armenian table. From time to time I looked back to see if he was celebrating my march toward victory, but he looked on coldly with his usual lifelessness. No matter how unlikely a roll I’d just had, or how riled up the crowd became at my winning streak (the American fans, in particular, seem to be loudly cheering on the only girl left in the tournament), Ruben remained detached. And then the strange thing happened: I saw three men—two older men and a younger man who all looked like Armenians, wearing expensive suits, but I couldn’t believe they actually were Armenians, since I’d convinced myself that Ruben and I were the only Armenians in the West. The three men approached the table with our country’s flag draped from it. For the first time all day, Ruben stood. And they talked. I had to return my focus to my match, and when I had another chance to look back at the table, I saw that Ruben was gone.