Enemy Queen Read online

  ENEMY QUEEN

  Copyright © 2020 Robert Steven Goldstein

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by SparkPress, a BookSparks imprint, A division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC

  Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 85007

  www.gosparkpress.com

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-026-4 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-027-1 (e-bk)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019910702

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Sandy, my eternal love,

  Although I conquer all the earth,

  yet for me there is only one city.

  In that city there is for me only one house;

  and in that house, one room only;

  and in that room, a bed.

  And one woman sleeps there,

  the shining joy and jewel of all my kingdom.

  (Sanskrit)

  IT IS A NIGHTLY RITUAL FOR THE PROFESSOR AND ME. We select a bottle of wine from a recent shipment and drink it while we play a game of chess before dinner.

  Our chess protocol was never explicitly negotiated; it evolved more through playful coercion. By nature, I would have opted for competitive games played in silence, which is how I approached it at first. But the professor has prevailed. Our nightly chess matches are now more of a social affair. The wine contributes to that, but from the beginning, the professor insisted on sharing with me his musings on the advantages one move posed over another, and kibitzed ceaselessly on the nature of the strategy and tactics we each sought to prosecute.

  Playing chess this way was contrary to every instinct I possess. For me, confrontation is innate; I am an attorney. Admittedly, I rarely appear in court. As chief counsel for the university, I deal mostly in contracts and correspondence. But the essence of the work is still adversarial. The intellectual athleticism inherent in adversarial logic is how I instinctively approach life.

  Or how I approached it before.

  I fear the professor has changed me more than I care to acknowledge.

  I ARRIVED HOME and set down my briefcase. The professor had already opened a bottle of zinfandel he received from a winery in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley. He smiled warmly.

  “Just tasting a bit and letting it breathe until you got home, Counselor,” he assured me in his rich southern drawl.

  The professor was being sincere.

  But I have noticed that many educated southerners who consciously cultivate their drawl can appear inviting and deferential even when being cunningly contentious. My clipped, upper Manhattan diction seems to have precisely the opposite effect on people here in North Carolina; they often infer that I’m being combative when I’m merely exploring an idea.

  I removed my suit jacket and tie and laid them carefully over the back of the sofa. I undid the top two buttons of my white shirt and sat down across from him at the chessboard. He had just finished filling my wineglass, concluding with his customary twirling flourish as he withdrew.

  The professor is a big man, strong and sprawling. He eats and drinks far too much, but his large frame finds a way to accommodate the excess. He is attractive for a man his age, in a hulking, ponderous way.

  “Had another story accepted for publication today,” he announced, and held out his glass to toast.

  We clinked wineglasses. “With that same university press in Alabama?” I asked.

  “It helps to have a hunting buddy on the screening panel,” he said with a laugh.

  “Hunting buddy?” I snarled. “I still don’t see how cultured men can spend a whole day out shooting defenseless animals and call it sport.”

  “Now, now, Counselor,” he said, grinning. “Let’s not drag your Yankee prejudices to the chess table. Down in these parts, hunting is a noble recreation. When your daddy presents you with your first hunting rifle and takes you out to teach you how to use it, it’s a ritual not unlike your people’s bar mitzvah, but far more viscerally meaningful.”

  “You’re a hopeless anti-Semite,” I said, and tasted the zinfandel. “Excellent!” I exclaimed. “I really never liked zins until I tasted these Dry Creek and Alexander Valley wines. They’re much more refined.”

  “I agree completely,” he said.

  “So you published another story?” I said. “You don’t miss publishing those scholarly literary articles that you used to write?”

  “Counselor, I taught English literature for three decades. I’d rather be dead than write another one of those horrid scholarly papers that I had to publish every semester. That cycle of research and composition became mindlessly automatic. It was a bit like masturbating without bothering to fantasize about anything.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Masturbate without fantasizing,” I said. “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

  “Well, I suppose there are pros and cons to that,” the professor said with a coy grin. “All in all, you probably have it right, though. The mechanical route always winds up empty in the end.”

  We had both finished our first glass of wine. The professor poured us each another.

  “Do you like actually teaching creative writing, though?” I asked.

  “Best change I ever made, Counselor. Like I said, on the publishing side, stories are a whole lot more fun to write than scholarly articles. But as far as the classes, it’s just so damn easy. Almost a scam, really. You have the kids write stories. Most of them don’t write nearly as much as they should, so I don’t have a lot to read. Then we all sit around and discuss ’em, and make suggestions. It’s a racket.”

  “Can you actually teach someone to write?”

  “I suspect you can help them refine their craft, but you can’t teach that instinctual thing. I will say this, however. In the students’ eyes, the persona of a creative writing professor is completely different from the persona of a literature professor. A creative writing professor is an artist. He’s subversive, mysterious. To the girls, especially, Counselor. I can make some offhanded remark, and they look at me like I’m a rock star. Here’s one line I like; I use it all the time. I say, ‘You’re not writing for professors. You’re writing for the guy at a Greyhound bus station with a paperback book stuffed into his back pocket.’ They eat that shit up, Counselor. I can see it in their eyes, the girl students. Like they want to jump my bones when I say it.”

  I sipped on my wine and laughed. “Be careful with that, Professor. A sexual harassment lawsuit could end your career.”

  “I’m sure a lawyer with your fine skills could find a way to finesse me out of it.” He chuckled and took a hearty gulp of the zinfandel. “Let’s play some chess, Counselor. We haven’t revisited the Sicilian Defense in quite some time. I’ll play black. I’m feeling feisty tonight.”

  A FEW OF the wineries we liked were offering free barrel tasting for members that Saturday. Most of our wine club memberships were with wineries in the Napa and Sonoma valleys of California, but the professor and I had found a few winemakers here in North Carolina who produced some decent vintages as well.

  We had been tasting nearly all morning. Now we were sitting at one of the winery’s wooden picnic tables along the edge of the vineyards. We had chosen one under
neath a large tree that could provide a bit of shade for me while the professor sat in the sun.

  We were drinking a bottle of very nice pinot grigio, one of the specialties of this particular vineyard. The winery had chilled it more than would usually be considered optimal, but on such a warm and humid summer day, it was especially good. I wondered if the winery had done that intentionally or just left the bottle in the cooler without thinking about it. I didn’t want to mention my speculation to the professor; he’d assume I was once again questioning the cognitive skills of southerners, something that annoyed him.

  We had bought food at the little market up the road. The professor was working on a double-sized ham and cheese sandwich, a huge vat of potato salad, and a bag of pork rinds. I had chicken salad on rye and a small side of coleslaw.

  It seemed to me that over the course of the day, the professor had consumed at least three times the wine I had. Yet he appeared relatively unscathed.

  He did outweigh me by nearly a hundred pounds.

  I checked with him again to be sure that he was okay to drive us home, and when he assured me he was, I poured another tall glass of wine to have with my sandwich. Halfway through, I became lightheaded and talkative.

  “Professor,” I said, “did you know that the university hospital is selecting a new computer system for their Admitting Department?”

  “Fascinating, but not on my radar, Counselor.”

  “As university counsel, I had to sit in on the discussions. All the usual suspects were present. Including another hunting buddy of yours, Al Rider, the head of the Medical Records Department.”

  “Ah, good old Al. I’ve known him a long time. We played football together in high school. He was a big ol’ lineman. Huge man.”

  “And set in his ways. We had quite a little quarrel regarding gender codes.”

  “Gender codes?”

  “Professor, when you’re selecting a computer system for a hospital, you go through every admitting prompt, every question that comes up on the screen when you’re registering a patient, to make sure that it fits your needs and meets all regulatory requirements.”

  “So what’s a gender code, Counselor? And why do I have this suspicion that I’m about to get some left-wing, political correctness lecture here?” He laughed and poured himself some more wine.

  “When you’re admitting a patient into the hospital, you have to assign them a gender. The system we were looking at defaulted to two gender codes, male and female. But you can customize more if you want. The university had engaged a consulting firm to advise us on the project—one of the big New York firms. They sent a young woman, pretty, well educated, but clearly new and a bit intimidated by the whole thing. She was at the table along with the vendors and all of us university folk. So I asked the young lady, ‘Do you think just two gender codes are sufficient for us?’ She seemed really glad that I pulled her into the conversation.”

  “Were you lusting after her, Counselor?”

  “Actually, in this case, Professor, I sincerely wanted to hear her perspective. But she was attractive.”

  “And what did the pretty girl say?”

  “She said she had just finished a similar engagement at a university hospital in Los Angeles, and they opted for five gender codes.”

  “Five?” the professor shouted.

  “Yes, five,” I said. As I listed them, I paused momentarily between each. “Male. Female. Male transitioning to female. Female transitioning to male. And ambiguous.”

  “Ambiguous?”

  “I asked her about that too. Do you know that almost a tenth of a percent of babies in the United States are born with ambiguous genitalia? We used to call them hermaphrodites. The consultant said the proper term now is intersexual.”

  “Intersexual?” The professor started chuckling but soon was laughing so hard he almost coughed up some wine. “Oh, good God!” he exclaimed. “I can just see Big Al Rider listening to all this. You know, Counselor, he’s in favor of making homosexuality a capital offense here in this state.”

  “He told the young woman, in no uncertain terms, to stop. And she did. But I pursued it.”

  “You pursued it? You’re a twisted son of a bitch, Counselor, but I do admire your courage. What exactly did you say to Big Al?”

  “I said we’re a university medical center, and these sorts of gender variations come up. It’s not a political issue. It’s an issue of accurately characterizing a patient’s gender for optimal medical treatment.”

  The professor slowed his laughing just enough to steady his hand and pour some more wine into his plastic cup. “I suppose you’re on Big Al’s shit list right about now,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve never been a favorite of his to begin with. But after I stated my position, Al Rider stood up across the table—all six foot six of him, in his long white coat, with its buttons straining over his huge belly—and stared me straight in the eyes. And then, Professor, he said the following, as loud as he could without actually screaming.”

  I stood up, raised an arm, affected an appropriate scowl, deepened my voice, and did my best imitation of Al’s heavy southern drawl:

  “He-ah in Nawth Carolahna, Counselah, we only requiah two gendah codes! And that’s the end o’ this damn convahsation!”

  I noticed that the people at the picnic table ten yards away were staring at us. I sat down, smiled sheepishly, and returned to sipping my wine.

  The professor remained oblivious to the stares. He was heaving with laughter. “I guess you lost that one!” he spurted between guffaws, his eyes tearing from exertion.

  THE SICILIAN DEFENSE usually results in white attacking on one side of the board and black on the other. Among modern grandmasters, it is the most frequently played response to white’s advancing his king pawn two squares to start the game. The Sicilian can be played cautiously, seeking positional advantage. Or it can be prosecuted more recklessly, each player asserting his attack, hoping that it will wreak sufficient havoc before his opponent’s does.

  That range of variation persistently stimulated the professor and me to explore the Sicilian’s permutations for weeks at a time, and to revisit it frequently.

  On this particular evening, the professor, playing black, had opted to proceed prudently, assembling a seemingly impenetrable configuration. We had made very few exchanges, so almost all our pieces were still on the board, complicating my efforts to analyze the position between each move.

  I relocated a knight closer to his primary encampment, hoping to place some additional pressure on him. My threat seemed to me purely symbolic; his position appeared absolutely impervious.

  But as the professor studied the board, he grew more and more agitated and uncharacteristically silent. He stared at the board for several minutes without speaking, without even taking a sip of wine. I had never before seen the professor quite this pensive.

  I fought the temptation to ask him what the matter was. I rather enjoyed seeing him in this state. My competitive juices were surging.

  Finally the professor raised his head, stared at me in exasperation, and exclaimed, “I’m in zugzwang!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Zugzwang, goddammit!” he shouted. “Don’t tell me you never heard the term zugzwang.”

  I thought for a moment. “It does sound familiar, Professor. I believe I’ve come across it a couple of times in old chess books. But I can’t recall the context.”

  The professor was irritated. He exhaled loudly and rolled his eyes. His voice was slightly raised as he answered me. “Yes, it’s a chess term, dammit. I’ve seen the word used in books but never till now actually experienced the condition. It’s a goddamn infuriating thing, Counselor. Look at my pieces. I’m perfect; I created an airtight position. But it’s my move now. I have to move. I can’t pass. And any move I make starts ripping my position apart. Look at it, Counselor. Any piece I move opens a hole for you to come right in. I don’t even have a move just to buy time. I’m in zugzwan
g, Counselor! I’m a goner!”

  LATER THAT EVENING, I was tossing a salad in the kitchen. The professor had heated up the backyard barbeque and was now laying out our main courses. A slab of venison for him, from a deer he’d shot on a recent hunting expedition. For me, he was grilling a fresh fillet of sea bass I’d picked up at the market on the way home from work.

  He’d also buried a couple of russet potatoes in the coals to bake.

  We were drinking a well-aged Napa Valley cabernet, redolent of black cherry. Each mouthful left a pleasant aftertaste of green olive on the palate. We were halfway through our second bottle.

  I took the wine out to the backyard to refill the professor’s glass.

  “Thank you, Counselor,” he said. “You’re a fine man.”

  “I’ve been thinking about your zugzwang predicament earlier this evening, Professor.”

  “Don’t remind me!” he shouted. “I should have resigned as soon as I recognized it. Then I wouldn’t have had to watch you methodically decimate me over the next dozen moves. I could see you relished it, Counselor.”

  “I suppose I did.” I chuckled and drank a bit of wine. “But actually it occurred to me, Professor, that zugzwang is a sort of metaphor for the comfortable life we’ve built here together.”

  He looked at me oddly. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Well, we drink wine; we play chess. We babble endlessly about women, but we never interact with any. I think we realize that venturing out from our safe little enclave here would be futile, perhaps even damaging.”

  The professor took a huge gulp of wine. “How do you mean, damaging?”

  “Well, Professor, let’s be honest. I screwed up two marriages, and you screwed up three. So, as I see it, we’re kind of in perpetual zugzwang here. We’re comfortable; we enjoy our evenings. But if either of us tried to go out and make more of our personal situations, we’d fully expect it to be a disaster.”

  The professor turned his strip of venison over. He checked my fish; it looked done. He moved it to the edge of the grill to keep it warm.