The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [49]
Mr. Morgan was also a great lover of games. In particular he loved chess and backgammon. He always preferred game playing to conversation. Mr. Morgan taught me to play chess and backgammon. Chess was Mr. Morgan’s wife and backgammon his mistress: he loved them both, but one more committedly than the other. I remember that Lydia once asked him where he went all day—he didn’t work and lived frugally on his disability checks—and he admitted that he spent most days playing chess in the park, even in the foulest weather. I now imagine him forlornly bundled up in a coat and hat in subzero weather, shivering at the stone chessboard in the park, playing against himself while waiting for a willing opponent to happen by. He usually had ten to twenty correspondence games going at once. He taught me to play chess, but was disappointed that I never got good enough to present him with any even remotely worthy opposition, which was why he preferred to play backgammon with me, the game at which I proved more skilled. I loved the mere object of his backgammon set: it came in a black leather briefcase that looked like it ought to contain important legal documents, or maybe stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills in a heist movie; but unclasp the snaplocks and unfold it, and look!—inside is a flat board with pockets set in the sides of it for the dice, the leather dice cups and the black and white playing chips! The board is divided in two by the hinge of the case, and is covered with a chocolate-brown felt lining, with long narrow isosceles triangles of alternating dark and light brown leather sewn flat to the felt, pointing out of the side of each quadrant of the board like jagged teeth. I loved the smell of the thing, all the felt and leather and glue, and loved the sound of the dice rattling in the leather dice cups, and the noise of their tumbling onto the board, and the deft clicks of the plastic chips as we lined them up on top of the triangles. It is Mr. Morgan to whom I owe my love of backgammon, our uncommunicative upstairs neighbor, with his kilt, his boiling beans, his bagpipes, and his parrots. Later in my life I would play backgammon a lot with my friend Leon, whom I lived with for a year in New York when I was a Shakespearean actor. Leon is also an avid gamer. He likes backgammon but is not as good at it as Mr. Morgan was (I usually win when I play Leon). Every time Leon visits me in my place of confinement, he brings his backgammon set, and sometimes, if the staff of my research center can be persuaded to let us, Leon and I imitate older and happier times by staying up all night talking, drinking wine, and playing game after game of backgammon, the chips clicking and the dice rattling in the cups sometimes until dawn.
The longer Lydia and I sat there on his stacks of newspapers, the less we got out of him. Griph Morgan was so crusty and taciturn, his recluse’s windpipes so reticent to make human speech that the parrots actually made better conversationalists. Mr. Morgan was clearly a man who felt more conversationally at home in the company of creatures whose vocabularies did not exceed more than ten or twenty words, or who spoke a not-dead-but-nearly-forgotten language that almost no one speaks anymore. Eventually we retreated back downstairs, with Lydia in parting making a vague offer to invite him down to dinner sometime, and Mr. Morgan accepting the open invitation even more vaguely. But after that visit, two things changed. One: I no longer had bad dreams that came from the parrots’ shrieks and squawks, but rather my sleeping mind attached more pleasant associations to them now that I knew they were not screaming in pain, but reciting