Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Chess Set
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Athens, Corfu, Rhodes, Santorini, Heraklion. Every city, town and harbor community in Greece brims with small tourist shops selling kitschy souvenirs. Kori dresses, blue and white kaftans, jewelry, keychains, coffee cups, copper pots, straw baskets, faux Grecian urns, Acropolis refrigerator magnets, busts of Alexander the Great. Hidden on a cloud in the pale Grecian sky, Hermes, the god of shopkeepers and merchants, is gloating.
I am in the middle of a souvenir emporium because my wife’s love language is giving. She is shopping for holiday gifts for her parents, my parents, her aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, her book club, our gardener, the postman, the neighbors.
The store is no bigger than our hotel room. I can barely turn around in the aisles. My elbow could easily knock a vase off its shelf. I could bring down a display case with a bump from my hip. The Greeks could package and sell claustrophobia.
Like a falcon flushing her prey, my wife hovers. Her kill is a chess set. The rooks are doric columns, the queen a goddess, the pawns Hoplite soldiers. The brass pieces are a green patina, the opposing team a mottled metallic black.
The king is three inches tall, the smallest piece is two inches high. The set weighs thirty pounds, give or take. This is my argument against buying it.
Her retort, argued like an Olympic javelin thrower, “You’ve always coveted a monumental chess set.” I smile, ambivalently.
“I’ll carry it,” she adds. Checkmate.
For three more islands, on and off ferries, up and down hotel steps, in and out of taxis and through two airports, she keeps the chess set packed in her suitcase. Arriving home, she hauls her luggage into our apartment, dropping it with a thud just inside the doorway.
Love makes us do crazy things.
Unable to purchase a chess board scaled to match the larger-than-normal pieces, the set goes into deep storage. Five years year in Mexico City, a furniture maker agrees to make a custom-built chess board table. A year passes before it arrives.
The inlaid marble top shines like the Parthenon under the Athenian summer sun, but the table is structurally top heavy. It wobbles. I disassemble it and pour sand into its hollow base to weigh it down. For months, we vacuum sand particles from our rug.
Setting up my pieces for the first time, there is a new discovery. The pieces, milled by hand, have uneven bottoms. At the slightest touch, they fall over. The pieces go back into storage.
Seven years later, I locate a machinist to attach footings to steady the chess pieces. It takes six months.
Finally—thirteen and half years into our marriage—the chess set and table is positioned in our living room. To complete the ensemble, we buy two chairs.
It’s a souvenir remembrance. A Homeric love poem about my wife’s epic belief that a marriage, a friendship, a life well-lived, is built on giving.
The entire setup—pieces, board, table, chairs—is never moved. Every week I dust it, but never use it.
I don’t know how to play chess.
