Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I’m cold,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”

  “You’re lying.” Now Sol was turned on, getting a little humpy, she knew the signs. “You’re not cold, you’re hot as a baked potato.”

  “I won’t argue, the world is founded on such contradictions. It’s possible I’m all at once cold and hot and lying. But not lying as much as you, Sol.”

  2 The Grey Goose

  Hello, boys and girls, this is Burl Ives, and I’ve come to sing some songs for you. Here’s a song about a grey goose, the strangest goose. The year after Miriam’s father left she was given an album. Last Sunday morning, Lord, Lord, Lord / Oh, my daddy went a hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord. Miriam was forbidden to operate her parents’ hi-fi, built into a long rosewood cabinet that also included a radio, the most fantastical item of furniture in their lives, purchased on installment at Brown’s Appliance on Greenpoint Avenue, and fixture of contention in any number of speeches on the subject of what her father termed, in grip of one of his baroque and finicky tantrums, their “slavery to commerce.” And along came the grey goose, Lord, Lord, Lord. Miriam had to request the Burl Ives each time. Rose handled what she’d only call “an album” in a manner Miriam related to the Jewish ritual actions Rose hastened to despise: the slipping of scrolls from a cabinet, her grandfather’s tender sheathing of the afikomen within its napkin at Passover, really anywhere Miriam had ever witnessed a Jew handling papers of importance or turning the pages of a book as if unworthy, grateful, ennobled, discreetly defiant, all of these at once. Rose tutored her in this action of handling a long-player like the Burl Ives, or her own Beethoven symphonies, narrating what she’d still forbid Miriam even to attempt getting right: middle fingers paired at the label, steadying thumb at the disc’s outer edge. Never so much as a breath grazing the sacred dark-gleaming music carved into its canyons, during the disc’s passage in and out of the crisp inner papers. That the papers themselves should ride back into the cardboard sleeve just so. A wrong glance could probably scratch the thing. God knew this was a house of wrong glances.

  He was six weeks a-falling, Lord, Lord, Lord / And they had a feather-picking, Lord, Lord, Lord. For what seemed a whole year of life Miriam sat entranced or bored, stilled anyhow, mulling what Ives seemed to have to impart, cheery parables of ducks and whales and goats and geese. Once, Sol Eaglin, making his mysterious visits, dapper bullshitting Sol before he’d been humbled, Sol on the make, stopped in the living room to jape at Miriam and her album.

  “What’s your kid know from ducks, Rose? You ever been to a farm, doll?”

  “She knows from ducks,” said Rose. “She’s been to a Chinese restaurant.”

  Animals, in Rose’s remorselessly unsentimental urban-pragmatist’s views, were for eating, sure. (No filthy pets for Miriam.) Rose frowned at children’s books when they veered in directions zoological or anthropomorphic to any extent beyond Aesop, with his ironclad morals (always, with Rose, special emphasis on the bitterness of grapes, the inaccessibility of tidbits residing at the bottom of a vase). To sentimentalize a duckling or rabbit was associated, for Miriam, with her mother’s contempt for Catholic ritual: Easter eggs, bland milk-chocolate bunnies (“Too bad, but I’d never have German chocolate in the house,” Rose would say, in irony and sorrow, then following with her regular sighing incantation: “They made the very best of everything, of everything”), smears of ash, idiot Irish and Italian neighbors under the knuckle of idiot priests. So what was the anomalous Grey Goose, who wouldn’t be made a meal of, meant to signify? He was nine months a-cooking, Lord, Lord, Lord / Then they put him on the table, Lord, Lord, Lord / And the knife couldn’t cut him, Lord, Lord, Lord / And the fork couldn’t stick him, Lord, Lord, Lord. Where was Aesop when you needed him? Of all the songs on the album, this was the one Miriam studied, helplessly. So they took him to the sawmill, Lord, Lord, Lord / Ho, it broke the saw’s tooth out, Lord, Lord, Lord. At last, one day, Rose took mercy on her daughter and explained. The answer, when it came, wasn’t difficult, though Miriam, at eight, could never have guessed it.

  Now, tonight, nine years later, on the postage-stamp-size platform in a club so small any table was front and also rear, the grapevines of smoke clinging to the ceiling providing an illusion of distance in a room that cleared of bentwood chairs and voices and clamor and filth, and properly lit and fumigated, would have been revealed as no larger than the parlor where Miriam had memorized her mother’s albums, yet which somehow made room for not only a stage and a side bar featuring Italian coffee and red wine but also for a whole and intricate social world that Miriam was just learning to parse and manipulate—here, the tenor folksinger on the tiny platform crooned out Burl Ives’s version of the folk song, exactly. Note for note, vocal gesture for vocal gesture, syllable for syllable. And the last time I seen him, Lord, Lord, Lord / He was flying over the ocean, Lord, Lord, Lord / With a long string of goslings, Lord, Lord, Lord. Miriam guffawed seeing with what neat sleight of hand the blond raffish singer offered up a version cribbed from a children’s LP as if dredged out of some mossy Appalachian music-finding expedition, as if salvaged during some hobo’s stint working in a train yard, or begging at the kitchen door of the very farm that had raised the Grey Goose itself. Laughed at how smugly the rendition was gobbled up by those unqualified to know the difference—or those who’d endure fingernail splinters before confessing they were familiar with Ives’s version. The boy at her side turned, as he had each time that night she’d laughed for no evident cause, and said, “What?”

  “Nothing.” All this she couldn’t explain, not to him. (Years later it would be his name, among so many here, that she, famous rememberer, resolutely couldn’t dredge up.) Then Miriam laughed again and said, “Do you know what the Grey Goose represents?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’m asking what the Grey Goose represents. I just wondered if you knew.”

  The song now finished, she’d gained the attention of their whole table, and the table beside theirs as well. Chairs, long since reversed so chests married chairbacks, cigarette-knuckled hands flung carelessly forward for ballast, now squeaked. The margin between different tables, between friends and strangers, those who’d arrived in one configuration and those who might later depart rearranged, in pairs or complicated threesomes or alone, had been lost a while ago.

  “Enlighten us, Mim,” said Porter, the clever one in horn-rims, the Columbia man. Eyeing her for several nights now but too genteel to pry her from the boy. He might think he had all the time in the world. She might agree.

  “Well, since you ask, the Grey Goose represents the irrevocable destiny of the working class.” Never had Miriam been so delighted to regurgitate a Roseism.

  Leaning in from the next table like a Disney wolf, Rye Gogan said, “Ach, fella, beware—your girl’s a Red.” Rye, middle baritone of the Gogan Boys, an act too big for this stage (not only reputation-wise but in strict bodily terms, the three Irish louts in their thick brocaded vests would never have fit on this club’s riser), was the celebrity among them here, not that any of them would acknowledge it. Rye Gogan was also already famous, though who knew how such fame was exactly circulated, as something worse than a wolf. A drunken shark at an evening’s end. The girl farthest from shore at that point was traditionally doomed.

  “No, really, she is one,” said Porter. Porter being one of those who always agreed with you by saying the word “no,” as if you hadn’t intended whatever you’d said so much as he felt you should have. “Not like us paper revolutionaries, gentlemen. Mim grew up in a cell, she’s been to secret meetings. Tell them, Mim.”

  “Meetings?” growled Rye. “Who hasn’t?” The Irish singer rounded his shoulders, that signature vest like a dank filthy sail hung from the rigging of his chest, and creaked his chair back toward his own party. Likely registering that engaging with Miriam’s table entailed simply too much smarty-pants confusion to be worth the bother now, even if he’d tabulated Miriam’s presence for some pending shark chase to
shore.

  “You have no idea,” said Miriam to Porter, and Porter’s friend, named, she was fairly certain, Adam, and the Barnard girl Adam had brought along, who’d said she was from Connecticut, and who’d been looking sick for most of an hour already. “I have a pedigree. My father’s a German spy.”

  “Can he get us into Norman Mailer’s party?” said Adam. Adam knew, or pretended to know, where the real action was tonight. Any crowded smoky basement or throngs on MacDougal or St. Marks to the contrary, all persons visible to their gaze were ipso facto losers like themselves.

  “He’s not allowed into the United States,” said Miriam, surprising herself with where this was going, but then seeing it play like nearly anything from her mouth, in this company: delighted amazement at what the wild child from Sunnyside might say next. Her fiercest sincerities were translated by the male ego, on arrival, into daffy flirtation. For instance, when Miriam said she was bored by jazz (worshipping at its longueurs, its brilliant “passages,” induced the same claustrophobia she always felt when sitting hushed before Rose’s Beethoven symphonies, being instructed in their remorseless dire profundities) and, instead, liked Elvis Presley (cutting class to hide in Lorna Himmelfarb’s basement listening to and gazing at Presley being sole salvation in the final semester of her senior year at Sunnyside High), men like Porter went into paroxysms of delight at how the female could want to provoke them, unstuff their admittedly self-satisfied views on every subject, never grasping how anyone they’d ever be seen squiring, let alone this raven-haired Jewess with a vocabulary like Lionel Trilling, could possibly possess such backward tastes. No one who actually didn’t get jazz would ever admit it! And if you got it, man, well, you got it. Miriam, therefore, was a tease, ironist supreme. And with a figure.

  “She’s dead serious,” said Porter now, fingering his frames Arthur Miller–style, again sealing Miriam’s words in his only-I-get-it endorsement.

  Miriam’s original boy had been morosely toying with the red wax pooling in their table’s blunt candle, dipping his fingertips so they coated. Then jostling the little inverted fingerprints off to assemble like a series of mouse-size bowls on the tablecloth, or tiny bloody footprints, a mock crime scene. Maybe trying to say someone had placed a tiny dagger in his tiny heart. Truly, Rye Gogan’s storm-cloud attentions had altered the barometric pressure at their table, possibly in the whole room. While the folksinger interred his guitar to the mildest applause, a poet or comedian, some Lenny Bruce hopeful, stood waiting to commandeer the wholly unnecessary microphone. He wore a cravat and clutched a sheaf of papers, particularly unpromising. Someone knew him. But someone knew everyone. Miriam believed she could get one or more of her admirers on their feet and outside, possibly even Porter among them, and suddenly wanted to prove she could. “What the hey. I’ll get us into Mailer’s party.”

  “How?”

  “With my secret Commie powers, of course.”

  An hour later they stood braving a cold wind at the gentle summit of the Brooklyn Bridge’s rotting-plank walkway, the East River’s boardwalk, and surveyed the transistor gleamings of the island they’d exited, contrasting it with the low-roofed smolder of Brooklyn Heights, the murk of their promised destination, Mailer’s party, down there somewhere, one of those faint flares amid a million darkened bedrooms, the sea of sleepers beyond. Here they halted, stared. Boroughphobia. Fear of Brooklyn. Miriam recognized it in her companions and laughed, but silently, not wanting to compel her unmemorable boy to another automatic, threatened What?

  Miriam felt it in them, this gaggle she’d manufactured by calling them out of the folk basement: their collective reservations at being dragged to this brink, the bridge’s perihelion, the immigrant shores. Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the sea. For the moment at least this seventeen-year-old Queens College freshman dropout had called their bluff. The Barnard girls, like Adam’s date, Adam himself, and solo, enchanted Porter, interested but too sweet to be predatory, and Miriam’s grown-sullen date, too. Miriam’s ad hoc committee, her cell.

  So forget Rose’s secret meetings, her living rooms, her smoky kitchens. This night, right here, New York splayed before them, a banquet they feared to eat, Miriam understood for the first time clearly that her Secret Commie Powers were not actually a joke: Miriam Zimmer understood tonight she was a leader of men. Not just men slavering over her curves or astonished at her wit or haunted by her Jewish mysteries or dazzled by fluency with the city’s mad systems, the subway lines, the Staten Island Ferry terminal and its pigeon population, the significance of a Dave’s egg cream on Canal Street, the parsing of baseball affiliation since Dodgers and Giants were fleeing to California (no, you couldn’t just suddenly become a Yankee fan, not while Sandy Koufax and Jake Pitler still lived), the dance of the monkeys and hippos on the Central Park Zoo clock, or her ease with Negroes or her startling ability to suddenly turn and greet a shambling, eccentric cousin—if only they knew!—coming out of a chess shop on MacDougal, her allusions to veiled knowledge, the transparency to her of symbols like the Grey Goose, but all of it, all. Surviving Rose and Sunnyside Gardens, that suburb of disappointment, had made Miriam sublime, a representative of the League of Absconded Kings or Queens. And seeing it she at once saw that it was visible to those she drew to her. Now she laughed aloud, and Forgettable weighed in again with “What?”

  “Listen.” Miriam’s favorite idiot bar bet, in her experience completely impossible to lose in any company, gained a new allure here where they shivered on the bridge. The answer would be staring them in the face and they’d still blow it. “I’ll bet anyone here five bucks they can’t name an island in New York State that has a bigger population than forty-eight of the fifty states.”

  “That’s dopey,” said Adam. “Manhattan, of course.”

  “You’re dopey, it’s Long Island. You owe me five bucks or your last cigarette.”

  “But hey, who’s counting?” said Porter, leaning in with his own still-plentiful pack, tapping a cluster of cigs halfway out. Fingers mobbed in, and then for an instant the five smokers were melded in physical purpose, clustering to bell-jar Porter’s match from the night’s wind, each dipping a cigarette’s tip to the flame. Ladies first, then, once the match was inevitably doused, finishing with the square dance of touching lit to unlit tips. Night workers edged in darkness past them, heads bent ignorant to the city’s splendor and misery, filing toward sour bedrooms. Fear of Brooklyn: There was plenty to fear, Miriam knew, though not what her companions imagined.

  “I’m freezing,” said Forgettable morosely, evidently intending them to understand him to mean frozen out. Miriam’s date had given up petitioning with his shoulders and elbows to clutch Miriam to him, as Adam and his Barnard girl were clutched, the girl’s shoulder inside Adam’s tweed jacket, her arm vanished within his shirt at the waist. Forgettable’s last few attempts had been despondent anyhow, as though he sensed the turn things were taking. For here at the bridge’s height something else had reached a height: Miriam was changing hands tonight, Porter sweeping her away, if something so completely under Miriam’s agency could be granted to Porter’s own agency. It surely would be. Miriam being just a girl, after all.

  Miriam plunged her cigarette’s orange tip into the night. “Charge!”

  “Screw Mailer,” said her former date. As if that were an option, in lieu of what he’d never get from Miriam. “I’ve got to get up in the morning. I’m going back.”

  “We’ll walk you,” said Adam, whose intrepitude might have fallen victim to a whispered consultation with his fearful girl. This sudden defection sealed Miriam’s transfer more absolutely than she might have wished: After a flurry of embraces, she and Porter hoofed it down the Brooklyn slope of the bridge, just the two of them, while the rest retreated to Manhattan. Miriam considered him entirely for the first time, her new courtier: With his funny knobbly gait, embarrassed or melancholic shoulders, and gigantic forehead, Porter was really drawn along Arthur Miller or Robert Lowell lines, t
hough for his labored quipping he might be trying to pass as Mort Sahl. Leery Rose, in the right mood, might give him a chance on the basis of a resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. But then why would Miriam need her mother’s approval? She canceled the thought.

  “Look,” she said, again pointing her cigarette past the bridge’s descent into Brooklyn Heights. “Remsen Street, it’s one of those, terminating at the Promenade.” In her imagining, the glamorous town houses would be visible, a crest of terraces peering back across the water at Manhattan, and one of them declaring itself by seeping out jazz and cocktail clatter, clouds of marijuana smoke, genius conversation. In truth all that was visible there was a dark barricade of greenery, seemingly more than a mile beyond and below them, across the silent river’s mouth.

  “Which?” Now, committed, Porter sounded nervous, as though Miriam should have the address in her pocket, perhaps an engraved invitation, too.

  “It’ll be obvious from the street, we’ll hear it a block away, I expect.”

  “If not, it isn’t worth going,” he bluffed, regaining his confidence. Yet that very bluff only carried them a stride or two more on the bridge’s downslope. Porter’s confidence was for some other purpose, now that they’d shed their companions. Only when you’d finally shaken them free, those couple-disguising little mobs, the self-chaperoning cocoons that blobbed around everywhere together, were you reminded of their uses. Porter kissed her. Miriam kissed him back, just as ravenous, even if strategizing how to delay or undo it, or where they would go, or what it would have to mean. Every personal possibility not deferred to an unimaginable future was present and urgent, a calamity sweeping all calm before it. Miriam had never managed to locate any sweet spot between. Porter’s cold fingertips already found gaps in the buttons of her antique dress at her tailbone, causing some electrical outline to quiver along the whole contour of her buttocks, to her feet where they attempted to stay rooted on the walkway’s planks. Porter was tall. Miriam got up on her toes, a half measure, compromise with an impulse to drop in a swoon to her knees or lift off into the sky.