Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  A decade later, Greenwich Village has exfoliated its vibe outward, encompassing the whole island overnight. Sure, hippiedom had daubed the planet with its paisley virus, doped flower kids adrift and hitchhiking anywhere. But Manhattan’s variation is more intricate and compelling. New Yorkers, a strain of the human species too consumed with mercantile striving to brook interruption, have, with typical acquisitive impatience, turned on without dropping out. Any given old format, like, say, an NBC quiz program run out of Rockefeller Center, now bleeds with dressed-up freaks along the lines of this kid. No fuckups, they carry the city’s tasks forward with as much alacrity as the type of go-getter they’ve replaced, even if in wry quote marks.

  Peter Matusevitch, the advertising executive who is the week’s champion so far, plainly shares in the same benign conspiracy. Miriam, seated now in the comfy oasis of the greenroom with the assistant and the accountant, studies her soon-to-be-opponent on the video monitor there. Matusevitch is outfitted in a wide-lapelled mint suit, sports an elegantly waxed mustache, not so large as to be silly, keeps his longish hair combed neatly over both ears, and speaks in tones both insinuating and sweet while he eliminates the previous pair of Who, What, or Where Game opponents, as though wishing to convert the tiny violence of their dispatch into a kind of seduction. As soon as this operation is completed Matusevitch enters the greenroom in person and Miriam enjoys another easy exchange of mutual recognition, this at a higher level than the older-sisterly affection she’d granted the assistant: Matusevitch really is a fox. Even if Madison Avenue is, basically, satanic.

  Not that Miriam is shopping, except in that, yes, older-sisterly way she shops, on behalf of the single chicks of the Grand and Carmine Street communes. Stella Kim, for instance. It is Stella, her current favorite, with whom Miriam has gotten high just before taking the subway up to Rockefeller Center, and Stella who’s volunteered to keep an eye on the toddler while Miriam competes on the show. Tommy, the loving dad, having coop-flown again. Reverting to Woody Guthrie, a man of his people who couldn’t stay home, he’d picked today to journey by train up the Hudson, to play a set to bolster the spirits of the ragged band of Quaker protesters keeping a death-penalty vigil at the prison in Ossining, a thing Miriam liked to call his Gig of Sisyphus. Though that might actually describe Tommy’s last decade. The career that Miriam, having made herself staunch behind, the great everywoman behind every great man, tries not to consider. Stella Kim would for instance dig Peter Matusevitch very much.

  And likely the reverse, Stella Kim being a fox herself. Stella Kim being really somewhat special, really quite a lot more than another of Miriam’s dopey commune girls. For it is more generally the case that Miriam, having surpassed the dread age of thirty, mother of a two-year-old, collects to herself living emblems of her earlier self, even if they are mostly without a clue, contain barely a notion behind their brush-shined waterfalls of hair. Nevertheless Miriam enfolds them within her sphere, plays older sister and girlfriend, purveyor of good grass and serious knowledge, to the barefoot and thank-Christ-for-the-Pill-not-pregnant lilies of the counterculture. Those subject, if they are lucky enough, to the special ironic burden of the chauvinist hippie boyfriend. At least Tommy Gogan is Irish, is famous, or had been, and has donated his fame and other, more material prospects to great causes—alibis unavailable to the hordes of ponytailed schlubs still looking to their chicks for laundry duty. So many of these are NYU girls, or dropouts from Bard or Vassar or Stony Brook, come awash in New York. Good churchgoers right through high school, members of Monkees fan clubs, tentative abusers of bathroom-cabinet amphetamines, victims generally of the stupefying effects of the suburbs. Miriam, usher to the city, unveiler of its occult corners, would have older-sistered most of these types even at seventeen, fresh from dropping out of Queens College.

  Stella Kim, Bronx-born Hunter grad, survivor of another staunch Red mother, and self-savvy hot ticket, has the capacity really to show Miriam to herself eight years younger. Or so Miriam would like to believe. They’d met, a year earlier, at Yippie headquarters, during a meeting for a call to solidarity with Cesar Chavez, Miriam honing in on Stella’s fitful intensity even before the girl bummed a smoke. “Waste of time,” Miriam told her as they left the meeting early, to snag falafels and amble to the park. “I haven’t touched iceberg lettuce for a year now, big news. Boycott’s too slow, let me show you.” She guided Stella to the Associated on Eighth Avenue, where they smoked dope behind the Dumpster, then, once inside, loaded their hand baskets with heads of iceberg and bunches of migrant-exploiting grapes. Around a corner, when no one looked, they excavated an open-casket freezer and buried the lettuce and grapes beneath pounds of plastic bags of frozen peas and carrots. “Only takes about ten minutes in the ice to wreck the lettuce. They might still be able to sell the grapes, but they sure won’t taste right.”

  “Cool,” exclaimed Stella Kim, impressed for certain. “But what’s the baby food for?”

  “A baby. C’mon.” She dragged her home to show off Sergius and Tommy, no feminist shame in the nuclear family, leastwise not on a night when Tommy had stayed home trying to tease into place between the infant’s lips a bottle, stand-in for her laden breasts, which began jetting in instantaneous response the moment she and Stella walked through the door to hear the father pleading with the bawling child. Stella Kim, unflappable, introduced herself to Tommy and then with a sly smile produced an extra couple of glass jars of Gerber, apparently booted into her macramé purse while Miriam paid for those she’d taken to the register. There are few tricks you can teach this girl, who conveys a certain Weather Underground vibe she’d acknowledge only in cipher remarks, passing behaviors. It is Stella, in fact, who has taught Miriam to use slugs for subway tokens, matte disks punched from rolled steel, purchased from a maker in Brooklyn—Stella who, with enough of these in that purse to coldcock a policeman, has gifted Miriam with handfuls. Miriam has used one of the slugs to ride the F to the Rockefeller Center studios today.

  It was with Stella Kim that Miriam, the famous rememberer, the memorizer of factual nonsense, one day found herself calling out her own long bluff and writing in to the game show to become a contestant. Miriam’s absurd ease with dates and names and geography so impresses her cohort, though this aptitude feels to her merely her legacy under Rose Zimmer’s nurture, Rose who would barely settle for less, and a skill Miriam truthfully finds less amazing in herself than she finds it amazingly lacking in her husband and his friends and her friends too. It was Stella with whom she sat at home caring for the kid with the television on, calling out answers invariably an instant before each contestant could do so, and at Stella’s exhortation—“Why not win some of their funny money, if you already know all the answers anyway?”—that she jumped for a pencil and scribbled down the address as Art James read it out: “All it takes is a postcard with your name, address, and telephone number to the 3W’S, P.O. Box 156, New York 10019.” Stella who understands how badly they could use the green, while Tommy remains stranded in a valley between recording contracts, a valley Miriam secretly fears may not in fact prove crossable in their lifetimes.

  That this is Stella Kim’s business to understand, more even than it is Tommy’s, is for Miriam as unremarkable as is her talent with facts. For Miriam it may always be this way: the male principle a kind of distant banner flying over her life, marking an allegiance unquestioned yet also in some manner fundamentally esoteric, out to lunch. Whereas beginning with Lorna Himmelfarb, or even earlier, and never more than in the instance of Stella Kim, Miriam’s lady confidantes are the ground beneath her feet, the earth itself. Perhaps also even the feet with which Miriam feels herself planted on that earth. Root and body of herself in another. So it is Stella whose eyes Miriam feels she sees through, as she sizes up the killer-hipster mustachioed adman Peter Matusevitch, as well as the other, possibly nonincidental competitor there in the greenroom, the stocky accountant who now presents himself as Graham Stone. Stone rises to take Miriam’s hand
and bow slightly. Knowing the rigorous screening with which she found herself faced to be granted an appearance on The Who, What, or Where Game, no opponent ought to be discounted. Stone has plenty of lascivious sparkle in his eye, too, and for that matter a strange, merkin-like beard blanketing the underside of his chin, perhaps masking a double chin, but also signifying the eligibility of an accountant for entry into the Aquarian age. So until Art James joins them in the greenroom, Miriam is the only one present without facial hair.

  Art James. No one being immune to present fashion, the tidily groomed, clean-shaven Art James wears beneath his tailored gray suit a pale purple shirt and a wide tie that looks like it may have been designed by Klee or Kandinsky. Miriam would gladly wear a dress made from the material of Art James’s tie. Nonetheless, as he glad-hands around the greenroom making everyone feel at home and confident for their imminent entry onto the show’s set, Art James is sheerly a phenomenon of time travel, a sealed voyager from the indefinite moment in the 1950s when anyone Miriam’s age had been first introduced by television to a certain dapper, snappily enunciating, and unspecifiably north-Midwestern version of United States masculinity, that of “the host.” Host of nearly anything, it didn’t matter. The type is characterized above all by its successful sublimation of the disarranging trauma of the generation of World War Two veterans from which the breed produced itself. It has colonized the public imagination to such a degree that the present mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, is, effectively, a “host.” What Miriam doesn’t happen to know, for all the trivial facts that, blizzarding in her brain as they do, qualify her to compete on one of the tougher of television’s quiz shows—and despite her specific curatorial fondness for the secret Jewish or Polish or Russian names of various blandly appellated U.S. celebrities—is that Art James’s name at birth was Artur Simeonvich Elimchik.

  The Name of the Game. Stepping onto the set of the show she watches five times a week is as strictly surreal for Miriam as it would be to locate her own face among those in the collage of famous characters surrounding the waxworks Beatles on the jacket of the Sgt. Pepper’s LP, the identifying of nearly all of which constitutes one of the parlor tricks that routinely causes Miriam’s friends to gape at her in wonder at the mad panoply of proper nouns at her ready disposal. The Who, What, or Where Game set is a kind of florid proscenium on which the three contestants are mounted like products in a display window, seated before a blue curtain woven with twinkling tinsel—why has Miriam never noticed this before? perhaps she has mistaken its twinkle for static on her inadequate television—and beneath the gigantic stylized W’s and the players’ individual scoreboards. These scoreboards are all set to “$125,” the sum the program spots its contestants, at the outset, for making their first bets. The announcer now briefly explains the rules, how each contestant must judge, from the name of a given category, whether their preference is for puzzling at the “Who” or the “What” or the “Where” of the matter, and then, measuring their confidence, select a dollar amount to bet on the result. The studio audience, concealed behind blinding spotlights, is a distant hum, easy to dismiss. Miriam is on the other hand too conscious of her proximity to Peter Matusevitch and Graham Stone—the sole female, she’s been seated between them and so, as at a dinner party, feels responsible to the vibrational neediness of the men at either side. While the theme music plays, unaccountably loud, each opponent leans in to wish her luck. Stone does so friskily, baring incisors, compensating for his husky body and brow. Matusevitch with a vulpine mournfulness that pretends to be sorry he intends to eviscerate her as he has all previous opposition. The announcer intones, “Who? What? Or where? That’s the name of the game! And here’s your host, Art James!”

  James welcomes the players, introducing them in the standard manner, according to their place of residence and their profession, or, in the case of housewives, with some anecdote obtaining from a hobby or “interest.” Miriam, on being screened for the show, had offered herself as “activist,” and suggested they mention her having been wrongfully arrested on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the May Day protests. Though many hundreds were arrested that day Miriam enjoys counting herself as among the “Capitol Steps Thirteen,” for it is in a cell of thirteen women that she found herself detained, and with those thirteen freed on bail by the ACLU lawyer thirty-six hours later, having for that time shared a single toilet in full view and proudly, too, and having shared the solidarity of refusing the only food offered them during that time. The guards brought baloney sandwiches and the thirteen prisoners, not so much defiant as giddy, stripped the baloney from the moist white bread in which it was entrapped and slapped the slimy stuff against the glossy gray wall of the cell where it stuck. One or two disks unpeeling to droop to the cell’s floor before the prisoners departed, but most remaining glued there, meat graffiti. Political speech formed of animal product and binders, salt and enzymes.

  Of course her breasts had been leaking, too, through that whole incarceration, and during the drive back in Stella Kim’s hippie boyfriend’s black Dodge, which had a chunky fist painted on the hood, and in the backseat of which she and Stella had curled together and doped and devoured a meatball sub and giggled and then slept, but not before Miriam revealed to Stella the soaked disaster of her bra beneath her T-shirt, and told how she’d been daubing her nipples with the cell’s rough toilet paper whenever no one watched.

  “Fuck the baloney sandwiches, you could have fed the lot of us,” said Stella.

  “That’s revolting.” You would think Miriam should be a lesbian and more than a few times she’d joked aloud that she wished she’d been able to explore in that vicinity, but the truth was she met a brick wall waiting for her there. Miriam found breasts in particular quite disgusting. They reminded her of her mother’s body.

  The great secret glory of her arrest and which she’d not confess even to Stella Kim had zilch to do with B-movie Ladies’ Cell Block fantasies but with what it had in common with her voyage just now up to Rockefeller Center: time away from the kid. A nonnegotiable interval in which she could pass Sergius off to Tommy and regain the autonomous contour of her self for an hour or two. Just breathe free of her own ceaseless mothering of the boy-child, the claustrophobia of loving duty, a liberty the hunger for which Miriam would never enunciate fully even to herself. And when she’d been given her one moment with the pay telephone in the jailhouse corridor it was Rose she phoned. Saying get on the subway and go to Tommy and help. Leaving the remainder unsaid, knowing it was as plain as the baloney on the wall. Go take care of my child, you organizer, you subversive, you unusual and ambivalent mother. Because I’m in jail. You Communist who loves cops, look what I’ve done. I’m in jail, where you dared me to go. I’ve gone in the name of your own beliefs. You protested Hitler and you put my head in an oven, now go help take care of my kid, because I’m in jail.

  Today Miriam finds herself rewritten. Art James says, “Miriam Gogan lives in Manhattan, New York. She’s a wife, mother, and community organizer—welcome to the show. You know, when I was growing up, my mother was a sort of community organizer, too, she’d organize the community of me and my brother to school each day, and believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

  Americana: Songs of the 1890s. The first category holds little appeal. Miriam as a student of the program has schooled herself to choose the “Who” question at such moments, the realm of human identities being that in which she regards herself most comfortable, most likely to dredge up the uncommon fact, and so she selects it despite the higher odds attached on the program’s board, betting thirty dollars. Graham Stone, who has revealed a “What” bet, also of thirty, goes first. Art James reads from his card: “One song that typifies the 1890s draws an analogy between a girl and a captive bird; according to the song’s title, where was the girl?”

  Gilded cage, thinks Miriam, and Stone indeed nails the answer. This ought to feel like good luck but feels like bad instead. Miriam is next. “A hit in its day, the 1894 s
ong ‘Sidewalks of New York’ was even more popular in 1924 when it became identified with a presidential contender. Can you name him?”

  Miriam feels distracted again by what ought to seem good fortune: In any category, a clue that included the term New York should be her meat, by right of legacy. She hears herself say “Wendell Willkie?” and into the scant interval before Art James’s reply comes the pall of certainty she is wrong.

  “No. Al Smith.”

  Miriam’s fund for future betting is thereby hobbled at the outset, the double digits appearing barren, flayed, on that scoreboard where she has envisioned bullying her way up to the four figures. In the wake of her blunder, though Miriam can barely attend to it, so nearly does it seem swallowed in the hum of the spotlight bulbs and the audience’s murmuring—speak up, you genteel bastard!—Peter Matusevitch knocks down an easy “Where” at even odds for thirty-five dollars: “The Man Who Broke the Bank at”—“M-Monte Carlo?” Was Wax Mustache genuinely uncertain? Does he have a slight stutter, or is he in fact playing to the crowd’s rooting interest, which, Miriam grasps all at one instant, is to witness the rarity of a weeklong champion’s crowning? There is always this to consider, the world’s old easy bias in favor of the familiar over the unknown.