Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Kornfeld wasn’t her boyfriend. Or wasn’t any longer. Tommy was never to press Miriam for the facts of her relations before, least of all to any singers or guitar players preceding him. She was twenty years old—well, almost twenty, she’d corrected later—and a MacDougal Street familiar, diaphragm in her purse until she could be among the Pill’s first customers. Whatever went on before had been blown away for her as totally as it had for him, or if not he didn’t care to know.

  He’d learn soon enough from her own lips she was a confidante of both Phil Ochs’s and Mary Travers’s, also that she worked at the Conrad Shop on MacDougal and Third, piercing comers’ ears by hand with a safety pin and an ice cube, radicalizing lobes one at a time. (Lacking her phone number, he’d have to visit the jewelry shop to find her the second time.) He’d learn of Rose the Red mayor of Sunnyside and of Albert the spy. For now he wished to repossess that instant she’d first come into the parlor.

  The reverend had been slowing down an arrangement of “Sportin’ Life Blues” so the younger men could follow.

  Someone placed a saucer with a piece of fresh crumb coffee cake awkwardly on Tommy’s knees.

  Plucked notes rising to the steamed windowpanes and beyond, to cold heaven.

  To hold on, if he could, to that moment she stood from her place at the table with the reverend’s wife and entered the parlor where the men sat. To halt that instant and try to see her face as he first saw it. To know what it might be like to have gazed into her eyes before she began talking.

  By the time he took anything remotely like full stock she’d donned her own sunglasses, dark Wayfarers, well advised in the pale blare of the storm. Therefore to gaze in the direction of her eyes was only to watch the fat flakes spatter against those dark windshields below her wild unhatted raven-black hair—which, captured in disorganization by a broad mother-of-pearl clasp, collected a bonnet of snow at the outermost, where the heat of her body left it unmelted, as blobs clung unmelted to the shoulders and front of her coarse heavy checkerboard coat. Beneath that only her black-stockinged legs appeared, her skirt briefer than the coat’s hem. Becoming bored at the guitar lesson (as Tommy himself was bored, the reverend working the same changes a hundred times over with Van Ronk and Kornfeld, and Tommy’d not brought his guitar and so felt unmanned yet perhaps not so unmanned as he’d have felt attempting to follow the old wizard’s fingering), she’d excused herself to Missus Annie and the men and insisted the el would still be working and that she knew her way and maybe Tommy would care to walk her? He would care to, yes.

  The two tumbled and staggered together on the clotted sidewalks, the whole sky swirling mad flakes plunging to melt at the heat of their cheeks and tongue and hands or array on her coat. By this time she’d been talking so much he couldn’t regain his head, couldn’t recapture his ground. Before he’d begun to ask she’d said, Yes, I know who you are. I’ve seen you sing. Had they met before? He couldn’t imagine it but feared he’d forgotten her in some passage of stage dizziness, the bewilderments typical in the company of his brothers. No, they’d not met, not exactly. But she knew him. And now he knew her. Miriam Zimmer.

  She said, I know who you are. As if to know Tommy Gogan’s name was to possess knowledge of some definite person who bore it, knowledge he lacked himself.

  And then by acting as if it were so, she made it so.

  Beginning that famous day in the snow when she drew him back to Peter’s loft and they shared some reefer and then brewed a pot of coffee for the derelicts and she explained to him why the Bowery was called what it was.

  The el barely slugged along its rail where snow had amassed, their car entirely empty though the trains tottering past on the opposite track bulged with the snow-fearful workers fleeing the island at three in the afternoon while they could, as though Manhattan had been hit by the hydrogen bomb and only fools would go in the direction they did, and as they inched into the tunnel the skyline was effaced, white turned to black, and still she wore her sunglasses, and for all he knew he’d missed forever his chance to see her eyes.

  He’d had a puff of reefer two or three times before and found it not a revelation, not like this day, but which was chicken and which egg on such a day of revelation? In defense against the onslaught he’d picked up his Silvertone, shoring his fumbling tongue with a few barre chords, no advantage in putting his fingerpicking against the reverend’s. Thank Christ, Peter was out, no sign where. The dark fell almost before they’d gotten upstairs, but they did nothing but light Peter’s candlesticks. She arranged both their shoes on the clanking radiator then found her way to the cabinets and uncorked a bottle of red wine she discovered there, filled two juice glasses halfway. The reefer came out of her handbag as if she’d planned it, this absconding, this near kidnapping. She lit it on a candle. They’d kissed already once, everything else not delivered but promised, in the snow-smashed route from the subway, no saying who’d initiated what as their plunging footfalls arranged collisions. Not so once indoors, where couch, armchair, man’s body with coat removed, woman’s body with coat removed, table between them, door for possible entrances or exits, all stood at a concrete and painful distance to be navigated with deliberation or not at all. His skin hived with risk, supersensitivity to her presence, the soda prickle of frozen extremities reclaiming life, dread of the clock’s advancement to some outcome.

  “Here’s the first song I ever wrote,” he said, and began strumming the opening chords of “A Lynching on Pearl River.” Tommy hoped to authenticate the impossible Jewess’s attentiveness by retracing his steps, the tenuous construction of a persona independent from the Gogan Boys. Though she must be a fan, she acted like no fan he’d met before. Anyhow, at this moment, in the flood of marijuana feeling, he wished to hear the song, which encrypted a defiance against his brothers he’d barely tasted before it had been rebuffed. So, finishing the first instrumental pass, he sang out the lyric for all he was worth.

  “That’s the first, huh?”

  “Yes—yes.”

  “Then play me the one after that.”

  She leaned forward, not missing a thing. He almost wished she would—miss a thing, turn aside. She’d shed her Wayfarers now, with the result only that he couldn’t look at her directly. Her attentions had seemed to him like a glorious bottle into which he’d hope to slip himself and then expand, like a model ship, sails tucked until the moment they rose to occupy every corner. Instead, he felt like a lightning bug, zooming inside only to be swallowed, rebounding against the impassive glass, pulsing a small light so as not to be lost inside.

  Oughtn’t the reefer have make her distractible? It hadn’t. The world was close around them, eye of the storm, dark fallen entirely outside the windows. Tommy had gone from finding it difficult to imagine Peter staying away a minute longer to a willed certainty that his brother had anchored himself at the bar of McSorley’s or the Spur and would ride out the night laid upon or beneath a wooden bench. Or had Tommy forgotten a gig? The prospect was incredible, yet injected him with fear. Then he considered how any gig would be scotched in this blizzard. Miriam Zimmer went on talking whenever Tommy paused in his playing, and he at once drank her talk in and missed it entirely, besotted as he was with interior murmurings, now vain, now flagellating, now quizzical. The difficulty in beholding another person was how you stood in your own way. To be struck open, as Tommy had just now been struck, was to wade into a mire of self-beholding.

  “For an Irishman you sure sing an awful lot about blacks.”

  He’d just unspooled a slack rendition of “Sharpeville Massacre.” This recital might be veering into something more resembling a pleading audition, as he scraped the bottom of his own small catalogue. If her remark was provocation, nothing in her expression gave it away. He couldn’t quite think how to answer her, not in her own language. He didn’t possess any other.

  “Did I make you uncomfortable? Would you rather I said ‘Negroes’?”

  “I suppose I do sing of them a lot,�
�� he managed. “Maybe just to harass Rye.”

  “South Africa, Haiti, Mississippi—hell, Tom, have you traveled to any of these places?”

  “I’m defenseless to the charges, which you’re hardly the first to lay down. My way of composing is to plunder newspaper headlines.”

  “You should visit the South, I hear it’s a head trip.”

  “I’ve thought I’d like to, but minstrel trios aren’t so much in demand.”

  “I mean without your brothers.”

  “Ah. Maybe I should. Peter keeps us working, though. There’s scarcely an interruption.”

  “What’s missing are voices, Tom.”

  “Missing from what?”

  “The songs.” Her words were neither chiding nor gentle, just laid as level and irrefutable as a brick set into its proper place. It might be that no one had ever listened to him sing until this instant, not even himself. His mother called him Thomas; his father, son; his brothers, Tommy. Nobody’d ever called him Tom.

  “We’ve got blacks—Negroes—of our own,” she said. “I mean, you only have to go downstairs.” They’d stepped, as a matter of necessity, over and around huddled figures making nests in the storm, just to arrive at Peter’s doorstep. The men littering the Bowery were black by definition (it was at this moment that he resolved to join her in exchanging the one word for the other), whatever the shades of their faces. They were blackened by condemnation, in wretched black tattered cloth, in shadow. Tommy never saw them if he could help it.

  He schooled himself to see her now, gaze past her blinding allure, her decorations and aura, the several bracelets clanking as she waved her hand, her beatnik’s wrinkled plaid skirt and thin turtleneck, the raven cackle of her hair, instead to meet her seeking hazel eyes beneath thick-arched brows, to address the twist of her wide lips, which at their infrequent rest formed a smirk so perpetual, so embracing in its implications, it absolved its recipient of individual judgment: By pronouncement of this woman’s look you were swept into a condition of universal exasperation and forgiveness at once. And then her nose, so thick and bowed it was like a Jew’s nose in caricature. You half expected it to be lifted off when the sunglasses were removed. This prole nose sat unenchanted by the enchantment all around it, a blot of humanity.

  “Let’s brew them a pot of coffee.”

  “Who?”

  “The guys downstairs, if they aren’t frozen into statues already. Come on.” She leapt up, began shoveling grind into his brother’s percolator.

  “Served in what?”

  “We’ll bring down cups, collect them after.”

  “We can’t serve them all.”

  “Who said all?” She hunted in sink and cabinet. “What say we serve four? You guys are awfully skimpy on china. Not expecting more than two overnight guests at a go, huh?”

  He could only gape.

  “Nothing more in storage?” She put on her coat and shoved ceramic cups into its two big pockets.

  “Here,” he said, ducking into the bathroom and taking Peter’s meerschaum shaving mug from atop the sink. He chucked the brush aside and rinsed it clean. “Five.”

  Miriam goggled at the meerschaum mug’s beard and scowl. “Holy shit, talk about your gruesome clichés. This is the last household that ought to feature leprechaun tchotchkes.”

  “That’s no leprechaun. He’s the Green Man.”

  “You say potah-to, I say potay-to.”

  Reclaiming shoes not dried, but now poached and reeking from their spell atop the radiator, Tommy and Miriam ferried the fresh pot and the five cups down two flights, out into a storm trickling to a conclusion. Under windless streetlamps the creaking white hand blanketed the world’s contours, each sill and lintel, all God’s immobile windshields and volcanic trash cans. The sole exception the human figures who struggled past, punching out of caverns with their knees, huffing steam into fingerless gloves. Miriam found her five huddling in a fleabag hotel’s entranceway. She distributed cups and poured the first service, then planted the pot in a mound at their feet, where it scorched a hole for itself to rest in. The Green Man was shoved into the chafed hands of a black derelict with leathery, pitted cheeks, gelid eyes yellow as corn.

  “Top yourselves off, there’s enough to go around. We’ll return in fifteen minutes to collect the utensils, gentlemen.”

  She tugged his elbow, and they slugged in the tracks others had forged by now, toward Houston. “C’mon, let’s get a tattoo.”

  “I don’t think they’re open.”

  “I’m kidding. Look, up there’s where Rothko paints.”

  “Is that what you wanted me to see?” Pollock and Kline and de Kooning were, like Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac, names sticking to Village chimeras sighted only instants earlier, further evidence you’d arrived to this great party too late.

  “No, look.” She pointed across the wide intersection at Houston. “This is the Bowery, right here.” Gesturing at the air.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t expect you to. Know why it’s called the Bowery? This used to be where New York ended.” She directed his attention behind them, the direction they’d come. “The Dutch, they had this footpath, leading to the farms and woods. There was a bower here, like a giant arbor.” This, she drew in the mote-strewn air above. “You pass through the Bowery, you’d exited the city, into the wilderness.”

  Tommy saw what she wished him to. The phantasmal cityscape above Houston might revert to wild before the snows melted off.

  “I’ve been living here, with no idea at all.”

  “Nobody knows this stuff,” she bragged.

  “Somebody could write a song about this.”

  “Somebody could write a great song about this.” These words, she whispered. If he could he’d have used his scarf to bind her mouth to his ear, to hear again the electrical hush of her voice in the canyons of the halted storm.

  “See, if you think about it, that’s probably the reason the bums and old sailors stack up here. They’re waiting to pass through, even if they don’t realize it. Petitioning for entry, like in a Kafka story.”

  “Yes.”

  “Entry to the gardens.”

  “Yes. To Eden.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Or else up to Fourteenth Street in hopes of a cut-rate fuck.”

  Nothing in The Pelican Anthology of Love Poetry had prepared him remotely. That Tommy could see the girl sought to topple and outrage him was no help. He was toppled and outraged. She was a child-woman, with the eerie savage preternaturality of a ten-year-old, the sort that stared at and through you on public transport. Yet with the self-possession of someone older than herself, a worldly spectator. The mother of the child on the bus. Having evidently skipped the raw stage between, where he’d stuck. Older sister I never had. He was mortified by the cruddy predictability of the expression. And the presumption of had. Was he having her? Did he have her? (Rye would undoubtedly say no.) After this storm in which the sun had been blotted out, the clock destroyed, what should happen? Was he supposed to take her to bed? Did love at first sight mean you weren’t to let the person out of your sight once you’d spotted them?

  “You don’t need to pretend you’re in wherever, in Algeria, Tom. Or the Delta. I mean, look, even the Reverend Gary Davis moved to Queens. Those guys down there, they’re the real thing. This shit is all around us.”

  This proclamation she’d made on the stairs, as they returned bearing the cups and coffeepot collected from the destroyed men huddling in the flophouse entranceway. The derelicts had drained the coffee and then handed over the cups in mute crushed gratitude, except Miriam had pushed the meerschaum shaving mug back into the crabbed claws of the one who’d held it. “Keep it, buddy. That’s a good luck charm. They call it the Green Man.” He’d moved his mouth in reply, yet nothing was audible apart from his address to Miriam, as “miss.”

  “You really talk to these guys, you find out they riveted girders on the Empire State Building, or got a Pu
rple Heart at the Bulge, or played cornet in Henderson’s band. They’re always about a thousand percent more interesting than whatever dumb pitying story you’ve told yourself—that’s what some genius ought to get into a song.”

  Before Miriam Zimmer’s vision could be further developed it met its nullification in the form of Peter Gogan, slushy tracks of his unremoved boots demarcating his beery suspicious perambulation of the apartment. He’d been examining the condition they’d left it in when fleeing in their bolt of inspiration, candles guttering, red inches in juice glasses, smoking traces in the ashtray.

  “Someone’s been … sitting … in … my … chair,” Miriam whispered.

  “Why, hello, good brother,” said Peter. “Some weather we’re having, eh? Be a gentleman now and introduce me to your lady friend.”

  While Tommy sought his voice Miriam pushed the snow-streaked coffeepot into Peter’s hands, then began unloading cups from the pockets of her coat, as in a magic act. She barely entered the apartment, arranging the cups on the shelves nearest the door. “My name is Miriam Zimmerfarbstein, I’m from Students Against Kitsch, and I’m horrendously sorry to have to announce, Good Brother Gogan, that my colleague and I have just taken it upon ourselves to liberate your unicorn.”