Dissident Gardens Read online

  Precisely to the same degree she’d been mothered in disappointment, in embittered moderation, in the stifling of unreasonable expectations, in second-generation cynicism toward collapsed gleaming visions of the future, the morose detachment of the suburbs, Miriam was in fact a Bolshevik of the five senses. Her whole body demanded revolution and gleaming cities in which revolution could be played out, her whole character screamed to see high towers raised up and destroyed. Every yearning Rose might ever have wished to dampen had been doubly instilled in her daughter. For all of her quashing of utopias, for all of her “facing facts,” Rose had merely been proving Miriam’s innate suspicion that life was elsewhere. For God’s sake, you could see the Empire State Building framed at the foot of Greenpoint Avenue! And for what felt like ten years Miriam had gathered in the special appearance and attitudes of the girls who had enrolled at City College but still lived at home, or at least kept rooms in their homes, in Sunnyside Gardens. The knowledge behind their new cat sunglasses, the cigarettes they snuck and the gossip they ceased on the communal back patios when nine- or ten- or twelve-year-old Miriam wandered up. Miriam knew these girls were telling her her future and wondered why they bothered to conceal it. They couldn’t conceal it. Miriam could see the Empire State Building now, past Porter’s shoulder as she pulled her mouth from his and leaned and gasped for air and stalled for time, her cheek against his arm. The stupid beckoning phallic symbol, brazenly named for the nation’s criminal ambitions yet paradoxically bearing with it the pride Rose had instilled in Miriam for being an American and a New Yorker, the dull amazing monument was always there, stabbing the air, calling to her, crushing her like a bug in advance. You’re nobody so special, Miriam Zimmer!

  Except here on the bridge, upper lip already raw in the high wind from Porter’s five-o’clock shadow’s scraping, Miriam felt all the freedom accorded to nobody special as a power equal to the Empire State’s mass and force. Had anyone ever already known what Miriam knew at seventeen? It seemed unlikely. And tonight she would know more. She was going to let Porter be the first to make love to her because he was just special and not-special enough to be the one to do it. That night beginning on the bridge, as she’d already half started to call it, could be sudden enough not to be a story she’d owe to anyone at all. It would erase the debt to Forgettable, too, if he’d been brushed off in favor of a significance in her own life that outweighed the difference between one man and another. Not that the discarded suitor would ever know what ledgers of guilt were kept in Miriam’s head. “Take me somewhere,” she said.

  There, with her words, to which Porter panted his grateful consent, began the insane night that had already had so many beginnings. First, withdrawal to Manhattan, not in boroughphobia now, no (and their ultimate destination would be proof of this), but total disinterest in Mailer or the dark roofs or cold sky or anything outside of themselves and their skins. If they could have left their clothing on the bridge, they might have done that. The IRT at City Hall took them to Union Square, where in a high-backed booth at the Cedar Tavern they entwined tongues and fondled until asked to leave. They repeated the performance at the Limelight coffee shop, to which Miriam had with exasperation dragged Porter after he’d expressed a dazed uncertainty as to where else to try—they’d have had more privacy in a corner of Mailer’s party, which she’d by now fully visualized as consisting of sultry Bennington girls being serially deflowered in piles of coats. They had more privacy even in Washington Square, where for another turbulent session they settled on a bench. But Miriam was freezing now, whenever they quit walking and Porter’s hands resumed inching inside to loosen her already flimsy coverings. She could actually feel a breeze where a trickle of her excessively fervent self had moistened her anus and inner thighs. “Why can’t we go to your rooms?” she whispered.

  Porter looked at her, not for the first time, with an admiration suggesting Miriam was Wuthering Heights mad. “There’s a strict dorm policy.”

  “I thought you Columbia men were trying to change that.”

  “Trilling weighed in against us,” bragged Porter, proud anytime he could cite that name. “He seemed confused that we’d even want women in the dorms, leaving their nylons around, as he put it—”

  “So why don’t you make a stand?” Miriam shamelessly gave this the Marilyn Monroe treatment, lips at his ear. “Protest for your cause.”

  “My roommate,” Porter said helplessly. “I couldn’t—”

  The virginity Miriam trailed around with her was an anchor, one she vowed to cast off before dawn. So they rode the subway again, to Grand Central, and she guided him downstairs to the track where the 7 line would carry them back to Queens, then to the rear of the platform. Miraculously, a train hovered, panting slightly with its doors open. They boarded and it took off as if it had been waiting for them. “After the river the train goes elevated, Porter. I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.”

  “What’s that?” he said dreamily. They’d walked with their fingers entwined, pulling downward to draw each other close, his hip at her waist, her breasts at his ribs, each awkward rubbing step a kind of prolongation of the endless make-out session the night had become. Now they stood against a door, unwilling to discontinue the contact between the lengths of their bodies, letting the train’s lurches buckle his knee into a place between her legs. She clenched his thigh at her crotch.

  “You’ll see. The greatest curve in the system,” Miriam teased.

  “I actually think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s when you can be certain you’re wrong.”

  “Nothing you could show me that was curved could be wrong.” What was this talk, so stupidly enchanted, so unguardedly self-beguiled on both their sides, so seemingly drunk on each other’s wit and promise? Or should the question be: How much red wine had she unthinkingly guzzled at the Cedar Tavern?

  “Hold that thought,” she said, whispering again.

  “I think I have been holding it, for a while already.” This latest of Porter’s attempted smutty remarks drew perilously close to nonsense. The Queens-bound train rescued them, with its progress up out of the darkness, scraping moonward into the constellation of streetlights and signage along Jackson Avenue. “Holy heck!” he shouted. “It’s like a roller coaster!”

  As usual, Miriam’s facts had been taken for not-even-double entendres, for beckoning inanities. “No, I told you,” she said, styling her formulation after Porter’s own manner, and leaning into his ear to put it over above the elevated’s rattle and shriek. “That was nothing, brace yourself. The real curve’s the next one, watch.” She urged him against the door’s windows, to take it in fully. The 7’s lead cars obligingly jackknifed into Queensboro Plaza; Porter’s jaw hung vindicatingly open. “It’s the only place in the system where you can watch the front cars of the train you’re on pull into a station from the rear cars,” said Miriam. Hammering the point home, she felt like Rose. Like she’d picked up Rose’s hammer of personality to impress the Columbia boy, to bonk against his broad, daft forehead. (How could you go to so much trouble to arrive in New York City, as the throngs at Columbia and Barnard had, and not ride the system?) As if Miriam’s life-exuberance pointed back toward Rose’s punitive ferocity, just the way the IRT screamed in the direction of home. Did Miriam pause at that instant and gander at her motives, bringing Porter to Queens? No. She was randy, had been randy for what felt like her whole life, and now she was going to find out the secret of what it was to make love. This was simple enough. They needed a private room. Miriam had one at home.

  She tried to see Sunnyside’s Forty-Seventh Street through his eyes, too. The slumbering apartment blocks, the tended shrubbery and flagstone walks, Miriam’s home borough some false vision of calm, an immigrant’s dull fantasy of American sanctuary that suddenly turned her stomach; she hurried him past. No one apart from the two of them had exited the train at the Bliss Street station, and now, on the sidewalks, they passed no o
ne. The whole journey might have been a dream she’d had from her bedroom, once she’d tiptoed inside through the Gardens and the kitchen door, that being farthest from Rose’s bedroom, and swept Porter inside. Only he was still blithering about the elevated’s rocket ride, so that she had to hush him until her door was safely shut. She stuffed a towel along the jamb as if enjoying a secret cigarette.

  At this point, the dream of night—or morning; she’d glanced at Porter’s wristwatch on the street and the time was past three—veered toward squalid comedy before becoming a nightmare. The two of them remaining on their feet, in some shyness still unwilling to commit to her bed, Porter struggling with one or another of her fasteners and buttons, forcing Miriam to add her hands to his and solve whatever problem he’d been muttering over, so that before very long she was entirely nude while he still wore his whole outfit. In exasperation she pulled him to the bed and half tented herself under the spread. “Take off your shoes, at least,” she whispered.

  “Have you got an, um, pessary?”

  “Pessary?” She tried not to snort at the absurd term, which struck her as Midwestern if not actually Victorian. “Do you mean a diaphragm?” What, was he afraid to remove his clothes for fear of pregnancy? Should she lie? Yes. “Yes.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s taken care of, Porter.”

  Miriam flashed on Rye Gogan and his reputation: Where was the masculine devourer when you needed him? Must you swim with sharks to get sharked? Take me, she wanted to tell Porter, yet refused to have to tell him, on the principle that even men in tortoiseshell glasses were meant to transform into animals in the dark. Perhaps especially men in tortoiseshell glasses, according to the cartoons in Playboy, Lorna Himmelfarb’s older brother’s copies of which she’d also perused during Elvis-auditing sessions in the Himmelfarb basement. Something should be swarming Miriam, apart from her desire to be swarmed. She got Porter onto the bed, on his knees before her, as though praying at the entrance to her tent. Pulled him by the belt. Unzipped and researched inside. Oh, Lord, the boy, nicely long and rigid, Chinese-finger-trapped by desire in his too-tight boxer shorts, wasn’t circumcised. He also blurted his goop into her palm at the same instant she’d groped the knob and discovered its stretchy hood. Then, sighing, Porter covered her lips and chin and nose with a flurry of seeking kisses, as if both grateful and falsifying the record. See, I’m ravishing you, therefore I must have been all along! Instead she’d accidentally ravished him. Like her trail of verbal conquests, Miriam persistently slayed men before she’d begun even trying to.

  They kissed as passionately as they had in the booth at the Cedar, embraces that claimed a story was still in the making in the space between their bodies, and meanwhile she cradled his softening self until her awkwardly turned wrist was the only bony thing trapped inside the fly of his boxer shorts. Miriam had gotten more action on the bridge or in Washington Square, more thrill out of Porter’s elbow at her breast, his knee nuzzling her lap, than she was likely to find rustling in the shrinkage and stickiness in his pants. And then Rose came barreling in, a titan, Alice’s wrathful Red Queen in her quilted robe, her gossamer nightdress beneath it, her expression a storm of reproach, and the story abruptly had nothing to do with their bodies, with Miriam’s nakedness and desire and what Porter was or wasn’t going to do about it. All that was left of that story was how fortunate Miriam could feel in retrospect that she’d gotten so little of Porter’s clothing off. Even knowing Rose had seen nothing, Miriam had time for the stray, absurd thought: Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have been circumcised either, so Rose couldn’t object to that, could she?

  “Should I call the police?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “No, Mother what?” Rose seized any occasion for a mental test, a verbal duel—why miss what was there for the taking?

  “Don’t overreact, Rose, for God’s sake.”

  The room flooded with light from the living room and foyer behind Rose, every lamp switched on, as though her mother had been awake for a duration of eavesdropping and pacing, and for expert selection of the awkwardest instant to make this confrontation, though truly she’d have had a few to choose from.

  “Don’t tell me how I should react. Don’t tell me what to do. If I don’t call the police it’s less a mercy than the fear they might arrest me for parental dereliction.” Rose’s bold, rising, theatrically superb declaration ran over a thin, husky, stuttering sound, something that might have been an effort on Porter’s part to apologize or introduce himself or both, even as he juggled his glasses back onto his face and pinched at his zipper and disordered trousers. Rose detoured to a Barbara Stanwyckian quip: “By the way, it’s rape, mister, unless you happen still to be in high school yourself.”

  “Nobody was raped,” said Miriam, letting her disappointment color the word with scorn for Rose and Porter both. “And I’m not in high school, thank you.”

  “You ought to be. This matter of skipping a grade makes you think you’re a woman now? The bosom on you fooled this young man, fair enough, but how can it have fooled you as well? Perhaps you’re ready to become parents of a child. It’s not as much pleasure as you’d think from the way it begins, making babies.”

  “Nobody’s making any babies.” Miriam thought of the word pessary again. So long as Porter was present this scene was only comic overture to the crisis, the explosion struggling to begin. It wasn’t that Porter wasn’t capable of defending Miriam from Rose, or not only. It was that Rose wouldn’t unleash what she had, so Miriam couldn’t know what she faced and had to defend against, until Porter had been shunted off.

  Instead Rose was left playing to some invisible distant gallery of those she imagined might judge her through Porter’s eyes: goyim, males, New York intellectuals, strangers generally. So while he stood gaping at her, a hand raised as if he really thought his own contribution would be expected at some point, Rose speechified, rehearsing various guilt-drenched postures. Miriam knew that for all its apparent force Rose’s monologue was a placeholder, a form of stalling. “I tried to raise a young woman but apparently produced an American teenager in her place. No doubt the fault is mine, yet it’s also the case that the result was sabotaged a hundred ways. First by the father, who couldn’t be kept at home. In that the fault is surely mine, we fought terribly, I couldn’t keep him fascinated in ways a freethinker like you appears to have already mastered, but what you two lovebirds couldn’t imagine is the world I brought this girl into. A battlefield. Not a playground for children in the bodies of adults. You’re in a hurry to grow up—we’d given up our childhoods before we knew we’d given them up. I slaved in the back of my father’s candy shop. This one, Miriam, ah! Look at the expression! He wouldn’t know what a barrel of halvah was if I shoved it in his face.”

  Halvah! Oh, an intervention was desperately needed, but the difficulty was in how little offense Porter gave, how few grounds for ejection. He stood dopily awaiting his turn, which would never come. As she’d wished for a little more rape earlier, Miriam now wished Porter would make some move, any move, even in panic, to incite Rose showing him the door. Instead Rose, measuring his passivity, latched onto a listener. Miriam couldn’t count how many she’d seen frozen on a square of sidewalk at one of Rose’s stunning harangues, though she’d never been draped naked in a bedspread while a would-be boyfriend played the part. Maybe Porter was about to begin taking notes as if at Trilling’s own feet. Miriam had to do everything herself. She elevated from the bed like a ghost or a muse in her drapery and took Porter’s elbow and guided him past a momentarily jaw-frozen Rose, back through the kitchen. Though Porter was apparently properly dressed, he moved as awkwardly as if he wore his jacket backward, his shoes on his hands.

  “Go.”

  “I’m so sorry. When can I—?”

  When can I what? Miriam thought, an exact Rose Angrush Zimmer cadence, except Rose would have said it aloud. What in this performance was Porter eager to reflect on or repeat? Well, they’d find
each other soon enough, that’s if Miriam ever got out of the house again. She craned on tiptoe for a quick kiss, surprising herself by wanting one. She’d after all fondled Porter’s secret heartbeat, collected his private sigh. They had, after all, been romancing across a connect-the-dot map of Miriam’s city for hours past, hours of what now seemed another night, another life entirely.

  The light in the Gardens was morning light. Carl Heuman stood dumbfounded on the lane, sad in a Dodgers jacket that made him look fourteen years old, commemorating or denying the fact of his absconded team, and presumably interrupted in his morning meander to an early-Sunday baseball practice on the diamond of Sunnyside High, where Miriam had polished off her senior classes a year before Carl and her other contemporaries. So Carl Heuman had seen her in her bedspread, shoving the Columbia boy through the kitchen door’s gap. It didn’t matter. Yet, their eyes meeting for an instant, Miriam now experienced a time-stopped revelation, wholly involuntary: If she died today (why think this, to begin with?), Carl Heuman would have known her a hundred, perhaps a thousand times better than Porter had. Just by virtue of knowing Sunnyside Gardens and what they signified, by knowing Rose Zimmer the way any one of their neighbors would have (the boys like Carl Heuman were all terrified of Rose), by being enrolled in the same classes Miriam had evaded, by being from and of these places, forlorn Carl Heuman, whose only living purpose was to become the third-ever Jewish pitcher on a team that no longer existed, bore incisive knowledge of who it was Miriam had not yet even begun to escape being, even if he couldn’t know he knew it. Porter, on the other hand, could be from Mars for what he grasped of the creature with whom he’d passed the night. Miriam might be altering herself at a furious rate into that other one, the girl Porter believed he’d deviously squired out of the basement club behind the stalking horse of her official date, then halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, then to Queens to find himself more or less raped and accused of rape within a span of minutes, but she wasn’t there yet. Miriam was still the one into whose soul dopey, obedient Carl Heuman so effortlessly, if abashedly, gazed. And so, as first Carl and then Porter wobbled along the light-blobbed lanes of the Gardens and vanished, Miriam closed the kitchen door and withdrew to face Rose.