Dissident Gardens Read Online Free PDF

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