Dissident Gardens Read Online Free PDF Page B

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