Dissident Gardens (18 page)

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 song ‘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.

Matusevitch $160 Gogan $95 Stone $155

Alphabet Soup: “S.”
“Alphabet Soup” being a mediocre category in which the only determinant is that the answer will begin with an
S
, Miriam finds herself retrieved from what she can now recognize had been the onset of a paranoid inkling, in which the quiz show’s topics today would all prejudicially favor Wax Mustache’s strengths: Barbershop Quartets, Innovations of Ogilvy & Mather, Cabinet Members of the McKinley Administration. She decides to will herself to confidence concerning the letter
S
, an old companion impossible to allow oneself to become alienated from. Irwin Shaw, for instance, or Subsidized Housing, or Students for a Democratic Society. Nina Simone. Jonas Salk. Bobby Seale. Cardinal Francis Spellman. Joseph Stalin. The System. Sex. Schmutz. She bets twenty-five, again on “Who,” this time at even odds. Matusevitch outbids her in this same category and thus by the rules she is denied even a question in the round.

With Miriam dying on the vine in plain sight between them, Graham Stone, questing for an ancient language of the Middle East, fumbles away the obvious “Sanskrit,” guessing at “Sikh,” while Matusevitch scores easily by completing the name of the gangster known as “Dutch”—“Schultz,” another reply she could have given in her sleep. Is it possible that her strengths and his are precisely the same? Miriam has never in a decade been unfaithful to her husband, but there is a time and place for everything. Can she beckon to Art James for a time-out and lure Matusevitch back to the greenroom? She may have to fuck him to wipe the smug mustache off his face after all.

Matusevitch $200 Gogan $95 Stone $130