Dissident Gardens (41 page)

The Last Communist on the last night of his life, maybe, comes to light again with the 7 train as it screams through its improbable curvature at Queensboro Plaza and onto the elevated track, moon and streetlamps piercing the subway’s car like Saint Sebastian’s arrows. Yet it’s not so much the light that wakes him as the tiny arrow of extinguished joint piercing his palm. He’d apparently clutched it while enmeshed in struggle and now finds it has singed the meat of his fist’s interior. He opens his hand and lets the roach fall to the train’s floor. A film noir clue, prized from a dead man’s fingers. His abductors
pay no attention. They have the car to themselves, likely have spooked other occupants from boarding as their odd tableau rolled through stations—two goons and a comatose Emancipator. Stovepipe perched on the seat beside him, miraculously unruined. Soreness of half-crushed esophagus suggests he’d gone half the distance to death already and then returned. He wonders how long his brain was without oxygen.

Since 1956, maybe.

Perhaps earlier, from the day he dandled his cousin and his mentality had drained into his lap.

Chessmen, baseball, Krugerrands, the constellation of nonsense with which he’s decorated his lonely life. All of it surrounding an abiding mystery: his beliefs. These form a little zone of dark, sheltered and abiding within the Last Communist through decades of incomprehension and scorn, as the 7 train shelters ignorant commuters through passages of dark and light.

The Last is a man abandoned by history. He should have been at the inception, forging a bloody Communism in the teeth of czars. Or lived to participate in its eventual triumph, an H. G. Wells vision impossible to impart to lesser mortals. He should never have been stranded here, in the endless disaster between. Here is only irrelevancy, Miriam’s Yippie boycotts and day-care marches; the folksinger’s death-penalty vigil; hairsplitting Trotsky dreamers and Frantz Fanon Third World fetishists, French eggheads who’d reconfigured Marxism as mumbo jumbo, a new form of Kabbalah. Or civil rights, which gave way to Black Power, and then see your reward: the hatred of a kid like Cicero. Ha! You might as well, just to pick a random example, try protesting apartheid by retailing ersatz Krugerrands to the Irish Republican Army.

There is no place anymore for the Last and yet if he is honest with himself he knows he is not the Last, he is only carrying a torch for the Last, a torch she hardly needs as she’s been out there blazing all the time, waiting for the world to come to her door. She who vanished into the neighborhood: cops, library, pizza parlor, a Christmas card from the borough president pinned on the fridge for her cover story. Sunnysideism is Late-Twentieth-Century Communism.

Lenny should have quit when he got in deep with pickles, should
have learned to relish shirts saturated in brine. He was closer then than he knew.

The 7 train idles at the Lowery Street station. Just as the doors begin to close he leaps, not forgetting to grab his stovepipe, and is through, and free.

Rose opened the door and let him in without a word: Perhaps it is the case that a visit from the man in the stovepipe hat is, by this time, her whole lifetime overdue.
Of course, come in, what took you so long?
Lincoln, Rose’s Elijah, and why be passed over forever? Just like her, to think that he’d select
her
door actually to come through. “Four score and seven years ago today,” Lenny said aloud, and his initial jest was overtaken by the sincerity the words and occasion seemed to demand of him, by the wish not to disappoint. But he stopped. If only he knew the whole speech. Rose stared flatly, her eyes acute and implicitly demanding, awaiting whatever. Her stoical gaze not so different from Cicero’s. Yet like the rest of the world Cicero had abandoned Rose, vanished to Princeton and beyond, into Miriam’s Halloween parade. Lenny wondered how long it had been since Rose had even heard from the ungrateful protégé.

The whole century had vacated Sunnyside Gardens, quit darkening her door. Yet had it learned anything in the process?

Lenny’s lips couldn’t from within the Lincoln beard say
hide me
or
hold me
though he desired both. He couldn’t think of the words of either Gettysburg or Proclamation and couldn’t find his own voice. No assertion seemed equal to the woman before him, from whom his every disappointment had sprung, she alone familiar with the unspeakable Red certainty in his soul because she herself had instilled it, even if barely meaning to. Goonish cousin, he’d been at her table, one summer evening in 1948, and heard something he believed, like others believed in God or country. His parents fed him forkfuls of kugel and Rose fattened his brain with revolution.

Rose in her nightgown stepped back across her kitchen linoleum and stared at the Lincoln silhouette against the moonlit green of the block’s courtyard gardens, and he wearing the costume suddenly
wondered if she even knew who it was inside, whether she’d made him from his voice or his thumbs, or was fooled. He’d seen no trick-or-treaters while stumbling in through the Gardens. No jack-o’-lantern at her front step. Lenny closed the door behind him. His tongue might be frozen but he still possessed the righteousness inside his Lincoln pants. Or he possessed it again, despite his being manhandled by the mooks and extradited onto the 7 train. This was like the hangover boner Lenny could rely on, at waking after a night of drinking, a force affirming life-in-the-old-boy-yet against evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps like the notorious erection discovered when they cut down and examined the body of a hanged man. Whichever, he’d use it to continue his statement, to make his protest, his filibuster against death. In fact, it encoded its own statement, was a homing device that knew more than he did, one pointing back through daughter to mother, from Manhattan to the old countries of Queens and Poland. A prewar boner, embodying knowledge of a time when neither Europe nor Communism nor the woman before him had been ruined territories.

“Four score!” he said again, deepening his voice, as anyone would be certain Lincoln’s ought to be deepened. He wished to thrill and command her. She retreated through a doorway’s shadow, leading him, he felt. The lights were extinguished, Rose’s typical fierce parsimony, and by the time he reached her they were two shadows, mysterious to each other in equal portion. Here, the very rooms where Lenny’d first conceived the urge to fuck. The silky layers he tore free of their buttonholes and clasps each held some bulging soft portion of her. The stovepipe had toppled off somewhere behind them, the beard got in between his mouth and hers and had to be ripped free, leaving them each for a moment tonguing gluey fluff, each issuing cat-with-hairball noises before he resumed the devouring effort of lips and tongue against hers, then below, to mumble wonderment at her neck and clavicle and into the sweet fog of her breasts.

The Lincoln slacks were zippered—anachronism, he wondered? He undressed himself with greater care than he’d taken over Rose’s night garments. No special reverence for the Lincoln suit, but if he shredded it he’d have nothing else to wear. Their flesh pooled warmly, in regions grown sadly unfamiliar to him over the past years. Not
even certain which expanses were exactly hers or his own, until he found the socket. The unmistakable connection, never young or old in its essence. Their root in the animal spectrum at last, such relief to encounter something that dwarfed human history.

Two people more the opposite of nature lovers had maybe never walked the earth, let alone brought into conjunction the sole undeniable natural facts lurking beneath their clothing.

She’d begun scrabbling at his ribs and ass, whether to deter or exhort he couldn’t be certain. In either case the effect was exhorting. Small censorious murmurings beneath him turned rhythmic. Decanting himself with what he hoped was a suitably Lincolnesque grunt, Lenny tried to imagine, if cousin impregnated cousin, what wonders might tumble forth? Some dreamy monster of revolution, an American Lenin or Kropotkin? More likely one of history’s orphans, like himself, yet more thoroughly cursed, never having even glimpsed the dream. Undrafted backup catcher for the Sunnyside Proletarians, waddling through life in the tools of ignorance.

What a sorry scene he made, by evidence of his own sticky fingertips: now barely able to recontain his hairy potbelly in the Lincoln waistline, as if in dissipating himself here he’d grown fatter, or slacker. His hard-on the last hardness in him, now spent.

“You know who I am?” he said into the dark. Too late, he realized this might be unmerciful. Let Rose have been despoiled by Lincoln, and maybe she’d take it for a dream. On any given night it might be John Reed or Fiorello La Guardia or her black policeman returning—or even Albert returning—so why not Abe?

“You thought you could fool an Angrush from recognizing an Angrush?”

He caught his breath and stood from the bed. “The suit, in the dark—”

“It’s true you’re ordinarily a lousy dresser, but the black suit is not totally without precedent. I was at your bar mitzvah.”

“You’re not scandalized?”

“Why all of a sudden be scandalized? My astonishment at you and any number of other developments is a chronic condition.”

Was she not human? Or merely inhumanely defended? Some ghost
of courtliness stirred in him now, a rarely called-on set of behaviors. “You’re a beautiful woman, Rose. I regret nothing. I only thought of our respective ages.”

“Don’t be a schmuck, Lenny. You’ve been a fifty-year-old man since you were approximately seven.”

Courtliness vaporized in the atmosphere of Rose’s feral frankness, itself the intoxicant that had always drawn him to this door. “Ironically it may have been my fruitless love for your daughter that prematurely aged me.”

“You know how long it’s been since I had sexual intercourse? Spare me about my daughter.”

“I saw her tonight.”

“And I spoke to her this morning. What are you trying to say?”

He’d backed to Rose’s bedroom door. Whether to bar himself in with her or maintain the option of fleeing, he was unsure. No night-light betrayed Rose’s posture, only rustling as she constructed something to cover herself from what he’d left behind. Out beyond these walls two idiots had ridden the 7 train an additional stop empty-handed, presumably exited at Bliss Street, and needed to decide how to explain to Gerry Gilroy how they’d cornered their quarry and lost him again. Perhaps switched platforms and gone one stop back to Lowery, to stalk the streets of Sunnyside.

“Miriam is inadequate to your standard.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“You tried to change conditions for the working class and alter the doomed trajectory of civilization. Your daughter just wants to put LSD in the water supply.”

“I beg to differ. My daughter is the greater revolutionary than you and me put together, Lenny.”

“You couldn’t mean this. You say it to spite me.” He was unable to keep the sulk from his voice. “She boycotts grapes and marches for day care but laughs at history. I saw her tonight with her Quaker, playing dress-up as South American guerrillas, like Woody Allen in
Bananas
.”

“They’re not playing dress-up.” Rose’s voice, in the dark, took on a dour prophetic undertone, like the Great and Powerful Oz. “They’re
putting the boy in boarding school and visiting Nicaragua at the start of next year. Tommy’s writing songs in Spanish.”

“Just costumes, Rose. You’re deceived.”

“You’re the one deceived. Why would they bother telling someone like you, for whom revolution is always allegory of some kind? You’re the one who plays dress-up. She got arrested on the steps of the Capitol, she picketed LBJ at the World’s Fair, now she’s plunging into actual revolution. Where were you? Staring at the mystical Masonic symbols on a five-dollar coin, thinking you’re too good to be bothered.”

“I saw them, dressed for Halloween in comic-book fatigues. They’d be arrested before they got out of the airport.”

“I don’t know from Halloween.”

“Look at your calendar.”

“You look. There is no such American tradition, it’s a rumor, a bad dream from the old country, from Transylvania. We came to get away from that horror. Except you, for whom it’s Halloween every night of the year. Grow up, Lenny.”