Dissident Gardens (5 page)

“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 purpose, clustering to bell-jar Porter’s match from the night’s wind, each dipping a cigarette’s tip to the flame. Ladies first, then, once the match was inevitably doused, finishing with the square dance of touching lit to unlit tips. Night workers edged in darkness past them, heads bent ignorant to the city’s splendor and misery, filing toward sour bedrooms. Fear of Brooklyn: There was plenty to fear, Miriam knew, though not what her companions imagined.

“I’m freezing,” said Forgettable morosely, evidently intending them to understand him to mean
frozen out
. Miriam’s date had given up petitioning with his shoulders and elbows to clutch Miriam to him, as Adam and his Barnard girl were clutched, the girl’s shoulder inside Adam’s tweed jacket, her arm vanished within his shirt at the waist. Forgettable’s last few attempts had been despondent anyhow, as
though he sensed the turn things were taking. For here at the bridge’s height something else had reached a height: Miriam was changing hands tonight, Porter sweeping her away, if something so completely under Miriam’s agency could be granted to Porter’s own agency. It surely would be. Miriam being just a girl, after all.

Miriam plunged her cigarette’s orange tip into the night. “Charge!”

“Screw Mailer,” said her former date. As if that were an option, in lieu of what he’d never get from Miriam. “I’ve got to get up in the morning. I’m going back.”

“We’ll walk you,” said Adam, whose intrepitude might have fallen victim to a whispered consultation with his fearful girl. This sudden defection sealed Miriam’s transfer more absolutely than she might have wished: After a flurry of embraces, she and Porter hoofed it down the Brooklyn slope of the bridge, just the two of them, while the rest retreated to Manhattan. Miriam considered him entirely for the first time, her new courtier: With his funny knobbly gait, embarrassed or melancholic shoulders, and gigantic forehead, Porter was really drawn along Arthur Miller or Robert Lowell lines, though for his labored quipping he might be trying to pass as Mort Sahl. Leery Rose, in the right mood, might give him a chance on the basis of a resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. But then why would Miriam need her mother’s approval? She canceled the thought.

“Look,” she said, again pointing her cigarette past the bridge’s descent into Brooklyn Heights. “Remsen Street, it’s one of those, terminating at the Promenade.” In her imagining, the glamorous town houses would be visible, a crest of terraces peering back across the water at Manhattan, and one of them declaring itself by seeping out jazz and cocktail clatter, clouds of marijuana smoke, genius conversation. In truth all that was visible there was a dark barricade of greenery, seemingly more than a mile beyond and below them, across the silent river’s mouth.

“Which?” Now, committed, Porter sounded nervous, as though Miriam should have the address in her pocket, perhaps an engraved invitation, too.

“It’ll be obvious from the street, we’ll hear it a block away, I expect.”

“If not, it isn’t worth going,” he bluffed, regaining his confidence. Yet that very bluff only carried them a stride or two more on the
bridge’s downslope. Porter’s confidence was for some other purpose, now that they’d shed their companions. Only when you’d finally shaken them free, those couple-disguising little mobs, the self-chaperoning cocoons that blobbed around everywhere together, were you reminded of their uses. Porter kissed her. Miriam kissed him back, just as ravenous, even if strategizing how to delay or undo it, or where they would go, or what it would have to mean. Every personal possibility not deferred to an unimaginable future was present and urgent, a calamity sweeping all calm before it. Miriam had never managed to locate any sweet spot between. Porter’s cold fingertips already found gaps in the buttons of her antique dress at her tailbone, causing some electrical outline to quiver along the whole contour of her buttocks, to her feet where they attempted to stay rooted on the walkway’s planks. Porter was tall. Miriam got up on her toes, a half measure, compromise with an impulse to drop in a swoon to her knees or lift off into the sky.

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 one. 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.