Dissident Gardens (28 page)

“Here’s the first song I ever wrote,” he said, and began strumming the opening chords of “A Lynching on Pearl River.” Tommy hoped to authenticate the impossible Jewess’s attentiveness by retracing his steps, the tenuous construction of a persona independent from the Gogan Boys. Though she must be a fan, she acted like no fan he’d met before. Anyhow, at this moment, in the flood of marijuana feeling,
he
wished to hear the song, which encrypted a defiance against his brothers he’d barely tasted before it had been rebuffed. So, finishing the first instrumental pass, he sang out the lyric for all he was worth.

“That’s the first, huh?”

“Yes—yes.”

“Then play me the one after that.”

She leaned forward, not missing a thing. He almost wished she would—miss a thing, turn aside. She’d shed her Wayfarers now, with the result only that he couldn’t look at her directly. Her attentions had seemed to him like a glorious bottle into which he’d hope to slip himself and then expand, like a model ship, sails tucked until the moment they rose to occupy every corner. Instead, he felt like a lightning bug, zooming inside only to be swallowed, rebounding against the impassive glass, pulsing a small light so as not to be lost inside.

Oughtn’t the reefer have make her distractible? It hadn’t. The
world was close around them, eye of the storm, dark fallen entirely outside the windows. Tommy had gone from finding it difficult to imagine Peter staying away a minute longer to a willed certainty that his brother had anchored himself at the bar of McSorley’s or the Spur and would ride out the night laid upon or beneath a wooden bench. Or had Tommy forgotten a gig? The prospect was incredible, yet injected him with fear. Then he considered how any gig would be scotched in this blizzard. Miriam Zimmer went on talking whenever Tommy paused in his playing, and he at once drank her talk in and missed it entirely, besotted as he was with interior murmurings, now vain, now flagellating, now quizzical. The difficulty in beholding another person was how you stood in your own way. To be struck open, as Tommy had just now been struck, was to wade into a mire of self-beholding.

“For an Irishman you sure sing an awful lot about blacks.”

He’d just unspooled a slack rendition of “Sharpeville Massacre.” This recital might be veering into something more resembling a pleading audition, as he scraped the bottom of his own small catalogue. If her remark was provocation, nothing in her expression gave it away. He couldn’t quite think how to answer her, not in her own language. He didn’t possess any other.

“Did I make you uncomfortable? Would you rather I said ‘Negroes’?”

“I suppose I do sing of them a lot,” he managed. “Maybe just to harass Rye.”

“South Africa, Haiti, Mississippi—hell, Tom, have you traveled to any of these places?”

“I’m defenseless to the charges, which you’re hardly the first to lay down. My way of composing is to plunder newspaper headlines.”

“You should visit the South, I hear it’s a head trip.”

“I’ve thought I’d like to, but minstrel trios aren’t so much in demand.”

“I mean without your brothers.”

“Ah. Maybe I should. Peter keeps us working, though. There’s scarcely an interruption.”

“What’s missing are
voices
, Tom.”

“Missing from what?”

“The songs.” Her words were neither chiding nor gentle, just laid as level and irrefutable as a brick set into its proper place. It might be
that no one had ever listened to him sing until this instant, not even himself. His mother called him Thomas; his father, son; his brothers, Tommy. Nobody’d ever called him Tom.

“We’ve got blacks—Negroes—of our own,” she said. “I mean, you only have to go
downstairs
.” They’d stepped, as a matter of necessity, over and around huddled figures making nests in the storm, just to arrive at Peter’s doorstep. The men littering the Bowery were black by definition (it was at this moment that he resolved to join her in exchanging the one word for the other), whatever the shades of their faces. They were blackened by condemnation, in wretched black tattered cloth, in shadow. Tommy never saw them if he could help it.

He schooled himself to see
her
now, gaze past her blinding allure, her decorations and aura, the several bracelets clanking as she waved her hand, her beatnik’s wrinkled plaid skirt and thin turtleneck, the raven cackle of her hair, instead to meet her seeking hazel eyes beneath thick-arched brows, to address the twist of her wide lips, which at their infrequent rest formed a smirk so perpetual, so embracing in its implications, it absolved its recipient of individual judgment: By pronouncement of this woman’s look you were swept into a condition of universal exasperation and forgiveness at once. And then her nose, so thick and bowed it was like a Jew’s nose in caricature. You half expected it to be lifted off when the sunglasses were removed. This prole nose sat unenchanted by the enchantment all around it, a blot of humanity.

“Let’s brew them a pot of coffee.”

“Who?”

“The guys downstairs, if they aren’t frozen into statues already. Come on.” She leapt up, began shoveling grind into his brother’s percolator.

“Served in what?”

“We’ll bring down cups, collect them after.”

“We can’t serve them all.”

“Who said all?” She hunted in sink and cabinet. “What say we serve four? You guys are awfully skimpy on china. Not expecting more than two overnight guests at a go, huh?”

He could only gape.

“Nothing more in storage?” She put on her coat and shoved ceramic cups into its two big pockets.

“Here,” he said, ducking into the bathroom and taking Peter’s meerschaum shaving mug from atop the sink. He chucked the brush aside and rinsed it clean. “Five.”

Miriam goggled at the meerschaum mug’s beard and scowl. “Holy shit, talk about your gruesome clichés. This is the last household that ought to feature leprechaun tchotchkes.”

“That’s no leprechaun. He’s the Green Man.”

“You say po
tah
-to, I say po
tay
-to.”

Reclaiming shoes not dried, but now poached and reeking from their spell atop the radiator, Tommy and Miriam ferried the fresh pot and the five cups down two flights, out into a storm trickling to a conclusion. Under windless streetlamps the creaking white hand blanketed the world’s contours, each sill and lintel, all God’s immobile windshields and volcanic trash cans. The sole exception the human figures who struggled past, punching out of caverns with their knees, huffing steam into fingerless gloves. Miriam found her five huddling in a fleabag hotel’s entranceway. She distributed cups and poured the first service, then planted the pot in a mound at their feet, where it scorched a hole for itself to rest in. The Green Man was shoved into the chafed hands of a black derelict with leathery, pitted cheeks, gelid eyes yellow as corn.

“Top yourselves off, there’s enough to go around. We’ll return in fifteen minutes to collect the utensils, gentlemen.”

She tugged his elbow, and they slugged in the tracks others had forged by now, toward Houston. “C’mon, let’s get a tattoo.”

“I don’t think they’re open.”

“I’m kidding. Look, up there’s where Rothko paints.”

“Is that what you wanted me to see?” Pollock and Kline and de Kooning were, like Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac, names sticking to Village chimeras sighted only instants earlier, further evidence you’d arrived to this great party too late.

“No, look.” She pointed across the wide intersection at Houston. “
This
is the Bowery, right here.” Gesturing at the air.

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t expect you to. Know why it’s called the Bowery? This used to be where New York
ended
.” She directed his attention behind them, the direction they’d come. “The Dutch, they had this footpath, leading to the farms and woods. There was a bower here, like a giant arbor.” This, she drew in the mote-strewn air above. “You pass through the Bowery, you’d exited the city, into the wilderness.”

Tommy saw what she wished him to. The phantasmal cityscape above Houston might revert to wild before the snows melted off.

“I’ve been living here, with no idea at all.”

“Nobody knows this stuff,” she bragged.

“Somebody could write a song about this.”

“Somebody could write a
great
song about this.” These words, she whispered. If he could he’d have used his scarf to bind her mouth to his ear, to hear again the electrical hush of her voice in the canyons of the halted storm.

“See, if you think about it, that’s probably the reason the bums and old sailors stack up here. They’re waiting to pass through, even if they don’t realize it. Petitioning for entry, like in a Kafka story.”

“Yes.”

“Entry to the gardens.”

“Yes. To Eden.”

“Sure,” she said. “Or else up to Fourteenth Street in hopes of a cut-rate fuck.”

Nothing in
The Pelican Anthology of Love Poetry
had prepared him remotely. That Tommy could see the girl sought to topple and outrage him was no help. He was toppled and outraged. She was a child-woman, with the eerie savage preternaturality of a ten-year-old, the sort that stared at and through you on public transport. Yet with the self-possession of someone older than herself, a worldly spectator. The
mother
of the child on the bus. Having evidently skipped the raw stage between, where he’d stuck.
Older sister I never had
. He was mortified by the cruddy predictability of the expression. And the presumption of had. Was he
having
her? Did he
have
her? (Rye would undoubtedly say no.) After this storm in which the sun had been blotted out, the clock destroyed, what should happen? Was he supposed to take her to bed? Did love at first sight mean you weren’t to let the person out of your sight once you’d spotted them?

“You don’t need to pretend you’re in wherever, in
Algeria
, Tom. Or the Delta. I mean, look, even the Reverend Gary Davis moved to Queens. Those guys down there, they’re the real thing. This shit is all
around
us.”

This proclamation she’d made on the stairs, as they returned bearing the cups and coffeepot collected from the destroyed men huddling in the flophouse entranceway. The derelicts had drained the coffee and then handed over the cups in mute crushed gratitude, except Miriam had pushed the meerschaum shaving mug back into the crabbed claws of the one who’d held it. “Keep it, buddy. That’s a good luck charm. They call it
the Green Man
.” He’d moved his mouth in reply, yet nothing was audible apart from his address to Miriam, as “miss.”

“You really talk to these guys, you find out they riveted girders on the Empire State Building, or got a Purple Heart at the Bulge, or played cornet in Henderson’s band. They’re always about a thousand percent more interesting than whatever dumb pitying story you’ve told yourself—
that’s
what some genius ought to get into a song.”

Before Miriam Zimmer’s vision could be further developed it met its nullification in the form of Peter Gogan, slushy tracks of his unremoved boots demarcating his beery suspicious perambulation of the apartment. He’d been examining the condition they’d left it in when fleeing in their bolt of inspiration, candles guttering, red inches in juice glasses, smoking traces in the ashtray.

“Someone’s been … sitting … in …
my
 … chair,” Miriam whispered.

“Why, hello, good brother,” said Peter. “Some weather we’re having, eh? Be a gentleman now and introduce me to your lady friend.”

While Tommy sought his voice Miriam pushed the snow-streaked coffeepot into Peter’s hands, then began unloading cups from the pockets of her coat, as in a magic act. She barely entered the apartment, arranging the cups on the shelves nearest the door. “My name is Miriam Zimmerfarbstein, I’m from Students Against Kitsch, and I’m horrendously sorry to have to announce, Good Brother Gogan, that my colleague and I have just taken it upon ourselves
to liberate your unicorn
.”

“My unicorn, you say?”

“She means … your leprechaun,” Tommy managed, and at the
word he and Miriam collapsed in shambles of hilarity there in the doorway, skating into a puddle of their own melting shoes and trouser cuffs. Their limbs glided together, coats like a tent collapsed, brains dissolving in a fever of mirth, whole selves liquid except now in the tangle between them for the first time Tommy felt his hard-on like a brick unlaid, a brick burning for the cool balm of mortar, and then Miriam was on her feet abandoning him there, not even straightening her hair or coat or uncrossing her wild eyes but said, “I’ve got to go, good night to you both, Gogan Boys,” and was down the stairs and gone.

“Your brother knows about this?” Saying “brother,” Warren Rokeach meant Peter. Rye could—would—care less. They sat on woven mats in Rokeach’s office, where Tommy had been just twice, first nearly three years ago, whisked from Penn Station to ink his new name to their general agreement, then again a few months later to meet the A&R man from Vanguard records and sign the contract for
A Fireside Evening with the Gogan Boys
. The place was considerably changed. Then, it had been a hive of professional evidence, walls pushpinned with flyers commemorating Rokeach’s roster of acts at career highs, playing Carnegie and Town Hall, glossy head shots, mock-ups for album covers, gunmetal filing cabinets with bulging drawers, wide metal desk heaped with papers and tape reels. All gone now, replaced with a low table of simple blond wood, around which Tommy and Miriam and Warren Rokeach sat cross-legged, sipping, from cups without handles, tea that smelled of carpenter’s glue. Rokeach had been flying to the coast; Rokeach had befriended Alan Watts; Rokeach was “getting heavily into Zen Buddhism”; in favor of Japanalia Rokeach had divested his office of evidence of striving, preening, or neurosis, aspects reduced to making testimony from his as yet un-Buddhafied person. For Warren Rokeach’s face and voice and mannerisms remained entrenched in decades of self-regard, of laying it on the line, of being he whom after a handshake you counted your fingers. Equally un-Buddhafied, the tension-worm of vein at his flat high temples. Rokeach’s fingertip visited the worm, then scratched at
the periphery of his neat-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. “You gotta decide now what your intention is in this deal, because in my opinion this isn’t a thing where you can go just partway.”