Dissident Gardens Read Online Free Page A

prove, yet believed in as a certainty, in the manner with which she had been raised to believe—but failed to believe—in an invisible Jehovah, or that her name was recorded somewhere in the Haggadah secreted in the shul’s rosewood cabinet. Her dossier would have told him, undoubtedly, that Rose had begun her affair with the Negro police lieutenant after colonizing the nascent Sunnyside block-watchers’ organization and appointing herself the liaison to the Sunnyside precinct house. Perhaps Sol imagined her participation in the Citizens’ Patrol was a long ruse, designed to allow her to sidle up to a married man she’d already lusted after. Let Sol think what he wanted. Rose had never glimpsed Douglas Lookins before that day.
    She lowered herself to a defense. “A neighborhood watch, Sol. Workers helping other workers, making them feel comfortable walking home from the el after a night shift.”
    “Some of us can’t help being reminded of brownshirts, seeing civilians forming marching societies, whispering on street corners to men in boots.”
    “You’d like to provoke me into an act of despair or outrage, so you can make a report of my diminished value to the cause. Or more likely you’ve written this report already and are disappointed I haven’t obliged you with a nervous breakdown.”
    “I haven’t written any report.” He spoke tightly, as though she were the one who’d crossed a line, referring too intimately to his subjugation to the unseen cell leader. For Sol Eaglin,
that
, rather than bodies meeting in the night, constituted intimacy.
    “I’m done inside, Sol,” said Rose, meaning the kitchen and elsewhere: inside all the implied philosophies and conspiracies that clung in the air around them, had been belched out when they came through the door like heat and fume when you opened a coal stove. “Take them away.”
    “You should permit us to follow procedure.”
    “Procedure for what? Looking at you, old man, I can see what the mirror won’t tell me. I’m an old woman. I don’t have time for it.”
    “You’re a fine woman in her prime, Rose.” Eaglin’s tone wasn’tpersuasive. Who knew whom he didn’t want to be heard by, in the nearby bushes?
    “I’m a degenerate, to hear of it.”
    “Come now, Rose.”
    “No, it’s a degenerate world now, so why wouldn’t we be part of it, you and I and those idealists in my kitchen?” She stepped into his embrace, loathing them both and wanting him to feel her loathing, as well as to prove how easily still she could squirm her bosom into the palms of his hands. Eaglin gave her boobies a good feel before shoving both hands into his jacket pockets. The act might have fit his definition of
procedure
.
    Yet she’d outwitted herself, wanted more than she knew. She took Sol by the wrists, this time forcibly inserted his chill palms within her blouse, let him rediscover how she spilled at the whole periphery of her brassiere. Rose’s versatile cynicism was dangerously near to spilling, too, becoming irrecoverable, mercury in a shattered vial. Sol Eaglin knew her better than any man alive. Better than her black lieutenant, though she might die rather than let Sol know it. She and Sol had for nearly a decade suffered identical contortions: the party line, and each other. If she’d only managed to wrest him from the obedient disobedience of his marriage, to a meek woman suffering nobly his claim to free love, Rose might have imprisoned Sol happily. They could have installed themselves as a Great Red Couple, lording it right here in the Gardens—but how these fantasies reeked of conformism! How bourgeois, finally, the aspiration to succeed socially within the CP!
    Be grateful, then, for Sol’s limpet wife and for the instincts of the body that had led her to seek elsewhere. Rose was beyond Sol’s destruction, being larger than Sol knew, much as Communism was larger than the party and therefore beyond the party’s immolations, its self-stabbings.