Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (11 page)

Nor was I summoned at the perjury trial that eventually sent my old friend to the hoosegow, for which he departed from the steps of the Foley Square courthouse on a blustery March day whose hurrying clouds seemed to augur the future Senator Tumor and Vice President Malignancy. Having turned up with a few other well-wishers to provide what flimsy good cheer we could, I saw that Alger’s handcuffs prevented a farewell handshake, and called his name instead. For the last time, my beclouded eyes met his glacial reserve. Then he was off to the pen, and I back to the penthouse.

As the postwar Cadillac that had replaced the Rolls purred us back to Central Park past streets shot from cannon, I saw that L.’s gaze was fogged too. But not, I’m afraid, noticeably more so than usual, although I took her gloved hand in my ungloved one nonetheless.

Yes—she was my earliest and only love. That’s why I hope I’ll be forgiven for not having plucked up the courage from the proverbial rag-and-bone shop until now to admit that I wasn’t hers, and never had been. Ever since our pre-
Titanic
to-and-fros in Mamzel Coudepiay’s dancing class—the sacred, resin-squeaky spot where I first laid eyes on L., amid peers of both sexes for whom adolescence described a more or less lamentable condition, rather than the state of grace she made of it—I had been the besotted, madly volunteering partner, she the reluctant, easily distracted one. Although I don’t mean to fault her dancing, for once in my devoted arms she’d swirl like caramel, her neck cast back in utter indifference to the goggling, boyish phiz ardent to nibble it—a heedlessness whose only interruptions were brief stares whenever one of my all but forgotten left feet would land with a thud in the wrong place, something
she
knew from the vibration alone.

From shared summer jaunts upstate to exclamatory
au hasard
encounters on European tours, our moneyed families’ long friendship kept putting me in her path throughout our teens, just as our shared social set
would once we became adults. Yet candy-backed child or grown-up sylph, she’d drift toward me without the faintest worry that she’d bump into anything much. As I hardly cared to risk turning her obliviousness into active ill will by forcing her to think about my presence, all I could do was lift my cap and later skimmer with a smile as I stepped off into the poison ivy.

I also knew I had no hope of altering her nonexistent feelings, since I lacked the prerequisite that permits a wooer to sit down at the heart-shaped baccarat table in Cupid’s Monte Carlo—whether he be flush or bankrupt when he stands and lights his final cigarette, tux wilted from the strain. Simply put, as we both knew, I utterly failed to interest her, and love without interest is as impossible as, in quite another realm, is interest without capital.

Since, with modest luck, L. and I will soon mark—although, to my undimmed regret, not celebrate; not with songs—an anniversary that Titania and Oberon might envy, I suppose the vulgar guess most likely to spring to mind, though I’d advise against lips if you value my indulgence, is that her people lost their loot in the Crash, making me the nearest sled in the blizzard if not the only boat in the storm. Port, whatever. In any case, chronology alone refutes that arid speculation, as we were married during the Boom.

Whatever prompted her to board the small craft of my love and push off from her mind’s dark shore with a satin-slippered, trembling, but irreducibly graceful foot, material fears had nothing to do with it—as I can testify, since the fortune she came into upon her father’s later death of apoplexy in California, in the midst of indelicate exertions, was to almost double my own. As to the actual reason that she wed the long rejected self, L. has never told me in the several decades since—and as it can plainly be no very happy story, I feel that only a bully, which I decline to be under any circumstances, would badger her to divulge it.

For some months, however, it had been apparent to me that what I saw as the
tour deforce
social occasions of the merrymaking Manhattan we shared—banquets, avant-garde charity balls, and now more and more often weddings, as one after another couple first paired at Mamzel Coudepiay’s went Charlestoning into madcap matrimony—were for L.
respites from other, visibly more exhausting amusements, at least when she even put in an appearance to raise dizzy dollars for lynched Negroes or watch the Carraways get hitched. As the twilight beneath her eyes turned to night, she developed modest eccentricities, as for instance her refusal to doff her fur coat amid her friends’ evening gowns, brief and accidental views of one bare shoulder or the other now the closest one came to glimpsing her pale, delicately veined arms.

In a harsh voice, she’d speak of authors and vagabond artistic personalities unknown to the rest of us, not that their alien names would necessarily have been obscure outside a crowd whose members, the self fondly included, would as a rule experience an almost unbearable intellectual stimulus simply from being forced to read the coupons they clipped. At a farewell dinner for young Lindbergh, I watched in dismay as L. moodily set her place card on fire, dropping it into her finger bowl a moment before her own dear digits would have been burnt, then watched the charred remnants swirl until, to her surprise, her tiara suddenly fell forward over her eyes, like an encrusted blindfold.

Then she vanished to Provincetown for a week with one of her vivacious friends, a wealthy widow with a young child. On her return, L. found her invalid mother dead; it had long been expected, but the timing was obviously dreadful. That same day, she came to see me in my old Fifth Avenue pile. In terms that brooked no sentimental interpretation of her decision—although her swain’s heart dove off a cliff for the pearl of its result as eagerly as any loinclothed Polynesian teen—she accepted my long-standing offer of marriage: a lamp long left in a window on no road she’d ever taken, and that no phaeton she’d ever thumbed a lift on had passed by.

Dazed to tears by the special sorrow of the happiness that was mine, I pressed her to announce our nuptials as speedily as possible. I was unsure if I played the role of question or answer to the urgency in her bruised eyes—which incidentally grew, to my bewilderment, downright haggard when, hoping to amuse an obviously disconsolate L., I sportively told her, “Well, my dear—if nothing else, I
can
afford a carriage!
And
the bicycle. And, by God, a zeppelin built for two, if you say the word.” That sweetest of America’s old songs had long held a special charm for me, but
as it seemed to disturb her I never once hummed it again, and had my housekeeper remove its sheet music from the rack atop our Steinway.

Still, I won’t have you think her behavior in all the years since has ever given me cause for reproach. A search of my brain more thorough than a burglar’s, which is more or less how I feel when I set figurative and stealthy foot inside those curtained, gray-and-pink precincts, yields only one smudged memory. One desolate afternoon in the early Forties, coming home to tell L. of some terrible news in the war, I found her in a bower with our son’s tutor, whose name eluded me even then. Her makeup was disarranged, and the silver pot and china cups on the white-linened table beneath the trellis had been untouched at my arrival, despite the frantic tone in which she asked the fellow, “Won’t you have some more Maxwell House, Mr. X? There’s always time for one more cup.” Yet the recollection itself is so flimsy and inconclusive—and the dialogue so odd, not least since L. favored espresso; besides, our son would have been a toddler—that I often lean toward calling this vivid but elusive tidbit of reality a dream, or perhaps a story I heard about another sad couple that lodged itself in an autobiographical cupboard by mistake. I rather fear my inner life is something of a grand hotel in the off season, with far too many vacancies despite its first-rate restaurant.

Whatever may be missing when I look into her eyes—a temporary blurring of life’s solitude in an exchange of glances, a tender ardor that, in any case, I know only in imagination, though I am sure I’d recognize it in an instant were L.’s face ever, miraculously or merely by accident, to offer it to me—we have grown comfortable with each other. Given longevity, almost any marriage, I suppose, eventually evolves into the cozy story of Mr. and Mrs. Crusoe, who have always built the signal fire in the same place, share pleasure in the promontories they have named together and the birds that they call pets, and know the offshore shipwreck’s skeleton in their sleep. Together, as we watch sunset coming on from atop our hefty heap of the GNP, which gives us a view of the emblazoned western sky far more magnificent than most, we are decorous, mildly addled, considerate, even fond. I try not to think of what might have been, and hope against hope that L. doesn’t dwell on it either—aware as I so painfully am that in her case no Thurston would
appear in the picture, unless it were as a gamboling clown juggling stocks and bonds to amuse children on the street below her clouds. Next to the heroes of star-crossed romances, for whom the sand in the awful hourglass always sprints, I know I’m blessed. I’ve been allowed to spend a long, long life next to my love, for all that she feels none for me.

Her presence is my consolation for my inconsolability in her presence. If that’s the best deal life could offer me, I’d still call it a bargain—a better one than any I ever encountered in the stock market, even during the Boom.

The son she bore me in September ’39 may have bored, or rather disconcerted, her. But from where I sat—beside her bed, sporting a grin both grander and more grateful than any Roosevelt ever tossed the voters, and babbling more noticeably like an idiot than usual—he was the great proof that a marriage need not be a success to have one. On him I lavished the adoration that L.’s grimaces of distress forbade me to drown her in, giving him all that money could buy and love break its aortal bank to provide.

As he grew, I was delighted by his emerging bent for literature and sensitive but manly interest in the arts. And moved in other ways he didn’t know, because of how those predilections mirrored his now indifferent mother’s old pursuits. At his encouragement, I began to sample the dusty volumes he’d de-cobwebbed and the new ones he was adding to the shelves in the Fifth Avenue pile’s long disused library, and found the experience unexpectedly congenial. The pinings I discovered could be soothed by poetry and fiction felt oddly familiar, and it did cross my mind that they might have been gratified with less anguish under a reading lamp all along.

Well, too late now, I told myself. But not for our son, who in any case had far less trouble than had Dad in getting the fairer sex to find him worth consideration. Suzanne, the French-Canadian girl he brought down from Andover for a few weekends one year, was a beauty from her parabolic hipbones to the light brown hair that flowed in two long waves
from a central part on her high forehead. She was also as charming as Joan must have been to the dauphin, and utterly devoted to my boy.

The daughter, so he told me, of a fine old Montreal family called the Cohen-Chansons, she made a hobby of the second half of the name by singing artless but beguiling ditties of her own composition, accompanying herself on the guitar. As the fog of old age grounds more and more flights from this particular airport, I find that I can only remember part of one:
“Mes yeux sont verts, mes lèvres sont roses / En te donnant un baiser avec mes yeux, ne puis-je pas te regarder avec mes lèvres? / Non, je ne te trahiras jamais / Avec not’ / professeur d’histoire / Pendant que ton père il meurt
…". In all honesty, it was breathtaking to see the loving intensity in the girl’s green eyes as she crooned those lines—some puppy-love promise whose bone largely eluded me, since I can never venture onto the unfamiliar golf course of a foreign tongue without a hefty stock of mulligans—and gather that one’s own flesh and blood had inspired it.

True, he did go through a mildly rebellious phase, during which he lurked about in blue jeans, white T-shirt and red windbreaker to an oddly John Philip Sousa-esque effect—while swigging milk directly from the bottle, an animalistic sight no doubt deliberately calculated to arouse more true horror in aging parental bosoms than would stealing strangers’ cars or knifing unknown West Side Puerto Ricans. Later—at least on his summer vacation, since at Andover they probably wouldn’t have permitted it—he grew a touchingly wispy goatee, went constantly about in a mangy sweatshirt, and began reading oddly titled books, often shaped like bathroom tiles, whose contents I was no longer invited to peruse in his wake. But I understood that he was simply asserting a separate identity for himself. In any case, throughout his adolescence, he and I had only one serious confrontation, the circumstances behind which will take some going into.