Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (17 page)

By now, I was adept enough to do for her with the syringe, just as she still did for me. But you must understand, there was nothing sordid about it. Daisy and I never stopped bathing, or dressing well, or having other interests and amusements. At the wheel of the Duesenberg, I never once nodded out. It wasn’t like it is nowadays, God knows, when any Negro with the price of a fix can stagger about Harlem with a spike hanging out of his arm, recently widowed housewives in bathrobes stuff half a medicine cabinet up their rumps in broad daylight, heedless of being observed in the act by their sons, and any adolescent with a case of melancholia—some sixteen-year-old Jackie-boy or girlegan—can inhale every last vapor from a tube of airplane glue before collapsing to dream of who knows what, levitating out of Arlington, Virginia, to invented Minnesotas, South Pacifics, Manhattans or anywhere his television-addled brain may wander.

This world has long since grown so vile that as far as I’m concerned he can do anything he likes. But in the Twenties that my own age shared with the century’s, civilization still persisted, the great unwashed hadn’t yet gotten their grimy hands on our pleasures, and
everything
was more elegant: the cars, the clothes, the conversation, the music, the narcotics, the—well, everything, absolutely everything.

I’m not sure how long our lovely life went on that lovely, lovely way. Certainly for months, but which and how many elude me. It was long enough for me to grow more confident down at my end of the table in Le Perroquet de Paris, and once even take issue with a claim that Daisy had made about Picasso up at hers (“Now, dearest—we don’t really
know
yet if his Blue Period is over, do we? It may just be in
abeyance
/’ I called
out, amid slurps of neighborly spaghetti). But on the night I’m about to describe, Daisy surprised me by waving a braceleted toodle-oo to the crowd at our usual table and leading me to a more secluded booth in back that was lit by a single candle.

Her smile as tender as the night, she produced a flat, elegantly wrapped package from her bag and pushed it across to me. “Well, it’s a
present,
darling—not a bomb,” she said brightly, to my mystified look. “Happy Whatever-Today-Is.”

Even as I opened it, I knew what it must be. Inside an oblong velvet case was a syringe exactly like Daisy’s, except that, while the metal parts of hers—or, as I thought of it, ours—were silver, mine was done in gold. As I mutely gazed down at it, she made a play of holding up her napkin like a curtain to hide the case’s contents from anyone else’s eyes, although no one was nearby.

“Mind taken a powder?” she asked finally, which was one of our favorite little jokes.

“No,” I said. “It’s just—I’ve just never seen such a
beautiful
hypo before,” having indeed only seen one other in my life up to now and fancying gold rather better than silver. Then a new thought appeared in its glints, and I jerked my head up to stare at her. “Daisy!” I exclaimed, with what I’m sure was some alarm. “Is this
goodbye?”

She laughed. “No, darling. It’s ‘hello.’ From now on, you can do for me with mine—and I can do for you with yours. It’s engraved, by the way; there, just past the last calibration mark.” Her finger tapped it.

The engraving was tiny, and difficult to read by candlelight, especially as it went all the way around the hypo and I had to keep turning it to get to the next letters.
Give me your answer do,
it said. I felt somewhat at a loss. “Thank you,” I finally said.

At the same time, however, I was as madly eager to try it out as she was, so we wasted no time paying the bill for the other table—we hadn’t had a bite ourselves—and dashing for the Duesenberg as our bohemians shouted their gratitude with mouths full of food. As I got behind the wheel and Daisy slipped into the front seat from the other side, I felt that my previous response had been awfully inadequate.

“Daisy,” I said, turning to her, “I really meant it. Thank-” Before I
could finish, her mouth was on mine, as it had been once or twice before when our pecks on the cheek hadn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. But then I felt her tongue start to delve between my lips.

I have no real idea how I got back to Gramercy Park. I may have found a taxi, although it seems to me I walked. Daisy didn’t call after me or try to follow, either on foot or in the car.

The next morning, I was awakened by the sound of a horn in the street outside my window. When I looked down, there was the Duesenberg, and Daisy’s Swede was climbing out of the driver’s seat. Looking up, she saw that I had seen her; I heard a faint tinkle as she tossed the key onto the brownstone’s stoop. Without a word, or any gesture except a heave of her broad shoulders implying that the trials of Job had been puny by comparison, she set off stoutly down the sidewalk, and was almost instantly out of sight beyond the nearest tree.

Although I did manage to creep out to retrieve the keys from the top step, that was the last I saw of the world beyond my room for four days. Of course, while I was walking home in the taxi, I had sworn to myself that I would never see Daisy again, and at first I told myself that the emotional strain and upset of this decision was the reason I could neither sleep nor picture myself going down the stairs for any reason until I died.

I told myself I’d surely start to mend soon. But aside from the relative reprieves of being able to pitch a shoe at the door and holler “Go Vay!” every time Lii Gagni brought me a tray of food identical to the one she always brought for Mother—and even after, as a last resort, she tried one different from the tray she always brought for Mother—my condition grew worse rather than better. Once I started to hear mice scratching in the wall behind my bed’s headboard—and soon, impossibly, in the headboard itself, leaving me in little doubt that my skull would be next—I finally had to face what the real problem was. Pulling on some clothes, and slinking out my bedroom door past the twelve shoes piled there, I stumbled down the stairs and got into the Duesenberg.

On the whole drive out to East Egg, I was heaving so much with nausea that I kept bumping my chin against the top of the steering wheel. The only news I had of how badly I must be handling the car was the endless roar of horns and squeal of brakes and thump of jerking tires
around me. Luckily, no policeman who was happy in his job was likely to pull over a Duesenberg; while I
might
be a nobody, the odds weren’t worth it. Somehow, in the midst of what I believe was the closest I’ve ever come to pure delirium, I found myself noticing that the billboard with the garish eyes on the way to Daisy’s house had been replaced by a new one advertising Maxwell House coffee, although the image—a clock with far too many, peculiarly human-looking hands—was hardly much less of an inducement to stark madness than old Dr. T.J.’s stare had been. Then a gate was thankfully open without my needing to sound the horn, a horse was loping away from me down a long driveway, and I had shut off the Duesenberg’s motor with a sob of exhaustion and relief.

The Swede opened the door to me with a dour and skeptical look, for which I repaid her by sticking my thumbs in my ears and wiggling my fingers while making a horrible gargoyle face the second her back was turned. Not bothering to take me to our mistress, she lumbered back toward the kitchen. I went on into the living room.

On a sofa from which the piles of books had now been dashed to the floor, as had the ones on the nearby table, Daisy was feeding bits of something to dreadful, pink-eyed SooSoo. Hearing my step, she glanced up, and we stared at each other in silence for some moments as SooSoo growled at me warningly.

“I need ore-may orphine-may,” I said.

Lifting an eyebrow, she tilted her head toward SooSoo. “This is the dog, not the child,” she said coolly. “Or had you already forgotten-” at which point her chin trembled. A moment later, she was sobbing in my arms.

“Oh, darling, it was terrifying!” her damp voice moaned in my hair. “I had to drive all the way back here—down
that road
—but you don’t know—you must never know…”As, indeed, I do not; to this day.

Regaining some control of herself, she went back to the sofa, and fished out something that had been stuffed between its frame and cushions. Smiling and brushing the last tears from her eyes with one hand, she held out the velvet case with my gold hypo in it with the other.

After we had sailed away, we lay on her bed, our two heads touching
but our feet angling off the coverlet in opposite directions. I felt as nervous as one could right after an injection of morphine—which, however hard I tried, wasn’t very. But Daisy seemed to be in no great hurry to make the thing happen that I knew would have to happen, probably many times, unless and until I managed to locate a narcotics supplier of my own. Instead, I heard her voice asking dreamily, “Would you like to go to Provincetown with me tomorrow? A lot of our friends from the Village are up there just now, and I’ve rented a cottage for a week. We can hire a car if you don’t feel like doing a drive that long.”

Hard as I found it to explain, I was touched—and somehow humbled—by the “our” when Daisy said “our friends.” I also didn’t much want to drive back to New York, since it was so pleasant here just now, no matter the apprehensions knocking, so far vainly, at the back door of my head. But if we were going to be in Provincetown for a full week, I had an enormous amount of wardrobe to select and pack, even though Daisy assured me that neither its temporary nor its permanent residents were any great sticklers for formality.

At the door, she kissed me in full view of the Swede, and this time my lips obediently parted when her tongue’s slither asked them to. But that was as far as it went.

In any case, the drive back to Gramercy Park was considerably easier than the drive out to East Egg had been. Early the next morning, I heard a car-horn outside the window, just as I had four days before. Oh, it’s the Swede back with the Duesenberg again, I thought nonsensically. But this was a different horn, and when I looked, a long black Daimler was idling down below. From its back window, Daisy’s face and arm protruded, waving and beaming enthusiastically.

Taking my four suitcases from Lii Gagni, who was rather overdoing the gasping and puffing, the Chinese chauffeur fit them into the Daimler’s luggage compartment, next to Daisy’s—three. Well, she’d certainly been fibbing about traveling light, I thought. Then the chauffeur opened the door, and I stepped in to find myself face-to-face with Daisy, her daughter, and SooSoo.

“The Swede quit last night.” Daisy’s smile was tight. “But it’ll be all right, darling. It’ll just have to, since it can’t be helped!”

As the Daimler pulled away, I saw the chauffeur’s eyes flick toward me in the mirror above his head. On the sidewalk, he had struck me as vaguely familiar. But now, seeing those eyes in the same elongated box where I had seen them so many times before, I realized instantly who this was.

“Cheng,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Wong.” Hearing his voice, I
knew
it was Cheng. Had he snuck back in on another boat, or had he never been deported?

“I’m
not
wrong!” I said sharply. “You’re Cheng.”

“No,” Cheng said. “My name Wong.”

Daisy’s daughter started to blubber.

Jumping into my lap, SooSoo bit me on the nose.

By the time the drive came to an end some eight or nine hours later, Provincetown would have had to be on fire to appear anything less than welcoming. And perhaps even that wouldn’t have done it, for the afternoon sun that made the eaves and corners of everything glow orange simply gave a feeling that one was inside a gigantic paper lantern. The cottage Daisy had rented was called “The Waves,” although marcels would have been more accurate, and on her instructions the Daimler trundled down a lane of flour to it, past a sign pointing people to the lighthouse. Which we could see, black against the sky beyond our roof. Behind the house were dunes declining to a somewhat marshy inlet into which the sea crept contentedly, like a blue kitten with white claws.

Once Cheng had unloaded the luggage, Daisy—who had been made rather peremptory by the fact that she, not I, had been in charge of the car—insisted that we all change into our bathing gear, except Cheng of course, and trot down to the beach. “Quick, quick! Before the sun goes down, and everything cools off. Wong, bring umbrella, um-įre/-la.” As he set it up, she went out into the water up to the first stripe above her knees, and bent down with a laugh to call some to her, reaching out for it as if it had been a child—a prettier one than her actual daughter, who was unfortunately turning out to be quite an ugly little fool.

After she and the sea had played awhile, she came back to drop onto the towel next to me, her blond head burnished by the sun and the tracery of punctures on her arms and legs looking like violet, delicate Rorschach blots. Naturally, I was used to those, having them myself. But as she turned to smile at me, a vein in her throat stood out more prominently than I had ever noticed it doing.

I started to watch Cheng, who, dutiless for the moment, had gone marching down the beach in his gray uniform and visored cap, his hands clasped behind his back and an interested expression on his neck. Seagulls flew around him, making noises. Behind him, the little waves scooted forward and washed away the indentations of the hobnailed footprints of his jackboots, a process I suddenly found fascinating.