Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (18 page)

“I always
knew
he was a spy—and look, the ocean’s on his side,” I said. “It’s making sure no one will know he’s been here.”

“Tide’s coming in.” Daisy raised her voice. “Sweetheart, no! That’s not your pail, nor SooSoo’s either. No, I don’t know whose it is, but I’m sure they’ll come back for it soon, and then how will you look? Come back to Mummy now, we’re going in the house.”

Dinner, which involved a boisterous reunion with some of our bohemians at a sandy restaurant where crackling plates of strange, good things from the sea kept being passed behind and above all our heads, was more relaxing. One of the poets even made Daisy’s daughter laugh, a phenomenon whose unfamiliarity the little girl signaled by catching up her small fat fists to her mouth as she did so. But as we strolled back to the cottage and Daisy slipped a shy, dry hand in mine as the dreadful dog yapped, my heart sank so fast that I could practically hear the cries of the drowning. Aside from the spot that we had fixed up for her daughter, or possibly SooSoo, on an ottoman in the front room, I had already observed that there was only one bed in the house.

I had rather hoped that we could sail away first, as I knew that afterward no great exertion would be possible, or seem all that inviting—to her, I mean. But Daisy gave a smile and said something about not wanting her recollections blurred, almost as if she already knew that the memory of it would be something she’d need to cling to.

As she attended to her child, I crept between rough cotton sheets, willing myself furiously to fall asleep on the instant. Of course, that was no great way to accomplish it, and soon I heard the door open and shut. But no one slipped into bed next to me, which was how I came to open my eyes at the moment Daisy’s camisole fell to her feet. The moonlight made her skin blue, even as its softness effaced the needle marks. Then, she had crouched beside me, and was tugging at my lacy nightgown. “Why do you have all this
on,
silly?” I heard her say, audibly trying to keep the fun in her voice and the urgency out of it.

That was how I finally learned what it was like to be a bad girl—to be a mad girl, between blue thighs. Then we lay with our two lanky, scrawny-breasted, period bodies fitted around each other, like two halves of the same Art Deco person. “Why, we’re lovely,” Daisy said, looking at us in the moonlight. Looking too, I had to admit that there was something aesthetically pleasing in our shared Juan Gris hips and two tufts. But it was like admiring a painting from a school with which one felt no real affinity. All the same, as Daisy’s breathing grew even beside me, I had the strange thought, troubling because it was calming, that between two women this act was a transition from comforting, whereas when one was with a man it was a transition from suffering; that is, if one was lucky

.1 also still wanted to sail away, and wondered if I could fix on my own and whether the bathroom light would wake up Daisy’s little girl. But the door was a mile away, and then at the top of a tower inside which I was ever so slowly tumbling down.

By the next morning, it felt as if we had already developed a routine, which seldom varied over the next five days. We’d spend long, sun-dazed mornings on our little kitchen carpet of beach behind the cottage, in company with some of our bohemians—some of whom brought tense-faced, chunky girls with them, a rarity on Carmine Street. The conversations and flickering semi-arguments they all had with each other about painting and writing were nonetheless almost identical to the ones in Le Perroquet de Paris, as the new additions spoke little. Yet somehow it sounded different—at once less affected and more artificial, if that makes any sense—when we were all outside and in sunlight, tawny-headed and
salty-lipped, as gulls cawed and one of the chunky girls, far out past the beach, determinedly inched her way along in the water below the gongstruck line that separated deeper from paler blue.

Then we’d stroll down Provincetown’s main street, eating crunchy seafood wrapped in paper and peeking into moldy little shops with weathered fishing nets winding around whatever it was they sold. In the afternoons, we’d go back to our various little houses to nap, read, or play games, or else go on motor excursions—Cheng sweating in his gloves behind the wheel—to other parts of Cape Cod, which were pretty much like our bit except that the names were different and more people looked at us oddly the farther back toward the mainland we got. Once it was dark, everyone would gather for a riotous meal at the same restaurant we’d gone to the first night.

Then, night after night, I’d irritably drag my nightgown off over my head with one hand as I stomped across our tiny floor to throw myself with deliberate and punishing ungainliness on the bed. Even in the dark, I could see the hurt welling in Daisy’s eyes. But she was never wounded enough to stop her caresses, her whispered requests for this and that here and there again and again, her maddening attempts to make all this a frolic by banging me on the head with a pillow or hiding my hairbrush.

On top of everything else, I had to sail away by myself a few times, clumsily fixing in the bathroom with the gold hypo whose engraved inscription I had tried several times by now to mar with my nails and teeth. Daisy sailed away often enough not to get sick, but she didn’t seem that interested. “We don’t really
need
it, do we?” she asked me on the beach one morning, before the first bohemians—later risers than we, to a man and chunky girl—had arrived. “With the sun on the water, and—well, each other? I mean, I know we
do.
But we can try
not
to need it, can’t we?”

“Why should we?” I said. She didn’t answer. After a moment, she picked up her book.

On the next-to-last night before we were supposed to go back, Daisy had arranged for something special—involving our whole crew and a movie theater, thank God, not me and some sort of there-she-blows apparatus acquired in a harpooning shop. She had rented Provincetown’s
tiny one and only motion-picture palace, which was another woodframe house on Main Street like the rest except that it had a marquee instead of a fishnet or a shark’s jaw over the door, and hired a projectionist to show some experimental movies from Europe that one of our bohemians was trying to convince the Metropolitan Museum in New York to run off for the public. I thought it strange that any movie should go to a museum without having, I don’t know, rolled around in the world a bit first, but apparently with things experimental it was either that or permanent Coventry, since people wouldn’t care unless they had been impressed
d’avance
. In Provincetown, at what I suppose would be called the premiere, we were most impressed by the fact that we could bring alcohol, since Daisy was paying for everything and there was no manager to object.

The first movie shown was so ghastly that I considered mailing the Metropolitan a private note hinting that the time had come to write off this medium as an art form. It was almost as if whoever had been entrusted with the camera had deliberately photographed the most revolting images he could imagine while rejecting all the beautiful ones, which I know sounds preposterous but does convey the general effect of watching ants crawl out of people’s palms and dead mules lie atop pianos for twenty utterly repulsive minutes. Early on, when a woman’s eye was slashed with a razor, Daisy’s daughter screamed and buried her head in her mother’s shoulder, and I felt caught between horror and envy myself. As the lights came up, I heard Daisy murmur a reproach to the bohemian who had arranged it all. “I didn’t know,” he muttered back.

“You hadn’t
watched
it?” Daisy hissed.

“I didn’t know your
daughter
was here. I didn’t know she was in Provincetown. I didn’t know you had a daughter. I thought she was your son. I’ve been drunk since Tuesday, for Christ’s sake, and I’m not sure who you are either. Other than that, what did you think? Ijust hope the dame who shelled out for this wing-ding isn’t going to be a ninny about it. But not much chance of that with these know-nothing, do-nothing rich twerps, I suppose.”

I didn’t catch her answer. But as for me, it had just crossed my mind that I had never really liked
any
of the art that knowing Daisy had subjected
me to. Still, I couldn’t have left without causing a stir. As we had a few minutes with the lights up while the projectionist got the next movie ready, I started to read the program notes for it to find out what I ought to be bracing myself for.

Das Herz von Avis
(The Heart of Avis)
ein Film von G. W. Langmur

Critical Remarks
: This adaptation of Mack Schlechtkunst’s famous fairy tale for adolescent lads employs very resource of the cinema.
Plot Synopsis:
Avis, the Boy-Prince of ancient Vommangia-zur-Alp, has been raised to reverence his prodigious father King Wuntag, whose throne he is intent to follow with his father’s footsteps one day. One day, a passing crone indicates to Avis that his bride must be the Apline maiden Siegheidi, who is seen nearby milking and gives testimonials she is undefiled. Having been foretold long ago that he would be told this, Avis knows it to be truthful, and he and Siegheidi mount the Alp to sing of their engagement and impending demise.
[Note:
Sheet music for organist attached
.]

Now we are returned to King Wuntag’s court down below, where in his absence the vengeful sorcerer Mahlhaus has cast a spell on his clothing. Donning them on his return from war, Wuntag discovers he is evil. He struggles to doff the clothings but they are too strong even for Wuntag. Strangling his throat and running himself through with his sword Dolwahl, he is hurleed by his own feet into a nearby pit of fire.

When back to the top of the Alp we go, Avis and Siegheidi are ending their song of loving. As they return down, the warlock Frack-Frack espies them in the forest he is disguised as. Exposing himself, he casts a spell on Siegheidi that turns her into a statue. Continuing on, Avis reaches the castle, where he is told of Wuntag’s turn to evil and subsequent death. He tries to lift Dolwahl but
the great sword melts in front of the eyes of everybody. Going in search of the forest he remembers, he sees that Frack-Frack has defiled perhaps multiple times the statue of Siegheidi, which indicates by means of crumbling that it has been thinking of Avis the whole time. The ingenious warlock meanwhile turns into a noxious vapor and escapes while Avis is having illness.

Realizing that his weakness makes him unfit to rule, yet resolved to do his duty by his people, Avis re-mounts the Alp. There in one manly gesture he tears his heart from his chest and offers it to the sky. As birds begin to eat his heart, Avis expires. In an epilogue, we are shown that eating The Heart of Avis has given the birds

strength, and they are reborn as a noble race of winged men.

To be honest, the epilogue
was
a bit funny, with nature photography of some distinctly noncommittal-looking seagulls on a rock dissolving into a view of a similar number of men striding around bare-chested in front of a black curtain in strapped-on papier-mâché wings, and trying hard to look like a noble race of winged men without getting unduly puffed up about it, as that wouldn’t be noble. The lack of winged women also did leave one rather suspecting that, noble or not, this race was unwittingly doomed to the briefest of evolutionary trajectories. And the Heart of Avis itself, at which even Daisy coughed very suddenly, did look rather more like a bladder.

But even though some people snickered toward the end, overall
Das Herz von Avis
had been a smashing success in Provincetown, certainly compared to its awful predecessor. Whatever you thought of the story—which proved awfully hard to follow for those who hadn’t troubled to read the program notes, especially after the organist, already somewhat off her feed after the razor sliced through the eyeball, accidentally played part of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” during Avis and Siegheidi’s love song—the film was tremendously well done, with lots of gloom and mountains and warlocks leaping out from behind chunks of scenery. I had enjoyed it, but on our walk home, Daisy seemed preoccupied.

Her daughter was trotting along between us, gamely enough but looking as if it would be a very long time before she gambled on seeing a film again. The silence was making me uncomfortable, since around Daisy I wasn’t used to it. “I thought the girl who played Siegheidi was awfully good,” I volunteered.

Glancing up and smiling a tad too quickly, Daisy tapped me with her handbag. “Lech,” she said. That made me sulky, because of course I hadn’t meant anything of the kind. I just thought that the actress had done marvelously well at looking like a statue while Frack-Frack was defiling her; even her eyes hadn’t moved. To see how long this could be done in reality, I began to stare at my nose as I walked. But soon I stumbled over Daisy’s nightmarish little dog, who had just come running up from the surf, wondering as usual why the bone that it had found there had disappeared in its mouth. To get another, it ran back down to the waterline, barking squeaky little attacking barks.