Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (22 page)

Someone watches.

For the kicker, we cut to Alfred Junior as an awful suspicion dawns. Can it be—has his revenge failed, after he went to all this trouble? Striding to the table, he tears aside the blindfold. With bitterness, he sees that he was right, because—

You
l*ked
it.

Someone watches.

■

“Well, what do you think?” Gagilnil asked, lighting a cigarette as I handed the treatment back. “If you ask me, this could be the beginning
of a whole new ball game. Not only does it have something to say—hell,
scream
—about the human condition, it’s got
mood.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do this, Mr. Gagilnil,” I broke it to him. “Much as I would truly adore having my very first movie part. I mean, what would my dear Rover say, back home? Either he’d be plumb mortified for my sake, or else he’d feel left out.”

“But dogs don’t even
go
to the movies,” he protested.

“Y’ain’t never been to Jolene, Alabam’,” I said with some pridaciousness; mentally adding “don’t-give-a-damn.”

“There can’t be any
art
cinemas in Jolene,” he said, with hauteur.

“No, but there are a lot of
men
in Jolene,” I explained, “and they usually go to watch the smokers straight from hunting. I used to play outside the door when I was a little girl, just listening to all that whooping and barking and the occasional gunshot and wondering which of those men was my poppa.”

“But this part was
written
for you,” Gagilnil complained. “How am I supposed to make
The Puerile Maid
now? It’d be like
Triumph of the Will
without Nazis, or
Birth of a Nation
without the Klan. Oh, sure, I could rewrite—but it won’t be the same. And this was my big chance to break out.” At which point, to my astonished consternation, he
did
break out, in sobs.

Although my mind was made up like Joan Crawford’s face in her later years, when her maquillage approached the hull of the
Merrimac
in resiliency, I did feel pretty bad for him. But then inspiration struck. It would involve a sacrifice, but then Gagilnil had been mighty kind to me—what with giving me my first job in this town, and all.

“You know, Mr. Gagilnil, I can’t do this. But my sister probably will,” I said. “And she makes
me
look like a tongue depressor with pretensions. Can I have the use of your telephone?” Barely taking in what I was saying, he waved me to it, the cigarette on his lower lip still trembling.

At the telephone, I hesitated. Suzannah lived in the Shakespearean hamlet of Alcapp, Tennessee, raising soybeans by day and hell by night. But we had not spoken in some years. In our sisterly rivalry, she and I had long been like Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, except that no one knew of us and we were trash.

I looked back at Gagilnil on the sofa. He had buried his face in his hands. Between them, his cigarette stuck out like a little tombstone on fire. Sighing, I dialed Suzannah’s number.

She picked up on the seventeenth ring. “Aw—heart attack, my abundant ass,” I heard her hollering. “If you can’t stand the heat, get to hell outta my Dixie cups. Now grab your pants and go, and don’t forget to take your sample case with you.”

When she heard who this was, she snickered cattily. “You got that Awscar yet?” she asked. “I must have fell asleep for that part of the broadcast, I guess. Or maybe my flushin’ toilet just drowned out your acceptance speech, Sis.”

“Now don’t you cry for
me,
bitch,” I said. “I’m here in California with a sad Jew on my hands. Listen-” and I told her of the situation. As I recounted the plot of
The Puerile Maid,
Suzannah kept making empathetical, nostalgicky “Mmm-hmmm” noises, as one or another element of its scenario reminded her of little memories of her own life. “Well, no wonder you can’t handle it,” she said when I was done. “Y’always were such a mousy lil’ prude, even when we were puttin’ on our shows for the boys down to the swimming hole and you never
would
somersault while you was doin’ the cannonball. What’s the money like?”

“Green and sort of rectangular. Got pictures of dead folks on it, mostly in wigs or whiskers.”

“Well, it’s gotta beat getting turnips back for soybeans, that’s for sure. But why’re you askin’
me
for? Why ain’t you talkin’ to Cousin Dewey Dell or Cousin Eula over t’ Mississippi? Or Cousin Red in Arno, Texas? Or Cousin Maggie the Cat, way down Delta way? Maybe she’s tired a’ watchin’ that nothin’-but-droop-in-these-drawers husband she’s got drink himself into stark m-sensibility…”

She went on until she had named all of us—all nine of Great-Grandma Jolene’s great-granddaughters. In the realm of male horniness, we were what the Muses were in the realm of artistic inspiration.

I hated to say it, but I had to. “Because you’re the only one of us who’d do it, that’s why,” I said.

Suzannah crowed in malignant triumph. “That’s right! That’s
damn
right and mighty white of you, sister mine, and don’t you ever forget it. Y’all are such ‘fraidy-cat wusses I sometimes wonder if any a’ you are real Gumstumps at all. Ony thing I won’t do is sleep with a coon, and that’s just ‘cause Momma made me promise. It was her dyin’ request.”

“Is she dying?”

“No, but she will be sometime. Probably a’ pure happiness when I wind up in the sack with the next Presi-dent of the United States, she told me.”

After I had given her the practical instructions for getting to Los Angeles and finding the Maxwell House, I hung up. Having stopped crying, Gagilnil was staring bleakly at the plastic palm tree in front of the ocean-sky backdrop. Sitting down next to him and patting his hand, I told him of Suzannah, at which he brightened up considerably. Then, having come to another decision while I was on the phone, I took a deep breath. “And I guess I’ll be moving on now, Mr. Gagilnil,” I told him. “You’ve been good to me, but it’s time for me to go in search of Darryl Zanuck once more and get on with my career.”

Apparently having had some intimation of this, he nodded. “Bettie’s going to miss you,” he said.

“Miss who?” I said, and we both smiled. “Anyway, I’ll still be seeing her at the Poil.”

I stood to go, but then hesitated. I had to ask.

“Mr. Gagilnil?”

“Yes?”

“How come, in all this time, you never once tried to lay a finger on me? Not that I’m complaining, exactly—but I am curious.”

“Why did I never touch the Happy Isles, you mean?” he said, with a wistful stare at my gazongas.

“Yes. Ivar Street is a sordid milieu, and on my arrival here, a girl like I would have struck most folks in your long unpolished shoes, one of which is presently unlaced as well—made you look!—as both an easy and a, not to flatter myself unduly, tempting, well let’s split the difference and just say ripe, target for sexual victimization. Are you, by any chance, a decent man?”

“Jesus
Christ,
no!” Gagilnil almost shouted, reeling as if struck. “Bite your tongue. No, no, not with your lips parted, that just drives me insane. To tell you the truth, Miss, it would have violated my aesthetic sense—in which I do take some pride, however little our work together documents it. You see,
you
—from your creamy skin to your miraculous gazongas, from your hair of eternal ruby fire to your incredible caboose—are a wonder of nature and a human Baskin-Robbins. I, on the other hand, on my best day, which believe me is on a calendar that would leave you blind and choking if you tried to blow the dust off it, would have to strive to manage a fairly miserable approximation of an absconding CPA on his first and no doubt last weekend in Vegas, since the cops would have his tuchus to the fire as soon as he tried to seduce a chambermaid by proudly wiggling a single five-dollar poker chip before her disbelieving and contemptuous eyes. The
contrast
would have been unbearable, you see.”

“I’ve slept with ugly folks before,” I said-”sometimes even with the lights on and breakfast together afterwards, and no great harm has come of it. That can’t be the only reason.”

“It is.”

“It is not,” I said, noting with some unease that I was rapidly growing taller again. As my bazooms sprang forth like bouncy twin editions of the U.S.S.
Missouri
hastening to receive the surrender of the Japanese, my upside-down heart became two globes unholdable-up by any Atlas, or indeed any human agency save my own bodaciofied, endlessly ascending legs—aw, come on, Sprout! Let me
down.

“All right!” Gagilnil said, as I resumed normal stature. “It’s
because you make me feel so fucking Jewish,
all right? In just the
worst
goddam way. When I look at you, I feel so hairy and disgusting and Jewish and disgusting and potbellied and Jewish and impotent and Jewish and disgusting that it just makes me want to
plotz
to think that I’m inside this skin, for Chrissakes. Do you have
any fucking idea
how all you longlegged, big-boobed Southern broads make the rest of us feel, here in this meshuggenah promised land we all allegedly share? It’s intolerable! You shouldn’t tolerate us! You should stick us in ovens today! Go on!
Go on! I fucking dare you! Have the fucking courage of the fucking principles of your fucking tits! Act on what your ass is telling the world! Gas me with your farts! Burn me with your hair! Shovel me into the mass grave of your snatch! Mix my bones up with my grandfather’s, as you grind them into pumice! What the fuck do you care!
You’re all getting laid!”

He took a breath.

“Don’t you understand,” he said, “that every time I stare at your jugs, I wonder if Hitler knew something I didn’t? All in all, it’s been enough

to drive any reasonably intelligent man berserk.”

I left him there—and maybe you should too, Sprout. You worry me. For one thing, far from being a middle-aged, broken-down nudie photographer, you aren’t
(or weren’t,
she breathes, in a sudden flash of intuition) hardly a day over sixteen, unless my formerly superb instincts have deserted me for good. And if you’ve ever so much as met anyone of the Hebraic persuasion, as Momma used to put it when minding her manners in front of them, I for one will be startled right out of my pink panties, not to give you more ideas than you know what to do with. I don’t know why in soybeans or hell you’re so down in the dumps, but you ought to try not to make the expression of it as unhealthy and woebegone-with-the-wind as the original feeling is.

There, that’s better.

To resume. Exiting the Maxwell House, I stepped into the white skull and blue Jell-O of a Los Angeles high noon. It was a typical day on Ivar Street: the remaining letters on the marquee of the shuttered nightclub across the way, closed for many a moon since a freakish bolt of lighting crashed its skylight in, still advertised the triumphant re-urn of
USA AL XANDER Κ NE.
Plump Judy Maine, our local crazy lady—things hadn’t gone that well for her, so my now former employer had told me, since the day her husband walked into the sea—came lurching along the sidewalk, still looking for her lost dog. Sauntering toward me from the bogus Riviera of his apartment building up
the street was Gagilnil’s debonair neighbor Joe Gillis, a scriptwriter whose smile’s weak charm belied his experience as a veteran of both German and Japanese prison camps in the war. Thinking I might hitch a ride with him to Culver City or at least Schwab’s, I hoisted my barely clad bazooms like the Jolly Roger; but the two-faced grin he gave them in reply froze unexpectedly into a look of panic, and he hurried past me to beat a couple of repo-company gumshoes to his car. Sliding into the driver’s seat just as they reversed course to make for their own wheels, he floored the accelerator and sped off toward Sunset Boulevard.

As I peered after him, hand visored like, Magellan’s, I contemplated the unseemly haste with which our endlessly provisional Los Angeles lives could change. Just then, my own did, the unlikely announcement of the fact being a gigantic set of antlers that now glided to a halt before my nose. They turned out to be mounted on the hood of a long black limo, above an engraved silver plaque on the grille that asked: “Are These Yours, Buddy?”

A smoked window was rolled partly down, releasing the actual smoke behind it. From within a Havana cloud came a voice whose regional accent put me pleasantly in mind of my beginnings in Jolene.

“I was right—you look even better in color. Could you use a lift?”

“Well, I wasn’t feeling especially depressed, to be honest,” I cautiously replied. “But I’m always happy to hear a funny story.”

Gurgling mirth from inside the limo. “Say, can you act?”

“Say, Mister—can you
pee
?” retorted I.

“Get in, then,” said the voice, opening the door.

This was how I soon found myself a starlet under contract to Y. Avery Willingham Productions, makers of Westerns that featured up to four horses onscreen simultaneously and a variety of other Β pictures in which you could often see the scenery wobbling when a character was slammed up against it and told to talk fast—but not too fast, as zippier dialogue tempos would have required lengthier and more elaborate scenarios to push the movie up to feature length. Budget-busting was ever the great fear at Y. Avery Willingham Productions, although its eponymous overseer was flush enough personally to own both a Tex-Mex
restaurant, which was in Los Feliz, and a genuine Calder, which was in his foyer.