Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (24 page)

“Being five minutes older ain’t nothing to brag on,” I said.

“Being about five yards smarter is, sister mine.”

“You two know each other?” said Slowy as he got in with us, his surprised tone not entirely lacking in a certain idiot glee. He really wasn’t much older than a sprout, I thought; no wonder I’d wound up with nothing but a sitcom.

“Somewhat,” I said frostily.

“Somewhat,” Suzannah said icily.

We had not seen each other since the world premiere of
The Puerile Maid
in a warehouse in San Pedro two years previous, which I had prevailed on Mr. Willingham to escort me to for old times’ sake—not that he was disinclined, soon afterwards obtaining a private print of it to run off whenever I was busy with tight-costume fittings at the YAWP studios. As the movie uncesspooled, I had been unable to prevent myself from watching my sister’s performance with a critical eye, considering the different ways in which I, Gagilnil’s original choice, might have interpreted this or that aspect of the role. Evidently, the novice director had lost control of his star, for unless my recollections of the original scenario deceived me Suzannah had added a good deal of improvised business of her own, of a sordid lubricity that put my former employer’s rather trite imaginings to shame: a classic case of the tail wagging the
doghouse, you might say. Yet we had not exchanged a word either before the screening or after it, stalking out instead past the two flashlights that Gagilnil had hired Homer to keep waving in crisscross patterns outside the door to climb into our separate cars with no more than a single fiery glance of mutual hatred.

“So what you been up to?” I asked.

As if they were five tiny scarlet mirrors embedded in her fingertips, Suzannah was contemplating half her nails. “Puttin’ on Chanel lipstick right after suckin’ Woolworth’s cock,” she said, which even I had to admit did evoke Hollywood in a nutshell. “You?”

“I’m going to be starting a TV series soon,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” Suzannah snorted. “What’s it called—My
Sister the Mattress?”

“What makes you think it’s about you?” I said.

“I wouldn’t
fit
on TV,” she said. “Takes a flat-chested lil’ hunk a’ itsy-bitsy nothin’ like you to even get inside the box.”

That seemed to have gotten us about as caught up as we cared to be. I turned to Slowy, who still wore the look of a candy lover who had woken up between two giant bonbons. “Where are we going, anyway?” I said.

“Palm Springs.” He giggled again. “But I really can’t tell you anything more than that.”

Silence fell, and did not pick itself up by its own bootstraps afterwards. Lit within by beaded lights that put me in mind of an airplane somehow carrying its own portable runway, the limo sped on. Slowy fixed us all drinks, which added a gently syncopated clinking to the humming-birdaciousness of whooshing tires and distant throb of engine. We had left the city behind and now glided across trackless wastes—well, trackless but for the highway we were on—whose burning sands were being cooled in a vast fridge of cobalt darkness.

After the perpetual phosphorescent glow that hangs above L.A. at night fell away in our rear window, more stars than there were at M-G-M appeared and glimmered white in the dark blue above. Through the front windshield, the tail-lights of the cars ahead of us and the headlights of oncoming ones drew alternating stripes of red and
white across the desert. With nothing better to do, I began to count the stars, and had reached fifty when they all evaporated in another, smaller civic glow. We had just slid into Palm Springs.

I had never been there before. And deep down, I had always privately wondered if the people everybody else in America so desperately wanted to be actually existed, that is in the form we imagined them. Even in the joyous days when I felt thrilled to espy my own reflection in the mirror above the circular bedspread at the nerve center of Mr. Willingham’s sumptuous Hollywood Hills abode, I had never been under any illusion of having attained or even being in sight of the ultimate height of heights, where the gods of celebrity played, in my fear that they would prove chimerical, and turn out to be more folks who wanted to be someone else too, I had sometimes supposed that their twinkling role in our lives was simply what Santy Claus did the other three-hundred-sixty-four days of the year. Now, as the limo prowled along quiet streets whose expensive-looking bungalows and ranch houses sprawled dimly well beyond an intervening no-fan’s-land of lawns made complex and barbizoned by bladed splays of exotic desert plants, I suddenly guessed that I was closer than I had ever been,
physically
closer, to finding out if Santy Claus was real.

We pulled up in front of one of the estates. With a finger that quivered noticeably, Slowy mashed the button underneath the gate’s speaker grille, with which he had an indistinct conversation. Then we were in the garden, a jumpy Slowy leading the way down a flagstoned path while I engaged in a small war of hips with Suzannah—the black-gowned Lilith to my white-gowned Eve—over which of us would take precedence in his wake.

At the house, light poured through a door left ajar. Pushing it gently, Slowy led us into a vast living room, the midpoint of whose vaulted ceiling was delineated by a balcony that ran around three of its four walls, with doors and hallways dimly discernible behind the rails. From an expensive-looking hi-fi by the bar, music played. The furnishings were elegant, although a few of the paintings struck even my indifferent eye as surprisingly undistinguished, albeit competent.

Unless the daubed clowns in those pictures counted, we were alone, and somewhat bemused. But then a voice I had been hearing my whole life, one so familiar that it seemed to be emanating from within my very brain, indeed the same voice that was on the hi-fi, spoke from above us. It called to Slowy by his proper name: “Adam, my man! Is that you down there? It just better be, buddy, that’s all
Γ m
going to say.”

It was Sinatra. Behind him, as he slowly descended to received us, came a gentleman with face unknown to me, his grin strikingly if oddly reminiscent of autumn leaves with a pack of Chiclets at the center. “I was just showing Jack around the joint,” said our host casually. “Hello, girls,” more casually still.

“Well! Um, great seeing you, um, Frank,” Slowy said unexpectedly. “I’m sorry I can’t stay—something I can’t get out of.”

“Someone you’d like to get inio, more likely,” Frank said, slapping him on the back; at which touch Slowy gulped as if swallowing the wafer at his first communion. “Come on, kid—I’ve got something I want to ask you on the way out.” And off they strolled, leaving Suzannah and I to swap a glance of silent, instantaneous recognition that we had just been macked. This irked us both, as we had never needed any help before.

Frank came back from showing Slowy out. A man who needed no introduction himself, he introduced his beaming tagalong instead, who turned out to be a politician: Senator Jawn F. Knowbody, I didn’t quite catch the name. Nor did I care, as I had small patience with either government or Yankees, and even less when they were conjoined—that particular combination, needless to say, having produced our sainted Dixie’s Gotterdangeroong. And while his voice was pleasant, with nice wry bits around the edges, this crinkly son of a bitch’s accent was Yankee enough to affect my ears as if my coiffure were Georgia and Sherman was coming through. He was genial as he greeted us, and just as genial when he turned to Frank and said, precisely as if my sister and I hadn’t been standing thirty-six inches from his nose, “Angie couldn’t make it, huh?” Not only was I miffed on my own behalf; I was miffed for my and Suzannah’s whole, too, with a sisterly solidarity such as I hadn’t felt since our shared girlhood in Jolene.

“No such luck, my friend. She’s making a movie with Howard Hawks. Duke Wayne’s in it too. So’s Dean,” Frank said, and was asking us what we’d care to drink when a sliding door’s distinctive snicker-slither sounded behind us. Turning, I saw an apparently headless Negro, clad in swimming trunks and dark skin beaded with moisture, step into the room out of the night, one bright parallelogram of which behind him was dancing. Then the white towel in his hands came down off his face, and I found myself staring directly into the deep brown eyes—one real and the other, as I knew without being able to remember or guess which, glass—of Sammy Davis, Jr.

“Hello,” he said, just as Frank turned to Senator Knowbody and muttered, “Sammy’s been out looking for a land of the blind again. Wants to be its king, I think.”

“As in Martin Luther, is the next knee-slapper,” Sammy told me fairly dryly, the towel having done its job. “That’s so you’ll be prepared. What about Dean?” he asked.

“That Western for Hawks. They’re on location now.”

“I’m surprised they talked him into hauling his ass down there,” Sammy said. “He’s a religious man.”

“I didn’t think that was, ah, a drawback in
show business,
too,” Senator Knowbody said drolly. “That’s always been much more my own, ah, crucifix to bear. But what’s being Catholic got to do with making a Western?”

“Who said anything about being Catholic? Not caring about anything, that’s all Dean believes in. But he believes in it the way Gandhi believes in non-violence—or the way Sammy Cahn believes in Frank, here. But Catholicism? Forget it.”

“So speaks the Jew of that which he ignores,” Frank mock-rumbled, jabbing a blunt-nailed finger Sammy’s way. “When you’re raised in the Church, you never forget it, buddy of mine, and can you believe,” he said to Senator Knowbody, “that this undersized black bastard I call my buddy decided to make life simpler for himself by converting to Judaism? That’s like shooting craps with someone else’s dice and complaining because
both
of them aren’t loaded, sweet Jesus Mary mother of God. He’s one-stop shopping for the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Ah, Sammy,” Senator Knowbody said, grinning broadly, “I want you know how important your people’s support is to me. And I think my position on, ah, Israel will gratify you.”

“Israel? Who’s
she
?” Sammy said. “Try any position you like. I’m going to go get dressed.”

This whole time, ignored by all three of them, Suzannah and I had been standing rooted to the spot, swiveling our coiffures from speaker to speaker like over-bebaubled spectators at a tennis match. As soon as Sammy trotted up the stairs, however, the other two men grew instantly aware of us, as if their intimacy was in fact a rivalry whose expression always had to be deflected to third parties if they didn’t want to abruptly find themselves pinwheeling in the whirl and churn of an exaggerated cartoon fistfight. So Frank took my arm, and Senator Knowbody took Suzannah’s—she looking distinctly nettled, at least to a sister’s expert eyes, at getting second best—and with over-compensatory, genial solicitude they took us to the bar. There, Frank got busy mixing us a couple of highballs, and Senator Knowbody, seemingly to give himself some sort of presence and demonstrate that he too had the use of his hands, lit a cigar.

“Um, Mr. Sinatra?” Clearly, Suzannah was still hoping that she wasn’t irretrievably destined for Senator Jawn Fucking Knowbody. But she also sounded something I had never heard her sound in all our lives together, namely nervous—and I could not avoid taking a certain malicious pleasure in this.

“Frank,” he corrected her, pouring. “What is it, doll?”

Suzannah dipped her wild brunette mane at the hi-fi. “Well, I know that’s
you
—but I’ve never heard these songs before, leastways not with you singing them. So I wondered…”

“It’s the first acetate pressing of a new long-player we got done recording this week,” he told her. “Normally, I don’t listen to myself at home. I like to think that I’m a proud man but not a vain one, and it wouldn’t be showing much class even if I did feel like it—you see that, don’t you, doll. But right after we finish a record, I wear out the acetate making sure that everything’s Α-OK. Because it’s got to b
e perfect,
right down to the fourth son-of-a-bitching violin on track nine, or back to the studio we go.”

“Well, how often do you have to go back?” I asked, largely because I had begun to miss the sound of my own voice. “Frank,” I added, to irritate my sister.

“Not often.” He handed me my drink, and then Suzannah hers. With a jerk of his head, he indicated that we were all going to move now to the facing couches out in the middle of the room. I ended up on the same one as him, at which Suzannah both indicated her displeasure and put in a bid for a shift in the arrangement by sticking out one hip more than she needed to as she turned to sit down, thereby letting any interested parties on
our
couch observe the mimetic fervor with which her black gown delineated the precise contours of her rump, and note in addition that she probably didn’t have panties on underneath, not even of the sheerest, flimsiest sort—down, Sprout, hold on; we’ve got a ways to go here. Not that my sister’s little let’s-put-the-dumb-back-in-dumb-show mattered much, because as soon as we were all settled in, the men went right back to ignoring us.

Holding his highball in both hands, Frank counted the ice cubes.
“Should
I think anything special about Israel, Jack?” he asked unexpectedly, having kept that in his head the whole time.

“Oh, I don’t think the, ah, Arabs are going to be taking another crack at them anytime soon, if that’s what you mean,” Senator Knowbody said affably, as interested in his cigar as Frank was in his drink. He grinned. “After all, they’ll have to get their ordnance replaced first. But there’s always plenty going on there. You know, the Israelis do us a lot of little favors in, ah, that part of the world, in exchange for our backup on the big thing of survival.”

“Cloak-and-dagger stuff, you mean,” Frank said. “CIA.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me: what should I think of
them
?” Frank asked. “Sometimes it sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me. Boys’ games. Comic books.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Senator Knowbody said. “They’re good, Frank, really good. If I get in—
when
I get in—they are the bunch I’m going to go to whenever I need something in a hurry, because they’re smart and fast and they don’t dillydally about on-the-other-hand-what-if-the-Queen-gets-her-tits-in-an-uproar
the way State does. And they don’t miss a trick. I forget who said it first or what about, but it fits them: the CIA is in the details.”