Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (25 page)

“Give me a for instance,” Frank said. Apparently, he was just interested; or considered it one of the duties of being Frank to collect knowledge that would make him omniscient about anything of potential consequence. As for Suzannah and me, in another temporary suspension of sibling hostilities, we kept on exchanging incredulous looks, unable to believe that we were in Frank Sinatra’s house—and bored. It would have been so much more fun if this Baastin jackass wasn’t here! We even wished that Sammy would come back; Momma wouldn’t have approved, but at least he was entertaining.

Senator Knowbody had shut his eyes in thought for a second. “All right,” he said. “Right after they overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala, I called over there and asked for a briefing—mostly because,” he laughed, “I was curious to hear how staging a coup
works,
if only so my father will have some sort of backup plan ready if things don’t work out in ‘60. Well, they’re good with the Hill, and even though I was still in my first term and had no particular importance then, they sent over a fellow who’d been there on the ground—Akin, Egan, something like that. As I remember it, he made me feel old, because for all that it was only a Central American one, he’d helped depose a government at the age of all of twenty-six, and I—well, I
wasn’t
twenty-six, all of a sudden. He was only supposed to brief me about Guatemala, but since I wasn’t bored and there’s a very nice nameplate on my desk that says ‘Senator,’ he told me about some other little things he’d been involved with.”

“Iran?” Frank asked, with a shrewd expression. Some years later, I found out this was a country.

“No—not that I’d have minded hearing about that one, believe me. Even if the Shah was royalty the way I’m monogamous, putting in a
hereditary
ruler is one trick that the Russians, for ideological reasons, can’t go tit for tat on us with, and I’ll remember that if the opportunity ever comes up. But there was one small operation this Egan fellow told
me about that stuck in my mind, just because it showed the infinite pains they can take.”

“Well?”

“I’m trying to remember it exactly—oh yes. It seemed there was some company in Belgium whose business was supplying safety equipment to small regional airports—windsocks, backup generators for runway lights, things like that. Well, without even bothering to consult his superiors, it occurs to our man Egan that this could be a useful company for the Agency to have a hand in. So he checked out the owner, who turned out to be a fairly sad case; back before the war, he’d found his wife in the bathtub with her wrists slashed one day, and apparently he hadn’t had much heart for anything from then on. In other words, it wouldn’t take too big a nudge to move him out. So friend Egan arranges for the company to experience a few modest difficulties—nothing majorjust enough to put the owner in a mood to sell. Well! Guess who bought it—and now it’s one of their most reliable ways of moving some fairly nasty things around without much risk of customs people putting a finger in. What do you think of that?”

“Not too bad,” said Frank, shaking his head. “That Egan sounds like a guy I wouldn’t mind having around to listen to my acetate. What’s happened to him since?”

“Oh, he’s stationed in … Paris now, I think. We’re not in touch, but I keep tabs.”

“Sounds like he’ll have an interesting future if you get in,” Frank mused.

“When
I get in—and yes, he may, along with everybody else in his shop. Sooner or later, we’re obviously going to have to do something about Castro, unless he’s gone away of his own volition by then—which I doubt, don’t you? And that mess in Indochina could start heating up again anytime. So-”

But Frank—whose own enthusiasm appeared to be flagging, and not a moment too soon if you asked the Gumstump sisters—was glancing toward the stairs. “Hey, who put the lights out?” he called, in a considerably rougher tone than the one he’d used to quiz Senator Knowbody. “It
just got
dark
in here. And what’s with the shirt—you been trying to make wine from a watermelon again?”

“It’s going to get a lot darker after I slug you,” said Sammy, now nattily attired in slacks, pink silk shirt, and gold necklace from which dangled a six-pointed star. Dropping his Jack Johnson pose, he sat down in an armchair between the two couches. “What does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” he asked, looking directly at me. I still couldn’t figure out which eye was the glass one.

I glanced over at Frank for his dispensation to use his bar and got a flick of a nod in reply. “Scotch, baby, and right up to the top of the glass,” Sammy called after me. “I’m not one of these bourbon drinkers—my throat and I have an understanding about that.”

While I was fixing it for him, the last song ended, and the needle lifted off the hi-fi turntable. “Mr…. Frank?” I called, making the “Frank” louder so as to make the “Mister” retrospectively inaudible. “Should I turn it over?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, doll,” he called back. “But be careful, huh? You’ve probably never picked up an acetate before, but they’re a little heavier than vinyl—and that’s about three fucking grand worth of record player you’re fooling with, baby-cakes.”

As the beauty of his
other
voice filled the room again, and I came back to the couches and handed Sammy his drink, Senator Knowbody stood up, having stubbed out his cigar half-smoked. “You know,” he remarked to no one in particular, “Frank’s shown me the house. But I haven’t really seen the grounds, and I’d like to while it’s, ah, still dark yet. Not to insult your singing, Frank, but I’ve heard this about six times tonight—and anyway, I think my ear for music is the one van Gogh cut off. Runs in the family—we can’t even remember what comes after ‘Give me your answer do.’ “

He looked down at Suzannah. “How’d you like to come with me?” he said. “I’ll bet you haven’t even seen the swimming pool.”

Well, she had absolutely no choice in the matter. In a situation such as this one, girls like us don’t choose; we get chosen, and Suzannah knew it. But that didn’t prevent her from shooting me a dark look of pure
maleviolence as she twitched her gown and self, looking rather like a black banana with each end partly peeled, up off the couch to accompany him.

Much later, of course, after Senator John F. Knowbody had become a distinct Somebody even to someone like me who only read
Variety
; I did have regrets—which I should probably mention. But no, too late: he went with Suzannah. He went with Lilith, my black-gowned sister.

In any case, she told me some time afterward that I hadn’t missed a lot. The only fun part, she said, was right after they got their clothes off, when he towed her on a rubber raft around the pool for a while by a strap held in his teeth; but just as she was starting to seriously enjoy the whole Cleopatra’s-barge aspect of this, he said something like, “Well, the choppers are still willing, but the back is now weak,” and that was that for that. When they got down to business, she said that he was very indolent, leaning back on the steps at the pool’s shallow end and getting her to straddle him, which gave her scrapes on both knees from bumping them repeatedly against the pool’s concrete wall. But that, she said, was still an improvement on his first idea, which had been for her to give him head underwater—a task that even Suzannah, who had the lungs of a medieval glassblower and had acquired them in a similar way, found herself unable to perform for long without experiencing a serious diminution of the celebrated Gumstump brio.

However, at the time that my sister’s rhythmically splashing keester was no doubt sending cascades of bright green water shivering all the way to the bougainvilleas, I hardly had space in my mind for curiosity about the state of things out in the swimming pool. I was too busy feeling stunned. You see, once Suzannah and Senator Knowbody split, I had simply assumed that Frank and I would soon depart upstairs to his vague but splendid bedroom, while Sammy wandered off to do whatever Negro sidekicks did in such circumstances—the dishes, I supposed, although we hadn’t eaten. But after no more than a couple of minutes, whose conversational content I do not remember, Frank suddenly held up his hand, as if to either stop traffic or bestow a blessing. “What’s today,” he asked, “Saturday?”

“Yeah.” Then Sammy glanced at his watch, which was flatter to his wrist than any I had ever seen. “Close to Sunday,” he said, “if you want to get technical about it.”

“I don’t. Believe me, getting technical about anything is the last thing I want to do right now. I’m beat.” He looked at his still upraised hand, as if only now recalling the chore it had been lifted to perform, and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been in the studio for six days straight. I need to rest,” he said, and stood up.

“See you in the morning, Nephew Remus. You know where everything is,” he told Sammy. Then to me, “You’ve been a sweetie, doll-cake. If you ever want to catch a show, there’s two tickets waiting at the box office the minute you find the dime for a phone call.” Then, as I was still blinking back my petrified astonishment, he was gone, back upstairs.

Since Sammy and I were both sitting down, and this now seemed a bit too much to have in common, I stood up. My plan was flawed, however, since he could stand up too; and promptly did so, to my resentment. With his one-glass-one-real-and-which-was-which eyes, he looked at me consideringly.

“You’re right,” he said abruptly, although I had said nothing. “I
could
have gotten that drink myself. But I decided that I wanted to accept it from your hand, because I wanted to see what your hand felt like.”

“And?” I said.

He smiled. “Cold and wet. I hoped it was the highball glass talking.”

The whole situation felt surreal to me, since this was Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, and he was a Negro, and it was late, and he was a Negro, and we were alone, and he was a Negro. My gown felt too tight; also insufficient to its job. Also, to reiterate something I may not have stressed sufficiently, he was a Negro. And on top of that, as if we didn’t have enough problems, he was a Negro. Plus which, I had just noticed something else: he was a Negro.

Abruptly, I felt dazed, as the realization came to me out of the black that he was a Negro. Why hadn’t anyone informed me until this crucial moment, including myself, that Sammy Davis, Jr., was a Negro? And was
he, himself, aware that he was a Negro? Clearly not, since we were alone and it was late and he was a Negro.

Briefly, I felt I had the upper hand, since evidently I knew something he didn’t—namely, that he was a Negro. However, on reflection, this struck me as no advantage after all, since we were still alone and it was still late and he was still a Negro. I am giving you a much abbreviated version of my thoughts in these few seconds, during the entirety of which, the seconds and the thoughts alike, Sammy Davis, Jr., was and remained a Negro. Beyond that, murky but enormous, hovered the ultimate questions:

Why had Frank made Sammy a Negro? In what way was that part of his plan? And were we all equal in Frank’s blue eyes?

“I have to know something,” I said, and felt glad that I had stopped before saying “first.”

“Sure.”

“Did you and Frank
arrange
this?”

“Do you mean did I ask him to find me a girl tonight? Or do you mean did we flip a coin?”

“Both.”

“Baby, it was neither,” he said. “If I hadn’t realized I was noticing things like the way you did your hair, I’d have gone to bed myself an hour ago.”

“But I was
brought
here,” I said. “My sister and I were brought some
two hundred miles
to this place. In a limousine,” I added, in what I sincerely hoped was not a pathetic attempt to impress him with anything more than the seriousness of the case.

“Vampira’s your
sister
? I’ll be damned. Dean would love that,” he said irrelevantly. “But now let me ask
you
something, all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“Baby, did anybody ask for a cigarette tonight?”

I thought for a second. “No,” I said.

Sammy flipped open a silver cigarette case on an end table. It was full. “They might have,” he said, and strolled to the bar. “Did anybody ask for some Dom Perignon tonight?” he asked, and pulled two bottles that had been icing in twin buckets there. “They might have.” Putting
them down again, he walked to the record shelves next to the hi-fi. Yanking out a Johnny Mathis album, he displayed it for me without a word.

“That’s how Frank
does
things,” he said, tucking Johnny Mathis back in for the night.

Enraged by now, I stamped my foot. “Did anybody ask for a goddamn live performance of ‘Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’ tonight, you black son of a bitch?” I shrieked. But he only smiled.

“Not yet,” he said. “But nobody’s asked you to go to bed with them yet, either.”

At a loss, I walked to the hi-fi, and picked up the jacket to Frank’s acetate so that I could pretend to be studying it. This was a dumb mistake, as the jacket was perfectly blank on both sides except for a scrawl reading “FAS Personal,” and however desperate I might feel, I did not want to appear cretinous. Putting it down, I propped my hands to either side of the hi-fi’s recessed turntable, peering down as the acetate went around and acting as if I were humming along with Frank’s voice in a state of acute musical concentration that forbade anyone’s breaking in on it, no matter how well intentioned, friendly, or burning with dark lust they might be. This too had its problems, chiefly that I had never heard this tune before and so had to guess at what I was humming as I hummed. Finally I gave that up and began pretending that I had been clearing my throat, albeit somewhat rhythmically and in the same state of acute musical concentration. In any case, the hi-fi’s needle was now under an inch from the revolving blank white label at the acetate’s center, and I had not bought myself any huge amount of time with this whole stratagem.

And now
the song is over. He’s right behind me.
His arms encircle my waist. Now his hands come up and press my bazooms through my gown, his wiry fingers on the white silk and my pale-pink skin creating a color contrast that would have my Momma keeling over in a dead faint midway through fetching the shotgun. He’s found my lollipops, which to my somewhat heavy-breathing consternation have begun to push out their red Jujubes. Yet his touch, while firm, is unexpectedly considerate. Plenty of men whose yearning looks have conveyed how
very, very badly they want to fondle my bazooms have managed to do precisely that, either kneading them with the sort of brutality best reserved for pizza dough or squeezing them by their girth as if sufficient pressure will fire off lollipops and Jujubes like little red rocket ships from the launching pad. But this, I have begun to recognize, is different. Sammy’s hands are gentle but authoritative, and the temperature of his breath on my neck feels just right, in the Goldilocksian sense of the term. My God, I have just noticed myself thinking, I can’t wait another minute; let’s get to hell out of here and find a bed, where I will give him the time of his life.