Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (26 page)

It had not yet occurred to me that he might give me the time of mine. However, I now grasped that I really
couldn’t
wait another minute—and that we really did have to get to hell out of here, though to find what hardly mattered. I had remembered something Sammy didn’t know, which was that my sister Suzannah, no less than I, could make men fire a gun faster than Wyatt Earp, and that she often did just this when she was bored with their exertions—or lack of same, though I could hardly know as yet how real the risk was in this case. Which meant that, at any moment, she and Senator Jawn Ε Knowbody might come sauntering through the patio door all of six feet from my eyes, and slightly over five from where Sammy’s hands were caressing me. So long as we were out of sight by the time the two of them returned, whatever he and I did or didn’t wind up doing would matter a lot less, for I knew that Suzannah, upon finding the living room deserted, would simply take it for granted (no doubt with much bitterness, as I could not forbear interrupting these urgent specunabulations to note with some delight) that I was off somewhere making seismical, ring-a-ding-ding-dinging hunchy-punchy with Frank. But never Sammy, as the heritage that she and I shared—not to mention the promise that Momma had solemnly extracted from us both—would simply block the possibility from any access to her mind.

“Where are you taking me?” I murmured, to nudge Sammy’s thoughts in the direction I now prayed they would go.

“Wherever you like, baby,” he murmured back, his lips tender in my
hair. “Wherever you want. Hey, I’ve got an idea: let’s go all the way to the moon. How does that sound to you, baby?”

Clearly, this wasn’t going to do at all.
“Sammy, for Christ’s sake!”
I howled, whirling to face him. “My
sister Suzannah could walk in any second now, and she is hopelessly afflicted with every last one of the prejudices to which I am so evidently and blessedly immune! You can go on fiddling and farzeling around with my beautiful white bazooms till Doomsday if you like, but get me the fuck behind a door this instant/”

From the look in Sammy’s eyes, or eye—
which one was it?
—I saw that this outburst had changed the mood for him, and that he was trying to determine whether to swing with that or not. Having come to a decision, he quietly spoke two words whose meaning I found flabbergastingly cryptic—but only for a second.

“The left,” he said. Taking my all but inert hand, he led me toward the stairs.

As we ascended, I thought of what I’d promised Momma. In a somewhat convoluted but nonetheless dandy piece of reasoning, I took what comfort I could from the thought that, after all, I wouldn’t be sleeping with a coon in Los Angeles, the apocalyptic scenario of her worst nightmare. I’d be sleeping with a Jew in Palm Springs, and though not exactly recommended, wasn’t that permissible in her book? God bless America when all is said and done, I thought, reaching around for my gown’s zipper as we reached the top of the stairs.

Gallantly, he showed me through the door first, then stepped in and closed it behind me. Hearing another click afterward, I realized with a silent prayer of thanks that he both could lock and had locked it. There was nothing in the room but an enormous bed. Midway there, I turned to face him. Taking a deep breath, I let my gown fall to my waist, then pushed it down past hips and knees until I could kick it off and away from my still high-heeled feet.

Needless to say, like my sister, Suzannah, I wore no underwear. As he took in the sight before him—from hair of eternal fire to fire-engine-red high heels and back, pausing along the way at two gallumphing, peachy, red-tipped Dixie Flyers, a torso like a Stradivarius, and hips that
flared out and soared up like cathedral arches to either side of the flaming mystery of all mysteries whose secrets he would soon penetrate even if of course he could not, as a man, ever entirely divine them—well, as he looked me over, I do not think I flatter myself beyond the pale by reporting that the expression in not only Sammy’s right eye but his left one altered slightly.

It was Oscar night.

We hurled each other into our arms. We threw our mingled self upon the bed. We tested the springs until they snapped. I rolled over him. He rolled over me. We rolled over us. We came together until we came together. When we were finally done, I sat up in a daze, and felt the hot blood pound down like Niagara beneath my dazzled skin before, unlike Niagara, it pounded right back up again. Next to me, Sammy’s breathing sounded slightly ragged; he glanced up with a smile. Tugging his wrist out from behind his head, I looked at his watch, and saw that I had just passed the most amazing ninety-two minutes in my far from inconsiderable experience as a mistress of the horizontal arts.

“Got another date?” he asked, with another smile.

“Not for the rest of my life,” I said, and meant it.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with it any longer,” he said. “But you really are something to look at, baby. And to touch. And to…”

“And to?”

“And to everything,” he said.

Right then, I would have done whatever he asked. Not only would I have swung naked from a chandelier at the opera for him, I would have let my own dear Rover mount me in Macy’s front window at high noon on a Sunday had such been his desire. Had he proposed it, which he did not, I might well have even let him diddle my caboose, which no man black white Martian or producer ever has, had or will.

Live with it, Sprout. Not gonna happen. Move on. You’ve got no one to resent but yourself. You could have tried to make all this stuff up about Suzannah instead of me, if you weren’t so damn scared of her.

But to resume: at that moment, I was Sammy’s slave.

It did not last.

And why, oh why, I wonder even now—why did I ever take it into

my head to tell him about Momma?

■

“ … That’s what she said,” I giggled-” ‘whatever you do, just don’t sleep with no coon!’ “I may have been a little drunk, though whether with liquor or love I did not know, and now never will. In any case, ignoring the new tension in the body I was straddling, I then compounded my error by reaching forward to tug his ears, even as my newly competitional bazooms staged a shoving match over which one got to tickle his nose, and saying playfully: “What do you think, Samby—maybe that’s just why I did it?”

In an instant, the room had become an empty glass, and Sammy was an ice cube that some giant hand—Frank’s, I guess—had dropped in it. Wasn’t melting none, either. For sure, no bourbon followed, nor libation of any sort.

“ ‘Samby
’?” he said.

“I didn’t say ‘Samby.’ I said ‘Sammy,’ “I had a distinct feeling of dawning unhappiness. “I know I did.”

He pushed me off him and stood up, reaching for a robe whose nearby presence on a hook I had not noticed in that breathless moment before the titanic collision of our black and white flesh in the now icy night—a moment now some ninety-seven minutes past. “You know you did not,” he said. “And so do I. So do my ancestors, who went on singing like birds as they were hunted like dogs and packed in like sardines to be drowned like rats or else sold like cattle and worked to death like plain and simple,” he paused, meaningfully I thought, “niggers.”

“Well, I guess I sort of thought that we were friends now,” I said.

“Skip it. Get dressed. You’re lucky I’m not making you do that
after
I throw you out.”

I slowly got up, allowing him and anyone else who might be interested a last, prolonged glimpse of my extraordinary, magnificently pale, Jujube-tipped and mystery-licked body—upon which even Sammy’s anger did
not prevent his right eye from lingering noticeably, even though his left eye didn’t know what his right one was doing.

“But"—I had thought fast and hard during that interlude-”this isn’t even your house. It’s Frank’s. Shouldn’t we go wake him up first?” I asked, pulling up my gown.

“Why?”

“Well, don’t you need his I don’t know permission, before you throw me out?”

“For this? He’d need mine to keep you here.”

“But earlier-”

He held up his hand. “I know—those dumb minstrel jokes. Baby, to say that St. Francis isn’t from Assisi may be the definition of cutting a long story short. But can
you
sing like that album we were listening to downstairs, baby? I didn’t think so. And you know why? I can’t, either. But on a good night, when the drummer doesn’t lag—I
hate
that!—then yes, I almost can, and I’m so much a better dancer it’s not funny. No guinea from Hoboken is ever going to be able to do the splits worth a damn, and I’m the one with all the razzle-dazzle. Baby, he knows those things about me. I know them about him. That’s a way we understand each other that nothing else can touch—not my skin, not bad jokes for the cheap seats, not Sam Giancana.”

I had no idea who the last-named person was, but I forged ahead anyhow. “Too bad none of us in the cheap seats ever see what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to get his goat. But that wasn’t even true, because I just
had.
You see, when he said “I
hate
that,” his voice had more jump in it than at any other time in this conversation. Generally, he just sounded tired—bone-tired, skin-tired, skin-and-bone-tired. And I had thought about how the only department of the vast human endeavor in which my own voice spoke with a similar decisiveness and un-overrulable confidence of judgment was that which takes place in bed and occasionally taxicabs and such, and had reflected that here was where Sammy and I might have shared the same mutual respect, as one great athlete and Olympian to another, that he and Frank did in the realm of entertainment.

Then it occurred to me that had I only been half as up-front about the whole black-white thing as his hands had been on my gazongas when we were standing before the hi-fi, bringing the topic up before we hit the hay and alluding to myself rather than Momma, race might have been another such meeting ground. Put simply, whatever fearful and vicious notions might be clogging and clouding our brains in this regard, no white Southerner can be said to be
uninformed
on the subject, and black people know this even if our shared history has given them precious few reasons to throw roses at it ever since the first slaver dropped anchor and hoisted the “
FOLKS FOR SALE
” sign in lovely Charleston Bay. So do we know this about them; so had Sammy known this about me, and I him, from the moment our hands had fleetingly touched as I passed him his drink. He’d felt the Dixie in my fingers, I a trace of the old sun and the ships, the ships, the ships—the ships so gaily setting forth from West Africa, monstrous with creaking rigging and their white sails swollen like bazooms upon the sea, centuries ago—in his palm. We might have talked about it all. But I had waited to bring it up until the moment when he might have been enjoying a brief illusion that race was out of the picture, and it was too late now, for any of it. You can’t
establish
things in retrospect, Sprout. Besides, he was about to throw me out, right on my upside-down heart.

“This isn’t
fair”
I faltered, as he marched me down the stairs; although how, and to whom, and if I was even referring to his actions, were all unplumbable to me.

“That’s very interesting.” He faced me at the door.

“You’d
never
do this to a girl,” I said, and we both heard “dare” and “white” intrude although I hadn’t spoken either word, “if you weren’t rich and famous.”

“Let’s not get into sophistry, baby, I don’t swing that way. If I weren’t rich and famous, a chick like you would holler rape the second I smiled at you on the street. We both know I can only do that from a stage, or in a movie theater where I’m twenty feet high and you’re eating popcorn, pretending that you don’t ever wonder what it would be like if it was me feeling you up and not the cracker who brought you.”

Opening the door, he nodded toward the street. It sank in that I was now going to be cast
outside
Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, a town with which I was unfamiliar, and that I didn’t have a dime anywhere on my begowned and flustered person. Somehow, when you’re a Gumstump and you already know you ain’t wearing underwear, you never think you’ll need to bring a purse.

“Sam-w-my,” I said, careful how I said it-”I bet you twenty dollars you can’t mispronounce my name.”

That did stop him, and he looked at me differently for a second. “You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

But then his mouth got tight again, and his right eye grew as hard and expressionless as his left one (and how could I have ever had the slightest doubt?) always was. “So go get famous,” he said. “In this country, believe me, it’s the only way.”

“Believe me I am trying that,” I said.

“Believe me, I wish I could wish you luck.”

“Just maybe I won’t need it,” I said.

He looked briefly incredulous. “Are you kidding, baby? I don’t know what you’ve got when you’re standing up, but talent’s the dice, not the throw. Why do you think Frank only feels at home in casinos?”

“So do’I,” I said.

“So do I,” he said.

“Well, I guess I’ll be heading on now,” I said.

“I guess you will,” he said.

“At least give me a hug goodbye first,” I said, thinking that there might be money in the robe and maybe I could grab it and then run off real fast before he could catch me.

I do think Sammy hesitated. But then he said, “Forget it, baby. I’d sooner hug Richard Nixon. Hit the road. Scoot. Beat it. It’s all been lovely, sweetest, but I’m tired now, and I’ve had enough.”

“Sam-m-my,” I said, “it’s four
A.M
. I don’t know anybody in Palm Springs. I don’t even know if there’s a bus from here back to L.A., or where I would present myself to get on it. Where am I going to go? What’ll I
do
, for God’s sake?”

“You know, frankly, I don’t-”

And then he heard what he was about to say, and started laughing. It was a kind of laugh that we call laughing with your heart down South, and he never did finish the sentence; nor did he need to. “
Oh”
he gasped, throwing back his head to drink of the entire indigo sky; and for a second, I had the feeling we’d been worth it to each other, after all.