Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (29 page)

“Hello, sir,” he said. “I don’t know if this’ll make sense to you, but I just wanted to say thanks for keeping me alive.”

“Are you sure that you don’t mean awake?” I said, mildly stupefied, as we shook hands.

“You mentioned in your lecture that you worked on the Manhattan Project, sir. My outfit was slated to land on Kyushu when we invaded Japan. I was on Iwo Jima, and we"—peculiarly, his attention seemed to wander for a moment; I wondered madly if he had spotted the pink sweater-”we were told that Japan would be worse, sir. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be here today, if it wasn’t for Hiroshima.”

“Don’t forget Nagasaki,” I said, perhaps a bit sharply.

“Yes, sir. I know a lot of people do. I wouldn’t know why that is, sir. Anyhow, that’s all I wanted to say. Appreciate your time.” He nodded and turned to go.

I glanced around. No pink sweater. She was gone, and something about him—some quality of banked but stokable fire—had impressed me.

“Wait,” I called. “Have a cup of coffee with me. My train doesn’t leave for an hour yet—and I don’t know a soul in Rochester, Minnesota.”

■

As I recall, his name was some Scotch-Irish monosyllable or near-monosyllable, and it and he were a good match. Alert gray eyes, good jaw, a shrewd calm voice with attractively gruff lifeguard and policeradio undertones, the whole thing pinned together by the perennial cigarette that was his combat-tautened generation’s universal badge of (ironic enough, this, when you recall the Surgeon General’s conclusions some years later) survival. In fact, in former days, the sandy-haired fellow sitting across from me in the railroad station’s coffee shop would almost surely have been the beneficiary of a surprise state visit from good King Priap—and the purring motor of my sexual charisma, once turned on, had outraced tighter train schedules than this one when it had to.

Somewhat to my own surprise, however, neither this kind of appeal nor its distaff equivalent aroused me that much anymore, and I hadn’t even noticed him during my lecture. Instead, and virtually from opening joke to closing thought, my reason to value the podium’s concealment had been the hunchbacked girl in the thick glasses midway back, the hump quite prominent beneath pink wool. The thought of her incredulous delight and abject gratitude when she was unexpectedly invited to pay fealty to my body with her imperfect one had been enfevering enough for the visiting speaker from the Atomic Energy Commission to start plucking at the loose rubber band around his wrist as he spoke—until the pings grew audible to the first row, which was how I found out I’d been doing it.

The urgings of the lower brain having been denied by her premature exit—with annoyance, I realized that I hadn’t even gotten to see her spine’s curve as she walked—I settled for keeping the upper one interested. Rochester was his hometown, he said, although he’d spent a short and apparently melancholy spell as a child in Florida. After his discharge from the Marines, he’d come back here to work in his father’s garage. But Bruno, the immigrant mechanic his dad had saved from an almost certain doom back East by hiring him twenty-odd years ago, seemed to have things well in hand, so the son had started taking courses on the GI Bill instead.

What did he want to do next? A rare unfettered grin informed me that this was the most interesting question he’d ever heard, and that he’d heard it often from himself He’d thought sometimes of becoming a journalist, and at other times of teaching; after being on the receiving end of it for a while, he guessed he’d gotten more interested in how history worked. Then again, about three days a week he thought of heading for the Gulf of Mexico, buying a fishing smack, and pointing it out to sea with no destination but the horizon, his dream since boyhood. So what did all of that add up to? Hands thrown apart above his elbows on the table, and joined only by the trailing rope of blue smoke from the cigarette in one of them, he amiably confessed he didn’t know.

I did. For a man who had once cut a Gordian knot by whirling Robert Oppenheimer around three times before shoving him at a wall map, it was child’s play to rearrange these only superficially random ingredients into a recipe. As I boarded my train and he called “Goodbye” and “Thanks, sir,” I had no idea if he would take my advice—carefully hoarded until just before boarding time, to maximize its effect—that he should try for the CIA. Yet a year or so later came a postcard signed with a name I had long since forgotten, now briefly recalled, and soon forgot again, and showing the surprisingly small stream that is the Mississippi that far north. It let me know the sender had been accepted by “the shop,” and thanked me warmly for my guidance.

Needless to say, I didn’t answer. Unless you’ve got a pressing reason, you don’t start a correspondence with a future spy. In any case, my only real concern had been to while away an hour, as un-idly as I could, before a train turned up to take me from somewhere to somewhere, and that hour was long since done.

As I recall, two or three other cards came over the next few years, until the sandy-haired, gray-eyed chap I’d steered to the Agency evidently concluded that I was indifferent—or else grew less grateful to me, I suppose, though I don’t really. The last one came from Guatemala, I believe, and since it turned up in my AEC mailbox not many weeks before the coup down there, I imagine he was involved with that in some way. But I scarcely paid attention, for this was in 1954—the year of an encounter that was to have far greater consequences for me.

As at so many other crucial junctures of my life, it all began with a thump of Good King Priap’s scepter.

I was leaning casually against a wall at Kay Josephs’ piano bar on Ρ Street in the lost blocks between Georgetown and Dupont Circle, right near the bridge above Rock Creek. If these two dimly lit rooms below street level in fact went by another name, the secret never passed the lips of Kay himself, an enticingly obese but disappointingly poised gent with a taste for hints, mints, and taunts. Denied the help of either a sign or telephone-directory listing in finding its way to his door, his all-male clientele had to rely instead on word of mouth, bathroom-stall graffitoes, and the guesswork invited by the chartreuse glow in the row of windows that hugged the sidewalk, too low for less gonadically goaded pedestrians to even notice they were there.

And to be candid, may I say that I find less enchantment in today’s boisterous blatancies than I did in that urgent, quasi-conspiratorial furtiveness, so reminiscent of espionage in everything but its object. Among its other special joys, repression guaranteed that a high proportion of Kay Josephs’ customers would lift their usual gin rickeys to mouths figuratively and sometimes literally twitching with an abject belief in their owners’ ghastliness—and while neurosis hardly equaled physical deformity when it came to putting a crowbar in my pants, this self-loathing did add zeal to my generosity in letting such wretched creatures briefly share me with myself, like pigeons on a heroic statue.

Despite the rich field of masculine misery it offered to my good king’s selflessness, their unhappiness otherwise left me mystified. But then I wasn’t homosexual, and indeed rather looked down on the breed. Confirmed in Schenectady and never revised, my own attitude was simply that it made no sense to deprive half the planet’s population of a chance to taste of life under good Priap’s rule, on no better grounds than their particular spoonful of chromosomal alphabet soup.

Indeed, the only worry that I was obliged, willy-nilly, to share with these pansies was fear of the vice squad. The all too frequent surprise
visits of D. C.’s finest explained the stacks of old
Washington Posts
left thoughtfully parked by Kay at all exits, enabling his clients to cover their faces should they chance to appear in the next day’s edition. For the mute assertion of the bearer’s normality they provided, sports sections were in particular demand, resulting in arrest photographs that often seemed to depict men dismayed by the Redskins’ latest loss or setting grainily marched off to lockup for their faith in the Red Sox. I believe that such explanations were often fobbed off by parents on credulous children perusing the paper, thus not only preserving the tykes’ naïveté but impressing them at an early age with the useful message that loyalty to a team is no laughing matter in America.

Needless to say, this apprehension was especially fraught for those of us who worked for the government. On an average night at Kay Josephs’, that category probably included half if not two-thirds of the men eyeing one another along the bar or tentatively holding hands at one of the tables as Kay’s piano player, known only as Clam even to regulars like myself, let two nimble pet white mice race back and forth along his keyboard. As a result, sheer probability may well have abetted my vague impression—acquired during our brief preliminary chat at the bar, so I believed, although more likely it came from newsreel images whose sullen mask I’d not yet matched to the pomaded head bobbing at my beltline—that the new subject kneeling to Priap at the moment in Kay Josephs’ supply room, to which Kay supplied a select few of us with our own key, had some sort of official status equal to my own. Or possibly a more prominent one, I thought, having suddenly recalled that he and not I had unlocked the door.

Although distinctly unattractive, with eyes that slid around in their weak sockets like two smoldering oil drops in an enameled saucepan, pudgily smirking lips, and the pasty complexion that in Washington advertises one’s importance by indicating business too pressing for one to ever see the sun—although in his case I certainly can’t see why he and Schine, on their junketeering raids in search of disturbing library books and suspect embassy personnel at U.S. facilities overseas, couldn’t have booked themselves into at least one country where they might get a
tan—this chappie wasn’t really my type. However, the primary problem wasn’t physical. Despite the servility suggested by our respective attitudes, the mere lip service he was paying Priap told me he had mistaken the good king for a mendicant in
his
kingdom, instead of acknowledging that he was a supplicant in mine. A man in his position was supposed to be giving pleasure, not receiving it—and, despising that kind of selfishness as I do, I grew increasingly bored and annoyed. However, I could tell His Majesty was on the verge of delivering an edict even so, and cupped both the ears beneath me to yank forward the face they were attached to for the finale, as I always did.

At my touch, his neck jerked back like that of
Naja
—the taxonomie name, of course, for cobra, Mary-Ann. “Hands off the coif, pal,” he snapped, giving the unpleasant sneer that, along with the smirk, comprised his sum total of facial reactions. “That’s a twelve-dollar haircut you’re messing up.” In what little light came from the street through the smudged window above our heads, his teeth had gleamed like bullets from a…

Machine gun!

He set back to work, but my loins had become a republic. Now demoted to mere Citizen Priap, their former ruler went into exile, to Roy’s evident disgust. After I’d gulped half a Laggilin for my heart condition as he watched, we departed the supply room in acrimonious silence, and chose stools far apart at the bar. A few minutes later, I saw him dangling his key before another prospect, whose repulsive physique—he looked like an Olympic swimmer—was soon following my recalcitrant former subject’s hunched shoulders and, in rueful hindsight and palmsto-pants frottage, gratifyingly greasy hair down a corridor.

As this type of encounter, though not the wilted conclusion, was no rarity in my life, I had all but forgotten it when my office telephone gave a suspiciously strident ring some weeks later. Without preliminaries, in an arrogant whine, a voice I didn’t yet recognize told me something interesting about my own life that I had never known. To wit, that—in the course of several long conversations we’d had at Los Alamos nine years earlier—Dr. Robert Oppenheimer had spoken sympathetically
to me about Communism, and had even suggested I might read some Marx.

“He did no such thing,” I protested. “We never had a single conversation like that. Who is this?”

“Jesus, don’t answer right off the bat, Prof,” the voice said. “This is important. Give yourself time to think. Maybe he even offered to loan you his own copy of
Das Kapital
—well, no, that won’t fly. But still: are those little chats with the Doc while you and he were building the big one together starting to come back to you at all?”

“No, they are not,” I said. “They never happened, and
this
conversation is preposterous. Who is this?”

“This is Washington, D.C., where preposterous is as preposterous does, pal—and it all depends on which story you’d rather see in the papers. The one about the pinko scientist up in Princeton who lost his security clearance, or the one about the faggot who got bounced out of the AEC for playing unlicensed hot-dog vendor at Kay Josephs’.”

Suddenly, I knew who this was—or rather, realized who the stranger servicing me in Kay’s supply room had been. The reason our preliminary chat before repairing there had been so brief, I now saw, was that his face was sufficiently familiar to me from newspapers and television that, without quite placing it, I had unconsciously behaved as if we already knew each other.