Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (40 page)

So I stopped yelling. I did not mean to be rude, I said. I, Mary-Ann, merely wished to register my impression that all this would simply
not have occurred
, had our respective situations been reversed. Did he disagree?

What do you know, the son of a gun didn’t. He just didn’t think it mattered much. All hypothetical thinking aside, he said, we had never
really had to come to grips with a bellicose Canada. Nor did he believe we had much reason to fear one’s emergence, although he granted I might be better informed than he on that point.

Besides, he said, Washington, D.C., just wasn’t as gosh-darn
pretty
as Paris. Not caring for travel, as few Parisians saw its point, he naturally hadn’t been there, but he’d seen photographs and in any case I knew this to be irrefutable.

And finally, he said, had he and his compatriots been informed that afterward they’d need to prove day in day out and all the time that they’d been
deserving,
they might well have waved the fleet off.

At which point, he got a grin on his face so wide it almost made me like him.

‘And
then
where would you
Amerloques
be?
Eh
?” he asked.

I thought about that. “Um, Jean-Luc?” I said.

“Oui,
Mary-Ann?”

“How would you say ‘without a paddle’ in French?” I asked.

He told me there were many equivalents. They had found use for them over the years since Vercingetorix surrendered at Alesia. Often, as during the retreat from Moscow, for instance, or in 1940, the equivalents had served as large numbers of Frenchmen’s final remarks on the situation before expiring, Jean-Luc said.

The going-away winner was “
Nous sommes foutus,”
he said. But since

Vercingetorix’s day, the tortoise to that particular hare had been “
Merde.”

Otherwise, when no one but we two existed, which condition could last for periods ranging from two seconds up to several hours at a time, only one real bone of contention ever emerged between Jean-Luc and myself. I assume I am leaving you on fairly safe ground when I suggest that you guess whose.

I had gotten my wish, and been kissed with the Seine for a backdrop. I had been kissed somewhat gauchely on the Left Bank, which was where we tried it first, and rather more adroitly on the Right. I had been kissed in the Tuileries Gardens, at what I would calculate as the apex of
a triangle whose other reference points were the statue of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides and Gericault’s painting of
The Raft of the Medusa
inside the Louvre. I hope you’ll understand when I say that the succession of minute and cascading little awarenesses on my part that, working as secretly as silkworms, were to create my memory of these embraces—a pointillism of unshavenness, some seemingly random bumpings of smoked glasses in close-up, a complex reek of Gauloises new and old, and the downright eerie hush caused by the temporary cessation of Jean-Luc’s voice—had, despite their prominent lack of resemblance to magazine advertisements, no downside, primarily because they made each kiss seem like the first, only improved.

Even those of you back home with four or more years of high-school French, however, may well depart the trolley when I say that the bone of contention between us came down to a grammatical struggle between the noun form of the French word for “kiss,” which meant pretty much what ours did (with the addition of Gauloises, unshavenness, and a gold and mounted Joan of Arc raising her banner in the distance to a victory she understood; for all this was how I, Mary-Ann, saved France), and its verb form, which meant something else. As far as I was concerned, that something else, absent a wedding ring, kept the mere existence of the verb form of
baiser
akin to having a special word devised for no purpose other than describing a fast trip to Alpha Centauri; and I, Mary-Ann, far from caring to play a mutineer Buck Rogers and lay a course for there without permission from my galactic superiors, was, as I have said, a good girl.

That concept bedeviled my boyfriend not only for the mournful absence it prophesied of a shiny American coin tumbling into the little cigar box marked “Jean-Luc,” but for the cultural differences it mapped between us even well this side of Alpha Centauri. For instance, as a good girl, the environment in which I was most used to being felt up was at the movies, and—well, enough said, at least if I have given an adequate picture of Jean-Luc’s religious beliefs. Of course, he had so little respect for actual churches that, given the chance, he’d have been happy to despoil me successively in all sixteen of Russell’s, tearing off my toreadors beneath #14’s white steeple and bumping me quick-quick and
gasping up against #6’s red brick. However, even had it been physically possible for him to materialize there, which of course it wouldn’t be until the next Unveiling, the image of Jean-Luc appearing in Russell, Kansas, in any capacity whatsoever—including that of projectionist at one or the other of our town’s two movie houses, which had struck my imagination as the likeliest bet—was so surreal in itself that the image of him despoiling me there, which incidentally I quite often managed not to dwell upon unduly, seemed redundant.

As it goes without saying that Jean-Luc didn’t own a car, my other customary domestic venue for getting felt up was equally inaccessible. That left opportunities for all but the most fleeting grope sessions, both aside from and during our public embraces, few and far between indeed, as I refused to let him come to my room in the Rue de Lille. Nor would I go to his apartment, protecting my past and future fondness for the noun form of
baiser
as well as my tense present feelings about the verb. While I had silently signed an armistice with Jean-Luc’s personal hygiene some time previously, the prospect of seeing its trophies displayed museum-fashion was no great draw. In any case, the paucity and fleeting quality of any getting-felt-up sessions in our relationship probably left I, Mary-Ann, a good deal readier to sulk and kick furniture than my boyfriend was, as Jean-Luc found the whole practice of feeling girls up and leaving it at that too purely silly to be memorably frustrating.

In reaching this impasse that summer, Jean-Luc and I were not unique. Both Penny Wise and Cherry Maraschino, my two closest pals among the other American gals at the Sorbonne, reported similar wrangles with
their
French boyfriends, Claude being by far the more coldly contemptuous while François was often simply too curious to remember to be annoyed. Cherry, by the way, was the first American of Italian extraction that I’d ever swapped giggles, gum, and groans with, and by extrapolation the first Catholic. Yet her first name, if not her last, instantly gave us common ground—or a few cobblestones we shared that may have dated to the Middle Ages, that summer in Paris, Paris, Paris.

Since
my
boyfriend was not only the brainiest but the most polemical of the three, however, and hair-raisingly filthy-minded to boot, our
debates about grammar were undoubtedly both more polytechnical and more licentious than either Penny and Claude’s tart or Cherry and François’s woebegone discussions of noun vs. verb. “
Mais, mais, mais, mais pourquoi enfin,
Mary-Ann"—so Jean-Luc used to get cranked up as we strolled, with blue Gauloise smoke hunting for Vercingetorix all around him—
”why
do you so cherish this absurd frontier between two utterly fictional countries named Today and Tomorrow, insisting that they not only engage in no commerce but do not even share a language? It’s just more life, like birth and death.”

“And the resurrection after death,” I said automatically, in English. But that was a whole other argument, one that we had tacitly agreed to let Notre Dame cathedral and Père Lachaise cemetery fight out in our stead; knowing that the Seine prevented them from actually coming to blows.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he resumed, “that your most precious possession is something
all the world
starts out with—me, Hitler, Mickey Mouse? Good God, even Billy Wilder!” Suddenly, he had stopped dead on the sidewalk, Gauloise hand and non-Gauloise hand alike pressed to his temples. “You must forgive me,” he said rapidly, “but I had never considered that before. Still, I must ask: how valuable can something once possessed by both de Gaulle and Laurel and Hardy truly be?”

“They don’t have
mine
, though,” I said, placing my hands on my hips. We were on the Boulevard St. Germain, where virtually every woman not sitting down in a café was doing this for one reason or another. De Beauvoir, although seated, just had too. But right now I, Mary-Ann, felt more like St. Joan Crawford of Arc than I did like Simone de Beauvoir; the idea that this distinction might well amount to hairsplitting not having yet occurred to me.

“Yes,” Jean-Luc now said with great bitterness, “and it would take a second Hitler to change that little true fact. With an Annunciation in the form of Panzers, or is it Mickey that you save yourself for?”

“We’d still have to be married first, just like he was any other man or talking mouse in bright red shorts. One reason we like our Disney characters back in Russell is that they play by pretty much the same rules we
do. Now Warner Brothers, I grant you, is a dicier matter altogether, which reminds me: when are you going to take me to Le Lapin Agile?”

“L’ Américaine, la petite pucelle—et voici la petite touriste! Coucou! Tu as vraiment du toupet! Á ce moment, même découvrir un nouveau film de Jean Vigo tourné en Cinemascope et Technicolor ne me rendrait pas heureux! J’aimerais bien penser à autre chose qu’à ton cul pendant cinq minutes de ma vie! Ah, bon! Enfin, nouvelle bobine! Je pense à tes seins! Oh, les hurlements de joie que j’entends dans ma cervelle écrasée! Quel répit pour notre pauvre ami Jean-Luc! Et dire que tu vas partir pour ton fichu Kansas en moins d’une semaine! Si je n’ai pas l’air très gai, il faut peut-être se demander qui gagne, comme a dit Lenine! Merde! Je me fiche de toi
, Mary-Ann!”

By now, even Sartre had shut up. Had a tourist been handy, that would have been the moment for the snapshot of the century, believe me.

“Come on, Jean-Luc,” I said, taking his trembling hand. “I bet Minnie will never divorce him, anyhow. Let me buy you a
café crème”

Two sips, and lighting a Gauloise, calmed him considerably. “One day, perhaps,” he said, smoking and patting my hand, “I will make a film in the manner of Mitch Leisen. And you will know who inspired it, because this will be its title:
Hail, Mary-Ann/”

“Mitch Leisen?” I said.

“I know,” he said, misunderstanding me slightly. “I too would prefer to say in the manner of Lubitsch. But Lubitsch would be hubris.”

“Really? Lubis would be hubritch?” I said, to tease him.

“Yes, yes,” he said irritably-”of course, Lubis would be hubritch.” But then he heard himself, at the same moment he saw my face; and we smiled at each other across our table at Les Deux Magots, as women stood around us with fists to hips and Sartre smoked like a freighter, one

day toward the all too rapid end of my summer in Paris, Paris, Paris.

Whether they were new or old, I always liked to go see American movies with my boyfriend. That was partly because it was fun to hear Humphrey Bogart say
Les choses dont les rêves sont faits”
in a mellifluous couturier’s
voice at the end of
The Maltese Falcon
, and partly because what Jean-Luc thought was going on in most of our movies was so bughouse. In the second connection, I particularly remember the last one we saw, scant days before my departure. One reason for that is that we had to see it twice, owing to circumstances I will explain in their place.

Stubbing out his cigarette as my red Kansas-bought pumps clumped their last few clumps down to the hotel lobby, Jean-Luc gave me a new wave, choppier and more freewheeling than the old one. As we walked toward the theater, which was in the Quartier Latin, he gave me his usual densely choreographed earful about today’s blue-smoke special. Although its producer-director, one Y. Avery Willingham, struck JeanLuc as an auteur without hauteur, I can recall no further details, as I mostly just liked the sound of my boyfriend’s voice when something interested and excited him. Nor, despite patting his pockets for ideas as if for Gauloises, was he ever short on commentary. We were not literally walking alongside the literal Seine at the moment, but I was strolling happily next to my private one; whose arm I got to hold, just listening to the river run.