Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (42 page)

The Moses he proposes is no ferocious, barbed Charlton Heston—not, well heard [?], to imply that the magnificent Heston is an icon of the cinema one iota or roar less imposing than the Lion of M-G-M itself—but
the charming young actress Gin
… [more water damage, but of course you know her name anyway],
whose character “Louise” needs no more than a proud toss of her scarlett hair; below her saucy new captain’s hat, to effectively replace the “Cogito, ergo sum” of graybeards become bluebeards with the female’s own defiant correction: “Sum—ergo cogito!”

Willingham’s place-in-scene [??] is a combination of artistic subtlety and elemental simplicity that has not been seen since the great films of silent days, such as G. W Langmur’s
Das Herz von Avis.
And yet, in the opinion of my clean heart, all the meanings are different now.

The audacity of the scenario is to present Louise with a real problem posed in false terms—-just as, for so many of her less fortunate sisters, life dwindles to a false problem posed in real terms. Of the two lovers between whom the plot—though not, in secret, the director!—urges her to choose, the Doctor seems to represent the best qualities of age: learning, authority, wisdom. His counterpart, Gilles the water boy, has all the ardor of youth, but also its confusions. Which represents her destiny? The viewer awaits at the end of his breath, but our Louise brooks no nonsense.

Ultimately, she recognizes that to choose either will deprive her of herself, for she will then only be a mirror of
their
qualities. While they may also reflect some of hers, our heroine grasps the fallacy of mirrors—in short, that every mirror, however tempting, is restricted by its frame. Rejecting the spurious decision that life wishes to impose on her, she sets sail instead for an unknown harbor. Yet one might say Louise has reached her destination at the moment that her hand first grasps the wheel.

At first, the fanciful environment put before us by Y. Avery Willingham seems to have few traits in common with our own. We, too seek our separate and collective mirrors in the dark, and do not readily find them in this middle [?] of resorts and tourists, through which our heroine moves as an itinerant ukulele player. (The actress’s skills on this instrument are prominent.) Yet as we emerge from the theater into our own world of music and bombs, where we too look for freedom—and yes, perhaps, love too, although in Louise’s case this is reserved for a sequel to be filmed only in our imaginations—among passing strangers unaware of the myriad small struggles and victories taking place in their very midst, we understand differently.
Having begun with one question, I must end with another: is not
Every Girl Is an Island
the cinema of truth raised to poetry, and poetry become the only cinema able to describe our age’s strange new truths?

—Jean-Luc [quelque-chose]

Unluckily for my boyfriend, although he stuck to his guns all the same, the theater’s management ran a public notice in the papers on the same day his review appeared in
Cailloux
(or whatever)
du Cinema
. It cleared the mystery of the ending right up.

Apparently as a result of some unexplained private disorder at Y. Avery Willingham Productions, this theater’s print of
Every Girl Is an Island
had inadvertently been shipped to Paris without the final reel, which had now belatedly arrived. The management apologized, and invited anyone who had seen the abridged version to come back and view the complete one at no charge.

You can probably picture the fuming rapidity with which Jean-Luc marched us back to the theater in the Quartier Latin—where this time, of course, Louise ended up picking one of the men, just as I had known in my bones she had to. I don’t recall which one, as I could not have cared less about either. Nor was I partial to the actors, for the Doctor was a sort of grade-Z Robert Preston type whom I was more accustomed to seeing in cheap horror pictures. As for whoever played the kid, he didn’t seem able to decide whether he’d rather be James Dean or Jerry Lewis—and talk about your false choices posed in real terms, at least if you’re asking Mary-Ann Kilroy of the Kansas
Expatriate.

At any rate, when Louise set out on the motorboat with such an air of jubilation, it turned out that she was only going around the corner, so to speak, to tell her boss at the cardboard hotel where she worked that she was giving up her career as an itinerant ukulele player. The last line in the picture was this one, which my future fellow castaway delivered in breathy close-up, batting eyelashes that bore an alarming resemblance to pine needles under fresh snow, just after she’d chucked her ukulele in the
harbor: “Oh—what’s making silly music matter, compared to finding the right man?”

And even the left man, whichever one he was, agreed with her.

Jean-Luc, you may not be surprised to hear, did not. Next to the bile he started venting the minute we hit the street, his previous outburst at me in front of Les Deux Magots was like something you’d find written in your yearbook by the shy classmate you had never guessed was such a sentimentalist.

“Mon dieu,
Mary-Ann!” he raged. “The film we saw yesterday was as much an organic masterpiece, in its way, as
Way Down East.
The one we saw
today
is an abomination, a travesty—an insult, an atrocity, a joke!” he seethed. “Clearly, the new ending was forced by the gutless distributors onto the cowardly, despicable Y. Avery Willingham, who bent to their yoke with a smile and a wink at his accountant,” he snarled.

“And I praised his artistic courage!” he spat.
“Il m’a trahi,
Mar y-Ann! He has held up his tarnished mirror to my eyes, and shown me only a pathetic, useless dreamer gazing back,” he moaned. “What’s more important, he has betrayed both cinema and life, by making of his beautiful film an offering to the Golden Calf whose moo repeats the lie that cinema and life are divisible,” he said quietly but menacingly. “Do
NOT
forgive him, André Bazin, do
NOT
forgive him, Otto Preminger, for he knows all too well what he does—
et tout ça me fait chier dans ta gueule, Monsieur
Y. Adolf Willingham!” he yelled.

“Pah!”
he finished up.

Spent Gauloises lay all around us. I took Jean-Luc’s trembling hands in mine.

“The
movie
is a travesty,” I told him earnestly. “What you wrote is still true.”

“But my review now hails a film that does not even exist,” he lamented. “It
should
exist, as you and I exist—but it doesn’t!”

Lifting my chin and shaking my head slightly to toss back my brown hair in a brief breeze that had sprung up—or had the Lili Gang set off another bomb?—I looked directly into his disconsolate smoked glasses.

“Prove it, Jean-Luc,” I said. “I read what I read.”

And while, to say the least, he never did need much encouragement to be headstrong, I like to think that I, Mary-Ann, played some small part in fixing his decision. Before noon of that same day, he had the entire staff of
Cailloux du Cinéma
out picketing the theater, distributing mimeographed leaflets headed “
Remettez Louise dans les chemins de la liberté
/” and chanting
“A
èds Willingham!” to alert the public and the theater management to their demand that the tacked-on, in Jean-Luc’s view, final reel be destroyed and
Every Girl Is an Island
shown in its integral, in Jean-Luc’s view, version. As the management had long depended on the
Cailloux du Cinema
crowd to help drum up appreciative and respectful audiences for minor, mediocre American films, they really had no choice but to cave in. By nightfall, holding hands, Jean-Luc and I stood on the Rue St. Severin, watching a hundred eager, buzzing Parisians queue up to buy tickets to what was, in a sense, the first movie my boyfriend ever made.

As we strolled away, we heard an explosion; turning, we saw smoke. Quite fortunately, nobody got so much as a scratch. But the O.A.S. had just bombed the theater, apparently under a confused impression that Charles de Gaulle was inside attending a private screening of
Every Girl Is an Island.

Which, events soon proved, he may well have been—and without the final reel, at that. The very next morning, every newspaper kiosk in Paris was a-blare with king-sized headlines screaming that he had granted every colony in France’s empire the right to determine its own destiny. Whatever came next, they weren’t going to be anyone’s possessions ever again.

By afternoon, the O.A.S. had posters up all over the Right Bank denouncing the decision. They consisted of endless paragraphs of tiny type and strenuously convoluted argument, but everyone in Paris knew what they really said; and I’ve never heard more pedestrians whistling happy tunes as they walked along in my life.

“Nous sommes foutus
,” the O.A.S. posters never stopped repeating, between every line.

“Merde
,” the O.A.S. posters howled in invisible but deeply satisfying letters, which were rather larger than the graffiti on the bookstall on the
Quai Malaquais had been. The characteristic rust color had also deepened noticeably.

The retreat from Africa had begun. This time, at least from now on, almost nobody died on the way home.

Not long after, de Gaulle announced the end of the war in Algeria. Whatever became of it from now on, it too wasn’t going to be anyone’s possession ever again. But by that time, my summer program at the Sorbonne had ended, the regular students were coming back to reclaim their classrooms and, I guess, their streets—and I, Mary-Ann, had left Paris, Paris, Paris behind.

As I now know, it was forever.

My last full day in Paris was special for a number of reasons, that is besides the obvious one of being my last full day in Paris. For one thing, it was the first time all summer that I, Mary-Ann, went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower—whose scaffolding of aerial dentistry, you might have supposed, I had eagerly scrambled toward on my very first afternoon, but which something had told me to save for last. For another, it was also my last full day with Jean-Luc, which lasted longer than I had supposed.

For yet another, it was, by coincidence, my twentieth birthday—the first I had ever celebrated that my daddy hadn’t had a chance to celebrate before me. Although he didn’t know the last part, Jean-Luc had promised that we’d spend all day doing whatever I liked, and not even see a single movie if such was my choice. Knowing what that cost him, I was touched.

Yet while a promise was a promise, my boyfriend was so appalled by where I wanted to go first that his smoked glasses virtually blanched.

“Ah, non! Surtout pas cette foutue Tour Eiffel
,” Jean-Luc protested Gauloiseily, in the lobby of my soon-to-be-departed-from hotel in the Rue de Lille. “Really, Mary-Ann. It’s one thing to personify America, and quite another to exaggerate it.”

Fists to hips, I placed my red Kansas-bought pumps well apart. “You’re sure wrong
there,
chum,” I sassed him, “so just think again, Jean-Luc.
And we’re going to the phoo-too Tour Eiffel, because I’m only going to turn twenty once in my whole life, and that’s where I want it to happen.”

From the grumbling that I had to listen to as we walked over there, you’d have thought my boyfriend had a peppermill for a brain. But his face grew somewhat queasy as we passed the Invalides, and by the time we two were soaring upward to the pinnacle of the Tour, he’d fallen completely and atypically silent in the elevator. And I’d been mighty slow in catching on that Jean-Luc had a fear of heights; making his many ascents, with or without me, fairly brave.

We stood there. I looked down. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

He lit a Gauloise, its blue smoke making a contrast with his green face that any Impressionist would have killed for. “Of
course
it’s beautiful,” he snapped, his Gauloise-bearing hand twitching. “It’s
Paris,
name of God. It’s its
job
to be beautiful—and it’s beautiful
down there,
too. It’s beautiful from an outside table at Les Deux Magots. It’s beautiful at the cinema. And while,
à mon avis,
it would be especially beautiful in your soon-to-be-departed-from hotel room, which I have never seen, the truth is that it’s beautiful almost
anywhere.
So how much longer do we need to stay
here,
name of God, Mary-Ann?”