Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (44 page)

After Jean-Luc and I had finished our
cafés crème
in turn, and started strolling toward the Seine, I was thoughtful. Once he finished telling me the true meaning of Howard Hawks’s
Red River,
which took him several blocks although I had no idea how that particular movie had even come up, he noticed.

“What are you thinking about?” Jean-Luc asked.

“Being American,” I said, moodily swinging my purse back and forth.

He ląughed. “Should I go find a taxi? I thought you had to be riding in a car to do that—a Cadillac, at least. Or on horseback, driving cattle toward
Abilene.
‘Mathieu, there is a railroad in
Abilene
,’ “he quoted happily.

“Maybe that’s when we
stopped
thinking,” I said, and stopped. To my mild non-surprise, I saw that I, and therefore we, had stopped right in front of my soon-to-be-departed-from hotel in the Rue de Lille. But even though I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it, I knew I had something I wanted to say.

First.

“Jean-Luc,” I said, “I know ycuVe never been to the U.S.A., so maybe you’ll just have to trust me on this one. But there’s something so
sweet
about it, so nice you wouldn’t believe it—no matter how many dumb mistakes we ever made, maybe because the sweetness always makes it so easy to forget them. And I guess we always thought the sweetness would
make up for the mistakes as far as all the rest of you were concerned too. But what I’m thinking now is what if we stopped being sweet—and went right on being mistaken?”

“The mistake was what you started with,” he said, shaking out a Gauloise. “Any country whose personification has the nerve to stand before me and call it
sweet
—and mean it, my God!—is
always
going to end up mistaken. And the world will suffer for it, as worlds tend to do.”

“O.K., never mind about that,” I said, snatching the cigarette from his lips and tossing it down the street. “The heck with it, this personification’s getting on a boat back to what she personifies at four
P.M
. tomorrow anyway.”

“Believe me, I know,” he said, irritably reaching for another Gauloise. “And”

“Upsy-daisy, Jean-Luc,” I said, jerking my chin toward the hotel door. “The rules of the game have just changed, and whether this is the end or the beginning of a grand illusion is up to you. Here’s the church, so where’s the steeple? Let’s go.”

“En français, s’il te plait,
Mary-Ann,” he said.

“O.K.,” I said, and took a breath.
“Baisez-moi.”

“You might at least have
tutoied
me when you finally said it,” he grumbled. Then, after we had gone upstairs—and after, glancing around my room as I demurely undressed behind him, Jean-Luc had marveled, “You never told me you were rich! Do
all
Americans have money?"—he showed me how everybody on the planet did it, which was lovely and interesting. As Ginger I’m not, you’ll just have to live with it if I let things go at that.

After all, it would be very un-Kansasish and non-ladylike of me to go into any details whatsoever regarding how, in spite of never having been there in his life, Jean-Luc instinctively knew how to lay I, MaryAnn, in every last church in Russell, tearing off my toreadors beneath #14’s white steeple and bumping me quick-quick and gasping up against #6’s red brick, or that one reason it was so lovely and interesting was that the whole time this was taking place he and I were in Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris PARIS parisparisparis PAAAAris Paris Paris ParrrrrrrIIIIIS parisparis Paris Paris
ParararararararararararaririririririRiRIS PARIS PARIS ParisParisParis andbriefiyalmostathens,untilisaid” ohcomeoffitjeanluc"andhedidPARISS PAAAAAAAAAAARIS pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa ΡΑ-ris paRARARAris ris Paris Paris
paris Paris Paris PARIS!!!!

Wouldn’t it?

If I did tell you anything of the kind, I mean. As, of course, I haven’t.

I’d never breathe it to a soul, because it’s so inadequate a description.

Yet here’s the thing, and a mystery to make my puzzlement over the ending of
Every Girl Is an Island
and the surprise appearance of Sukey Santoit near the Pont des Arts look like mazes on a diner place-mat by comparison. When I woke up the next morning, I was a virgin again. Virgo intacta, maidenhead of the class, hymen make yourself at home, the whole shebang. Or debang, now I think on it.

Even Jean-Luc agreed I was, and it drove him batty. “Personifying America is one thing,” he was to fume before the morning was gone. “And since I know you do, believe me I try to be understanding. But
this,
Mary-Ann—
this
is just
too
foutu
muchl “

The night before, we had gone out after the first time we did it, and I had eaten the best meal of my life. (The service was slow, the food was awful, and the wine was pure Satan’s grape juice; I’d recommend that restaurant to anyone who’s just had lovely, interesting sex.) But then, when we had then gone back up to my hotel room to do it again, it had felt just like the first time.
Exactly
like it, is what I’m trying to convey, to the point that Jean-Luc had made a modestly quizzical noise and I had squinted briefly at the ceiling. But our minds, which in any case weren’t being anything much more purposeful at the moment than barnacles on the S.S
. Jean-Luc Mary-Ann,
soon to be rechristened the X.X.
Jeanmarylucann
, had soon been distracted by matters far more interesting and less puzzling. By the time, exhausted, I finally gasped, “My gosh! How do you say ‘I’m out of breath’ in French, Jean-Luc?” and he told me, and we went to sleep in each other’s arms—-actually, I think Jean-Luc stayed up awhile—I had just about forgotten that tiny, not entirely mental
twinge of panic as I wondered if I was somehow, inexplicably, back at square one.

Just about.

But that morning, when we did it the third time, it was unmistakable and undeniable. After the fourth time, which was cutting it very close if I wanted to make the boat train, Jean-Luc
watched
it happen; it was genuinely amazing, he said, and seemed to take about five minutes. Being Jean-Luc, of course, he immediately wondered if he could
film
it happening—but there I put my foot down, even if I did have to take it off the wall first. Whatever the hell was going on, I told him, Christine Jorgensen I was not. Whatever the hell
had
gone on, I was still Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas.

And saying our town’s name aloud put a horrible fear in my heart, for an all too obvious reason. It was well over a decade until the next Unveiling, by which time my mother, the librarian of Russell, might well have passed on. And even then, of course, I’d only get to go back for twenty-four hours, which might be more painful than blissful even if my mother was still with us—or with them, anyway, I forced myself to tell myself unhappily. But right now, and especially if I wanted to find out whether my private dread had any foundation, I had a train to catch from the Gare du Nord to Le Havre.

By the time we reached the Gare du Nord, Jean-Luc had grown bitter, the first blow to his previous attitude of pure fascination piled atop continuing lust—whatever the hell else was going on, he
had
been waiting six weeks—having been my refusal to let him film me becoming a virgin again. He just kept putting out half-smoked Gauloises in his
café crème
and calling for another, and muttering
“Merde”
even after, to tease him, I started asking sea of
what,
for gosh sakes; mother of
what?
Then it was all aboard.

When I reached for his hand for the last time, he didn’t even look up as he said
“Adieu,
Mary-Ann.” As I had just said
“Au revoir,
Jean-Luc,” this caused me the worst case of special astigmatism I’d yet had as I stumbled out onto the platform, into the train—and away from Paris, Paris, Paris; for good, although I didn’t know that yet.

Looking back, I can only hope that the experience didn’t end up souring
Jean-Luc on America and Americans permanently, especially since he loved our movies so. While it would perhaps be going too far to say that they had liberated him from whatever oppressed him, the messages he got from them had certainly helped him to begin his own resistance.

That’s why I hope he still thinks well of us sometimes. But all I know is yesterday, and yesterday never knows.

As I was aware that Americans traveling overseas have the benefit of all sorts of protections and reprieves that they don’t necessarily know about or understand, on the boat train I half worried—and half hoped—that becoming a virgin again and again was something that could happen to me only abroad. But assuming he is alive and track-downable, the assistant purser on the S.S.
America,
sister ship to the
United States,
can testify that I became a virgin again several times in international waters. Making the same proviso, although like the purser he’d be fairly old by now, a slick young advertising man bearing the odd name Holden Caulfield can vouch for it happening in New York, even if he was much too self-absorbed and complacently melancholy afterwards, in a
bonjour comme d’habitude tristesse
sort of way, and aren’t those creeps who get the sad post-coital smiles just the
worst,
Ging, to pay a great deal of attention to the fact that he deflowered I, Mary-Ann, twice, at both the Plaza Hotel and in his locked office on Madison Avenue, before he put a once again re-flowered me in a cab to Idlewild.

You see, I had to find out; and was still Kansas-ish enough to realize that, as far as most of my fellow Americans were concerned, neither the shipboard project nor even the Manhattan one was conclusive proof that I could become a virgin again here in the good old U.S. of A. But once I’d hopped a plane to Topeka, a saintly motorcyclist who took me up a hill on his Harley and tumbled me on the grass—in full sight of my Ellfrank alma mater, although not, as the night was moonless, of any of its current students or faculty—removed the final shadow of a doubt. Before he’d so much as kick-started his chopper and jerked his head to indicate that I, Mary-Ann, should swing a leg over behind him, his temporary
inamorata-rata-rata-
vroom
had felt herself become a virgin again—not just in these United States, not just in any state, but in
Kansas itself;
smelling its very wheat, along with motor oil, under the sky of my childhood, and of my daddy’s childhood, and of all sorts of Kilroys before us.

Et in Arcadia virgo.

If that settled that, another question still pressed in on me; and was doing so like God’s own fingers on my temples by the time, having patted a greasily stubbled cheek goodbye and rented a car in Topeka—Hertz or Avis, don’t recall—I started the drive to Russell. Once I turned north toward our town off Route 40, not even a radio turned up to full volume and blasting out “Runaround Sue” could drown out the hoofbeats of my thumping anxiety. And soon and forever, I had my answer, for I had just pulled over and killed the engine in front of a sign that told all comers, just as it always had and always would,
WELCOME TO RUSSELL, KANSAS, U.S.A.

Nothing besides remained. Boundless and rippling, the gold and level wheat stretched away to the horizon, under the same old sky.

Needless to say, I knew it was really all still right there in front of me: Main Street, Dawson’s Drug, our two movie theaters, both our right bank and our left bank, our courthouse, my old high school. I knew that our townspeople still moved about mere yards from my nose, primarily on foot except the ones from outlying farms. I knew our sixteen churches stood, and that our limestone fence posts with no railings still poked upward to give their mute and stubborn testimony of having something to do with the sky. For all I knew, my mother, the librarian of Russell, was standing right in front of me, with her gun-barrel spectacles and an armful of Sukey Santoit books to pass on to the next generation of Russell girls, who might make better use of them than I had up to now.