Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (46 page)

As she had plainly never given an inch to anyone since whenever she’d lost
her
virginity, I sometimes thought of asking my new roommate for advice. But she seemed too engrossed in her burgeoning antithesis for me to feel comfortable barging in on her, and by the fall of the same year I was on the island with the others. Anyone can see that even if we had something to rebel against here, that is besides each other, there wouldn’t be much point in trying. It would be like arguing with the sky.

Nor, for that matter, do I feel any desire to—and the distinct lack of get-up-and-go that my current life encourages isn’t the only explanation. That summer of ‘64, not long before I left on the vacation that never quits, a chance encounter made me see my unexpectedly strange life in a new light.

In a furious and therefore most un-if not downright anti-Mary-Annish mood, aching to kick off the traces and rid myself of this whole renewable-virgin, personifying-America load of you-know by hook or by crook, I suddenly found myself seated in a Greenwich Village saloon. To this day, I’m not sure what dragged me there, as I had grown leery of the artistic set after my fling with Jean-Luc ended in such acrimonious mutual perplexity; an aversion putting Carmine Street and environs well outside the ambit of a Mary-Ann-ized Manhattan that consisted in toto of the United Nations General Assembly, a nondescript apartment where I watched
Ed Sullivan
with my roommate, and a motley slew of midtown nightclubs, midnight powder rooms, and slaloming hotel beds. But I do recall the bar’s name. Freshly painted and indeed being hoisted with some difficulty by a couple of burly workmen as I passed under it, next to a banner reading “Grand Re-Opening Under New Management,” the sign above the door told me that this shadowy place, whatever its previous incarnations, was henceforward to be called The Bar of History.

One stool over, having slammed himself down on it mere moments after I came in, was a bright-eyed, slightly cracked-looking fellow in a mackintosh who looked to be in his early forties, drinking coffee and doodling on a napkin. Once he had drawn me into a conversation, it soon came out that he was even less a New Yorker than I, Mary-Ann, having just dashed up for the day from his home in Virginia.

His name, I think, was Gaingill.

Anywhere this side of a shipwreck, Gaingill and I would have had little in common, he being one of those irksome types whose private grins are more undercut by their public blinks than they know, as well as vice versa; not to mention a man whose jacket evidently hadn’t had to match his pants a single workday of his life. Yet he must have struck me as a sympathetic auditor, for within a few minutes—and to my own astonishment, as I had never breathed a word of it to anyone—I found myself spilling the whole story: being Kilroy’s daughter, sailing to Paris on the S.S.
United States
, my summer program at the Sorbonne, Jean-Luc, Sukey Santoit, sailing home on the S.S.
America,
my renewable virginity that I’d paid for with the loss of Russell, Kansas, and my current life as the UN’s most notorious party girl. In short, the works, bedewed with more than one outbreak of my special astigmatism.

All in all and with no aim of self-flattery, I was reasonably sure that the story of my life up to then was a cut or two above the average anecdotes told in bars. Considering that, Gaingill took my narrative remarkably in stride. Then, with a grin whose clear preference for the far side of his face got me suspicious that he might be teasing me, much as JeanLuc used to—the ashtray’s little Père Lachaise of mashed stubs was familiar, though not the perky and brunette Notre Dame that my interlocutor’s eyes were making of I, Mary-Ann, whose reflection in The Bar of History’s mirror he almost seemed to prefer to looking at me directly, as if he feared that doing so too often would turn my features into Medusa’s instead—he gave me his best guess as to the meaning of my uniqueness.

As far as he was concerned, Gaingill explained, my endlessly renewable virginity could only mean one thing. And that one thing was that,

when and if I ever did get pregnant, it was going to be with Jesus.

Except on the jukebox, where the Everly Brothers were trying to wake someone up, things got awfully quiet then in The Bar of History, at least to my own hearing. Now that he’d said it, I was floored that I, MaryAnn, despite having been raised amid sixteen church steeples, had never
considered that possibility on my own. And so, Gaingill confessed, was he, since he had thought I’d be smart enough to guess without his help—a belief I promptly validated by figuring out the meaning of the meaning of my uniqueness.

“Wait a minute,” I said, and we did.

“Do you mean God’s my
pimp
?” I said, when it was up.

He nodded. It was the only explanation that made sense to him, he said, given my story. So far as he could tell, the Deity Himself had no idea what was really going on anymore, or any sure sense of how to accomplish whatever it was that He was trying to accomplish, and possibly why too; and so He just kept on sending me out into the world, hoping that I and so He would get lucky someday. He was, Gaingill imagined, sorry about Russell, Kansas. But even I, Mary-Ann, couldn’t have everything, Gaingill supposed.

At this point, I gathered that I had some reason to be wary of my new friend; being, as he himself had pointed out, no fool. “Hold your horses, mister,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude. But is all this just your way of hinting around that you wouldn’t mind giving the job of fathering Our Savior the old college try yourself? Because-”

No, no, Gaingill interrupted me, with a scuttling sort of chortle and an upheld, smoke-wreathed hand. Unless my God’s dark wit knew no bounds, he said, he was an unlikely choice to make a success out of the gig of Holy Ghost, as he was not only an agnostic but an atheist. Personally, he suspected that one reason I had yet to lose my virginity was that more people in this country believed in believing in God than actually believed in Him. But then again, being not only an a but an a., he probably wasn’t the best judge of that, he allowed. After all, he’d once considered buying a dog and naming it Robertson just so he could tell people to pat Robertson.

I didn’t understand this, and Gaingill told me never mind. The fellow in question hosted a sort of cooking show minus utensils on TV, he said. Anyhow, he went on, even an atheist could have a sense of sacrilege, and the mere prospect of attempting sexual congress with the personification of America that I, Mary-Ann was left him feeling so pre-emptively over-whelmed
and inadequate that he doubted he’d be able to rise to the occasion even if I were to suddenly up and say ‘O.K. let’s go Gaingill,” which he didn’t consider likely. He’d had a previous experience in this vein in his youth, he said, and offered to tell me about it if I was interested.

“Sue me, mac, but I think I’ll take a rain check on that one,” I said—being preoccupied, understandably I would say, with my own new status as the future mother of a messiah. Shortly afterward, it appearing that we had run out of things to say to each other and I having a date to meet, I got up to leave. But at The Bar of History’s door, I turned and looked back at Gaingill, still seated among the roseate shadows, the glints of silver and gold, the murmured conversations of strangers and the imaginary laughter of the dead.

“Tell me true,” I said. “Have you just been having fun with me? If I’m going to spend the rest of my life waiting to give birth to Jesus just because some guy in a bar said I would, I kind of have to know.”

He admitted that middle age had given him a weakness for trying to keep himself entertained. But I should never think that having fun was the same as making fun, something he’d never do with regard to I, Mary-Ann—or my hometown, either. Not when our existence filled him with such awe.

When he spoke next, though, it wasn’t to me, but to his own now companionless reflection. “Nope—I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars,” he said as if reciting something
which, of course, I was
. “I wouldn’t do that in a million years.”

To my mind, it’s poor manners when people go off somewhere by themselves without budging, even though they can see you standing there personifying America right in front of them and they will most likely never lay eyes on you again. But I was also raised in Russell, Kansas, which means that I was raised to be unfailingly pleasant, polite, and cheerful.

“Well, I’d better get going now. Goodbye-aye!” I called out pleasantly, politely, and cheerfully from the door.

Though he still wouldn’t look at me—or maybe couldn’t, for whatever reason—his hand shot up in salute: “So long, Mary-Ann!”

Just so as not to leave anyone in false suspense: whether or not Gaingill—or was it Gillgain?—was pulling my leg, I’m still waiting. Not that opportunities to get pregnant with Our Savior, or for that matter Little Ricky, appear any too teeming at present, or indeed have for decades. Even if any of the men looked the least bit plausible to my still virginal but for all that somewhat jaded by now eyes, which they do not, none of us can stand any of the others anyhow—with the sole exception, in my case, of Ginger, who I’m proud to call my friend. But even if we were, as Ging puts it, lesbiatically inclined, which we
shyly; tenderly; and ever so gradually discovered we
are not, maternity obviously isn’t in the cards on that front.

Nonetheless, if Our Savior I must bear, then Our Savior I, Mary-Ann,
will
bear. It’s only a question of waiting.

Now, you may care to observe that, in light of the mission of which I’d now been informed, a
smart
future Jesus’ mom would have done better to stay in New York—since all sorts of people come through there, and you never know. I won’t dispute the point. But I had already booked my vacation, not knowing yet that it would be the one that never quits. Besides which, I had reason to feel some urgency as to getting out of town. Ever since my pal Holly had split for parts unknown to avoid testifying before a grand jury about a man I too had had dates with, I had nursed an obscure feeling that some sort of day of reckoning might be looming ahead for I, Mary-Ann as well
et in Saigon virgo et in Hue virgo et in Danang virgo et in Khe Sanh virgo et in My Lai virgo,
and I naturally wished to avoid it by being somewhere else when it arrived.

At first, I wasn’t sure which somewhere else to pick. I did consider going back to Paris, but soon saw I could not. Not, that is, to I, Mary-Ann’s specific Paris, Paris, Paris, in what I now saw had been a time of hope. Or rather—at least after my friend Karina, who was from there, had goggled at my reflection in candid stupefaction when I idly mentioned the French preference for undated newspapers as we were lipsticking side by side in the girl translators’ lounge, yé-yé-ing a Françoise
Hardy song, one afternoon at the UN—now saw as several times of hope, mysteriously jumbled together.

With Karina’s help, she having been a
Cailloux
(or whatever)
du Cinéma
reader in her teens, I figured out that for Jean-Luc it could only have been the summer of either 1957 or 1958. But the Algerian war had ended in 1962, and de Gaulle had given France’s colonies the right of self-determination at an altogether different time. And unaided by Karina, without knowing how I knew
hello Mary-Ann hello I’m with you on the Island,
I knew that for the three-year-old I had seen clutching a small Stars and Stripes one day on the Boulevard St. Germain, it had been the summer of 1960; even though the only thing that might have made that a time of hope for him was that he’d finally been given a name he could call his own, albeit in distressing circumstances.

Most bewildering of all, however, was the fact that in none of those years could I have celebrated my twentieth birthday in Paris or anywhere else, considering the date on which Eddie Kilroy’s only child was born to my mother, the librarian of Russell. You see, I, Mary-Ann, came into this world on August 7, 1945. As my onetime boyfriend Jean-Luc might have phrased it, my birth was a bit of music between two bombs.

This whole tissue of colliding impossibilities seemed to prove that none of the things I thought had happened in my life could actually have happened, at least not to me
but they did.
And every time I tried to sort out how they could have happened to me anyway
because I wanted them to, that’s why,
my mind kept returning to what hindsight now told me was an utterly inexplicable moment on the Quai Malaquais—a moment when people had been pointing and shouting, “Lili Gang!
Lili Gang!,”
and I had turned to find myself staring into Sukey Santoit’s green eyes.