Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (47 page)

Whatever the real explanation was, though, I could still practice Russell, Kansas, common sense when it was called for. Having had poor luck with said gambit before, no way was I about to fool with going back to anywhere I’d already been. I, Mary-Ann, did not want to step off an aircraft in front of a sign reading
WELCOME TO PARIS, FRANCE
, and see that nothing lay beyond it but absences: no Louvre, no Pont des Arts, no Rue de Lille, no Tour Eiffel, no Sorbonne. And no present, because those
can’t exist without pasts. Of course, the Seine would still have been there, for rivers are eternal, and this one had once divided perfection to my eyes. Yet they are less beautiful without bridges, and I feared those would be gone as well.

After some reflection, I booked a flight to the West Coast and points onward. Given my general direction, you may well ask if I had any notion of trying to visit an eight-square-mile island with beaches of black volcanic sand, on whose southern mountain peak the Stars and Stripes are being raised in a well-known photograph that shows absolutely none of the 6,822 Americans killed there, unless you count the three out of six flag raisers who were dead within days of Joe Rosenthal popping the shutter; and the answer is that, yes, it did cross my mind. But as it did, it trailed a small cloud of surprised recognition that I had hardly thought of
my father
in some time.

Since you know which island I washed up on instead, there is not that much more to tell. But there is some, for on the last night before my departure, once I’d finished packing the last of my bags, I realized that something was missing from my mental luggage, so to speak.

Despite the not inconsiderable interest level guaranteed by sheer chaos, my life had left me woefully ignorant of one of humanity’s, and more specifically my own gender’s, most elementary rites of passage. Yet I wasn’t thinking of motherhood, most likely your first guess. As I’d been told that when and if I gave birth I would give birth to Jesus, I had a fair hunch that the average woman’s report on the ups and downs of parturition would be no very useful guide as to what to expect in my case.

Instead, it had just struck me, with some pain, that after all I’d been through I, Mary-Ann, still had no conception of what it was like for a woman to lose her virginity. That is, for good, for real: forever. Even my recollections of the glorious first time with Jean-Luc had grown hazy, as I had been through the identical set of first-time sensations so often since. Nor had their aftermath ever lasted long enough for me to develop even a speculative sense of what losing one’s virginity permanently would be like.

Given the nature of my peculiar predicament, it was obviously not the physiology of it I felt curious about. I’d had
cigars
up me, for gosh sakes.
What I suddenly ached to learn was whether the loss of virginity really did change a person, and if so, how essentially; or whether, on the other hand, it might be not that big a deal in the long run, as one nodded to oneself in that mirror and then turned to face a window or the sky. That would be every bit as useful to know, if it turned out that nodding and then getting on with whatever came next turned out to be more the general drift of things.

Put simply, either way, I, Mary-Ann, the personification of America, now found myself wondering for the first time what in hell it felt like to grow up.

After a frazzled day of shopping, packing, and fretting, I was tuckered out. In fact, thinking I could certainly use a good night’s rest before I started my vacation, I had already gone to bed. But now, switching on my bedside lamp, I rose in my pink jammies and pushed open the door to my apartment’s living room.

No doubt because I was so sleepy, making for perceptions as off-kilter as if the change in time zones was already in effect, I felt as if I’d never truly seen where I now lived. Smaller even than my hotel digs in the long-since-departed-from Rue de Lille, the living room held only a sofa, which I observed with irritation was so dilapidated that its proper home should have been in someone’s basement, and a lawn chair with frayed webbings. Some important item appeared to be missing, but I couldn’t put my finger on which.

More disconcerting than the lack of space as such, however, were the room’s bizar rely foreshortened dimensions, at least to my befuddled eyes. Its two flanking walls were so narrow that you would need to maneuver like an Egyptian hieroglyph to cross it from left to right. Above the hoary old sofa, in the picture window that took up nearly all of the back wall, the whole city skyline—the UN, the Plaza, and the Sherry-Netherland—twinkled dingily, as if its mighty buildings were no more than an assortment of cheap Christmas-tree lights in the iron-cold Manhattan dark.

The fourth wall, which the sofa faced, was perfectly blank, and so thin as to seem almost translucent. In fact, with alarming clarity, I could hear some unknown neighbor knitting on its far side—all as if in an unnerving
adumbration, so I, Mary-Ann, suddenly thought, of my New York life’s peculiar flimsiness and generally makeshift air.

In a recumbent S shape on the ancient sofa, surrounded by books stacked on the cushions and spilled on the floor beside her, my roommate was inspecting a sheaf of typed pages propped fanwise, in a parodie mimesis of childbirth, between her up thrust thighs. This must be the antithesis she was writing for her master’s degree, I supposed, meanwhile noting with puzzlement that I had never once thought to ask her anything about it. In her far hand, she held another wad of paper, and her eyes shuttled between the two as if she were conducting a dialogue between them. On the floor was a radio playing music at such a low volume that I couldn’t make out the tune.

Then the song faded away, and a surprisingly strong-voiced announcer started spieling: “This is Double-You-Ache-Ay-Eee, your pop-classics station, where the Top Twenty’s older than a lot of people who have died. Now—say, folks. When you’re a nude descending a staircase under the brown fog of a winter noon, does the greed of this metropolis fill you with intolerance? Go to our sponsor: Refuge Paints. Art Refuge knows the secret of durable pigments, gang, and he’s out to save you a stately, plump buck. Get on down there! Just catch the velvet underground to the corner of Twentieth and Century. Lots of curves, you bet! We’re almost done. My engineer is leaving now. Goodbye, Joey—thanks for everything. Sitting in for Madeleine Proust on
The M.C. M Show
tonight, I’m…”
ZZT ZZT,
went an outbreak of static.

Another tune started in his wake. Or possibly another version of the same one, as I still couldn’t catch the melody. Squeezing along the fourth wall to seat myself in the lawn chair, and realizing as I did so that I had no more idea how to launch this conversation than I did which important item was missing from the decor, I carefully cleared my throat.

As my roommate glanced up, the light brown hair that flowed in two waves from a central part on her high forehead fell away from her face, unveiling an amused and full-lipped mouth. Behind the glasses that she
almost certainly
wore these days, her eyes’ twin pools of dilute green light looked at me inquisitively.

“Um,” I said, “I was just wondering. How’d you lose it, Susan?”

After blinking at me for a nonplussed second, she gave a snort of merry and derisive laughter. “Oh,
Godl
To my
history
teacher, believe it or not. He was a pompous ass—and a little pathetic, so hindsight informs me in its thoughtful way. Just another handsome guy in his thirties whose looks were starting to tiptoe the same direction his unfinished dissertation had, and wanted us to call him ‘Professor.’ Which I now know would probably have gotten him in lukewarm water with ye olde Arlington County school board, if they’d heard about
that
little vanity. Much less that he was boning me. ‘No consequences,’ we both said afterwards, over my first glass of Dart Drug’s finest chardonnay—making me feel just splendidly sophisticated, because the candles I was used to had been the ones on birthday cakes, and a fine ho ho ho to that. But I knew he’d be too busy preening to even notice the door closing when I left—-and I think that was how I wanted it, to be honest.”

“It was in
high school
? How old were you?”

“Sixteen. First female captain of the debate team at George Pickett High, or anywhere in northern Virginia. Our football team was the Pickett Chargers—not the luckiest name, when you think about it.
Big
turmoil our junior year when the first black kid on the team got thrown right back out for putting tape over the Stars and Bars on his helmet. I had a quote in the
Post.
It was fervent. Anyway, we won more often than they did. Prof was our adviser. Now it can be told.” With a deprecating facial shrug, letting her
honeyed
hair fall forward
in its swaying ballet move
on her cheek, my roommate went back to comparing her two typescripts.

“Um—
why
was that how you wanted it?” I asked.

With mild surprise, she laid aside her reading, gathering that—for reasons unknown to her, as a wry but tolerant dip of her mouth indicated—this conversation might go on for a while. “Well, to start with,” she said, sitting up to hug her
bell-bottomed, blue-jeaned
knees, “I had a boyfriend.”

Since this struck me as dis-explaining Prof rather than the reverse, I was confused. “What was the matter with him?”

“Oh, no!” As she let out a yowl, cascading hair romped at her throat; her hands scrubbed air. “You don’t know what you’re getting
into,
Mary-Ann, because that,” she said,
in a glad voice that leaped through sentences like a just-born mountain creek, its eagerness to get on and find a river tumbling over its unpredictable infatuations with precision until even her sorrows sounded livelier than other people’s joys,
“is a
very
long story, and it’s also
been
quite a while. But let me see.”

She’d misunderstood. Though to the best of my knowledge even living in New York had not turned me uncompassionate, at the moment I, Mary-Ann, wasn’t especially interested in her boyfriend’s problems, since I didn’t know him
that’s what you think.
I had only been asking how come she hadn’t lost her virginity to him, if he was in the picture and she wanted to get it over with
believe me, you haven’t wondered as long as I have.
“No,” I said falteringly, “all I meant was-”

“First
off, his father was CIA, and I never knew a CIA brat who wasn’t either a basket case or a fink to beat the band. Or maybe a fink trapped in a basket case’s body, because even the messed-up ones are sort of helplessly arrogant about it. If you don’t mind me going all parenthetical and pop-sosh on you, it’s different for the military brats: even when Sergeant Dad hauled them to Germany, they weren’t really in foreign countries. They lived in little bits of America stuck here and there on the map, so it’s not that hard for them to adapt when they get shipped back Stateside. In the pecking order of who’s weirder, the State Department and Langley kids win going away. This guy Don Biehl that we were both friends with called them the government Martians—this whole subset of sore thumbs at Pickett who’d grown up everywhere but here, and hated being exotic.”

I was having some trouble following this, particularly as the unaccountably prominent sound of knitting through the wall kept getting mixed up with the elusive tune on the radio and my nagging sense of an important item missing. But I was also getting interested despite myself. “Wait,” I told her, “wait"—all but panting in my strangely narrow, all but oxygenless apartment, in the iron-cold Manhattan dark. “Do you mean foreigners?”

“American
foreigners. You see, one peculiarity of the cold war was that the warriors took their children with them. They rode in triumph through Persepolis in baby carriages, wondering what baseball was. Naturally, this being the D.C. suburbs, a lot of
our
parents were government too. My father was Commerce, my mother was Justice. They’re divorced. I think Don Biehl’s dad was an FBI shrink. But we hadn’t been stationed abroad. Big difference.
Their
dads were the glory guys. Sinbad with a diplomatic passport, and Mrs. Sinbad and Junior trotting off the plane in his wake. You should have seen their scrapbooks. Americans look very strange when nobody around them is.”

Why, that’s probably what
he’d
have done, I thought. But it took me me a second to sort out that I had meant my daddy, whom both I and the Marine Corps graves-registration office knew to have been a patriot and who I had always guessed would have liked to be a voyager. I would have given anything to have that childhood, and not only because then he would have been alive. With him holding my hand as I grew taller, and my mother now a librarian of photo albums, we Kilroys might have gone ‘round and ‘round the globe together for our country’s sake, learning new languages, seeing fantastic sights and returning to Russell—arms laden with miniature Tour Eiffels and Taj Mahals—only for the Unveiling. “Oh, he was lucky,” I said, meaning my roommate’s boyfriend.