Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (49 page)

“My God!” I, Mary-Ann, squealed, having just sat bolt upright in what were, after all, my jammies. “Was that a
gunshot
? I swear, the big Apple wasn’t anywhere
near
this dangerous when I moved in.”

“Mackintosh,” my roommate murmured, as if she knew something I didn’t. “But I think it was just an exploding cigar,” and she grinned. “Otherwise, Monsieur—I mean Madame—Defarge would have quit, and you could hear yourself think.”

“Fat chance of
that
!
”
I said, jumping up in my corset and high-heeled black boots to give #6’s brick wall another smack.

“It won’t do any good,” my roommate murmured. However, my banging must have changed the light, which incidentally had no evident source that I could see. As it quivered, it made her seem older, for she briefly appeared to be in her forties—or rather, like a luminous sketch of herself in her forties, drawn by a hand whose lack of firsthand information alternated with both a desire to believe and a flickering sense of utter impossibility. But then the tentative age lines vanished, though not the retrospective cast of her expression.

“So you never saw him again?” I asked.

“Boyfriend? I saw him all the time. In school, anyway; Prof’s classroom, too, since we had history together. Even if I had wanted to stop having a relationship with him, which I didn’t, I couldn’t’ve. His idea of being gallant was to turn his suffering into a role—to amuse me, you know, so that my attention wouldn’t have wandered by the time I came back to my senses. I mean, his family was as Catholic as you can get when Mom keeps making fish on Saturday from forgetfulness, but this was when Hollywood had just discovered Jewishness was funny, and since
everything
was mimicry for the government Martians, he decided that was his favorite fake him: ‘I tried to assimilate, but you
schmatte
goyim would never tell me why you act the way you do. Then came the pogrom.’ The pogrom was me. Not a lot of girls at Pickett were getting courted that way—which was what he was doing, of course. He didn’t mind if everybody else thought he was goofy—or Jewish, for that matter—so long as he could still make me laugh.”

“But it didn’t work,” I said.

“No. On top of everything else, his home life was turning into a horrible mess around then—and I did
not, not, not
want to be the
answer
to that horrible mess. I mean,
help,
yes—anything I could do, and he knew it. But answer? Call the fire department, because I’ll just make it worse. Which I’m afraid I did anyway,” she admitted-”but I didn’t mean to.”

“What happened?” I asked, glancing with fascination around the small patch of woods behind the tawny-bricked ranch house where my roommate had lived in high school. Off in the distance, in the skewed perspective
of a primitive painting, I could see a fat-pillared mansion on a hill surrounded by Scrabble tiles. Unseen traffic honked. Closer by, a clickety-clacking weathervane was turning in an interesting manner, and I should probably explain that I was keeping my attention on the scenery because I was embarrassed to look at her. She had folded her arms to cover her bare bosom.

“It’s another long story, so brace yourself.” From the sofa, she looked at me quizzically; then glanced at Monsieur Defarge’s wall, which now appeared to be growing somewhat more translucent. More unnervingly, it also seemed to have moved closer. With a good-natured roll of her eyes, my roommate brought them back to my face.

“No. I want to hear it,” I forced my yawning mouth to say,
not having a whole lot of choice in the matter.
“Anything to distract me from that racket, my gosh! It sounds like fifty sweaters all getting made at once. Les Deux Magots was
never
this noisy before,” I complained, sipping my
café crème
, as cups clicked and clacked into saucers all around us and Sartre and de Beauvoir began to bicker at the table next to ours.

“Well. He didn’t know about Prof and me—I didn’t know about Prof and me. Not yet. But the two of them went at it hammer and tongs in history class about two days a week. An inverted obsession is still an obsession, and America’s sins were now a way of going on taking America personally. What it was really all about, needless to say, was that he couldn’t get his head screwed on right about his own father—who was the bad-guy CIA, and had
been
one of those guys running around destabilizing governments and bribing officials and helping to keep dictators propped up, and all those other eagle-in-a-china-shop things we did and do. But Dad was also the brave Marine who’d fought on Iwo Jima, which complicated things a good deal.”

That certainly gave I, Mary-Ann, a start—of not only recognition but an inexplicable suspicion
that I had invented her father to cope with mine, of course.
For the first time, I found myself mentally blinking at the date on my daddy’s tombstone—and the one on Corporal John G. Egan’s letter to my mother, too. “Well, that
does
complicate things,” I told my roommate, in a slightly jumpy voice.

“It did for him. I think he was too awed by the Bronze Star in Dad’s
dresser drawer to ever figure out that his father had been, maybe,
seventeen
on Iwo Jima, or wonder what going through that must have done to a seventeen-year-old. But his dad was the kind of guy who’d made up his mind right afterward that
he
wasn’t ever going to wonder about it, either. I mean, maybe what had frozen in his eyes were tears, but all there was there now was ice. It scared me to look at him, and I don’t think it did a
whole
lot to relax his son, either.”

“What about his mother?” I asked.

“Oh! Her I liked. She’d been in the Foreign Service before she got married, and I once made myself a mite unpopular with her husband by voicing my frisky curiosity as to why she hadn’t gone on doing that afterward. By the time I knew her, she was one of those friendly blonde women in slightly accidental clothes, whose hands are on a first-name basis with everybody’s arms and shoulders the minute she says hello, and who had concocted a sort of kidding fetish about the Rat Pack to give her personality a focal point. You know, like the birthstone necklace that someone tells you they
always
wear—meet me, meet my necklace. But she was nice.”

“And beside the point,” I guessed.

“For a lot of women her age, that’s the only place they felt safe calling home,” my roommate said. “She’d even had that little bit of a career, but when I met her, it was: Oh, I didn’t know they had a girls’ debate team at your school.’ No, no, I said, it’s just
the
debate team. Oh, my. Jack, did you hear that? It’s
the
debate team.’ But not to rebuke him: more as if she had been put in possession of a fact that she didn’t want to be solely responsible for. She was passing it up the chain of command.”

“And he—your boyfriend—was between a rock and a soft place,” I guessed again. Though both the perception and the manner of articulating it made I, Mary-Ann, feel my old irksome sense of being no more than a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy. “But if he wasn’t your boyfriend anymore, how did you get to be part of the horrible mess? That’s a really strange billboard behind you, by the way.”

“Timing,” my roommate said, as the hands on the Maxwell House clock began to tick and tock. “Just before he and I got together, the Phoenix program had started to stink so bad in the papers that
somebody
had to be the scapegoat—and his father was one of the gung-ho guys who’d helped set it up, which was another reason it was kind of scary to meet those eyes across a dinner table. Guess who carves the roast! But he fell on his electric knife, because he had just enough seniority to satisfy the Hill and not enough of it for Langley to protect him, and they gave him the boot from the Agency. That’s Washington: the story runs below the fold, and mostly not even on Page One. There’s somebody’s picture, with that expressionless smile they all have in their work photograph—what are they
looking
at, to be that happy and that vague?—and you know you’re reading an obituary. Between the lines is a small elegy for black passports and the day Suharto shook your hand, and that great time with old Joe Doakes in Rangoon, and a gray panic about making the car payment. Sometimes you went to school with their kid.”

“But they didn’t leave,” I said.

“Oh, no. Nobody does. Nobody goes back to Kansas, unless it’s to Leavenworth. Or back to Rochester, Minnesota, either. His dad was one of the lucky ones. He had friends in Nixon’s re-election campaign. They found him a good job.”

“Wait,” I said, bewildered. “Re-elec-, what are you-”

My roommate’s snicker was grim. “He ended up as one of the White House Plumbers, working for his fellow ex-gyrene Chuck Colson. That’s some career progression, wouldn’t you say—USMC, CIA, CREEP? I’m actually not sure if he would have gone to jail, but I guess he was still one of the lucky ones. He didn’t end up in prison. Right in the middle of Watergate, he ended up in a hospital instead—with terminal cancer, at the age of all of forty-five.”

Between the UN, the Plaza, and the Sherry-Netherland, I, Mary-Ann, did not consider myself uninformed. But to my ears, my roommate had started spouting gibberish, in the iron-cold Manhattan dark. I had no idea what she meant by “Watergate,” and while I could see that working as a plumber, even in the Executive Mansion, might well qualify as a comedown for a white-collar type of fellow, my roommate’s unexpected snobbery annoyed me to my Russell, Kansas, toes—now clad, I noticed, in the red pumps I’d worn to the top of the Tour Eiffel. Nor had I ever heard of any television show such as the “Phoenix” program,
which came
under the heading of “pacification” in bureaucrat-speak and operated as a CIArun assassination bureau in Vietnam.

“O.K.,” I said, “I’m getting lost here.” Since we had just flown over what I knew perfectly well to be the Lincoln Memorial, which was now passing from sight beneath our helicopter as we dipped toward a large building whose scalloped balconies had an uncanny resemblance to stacked dentures before veering south over an island in what must be the Potomac River, this was not literally true. But I was beginning to feel frustrated.

“Well,” my roommate shouted, as we crept out from underneath our chopper’s clickety-clacking blades, “while his father was in intensive care, he came upon you and Prof—here in the woods behind your house. It was April Fool’s Day, 1974.”

And for me it was still winter; but for you it was already spring. So far as the weather went, you were right; it was so mild that I didn’t even have a sweater on when I ran out of the hospital and past that damned billboard to find you, not so incidentally leaving my mother in the ICU alone. But if she and I tried to treat forgiveness for either my or her behavior at the time on a case-by-case basis, we’d still be at it today.

“He hadn’t known?”

“No. And since you’ve got your top off"—with a yelp, I crossed my wrists over my collarbones-”you can’t really tell him that Prof’s just helping you work up your cards on that year’s debate topic. Which was, by the by, and not without a certain irony, ‘Was Alger Hiss Unjustly Accused?’ “

“Was he?” I asked, shivering in her back yard.

“Well, this was debate. The trick was, if you built the case that the government fiddled the evidence to get him, you were going off on a tangent so far as the judges were concerned,” my roommate explained briskly. “I had all that in my notes, but I surprised myself by deciding that anyone who thought the S.O.B, was
innocent
was definitely barking up the wrong crucifix. As I say, though, you can’t really pretend that this is the point of your rendezvous—not when Boyfriend has just seen you with Prof’s robust thumbs and index fingers twiddling your bare nipples like two pieces of pink classroom chalk, Mary-Ann.”

“But hadn’t you broken up with him by then?” I asked, relieved that we were back in my apartment, I had my checked top on again, and no strange hands were in sight.

“Try telling
him
that,” my roommate said from the sofa. “One and only, love story for the ages, so on and so forth. It was a little scary, to be honest—he was more like his father than he thought.”

“Well, I’d call that pretty good I’m-going-to-be-messed-up-there-for-a-while stuff,” I said. “But is it really Grade-A I’ll-hate-you-for-the-rest-of-my-life stuff?”

At which she looked blank; then realized what she’d left out. “The reason he’d come looking for me in the first place was to tell me that his father had just died.”

“Oh,” I said.

“April fool, Gil. Too bad, wouldn’t you say? Too bad all around. Well, for everyone but Prof, I guess—he didn’t give a damn.”

Leaning forward, she turned up the volume on the radio. As the elusive tune gained on the knitting or else the knitting paused, I heard this:

“Monday; Monday…”

“What happened afterward?” I asked.

“Well—it wasn’t
good.
I think he spent a solid
week
sniffing glue, which he used to do in between PT boats when he was younger, and listening over and over to that record whose cover you were glancing at in such perplexity a while back. It must have been something to be around the house, because Mom was losing herself to the delights of the medicine cabinet. And didn’t much notice or care who saw-”

But then my roommate stopped,
because I told you that in confidence, and you aren’t going to repeat it—not even to Mary-Ann. As I say, afterward we found it easier to forgive each other in bulk. I wish Lovey hadn’t let it slip out, but too late now.

“What about later?” I asked, as she apparently wasn’t going to complete the sentence.

“Oh, later was all sorts of things. Later was June, when I found myself—courtesy of Prof—sitting in Doctor Rubicon’s waiting room, a
very
scared almost-seventeen. When the nurse called my name, my knees were shaking so bad I wasn’t sure I could even stand up.” Lips compressed,
she paused to inspect her clamped hands. “But I did, and slowly gathered that, even though it was what I had come there to prevent, somebody was going to get born anyway: me.”