Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (50 page)

I had just realized what she meant; not, needless to say, that this had ever been a problem I, Mary-Ann, had had to contend with. “Lordy! Did you go to Tijuana, or-”

“Shit, no,” she said. “I went to a clinic in the District. Why would—oh, right. You don’t know yet. Never mind. Anyway: later was college. Gil and I ended up in facing dorms, but of course he was my bitter enemy by then. I’d walk past his window on my way to Commons, and hear him playing Aladdin Sane’ at full blast as if he’d put it on when he saw me coming. It was all Bowie and Lou fucking Reed from freshman to junior year. But I don’t think anything ever really made him happy until the Ramones came along.”

“The who?” I stammered in confusion.

“No. I told you: that was earlier. But then he went away this way, and I went away that way, and we probably both tried real hard to grow up until one day we realized we’d succeeded beyond our wildest dreams at it. That’s that.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No.” Her smile was rueful, but the way it pinched one side of her face made it look as if she’d winked. “I mean, I can
guess
—and so, I guess, can he. But we didn’t exactly keep in touch.”

“What did you say his name was?” I asked. “His whole name.”

So she told me, which was how I learned that ex-Corporal John G. Egan—if that had indeed been him I’d seen briskly striding to hoist up a three-year-old, as a bomb went off and a Marlboro bobbed, on the Boulevard St. Germain one day—had kept his promise to stop calling his son “Junior” from then on. But then she re-pronounced the same three syllables she’d just spoken, whoopingly altering the stresses:

“…I mean, the poor son of a bitch!” my roommate was saying, giggling and shaking her head. “You can imagine how long it took to spot
that
nickname in tenth grade—even though I never called him that,”
for which I thank you.
“And he even
looked
a little like Bob Denver,
so of course the nickname stuck. No wonder he could hardly stand the show.”

“The show?” I said confusedly,
not yet remotely aware that she was
that
Mary-Ann.
Yet in my mind, I’d just re-seen the pointing bystanders near the Pont des Arts, and just re-heard what they were shouting; had re-felt a hand on my shoulder, and had re-looked into green eyes. I knew that this unveiling was connected to that one in some way I couldn’t grasp, but all I wished for at the moment was an exit from this flimsy, endlessly mutable, peculiarly clickety-clacking maze. Sleepily, I longed to find a place whose reality—which I equated, simply and naively and despite everything that Jean-Luc ever tried to teach me, with its constancy—I could count on.

I’d like to be somewhere that never changes, I thought. Rather ironically, in hindsight.

“It’s in my antithesis,” my roommate said, apparently meaning the show, in a tone that suggested she was under an impression of explaining something. “The last chapter, in fact.”

“What’s your antithesis about?” I asked somewhat timidly, my summer program at the Sorbonne having stopped well short of connoisseurship of this type of project. I had heard of theses, but not antitheses.

“Sometimes I wish I had a good short answer to that one,” my roommate said. “But Paul Burns—my adviser—thinks I ought to try to turn it into a book just the same. Want to take a look at the table of contents? It might give you an idea.”

“Sure,” I said, by now completely at sea and guessing that information of any sort would be helpful. Wrong again I was. Pulling a single sheet from her typescript, my roommate passed it over, and I stumbled my way through this:

A Cage Is a Cage Is a Cage

A Master’s Antithesis

By Susan Β. O’Hara

1.   The Myth of Purity and the Cult of Hysteria:

From Quentin Compson to
The Catcher in the Rye

2.   Hung Up on GI Dad:

Find Your Own Big One or Shut Up

3.   Let’s Call It “Macho-Chism”:

Why Male Romantics Love to Rescue Women Who Might Have Learned to Swim Instead

4.   Dreams in a Funhouse Mirror:

Transcending the Self \ Inventing the Other; and the Allure of the Lesbian Fantasy

5.   Goodbye, Doctor:

Cheesecake as Therapy

6.   We’ll Be His Mirror:

The Narcissist (Male) as Superpower (Guess)

7.   Pre-Feminist Archetypes Marooned in a Midcentury Eden:

Was That “Uncharted Desert Isle” Paradise—or the Alamo?

“Well?” my roommate said, with a faint smile, as I handed it back. At which point I, Mary-Ann, exploded.

“What do you mean, ‘Well?’ ” I hollered. “
None of this makes any sense to me! I am Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas, and briefly of the Sorbonne, and I have
no
idea what’s going on!
You tell me an
interminable
story about you and your high-school
boyfriend,
when
all I wanted to hear about
was how you lost your virginity—and I don’t even
know
why I felt curious about
that!
You keep mentioning all these crazy things I haven’t heard of and don’t want to hear of—
Phoenix
program!
Watergate!
Nixon’s
reelection
campaign—for what,
dogcatcher
? For gosh sakes,
he couldn’t even get elected governor of California!
Next, you’ll be telling me that Ronald Reagan
did, AND GOD KNOWS WHAT-ALL ELSE!
I am Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas, and
I hardly even know what the CIA is, for gosh sakesl
And
that’s
supposed to be an
oldies
station,
and I have never heard that song in my life until now! THE CLICKETY-CLACKING THROUGH THE DUMB WALL IS DRIVING ME PLUMB NUTS!
And you keep
talking about a
TV show
that I never
saw
in my life—
and you get the most infuriating damn smirk on your face when you do
! And we’re not
DONE, oh no,
because
THEN
you show me what you say is the
table of CONTENTS
for something called a master’s
antithesis,
of which I have never
heard,
and what do you know?
BIG surprise coming, folks! I CAN’T MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT EITHER! It reads like one half of a telephone conversation on MARS,
and all I can tell you about
that
is that you start out
on Mars
sounding like you’re
arguing
with somebody else
on Mars,
and
then
you decide you
agree
with them
on Marsl Well, JIMDANDY! SO WHAT! WHAT IN HELL DOES ANY OF IT HAVE TO DO WITH ME? AND WHAT MAKES IT WORSE IS THAT THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO ME MY WHOLE LIFE, AND I DON’T KNOW WHY!”

Taking a breath, I looked around.

“Where’s the TV set?” I said.

“Actually,” Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective, told me comfortably, “I think it was the other way around. The argument, I mean—so far as which of us ended up agreeing with the other.” Then, raising her voice and addressing Monsieur Defarge’s increasingly translucent wall, she bafflingly went on: “I didn’t think you’d even
remember
the day I made you take me to Occoquan.”

Come on. When you told me that you wanted to go, I’d only had my license for a week. It was the first time I’d driven anywhere outside of Arlington, and when we got there, we kept wandering around, because you were so stubbornly convinced that there must be a monument somewhere. But even at that little Tourist Information shack, they didn’t know what you were talking about; all they could give us was directions to the prison. Then, among weeds and whizzing cars, we finally found that sad little plaque from the Fairfax County League of Women Voters, which was and is the only indication of what happened there in 1911, when a few women armed only with their own bodies fought a battle with the U.S. government and won. You sat down on the median strip in your white peasant blouse and jeans and started bawling, and even then I understood you well enough to know it wasn’t grief. It was fury.

Before I could even get started trying to make sense of what my roommate had just said, which I suspected would be a fool’s errand in
any case, she had kindly resumed talking to me: “Anyway, you’re right, Mary-Ann. I don’t blame you for getting fed up. Even without the sudden dizzying changes of clothing and scenery, accompanied only by that persistent, annoying clacking sound, this whole conversation would be out of whack. In real life, I think I’m at least fifteen years younger than you are—or than Dawn Wells is, anyway. And if it’s 1964, then feminism isn’t much more thàn a gleam in Betty Friedan’s eye—you know, sort of like a locomotive coming at you in the dark, but from
really
far away. And to be honest, while I’ve always been fond of you, I don’t think that you and I would ever be roommates, much less the torrid lovers I suspect we briefly were in danger of becoming. But Gil never did get why I always rooted more for Ginger—and also objected to the choice.”

Peculiarly, she raised her voice again. “I take it that’s no longer the case,” she called out. But there was no one there for her to be talking to—just the wall, which had now become so thin and translucent that endless parallel lines of regimented black markings showed through it from the far side.

“Well Here we God Damn go again,”
I raged. “Will
SOMEONE
please tell me
what is going on?”

As no doubt goes without saying, no one did. Instead, even as it visibly inched closer to us and the room began to grow more shallow and confining as a result, the wall became slightly concave—and I, MaryAnn, would not be getting out of here a minute too soon, I told myself. When I got back from my vacation, I was definitely going to be in the market for another apartment; so I thought.

“I’m glad you tried to understand,” Sukey Santoit told whoever she was talking to. “You know I didn’t want you to find out the way you did, or God knows on the day you did. But Ginger’s right: these things happen. Sometimes it just works out that way.”

However, she no longer had to raise her voice to do this, as the room was now sufficiently narrow to make that unnecessary. At this rate, in only seconds more, whatever it was we were inside would be completely flat; and I had just seen the writing on the wall.

EMOCLEW
, it said.

“For
God’s sake, stop yakking and get me the hell out of herel
” I shrieked at Sukey Santoit. “Can’t you see he’s got us
trapped?”

“Don’t worry, Mary-Ann,” she said. “We’ve both been gone a long time.”

Apparently not the least perturbed that the room was now virtually two-dimensional—and we with it, I realized with a consternation I can only ask you to imagine, for now I could see through us both—she reached down with a shrug and picked up the typescript that she’d been comparing against her antithesis. To my utter stupefaction, and most un-Mary-Ann-ish rage.

“What are you talking about?”
I screamed at her at the top of my lungs.
“Who are you? What are you? What are WE, for gosh sakes?”

Tender, eager, mocking and amused, her eyes’ twin vestiges of dilute green light—now all that was left of her—looked up from the last pages of her book.

“Memories,” she said.

Dear Roadrunner,

Yes—and here I sit among my Acme traps and gizmos, watching you dash away. But you have somewhere to get to, and unlike my beloved master—the great Wile E. Coyote, whom we knew—I wasn’t trying to catch you. You know I only wanted to see you one more time. And make you laugh, because you’d have to have changed a lot not to get a smile or two from this—especially since you know that the real story was so different.

Anyhow, this is all I really wanted to say: bless you. I started making up these jokes not long after they dropped the Times Square wrecking ball on the century you and I grew up in. Looking out of the small window that I had on it at sixteen—when you above all things were glad and young, as your favorite poem put it—I realized that the reason your eyes were green was that all of you was.

You see, in my memory, you were standing in New York Harbor. Back then I didn’t understand what freedom meant to you, and of
course I couldn’t see why
anyone
would want to be free of
me—
even though I sure did, which should probably have been some sort of tip-off. But everything I ever thought you did to me has turned out to be what you did for me, and I’m grateful. As is the woman I’m married to, who sends your youthful ghost bemused regards.

So it’s thirty years later, and what do you know? I’m a middle-aged fathead staring at a computer screen, still thinking about a girl I used to know in high school. Congratulate me, Susan—or S usa Ν, as I used to write it: that must prove I’m a real American at last.