Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  On the whole drive out to East Egg, I was heaving so much with nausea that I kept bumping my chin against the top of the steering wheel. The only news I had of how badly I must be handling the car was the endless roar of horns and squeal of brakes and thump of jerking tires around me. Luckily, no policeman who was happy in his job was likely to pull over a Duesenberg; while I might be a nobody, the odds weren’t worth it. Somehow, in the midst of what I believe was the closest I’ve ever come to pure delirium, I found myself noticing that the billboard with the garish eyes on the way to Daisy’s house had been replaced by a new one advertising Maxwell House coffee, although the image—a clock with far too many, peculiarly human-looking hands—was hardly much less of an inducement to stark madness than old Dr. T.J.’s stare had been. Then a gate was thankfully open without my needing to sound the horn, a horse was loping away from me down a long driveway, and I had shut off the Duesenberg’s motor with a sob of exhaustion and relief.

  The Swede opened the door to me with a dour and skeptical look, for which I repaid her by sticking my thumbs in my ears and wiggling my fingers while making a horrible gargoyle face the second her back was turned. Not bothering to take me to our mistress, she lumbered back toward the kitchen. I went on into the living room.

  On a sofa from which the piles of books had now been dashed to the floor, as had the ones on the nearby table, Daisy was feeding bits of something to dreadful, pink-eyed SooSoo. Hearing my step, she glanced up, and we stared at each other in silence for some moments as SooSoo growled at me warningly.

  “I need ore-may orphine-may,” I said.

  Lifting an eyebrow, she tilted her head toward SooSoo. “This is the dog, not the child,” she said coolly. “Or had you already forgotten-” at which point her chin trembled. A moment later, she was sobbing in my arms.

  “Oh, darling, it was terrifying!” her damp voice moaned in my hair. “I had to drive all the way back here—down that road—but you don’t know—you must never know…”As, indeed, I do not; to this day.

  Regaining some control of herself, she went back to the sofa, and fished out something that had been stuffed between its frame and cushions. Smiling and brushing the last tears from her eyes with one hand, she held out the velvet case with my gold hypo in it with the other.

  After we had sailed away, we lay on her bed, our two heads touching but our feet angling off the coverlet in opposite directions. I felt as nervous as one could right after an injection of morphine—which, however hard I tried, wasn’t very. But Daisy seemed to be in no great hurry to make the thing happen that I knew would have to happen, probably many times, unless and until I managed to locate a narcotics supplier of my own. Instead, I heard her voice asking dreamily, “Would you like to go to Provincetown with me tomorrow? A lot of our friends from the Village are up there just now, and I’ve rented a cottage for a week. We can hire a car if you don’t feel like doing a drive that long.”

  Hard as I found it to explain, I was touched—and somehow humbled—by the “our” when Daisy said “our friends.” I also didn’t much want to drive back to New York, since it was so pleasant here just now, no matter the apprehensions knocking, so far vainly, at the back door of my head. But if we were going to be in Provincetown for a full week, I had an enormous amount of wardrobe to select and pack, even though Daisy assured me that neither its temporary nor its permanent residents were any great sticklers for formality.

  At the door, she kissed me in full view of the Swede, and this time my lips obediently parted when her tongue’s slither asked them to. But that was as far as it went.

  In any case, the drive back to Gramercy Park was considerably easier than the drive out to East Egg had been. Early the next morning, I heard a car-horn outside the window, just as I had four days before. Oh, it’s the Swede back with the Duesenberg again, I thought nonsensically. But this was a different horn, and when I looked, a long black Daimler was idling down below. From its back window, Daisy’s face and arm protruded, waving and beaming enthusiastically.

  Taking my four suitcases from Lii Gagni, who was rather overdoing the gasping and puffing, the Chinese chauffeur fit them into the Daimler’s luggage compartment, next to Daisy’s—three. Well, she’d certainly been fibbing about traveling light, I thought. Then the chauffeur opened the door, and I stepped in to find myself face-to-face with Daisy, her daughter, and SooSoo.

  “The Swede quit last night.” Daisy’s smile was tight. “But it’ll be all right, darling. It’ll just have to, since it can’t be helped!”

  As the Daimler pulled away, I saw the chauffeur’s eyes flick toward me in the mirror above his head. On the sidewalk, he had struck me as vaguely familiar. But now, seeing those eyes in the same elongated box where I had seen them so many times before, I realized instantly who this was.

  “Cheng,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Wong.” Hearing his voice, I knew it was Cheng. Had he snuck back in on another boat, or had he never been deported?

  “I’m not wrong!” I said sharply. “You’re Cheng.”

  “No,” Cheng said. “My name Wong.”

  Daisy’s daughter started to blubber.

  Jumping into my lap, SooSoo bit me on the nose.

  By the time the drive came to an end some eight or nine hours later, Provincetown would have had to be on fire to appear anything less than welcoming. And perhaps even that wouldn’t have done it, for the afternoon sun that made the eaves and corners of everything glow orange simply gave a feeling that one was inside a gigantic paper lantern. The cottage Daisy had rented was called “The Waves,” although marcels would have been more accurate, and on her instructions the Daimler trundled down a lane of flour to it, past a sign pointing people to the lighthouse. Which we could see, black against the sky beyond our roof. Behind the house were dunes declining to a somewhat marshy inlet into which the sea crept contentedly, like a blue kitten with white claws.

  Once Cheng had unloaded the luggage, Daisy—who had been made rather peremptory by the fact that she, not I, had been in charge of the car—insisted that we all change into our bathing gear, except Cheng of course, and trot down to the beach. “Quick, quick! Before the sun goes down, and everything cools off. Wong, bring umbrella, um-įre/-la.” As he set it up, she went out into the water up to the first stripe above her knees, and bent down with a laugh to call some to her, reaching out for it as if it had been a child—a prettier one than her actual daughter, who was unfortunately turning out to be quite an ugly little fool.

  After she and the sea had played awhile, she came back to drop onto the towel next to me, her blond head burnished by the sun and the tracery of punctures on her arms and legs looking like violet, delicate Rorschach blots. Naturally, I was used to those, having them myself. But as she turned to smile at me, a vein in her throat stood out more prominently than I had ever noticed it doing.

  I started to watch Cheng, who, dutiless for the moment, had gone marching down the beach in his gray uniform and visored cap, his hands clasped behind his back and an interested expression on his neck. Seagulls flew around him, making noises. Behind him, the little waves scooted forward and washed away the indentations of the hobnailed footprints of his jackboots, a process I suddenly found fascinating.

  “I always knew he was a spy—and look, the ocean’s on his side,” I said. “It’s making sure no one will know he’s been here.”

  “Tide’s coming in.” Daisy raised her voice. “Sweetheart, no! That’s not your pail, nor SooSoo’s either. No, I don’t know whose it is, but I’m sure they’ll come back for it soon, and then how will you look? Come back to Mummy now, we’re going in the house.”

  Dinner, which involved a boisterous reunion with some of our bohemians at a sandy restaurant where crackling plates of strange, good things from the sea kept being passed behind and above all our heads, was more relaxing. One of the poets even made Daisy’s daughter laugh, a phenomenon whose unfamiliarity the little girl signaled by catching up her small fat
fists to her mouth as she did so. But as we strolled back to the cottage and Daisy slipped a shy, dry hand in mine as the dreadful dog yapped, my heart sank so fast that I could practically hear the cries of the drowning. Aside from the spot that we had fixed up for her daughter, or possibly SooSoo, on an ottoman in the front room, I had already observed that there was only one bed in the house.

  I had rather hoped that we could sail away first, as I knew that afterward no great exertion would be possible, or seem all that inviting—to her, I mean. But Daisy gave a smile and said something about not wanting her recollections blurred, almost as if she already knew that the memory of it would be something she’d need to cling to.

  As she attended to her child, I crept between rough cotton sheets, willing myself furiously to fall asleep on the instant. Of course, that was no great way to accomplish it, and soon I heard the door open and shut. But no one slipped into bed next to me, which was how I came to open my eyes at the moment Daisy’s camisole fell to her feet. The moonlight made her skin blue, even as its softness effaced the needle marks. Then, she had crouched beside me, and was tugging at my lacy nightgown. “Why do you have all this on, silly?” I heard her say, audibly trying to keep the fun in her voice and the urgency out of it.

  That was how I finally learned what it was like to be a bad girl—to be a mad girl, between blue thighs. Then we lay with our two lanky, scrawny-breasted, period bodies fitted around each other, like two halves of the same Art Deco person. “Why, we’re lovely,” Daisy said, looking at us in the moonlight. Looking too, I had to admit that there was something aesthetically pleasing in our shared Juan Gris hips and two tufts. But it was like admiring a painting from a school with which one felt no real affinity. All the same, as Daisy’s breathing grew even beside me, I had the strange thought, troubling because it was calming, that between two women this act was a transition from comforting, whereas when one was with a man it was a transition from suffering; that is, if one was lucky

  .1 also still wanted to sail away, and wondered if I could fix on my own and whether the bathroom light would wake up Daisy’s little girl. But the door was a mile away, and then at the top of a tower inside which I was ever so slowly tumbling down.

  By the next morning, it felt as if we had already developed a routine, which seldom varied over the next five days. We’d spend long, sun-dazed mornings on our little kitchen carpet of beach behind the cottage, in company with some of our bohemians—some of whom brought tense-faced, chunky girls with them, a rarity on Carmine Street. The conversations and flickering semi-arguments they all had with each other about painting and writing were nonetheless almost identical to the ones in Le Perroquet de Paris, as the new additions spoke little. Yet somehow it sounded different—at once less affected and more artificial, if that makes any sense—when we were all outside and in sunlight, tawny-headed and salty-lipped, as gulls cawed and one of the chunky girls, far out past the beach, determinedly inched her way along in the water below the gongstruck line that separated deeper from paler blue.

  Then we’d stroll down Provincetown’s main street, eating crunchy seafood wrapped in paper and peeking into moldy little shops with weathered fishing nets winding around whatever it was they sold. In the afternoons, we’d go back to our various little houses to nap, read, or play games, or else go on motor excursions—Cheng sweating in his gloves behind the wheel—to other parts of Cape Cod, which were pretty much like our bit except that the names were different and more people looked at us oddly the farther back toward the mainland we got. Once it was dark, everyone would gather for a riotous meal at the same restaurant we’d gone to the first night.

  Then, night after night, I’d irritably drag my nightgown off over my head with one hand as I stomped across our tiny floor to throw myself with deliberate and punishing ungainliness on the bed. Even in the dark, I could see the hurt welling in Daisy’s eyes. But she was never wounded enough to stop her caresses, her whispered requests for this and that here and there again and again, her maddening attempts to make all this a frolic by banging me on the head with a pillow or hiding my hairbrush.

  On top of everything else, I had to sail away by myself a few times, clumsily fixing in the bathroom with the gold hypo whose engraved inscription I had tried several times by now to mar with my nails and teeth. Daisy sailed away often enough not to get sick, but she didn’t seem that interested. “We don’t really need it, do we?” she asked me on the beach one morning, before the first bohemians—later risers than we, to a man and chunky girl—had arrived. “With the sun on the water, and—well, each other? I mean, I know we do. But we can try not to need it, can’t we?”

  “Why should we?” I said. She didn’t answer. After a moment, she picked up her book.

  On the next-to-last night before we were supposed to go back, Daisy had arranged for something special—involving our whole crew and a movie theater, thank God, not me and some sort of there-she-blows apparatus acquired in a harpooning shop. She had rented Provincetown’s tiny one and only motion-picture palace, which was another woodframe house on Main Street like the rest except that it had a marquee instead of a fishnet or a shark’s jaw over the door, and hired a projectionist to show some experimental movies from Europe that one of our bohemians was trying to convince the Metropolitan Museum in New York to run off for the public. I thought it strange that any movie should go to a museum without having, I don’t know, rolled around in the world a bit first, but apparently with things experimental it was either that or permanent Coventry, since people wouldn’t care unless they had been impressed d’avance. In Provincetown, at what I suppose would be called the premiere, we were most impressed by the fact that we could bring alcohol, since Daisy was paying for everything and there was no manager to object.

  The first movie shown was so ghastly that I considered mailing the Metropolitan a private note hinting that the time had come to write off this medium as an art form. It was almost as if whoever had been entrusted with the camera had deliberately photographed the most revolting images he could imagine while rejecting all the beautiful ones, which I know sounds preposterous but does convey the general effect of watching ants crawl out of people’s palms and dead mules lie atop pianos for twenty utterly repulsive minutes. Early on, when a woman’s eye was slashed with a razor, Daisy’s daughter screamed and buried her head in her mother’s shoulder, and I felt caught between horror and envy myself. As the lights came up, I heard Daisy murmur a reproach to the bohemian who had arranged it all. “I didn’t know,” he muttered back.

  “You hadn’t watched it?” Daisy hissed.

  “I didn’t know your daughter was here. I didn’t know she was in Provincetown. I didn’t know you had a daughter. I thought she was your son. I’ve been drunk since Tuesday, for Christ’s sake, and I’m not sure who you are either. Other than that, what did you think? Ijust hope the dame who shelled out for this wing-ding isn’t going to be a ninny about it. But not much chance of that with these know-nothing, do-nothing rich twerps, I suppose.”

  I didn’t catch her answer. But as for me, it had just crossed my mind that I had never really liked any of the art that knowing Daisy had subjected me to. Still, I couldn’t have left without causing a stir. As we had a few minutes with the lights up while the projectionist got the next movie ready, I started to read the program notes for it to find out what I ought to be bracing myself for.

  Das Herz von Avis

  (The Heart of Avis)

  ein Film von G. W. Langmur

  Critical Remarks: This adaptation of Mack Schlechtkunst’s famous fairy tale for adolescent lads employs very resource of the cinema. Plot Synopsis: Avis, the Boy-Prince of ancient Vommangia-zur-Alp, has been raised to reverence his prodigious father King Wuntag, whose throne he is intent to follow with his father’s footsteps one day. One day, a passing crone indicates to Avis that his bride must be the Apline maiden Siegheidi, who is seen nearby milking and gives testimonials she is undefiled. Having been foretold long ago th
at he would be told this, Avis knows it to be truthful, and he and Siegheidi mount the Alp to sing of their engagement and impending demise. [Note: Sheet music for organist attached.]

  Now we are returned to King Wuntag’s court down below, where in his absence the vengeful sorcerer Mahlhaus has cast a spell on his clothing. Donning them on his return from war, Wuntag discovers he is evil. He struggles to doff the clothings but they are too strong even for Wuntag. Strangling his throat and running himself through with his sword Dolwahl, he is hurleed by his own feet into a nearby pit of fire.

  When back to the top of the Alp we go, Avis and Siegheidi are ending their song of loving. As they return down, the warlock Frack-Frack espies them in the forest he is disguised as. Exposing himself, he casts a spell on Siegheidi that turns her into a statue. Continuing on, Avis reaches the castle, where he is told of Wuntag’s turn to evil and subsequent death. He tries to lift Dolwahl but the great sword melts in front of the eyes of everybody. Going in search of the forest he remembers, he sees that Frack-Frack has defiled perhaps multiple times the statue of Siegheidi, which indicates by means of crumbling that it has been thinking of Avis the whole time. The ingenious warlock meanwhile turns into a noxious vapor and escapes while Avis is having illness.

  Realizing that his weakness makes him unfit to rule, yet resolved to do his duty by his people, Avis re-mounts the Alp. There in one manly gesture he tears his heart from his chest and offers it to the sky. As birds begin to eat his heart, Avis expires. In an epilogue, we are shown that eating The Heart of Avis has given the birds