Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  He looked down at Suzannah. “How’d you like to come with me?” he said. “I’ll bet you haven’t even seen the swimming pool.”

  Well, she had absolutely no choice in the matter. In a situation such as this one, girls like us don’t choose; we get chosen, and Suzannah knew it. But that didn’t prevent her from shooting me a dark look of pure maleviolence as she twitched her gown and self, looking rather like a black banana with each end partly peeled, up off the couch to accompany him.

  Much later, of course, after Senator John F. Knowbody had become a distinct Somebody even to someone like me who only read Variety; I did have regrets—which I should probably mention. But no, too late: he went with Suzannah. He went with Lilith, my black-gowned sister.

  In any case, she told me some time afterward that I hadn’t missed a lot. The only fun part, she said, was right after they got their clothes off, when he towed her on a rubber raft around the pool for a while by a strap held in his teeth; but just as she was starting to seriously enjoy the whole Cleopatra’s-barge aspect of this, he said something like, “Well, the choppers are still willing, but the back is now weak,” and that was that for that. When they got down to business, she said that he was very indolent, leaning back on the steps at the pool’s shallow end and getting her to straddle him, which gave her scrapes on both knees from bumping them repeatedly against the pool’s concrete wall. But that, she said, was still an improvement on his first idea, which had been for her to give him head underwater—a task that even Suzannah, who had the lungs of a medieval glassblower and had acquired them in a similar way, found herself unable to perform for long without experiencing a serious diminution of the celebrated Gumstump brio.

  However, at the time that my sister’s rhythmically splashing keester was no doubt sending cascades of bright green water shivering all the way to the bougainvilleas, I hardly had space in my mind for curiosity about the state of things out in the swimming pool. I was too busy feeling stunned. You see, once Suzannah and Senator Knowbody split, I had simply assumed that Frank and I would soon depart upstairs to his vague but splendid bedroom, while Sammy wandered off to do whatever Negro sidekicks did in such circumstances—the dishes, I supposed, although we hadn’t eaten. But after no more than a couple of minutes, whose conversational content I do not remember, Frank suddenly held up his hand, as if to either stop traffic or bestow a blessing. “What’s today,” he asked, “Saturday?”

  “Yeah.” Then Sammy glanced at his watch, which was flatter to his wrist than any I had ever seen. “Close to Sunday,” he said, “if you want to get technical about it.”

  “I don’t. Believe me, getting technical about anything is the last thing I want to do right now. I’m beat.” He looked at his still upraised hand, as if only now recalling the chore it had been lifted to perform, and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been in the studio for six days straight. I need to rest,” he said, and stood up.

  “See you in the morning, Nephew Remus. You know where everything is,” he told Sammy. Then to me, “You’ve been a sweetie, doll-cake. If you ever want to catch a show, there’s two tickets waiting at the box office the minute you find the dime for a phone call.” Then, as I was still blinking back my petrified astonishment, he was gone, back upstairs.

  Since Sammy and I were both sitting down, and this now seemed a bit too much to have in common, I stood up. My plan was flawed, however, since he could stand up too; and promptly did so, to my resentment. With his one-glass-one-real-and-which-was-which eyes, he looked at me consideringly.

  “You’re right,” he said abruptly, although I had said nothing. “I could have gotten that drink myself. But I decided that I wanted to accept it from your hand, because I wanted to see what your hand felt like.”

  “And?” I said.

  He smiled. “Cold and wet. I hoped it was the highball glass talking.”

  The whole situation felt surreal to me, since this was Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, and he was a Negro, and it was late, and he was a Negro, and we were alone, and he was a Negro. My gown felt too tight; also insufficient to its job. Also, to reiterate something I may not have stressed sufficiently, he was a Negro. And on top of that, as if we didn’t have enough problems, he was a Negro. Plus which, I had just noticed something else: he was a Negro.

  Abruptly, I felt dazed, as the realization came to me out of the black that he was a Negro. Why hadn’t anyone informed me until this crucial moment, including myself, that Sammy Davis, Jr., was a Negro? And was he, himself, aware that he was a Negro? Clearly not, since we were alone and it was late and he was a Negro.

  Briefly, I felt I had the upper hand, since evidently I knew something he didn’t—namely, that he was a Negro. However, on reflection, this struck me as no advantage after all, since we were still alone and it was still late and he was still a Negro. I am giving you a much abbreviated version of my thoughts in these few seconds, during the entirety of which, the seconds and the thoughts alike, Sammy Davis, Jr., was and remained a Negro. Beyond that, murky but enormous, hovered the ultimate questions:

  Why had Frank made Sammy a Negro? In what way was that part of his plan? And were we all equal in Frank’s blue eyes?

  “I have to know something,” I said, and felt glad that I had stopped before saying “first.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you and Frank arrange this?”

  “Do you mean did I ask him to find me a girl tonight? Or do you mean did we flip a coin?”

  “Both.”

  “Baby, it was neither,” he said. “If I hadn’t realized I was noticing things like the way you did your hair, I’d have gone to bed myself an hour ago.”

  “But I was brought here,” I said. “My sister and I were brought some two hundred miles to this place. In a limousine,” I added, in what I sincerely hoped was not a pathetic attempt to impress him with anything more than the seriousness of the case.

  “Vampira’s your sister? I’ll be damned. Dean would love that,” he said irrelevantly. “But now let me ask you something, all right?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Baby, did anybody ask for a cigarette tonight?”

  I thought for a second. “No,” I said.

  Sammy flipped open a silver cigarette case on an end table. It was full. “They might have,” he said, and strolled to the bar. “Did anybody ask for some Dom Perignon tonight?” he asked, and pulled two bottles that had been icing in twin buckets there. “They might have.” Putting them down again, he walked to the record shelves next to the hi-fi. Yanking out a Johnny Mathis album, he displayed it for me without a word.

  “That’s how Frank does things,” he said, tucking Johnny Mathis back in for the night.

  Enraged by now, I stamped my foot. “Did anybody ask for a goddamn live performance of ‘Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’ tonight, you black son of a bitch?” I shrieked. But he only smiled.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But nobody’s asked you to go to bed with them yet, either.”

  At a loss, I walked to the hi-fi, and picked up the jacket to Frank’s acetate so that I could pretend to be studying it. This was a dumb mistake, as the jacket was perfectly blank on both sides except for a scrawl reading “FAS Personal,” and however desperate I might feel, I did not want to appear cretinous. Putting it down, I propped my hands to either side of the hi-fi’s recessed turntable, peering down as the acetate went around and acting as if I were humming along with Frank’s voice in a state of acute musical concentration that forbade anyone’s breaking in on it, no matter how well intentioned, friendly, or burning with dark lust they might be. This too had its problems, chiefly that I had never heard this tune before and so had to guess at what I was humming as I hummed. Finally I gave that up and began pretending that I had been clearing my throat, albeit somewhat rhythmically and in the same state of acute musical concentration. In any case, the hi-fi’s needle was now under an inch from the revolving blank white label at the acetate’
s center, and I had not bought myself any huge amount of time with this whole stratagem.

  And now the song is over. He’s right behind me. His arms encircle my waist. Now his hands come up and press my bazooms through my gown, his wiry fingers on the white silk and my pale-pink skin creating a color contrast that would have my Momma keeling over in a dead faint midway through fetching the shotgun. He’s found my lollipops, which to my somewhat heavy-breathing consternation have begun to push out their red Jujubes. Yet his touch, while firm, is unexpectedly considerate. Plenty of men whose yearning looks have conveyed how very, very badly they want to fondle my bazooms have managed to do precisely that, either kneading them with the sort of brutality best reserved for pizza dough or squeezing them by their girth as if sufficient pressure will fire off lollipops and Jujubes like little red rocket ships from the launching pad. But this, I have begun to recognize, is different. Sammy’s hands are gentle but authoritative, and the temperature of his breath on my neck feels just right, in the Goldilocksian sense of the term. My God, I have just noticed myself thinking, I can’t wait another minute; let’s get to hell out of here and find a bed, where I will give him the time of his life.

  It had not yet occurred to me that he might give me the time of mine. However, I now grasped that I really couldn’t wait another minute—and that we really did have to get to hell out of here, though to find what hardly mattered. I had remembered something Sammy didn’t know, which was that my sister Suzannah, no less than I, could make men fire a gun faster than Wyatt Earp, and that she often did just this when she was bored with their exertions—or lack of same, though I could hardly know as yet how real the risk was in this case. Which meant that, at any moment, she and Senator Jawn Ε Knowbody might come sauntering through the patio door all of six feet from my eyes, and slightly over five from where Sammy’s hands were caressing me. So long as we were out of sight by the time the two of them returned, whatever he and I did or didn’t wind up doing would matter a lot less, for I knew that Suzannah, upon finding the living room deserted, would simply take it for granted (no doubt with much bitterness, as I could not forbear interrupting these urgent specunabulations to note with some delight) that I was off somewhere making seismical, ring-a-ding-ding-dinging hunchy-punchy with Frank. But never Sammy, as the heritage that she and I shared—not to mention the promise that Momma had solemnly extracted from us both—would simply block the possibility from any access to her mind.

  “Where are you taking me?” I murmured, to nudge Sammy’s thoughts in the direction I now prayed they would go.

  “Wherever you like, baby,” he murmured back, his lips tender in my hair. “Wherever you want. Hey, I’ve got an idea: let’s go all the way to the moon. How does that sound to you, baby?”

  Clearly, this wasn’t going to do at all. “Sammy, for Christ’s sake!” I howled, whirling to face him. “My sister Suzannah could walk in any second now, and she is hopelessly afflicted with every last one of the prejudices to which I am so evidently and blessedly immune! You can go on fiddling and farzeling around with my beautiful white bazooms till Doomsday if you like, but get me the fuck behind a door this instant/”

  From the look in Sammy’s eyes, or eye—which one was it?—I saw that this outburst had changed the mood for him, and that he was trying to determine whether to swing with that or not. Having come to a decision, he quietly spoke two words whose meaning I found flabbergastingly cryptic—but only for a second.

  “The left,” he said. Taking my all but inert hand, he led me toward the stairs.

  As we ascended, I thought of what I’d promised Momma. In a somewhat convoluted but nonetheless dandy piece of reasoning, I took what comfort I could from the thought that, after all, I wouldn’t be sleeping with a coon in Los Angeles, the apocalyptic scenario of her worst nightmare. I’d be sleeping with a Jew in Palm Springs, and though not exactly recommended, wasn’t that permissible in her book? God bless America when all is said and done, I thought, reaching around for my gown’s zipper as we reached the top of the stairs.

  Gallantly, he showed me through the door first, then stepped in and closed it behind me. Hearing another click afterward, I realized with a silent prayer of thanks that he both could lock and had locked it. There was nothing in the room but an enormous bed. Midway there, I turned to face him. Taking a deep breath, I let my gown fall to my waist, then pushed it down past hips and knees until I could kick it off and away from my still high-heeled feet.

  Needless to say, like my sister, Suzannah, I wore no underwear. As he took in the sight before him—from hair of eternal fire to fire-engine-red high heels and back, pausing along the way at two gallumphing, peachy, red-tipped Dixie Flyers, a torso like a Stradivarius, and hips that flared out and soared up like cathedral arches to either side of the flaming mystery of all mysteries whose secrets he would soon penetrate even if of course he could not, as a man, ever entirely divine them—well, as he looked me over, I do not think I flatter myself beyond the pale by reporting that the expression in not only Sammy’s right eye but his left one altered slightly.

  It was Oscar night.

  We hurled each other into our arms. We threw our mingled self upon the bed. We tested the springs until they snapped. I rolled over him. He rolled over me. We rolled over us. We came together until we came together. When we were finally done, I sat up in a daze, and felt the hot blood pound down like Niagara beneath my dazzled skin before, unlike Niagara, it pounded right back up again. Next to me, Sammy’s breathing sounded slightly ragged; he glanced up with a smile. Tugging his wrist out from behind his head, I looked at his watch, and saw that I had just passed the most amazing ninety-two minutes in my far from inconsiderable experience as a mistress of the horizontal arts.

  “Got another date?” he asked, with another smile.

  “Not for the rest of my life,” I said, and meant it.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with it any longer,” he said. “But you really are something to look at, baby. And to touch. And to…”

  “And to?”

  “And to everything,” he said.

  Right then, I would have done whatever he asked. Not only would I have swung naked from a chandelier at the opera for him, I would have let my own dear Rover mount me in Macy’s front window at high noon on a Sunday had such been his desire. Had he proposed it, which he did not, I might well have even let him diddle my caboose, which no man black white Martian or producer ever has, had or will.

  Live with it, Sprout. Not gonna happen. Move on. You’ve got no one to resent but yourself. You could have tried to make all this stuff up about Suzannah instead of me, if you weren’t so damn scared of her.

  But to resume: at that moment, I was Sammy’s slave.

  It did not last.

  And why, oh why, I wonder even now—why did I ever take it into

  my head to tell him about Momma?

  ■

  “ … That’s what she said,” I giggled-” ‘whatever you do, just don’t sleep with no coon!’ “I may have been a little drunk, though whether with liquor or love I did not know, and now never will. In any case, ignoring the new tension in the body I was straddling, I then compounded my error by reaching forward to tug his ears, even as my newly competitional bazooms staged a shoving match over which one got to tickle his nose, and saying playfully: “What do you think, Samby—maybe that’s just why I did it?”

  In an instant, the room had become an empty glass, and Sammy was an ice cube that some giant hand—Frank’s, I guess—had dropped in it. Wasn’t melting none, either. For sure, no bourbon followed, nor libation of any sort.

  “ ‘Samby’?” he said.

  “I didn’t say ‘Samby.’ I said ‘Sammy,’ “I had a distinct feeling of dawning unhappiness. “I know I did.”

  He pushed me off him and stood up, reaching for a robe whose nearby presence on a hook I had not noticed in that breathless moment before the titanic collision of our black and white flesh in the now icy night—a mo
ment now some ninety-seven minutes past. “You know you did not,” he said. “And so do I. So do my ancestors, who went on singing like birds as they were hunted like dogs and packed in like sardines to be drowned like rats or else sold like cattle and worked to death like plain and simple,” he paused, meaningfully I thought, “niggers.”

  “Well, I guess I sort of thought that we were friends now,” I said.

  “Skip it. Get dressed. You’re lucky I’m not making you do that after I throw you out.”

  I slowly got up, allowing him and anyone else who might be interested a last, prolonged glimpse of my extraordinary, magnificently pale, Jujube-tipped and mystery-licked body—upon which even Sammy’s anger did not prevent his right eye from lingering noticeably, even though his left eye didn’t know what his right one was doing.

  “But"—I had thought fast and hard during that interlude-”this isn’t even your house. It’s Frank’s. Shouldn’t we go wake him up first?” I asked, pulling up my gown.

  “Why?”

  “Well, don’t you need his I don’t know permission, before you throw me out?”

  “For this? He’d need mine to keep you here.”

  “But earlier-”

  He held up his hand. “I know—those dumb minstrel jokes. Baby, to say that St. Francis isn’t from Assisi may be the definition of cutting a long story short. But can you sing like that album we were listening to downstairs, baby? I didn’t think so. And you know why? I can’t, either. But on a good night, when the drummer doesn’t lag—I hate that!—then yes, I almost can, and I’m so much a better dancer it’s not funny. No guinea from Hoboken is ever going to be able to do the splits worth a damn, and I’m the one with all the razzle-dazzle. Baby, he knows those things about me. I know them about him. That’s a way we understand each other that nothing else can touch—not my skin, not bad jokes for the cheap seats, not Sam Giancana.”