Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  “I didn’t know Joan Crawford was so big here,” I said, in French more diffident than my norm. But this unshaven runt in the smoked glasses looked like he really talked it, all the time and quite a lot too.

  “Crawford has her special hysteria that does not know how problematically it makes her actual hysterics difficult to distinguish from more routine behavior. But there are perceptions there. Still, her we can take or leave,” he said, all with an impatience that seemed to be his version of friendliness—and was, as I soon learned, Jean-Luc’s version of respect, although not to the exclusion of other, more predictable importunings. “The important name on that poster is much smaller.” He pointed.

  “C’est qui, ça?” I asked, peering. Guy could use a manicure, I thought.

  “I wonder why I try to learn English,” he grumbled in surprisingly good ditto, “when I reflect it will only bring me into closer contact with one hundred and seventy-five million people who have never heard of Nicholas Ray. In your country, I think he may feel fortunate to have heard of himself.”

  “Explique-moi, alors,” I said—and, in a very un-Mary-Ann-like gesture, which as a result left both of us disconcerted, seized the cigarette that he’d just started putting to his lips. “Uh-uh! Won’t let you smoke it until you do,” I said. “I will need a whole package of them for that,” he said in French, and led me into a tabac so he could buy one. Despite some four weeks in Paris, I found myself surprised that there were tables present, and told myself to snap out of it. It also seemed I would have time to, as he had asked for two cafés crème with his Gauloises. Later, I learned that his minuscule fee for a whole movie review had gone up in smoke—or steamed milk, anyhow—at that instant.

  Jean-Luc gave me his view of who Nicholas Ray was. I explained that I could not go along with him there, having been raised a Lutheran (#9) and wishing to stay faithful to my creed. This made him temporarily abject and about five years younger, which was why I bought the next two cafés crème. By the time I returned with them, he had gotten older and perked up again, although I could see a certain chicken-and-egg aspect in wondering which one came first.

  “Orson Welles,” he announced, in a tone so knowledgeable and satisfied I actually glanced over my shoulder at the door his seat was facing toward. “Here I know I can convince you, if only because him I know you have at least heard of, Marianne.”

  “It’s not Marianne,” I told him, not for the first time. “It’s Mary-Ann Kilroy. Mayr-ree-Ann.”

  He smiled—through smoked glasses, glassy smoke, hands, and bits of Paris. “Marianne is the personification of France,” he said, which I knew. “Are you the personification of the United States, Mayr-ree-Ann?”

  “Well, I’m not on a stamp, sir, if that’s what you mean. And I’m not sure I’d much like being licked by strangers day in and day out while my back is turned,” I said, thinking of poor Mr. Clark in the Russell post office. “So I guess that answers that.”

  We had been switching back and forth between languages, but I must have rattled this off in English, because I couldn’t make jokes in French. In any case, as I spoke, his eyebrows had briefly appeared for the first time above the upper rims of his glasses, putting me disconcertingly in mind of Groundhog Day.

  And I believe their retreat was the signal that I’d get six more weeks of Jean-Luc. For what he said next was “Mon dieu. And to think I was just bantering.”

  Along with many, many, many movies, my new boyfriend in Paris, Paris, Paris took me to see a play I kept calling The Condemned of Altoona, mostly to tease him. But as he had never heard of Altoona, P-Α, and despite straining my ears and much increased command of French idiom alike I was none too clear on the location or actuality of Altona even afterward, it would be understatement to say this never became a running joke between us. It had barely staggered to its feet to try a shambling jog when it was shot down by both sides.

  Jean-Luc and I both enjoyed ourselves more when he took me to see the play’s author, Jean-Paul Sartre, of whose location and actuality neither I nor anyone in Paris, Paris, Paris was in any doubt. Not that such as we would ever dare to approach his table at Les Deux Magots to so much as genuflect, let alone remark that it sure looked like rain. Still, one could sit nearby, and listen to him and Simone de Beauvoir bicker about where they were going on vacation this year, whether they truly felt they had earned one, and if so whether it could be separate. Every once in a while as they did this, particularly if they were sitting outdoors, a tourist would step up and snap Sartre’s picture, apparently feeling that he had come across the ideal combination of landmark and zoo animal. Although no teacher at the Sorbonne ever suggested as much, I have often wondered if the famous existentialist’s views on human freedom, through the unlighted funhouse of which I was limping along in my schoolwork that summer, were colored in any way by this frequently repeated experience.

  Then again, I couldn’t help but ponder the obvious fact that Sartre could have drunk scads of coffee, smoked like a freighter, and rolled his walleye at de Beauvoir behind closed doors somewhere. This was his choice. He had been born free, but he was at Les Deux Magots.

  There and elsewhere, Jean-Luc and I mostly kept to ourselves, holding hands except when he needed one to smoke with. A small tragedy of our six weeks together was that I didn’t much care for his pals at Cailloux du Cinéma or whatever the magazine he reviewed for was called, and on their end they found me inexplicable at best. We more or less gave up group socializing after an evening in a transplanted Greenwich Village jazz club, somewhat ironically called Le Perroquet de New-York, at which I got into an argument with one particular homme moyen avantgarde who had decided to explain the true meaning of the Second World War to us all. But particularly to me, as I was evidently the least educated.

  It had all been about America acquiring an empire, he said. From Lend-Lease to the Marshall Plan, the whole shebang had all been about us using our economic might to cut a pretty hefty piece of the pie for ourselves in the ingenious guise of saving the world. The Russians might have introduced tanks into Hungary, but we had introduced Coca-Cola into France, and pas question which one was turning a bigger profit—something I indeed wouldn’t question, although I was unclear if this made the Russians more virtuous or just proved they weren’t the folks you’d turn to for your estate planning.

  In short, we had saved the world in order to make ourselves the masters of it, and he disapproved of this. He felt so, I gathered, partly on principle and partly because we were such bumblers at the job, though it seemed to me that even principled sorts might well find cretins with danceable music to be somewhat less of a stench in the nostrils than an ultra-efficient crew.

  My eyes had begun to smart with a special form of astigmatism from which they occasionally suffered, and not from smoke either. But I allowed that I was not personally familiar with the thinking of my country’s leaders during the period in question, or for that matter now. For all I knew, it might well have included or still include chicanery, gleeful or otherwise. I also agreed that imbibing a billion gallons of Coca-Cola tout d’un coup might well irritate any national palate raised on wine half as good as this third glass of burgundy I’d just downed. I even granted the point that, in the eyes of the world, the role of the United States might well seem at once naive and sinister, and that any apparent paradox in this characterization dissolved on the point that naïveté in today’s world might well qualify as sinister by definition.

  Having said all this, I nonetheless went on to express my distinct impression that, had it been the other way around—had, for instance, the Canadians revealed their true colors after centuries spent lulling us into a false sense of security by means of hockey, lumbeqack shirts and beers with names like “Moosehead,” and slammed their tanks south from Saskatchewan into our vitals like a shiv—that, had the situation been reversed, I for one could not help seriously doubting, despite my deep affection for many things and some people French and current wish to remain
unfailingly pleasant, polite, and cheerful, that we in occupied America would have woken up one June morning to see a vast and mighty fleet off our coast, and watched with curiosity and interest the appearance therefrom of dozens of ungainly little boats packed with green-faced French boys from the farms and villages of Bordeaux, Alsace, Provence and, oh, just let me think a minute here, Normandy, all of them mighty confused about the whole thing and probably doing their business in their pants from dread but nonetheless prepared to soak the sands of Chincoteague with their blood and leave their brains smeared in the ruins of Norfolk if they had to before, having defeated the most fanatical units of fearsome Québécois armor the butchers of Ottawa could throw at them in the Invasion of Chesapeake Bay, and now presumably singing the “Kissy-Missy from Trenton, N.J.” song that their surviving daddies back in Bordeaux Alsace Provence and, oh, yes, Normandy had taught them after the last God Damned time they the French had had to do this for us spineless Americans, they drove up Constitution Avenue in triumph to throw off the yoke of Canadian tyranny, tear down the hated maple-leaf flag that had floated over the Washington Monument too long, and give us our God Damned freedom back on a God Damned olive-drab platter.

  At this point, Jean-Luc, who had begun writing a monograph on Howard Hawks on his cocktail napkin so as to disoblige himself from taking an attitude, patted my arm and pointed out that the band had gone on break some minutes ago. I asked him what relevance this had to the intellectual discussion I was having, and he gently said none whatsoever except possibly as pertained to its volume.

  So I stopped yelling. I did not mean to be rude, I said. I, Mary-Ann, merely wished to register my impression that all this would simply not have occurred, had our respective situations been reversed. Did he disagree?

  What do you know, the son of a gun didn’t. He just didn’t think it mattered much. All hypothetical thinking aside, he said, we had never really had to come to grips with a bellicose Canada. Nor did he believe we had much reason to fear one’s emergence, although he granted I might be better informed than he on that point.

  Besides, he said, Washington, D.C., just wasn’t as gosh-darn pretty as Paris. Not caring for travel, as few Parisians saw its point, he naturally hadn’t been there, but he’d seen photographs and in any case I knew this to be irrefutable.

  And finally, he said, had he and his compatriots been informed that afterward they’d need to prove day in day out and all the time that they’d been deserving, they might well have waved the fleet off.

  At which point, he got a grin on his face so wide it almost made me like him.

  ‘And then where would you Amerloques be? Eh?” he asked.

  I thought about that. “Um, Jean-Luc?” I said.

  “Oui, Mary-Ann?”

  “How would you say ‘without a paddle’ in French?” I asked.

  He told me there were many equivalents. They had found use for them over the years since Vercingetorix surrendered at Alesia. Often, as during the retreat from Moscow, for instance, or in 1940, the equivalents had served as large numbers of Frenchmen’s final remarks on the situation before expiring, Jean-Luc said.

  The going-away winner was “Nous sommes foutus,” he said. But since

  Vercingetorix’s day, the tortoise to that particular hare had been “Merde.”

  Otherwise, when no one but we two existed, which condition could last for periods ranging from two seconds up to several hours at a time, only one real bone of contention ever emerged between Jean-Luc and myself. I assume I am leaving you on fairly safe ground when I suggest that you guess whose.

  I had gotten my wish, and been kissed with the Seine for a backdrop. I had been kissed somewhat gauchely on the Left Bank, which was where we tried it first, and rather more adroitly on the Right. I had been kissed in the Tuileries Gardens, at what I would calculate as the apex of a triangle whose other reference points were the statue of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides and Gericault’s painting of The Raft of the Medusa inside the Louvre. I hope you’ll understand when I say that the succession of minute and cascading little awarenesses on my part that, working as secretly as silkworms, were to create my memory of these embraces—a pointillism of unshavenness, some seemingly random bumpings of smoked glasses in close-up, a complex reek of Gauloises new and old, and the downright eerie hush caused by the temporary cessation of Jean-Luc’s voice—had, despite their prominent lack of resemblance to magazine advertisements, no downside, primarily because they made each kiss seem like the first, only improved.

  Even those of you back home with four or more years of high-school French, however, may well depart the trolley when I say that the bone of contention between us came down to a grammatical struggle between the noun form of the French word for “kiss,” which meant pretty much what ours did (with the addition of Gauloises, unshavenness, and a gold and mounted Joan of Arc raising her banner in the distance to a victory she understood; for all this was how I, Mary-Ann, saved France), and its verb form, which meant something else. As far as I was concerned, that something else, absent a wedding ring, kept the mere existence of the verb form of baiser akin to having a special word devised for no purpose other than describing a fast trip to Alpha Centauri; and I, Mary-Ann, far from caring to play a mutineer Buck Rogers and lay a course for there without permission from my galactic superiors, was, as I have said, a good girl.

  That concept bedeviled my boyfriend not only for the mournful absence it prophesied of a shiny American coin tumbling into the little cigar box marked “Jean-Luc,” but for the cultural differences it mapped between us even well this side of Alpha Centauri. For instance, as a good girl, the environment in which I was most used to being felt up was at the movies, and—well, enough said, at least if I have given an adequate picture of Jean-Luc’s religious beliefs. Of course, he had so little respect for actual churches that, given the chance, he’d have been happy to despoil me successively in all sixteen of Russell’s, tearing off my toreadors beneath #14’s white steeple and bumping me quick-quick and gasping up against #6’s red brick. However, even had it been physically possible for him to materialize there, which of course it wouldn’t be until the next Unveiling, the image of Jean-Luc appearing in Russell, Kansas, in any capacity whatsoever—including that of projectionist at one or the other of our town’s two movie houses, which had struck my imagination as the likeliest bet—was so surreal in itself that the image of him despoiling me there, which incidentally I quite often managed not to dwell upon unduly, seemed redundant.

  As it goes without saying that Jean-Luc didn’t own a car, my other customary domestic venue for getting felt up was equally inaccessible. That left opportunities for all but the most fleeting grope sessions, both aside from and during our public embraces, few and far between indeed, as I refused to let him come to my room in the Rue de Lille. Nor would I go to his apartment, protecting my past and future fondness for the noun form of baiser as well as my tense present feelings about the verb. While I had silently signed an armistice with Jean-Luc’s personal hygiene some time previously, the prospect of seeing its trophies displayed museum-fashion was no great draw. In any case, the paucity and fleeting quality of any getting-felt-up sessions in our relationship probably left I, Mary-Ann, a good deal readier to sulk and kick furniture than my boyfriend was, as Jean-Luc found the whole practice of feeling girls up and leaving it at that too purely silly to be memorably frustrating.

  In reaching this impasse that summer, Jean-Luc and I were not unique. Both Penny Wise and Cherry Maraschino, my two closest pals among the other American gals at the Sorbonne, reported similar wrangles with their French boyfriends, Claude being by far the more coldly contemptuous while François was often simply too curious to remember to be annoyed. Cherry, by the way, was the first American of Italian extraction that I’d ever swapped giggles, gum, and groans with, and by extrapolation the first Catholic. Yet her first name, if not her last, instantly gave us common ground—or a few cobblestones we shared that may have dated
to the Middle Ages, that summer in Paris, Paris, Paris.

  Since my boyfriend was not only the brainiest but the most polemical of the three, however, and hair-raisingly filthy-minded to boot, our debates about grammar were undoubtedly both more polytechnical and more licentious than either Penny and Claude’s tart or Cherry and François’s woebegone discussions of noun vs. verb. “Mais, mais, mais, mais pourquoi enfin, Mary-Ann"—so Jean-Luc used to get cranked up as we strolled, with blue Gauloise smoke hunting for Vercingetorix all around him—”why do you so cherish this absurd frontier between two utterly fictional countries named Today and Tomorrow, insisting that they not only engage in no commerce but do not even share a language? It’s just more life, like birth and death.”

  “And the resurrection after death,” I said automatically, in English. But that was a whole other argument, one that we had tacitly agreed to let Notre Dame cathedral and Père Lachaise cemetery fight out in our stead; knowing that the Seine prevented them from actually coming to blows.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” he resumed, “that your most precious possession is something all the world starts out with—me, Hitler, Mickey Mouse? Good God, even Billy Wilder!” Suddenly, he had stopped dead on the sidewalk, Gauloise hand and non-Gauloise hand alike pressed to his temples. “You must forgive me,” he said rapidly, “but I had never considered that before. Still, I must ask: how valuable can something once possessed by both de Gaulle and Laurel and Hardy truly be?”

  “They don’t have mine, though,” I said, placing my hands on my hips. We were on the Boulevard St. Germain, where virtually every woman not sitting down in a café was doing this for one reason or another. De Beauvoir, although seated, just had too. But right now I, Mary-Ann, felt more like St. Joan Crawford of Arc than I did like Simone de Beauvoir; the idea that this distinction might well amount to hairsplitting not having yet occurred to me.