Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  The audacity of the scenario is to present Louise with a real problem posed in false terms—-just as, for so many of her less fortunate sisters, life dwindles to a false problem posed in real terms. Of the two lovers between whom the plot—though not, in secret, the director!—urges her to choose, the Doctor seems to represent the best qualities of age: learning, authority, wisdom. His counterpart, Gilles the water boy, has all the ardor of youth, but also its confusions. Which represents her destiny? The viewer awaits at the end of his breath, but our Louise brooks no nonsense.

  Ultimately, she recognizes that to choose either will deprive her of herself, for she will then only be a mirror of their qualities. While they may also reflect some of hers, our heroine grasps the fallacy of mirrors—in short, that every mirror, however tempting, is restricted by its frame. Rejecting the spurious decision that life wishes to impose on her, she sets sail instead for an unknown harbor. Yet one might say Louise has reached her destination at the moment that her hand first grasps the wheel.

  At first, the fanciful environment put before us by Y. Avery Willingham seems to have few traits in common with our own. We, too seek our separate and collective mirrors in the dark, and do not readily find them in this middle [?] of resorts and tourists, through which our heroine moves as an itinerant ukulele player. (The actress’s skills on this instrument are prominent.) Yet as we emerge from the theater into our own world of music and bombs, where we too look for freedom—and yes, perhaps, love too, although in Louise’s case this is reserved for a sequel to be filmed only in our imaginations—among passing strangers unaware of the myriad small struggles and victories taking place in their very midst, we understand differently. Having begun with one question, I must end with another: is not Every Girl Is an Island the cinema of truth raised to poetry, and poetry become the only cinema able to describe our age’s strange new truths?

  —Jean-Luc [quelque-chose]

  Unluckily for my boyfriend, although he stuck to his guns all the same, the theater’s management ran a public notice in the papers on the same day his review appeared in Cailloux (or whatever) du Cinema. It cleared the mystery of the ending right up.

  Apparently as a result of some unexplained private disorder at Y. Avery Willingham Productions, this theater’s print of Every Girl Is an Island had inadvertently been shipped to Paris without the final reel, which had now belatedly arrived. The management apologized, and invited anyone who had seen the abridged version to come back and view the complete one at no charge.

  You can probably picture the fuming rapidity with which Jean-Luc marched us back to the theater in the Quartier Latin—where this time, of course, Louise ended up picking one of the men, just as I had known in my bones she had to. I don’t recall which one, as I could not have cared less about either. Nor was I partial to the actors, for the Doctor was a sort of grade-Z Robert Preston type whom I was more accustomed to seeing in cheap horror pictures. As for whoever played the kid, he didn’t seem able to decide whether he’d rather be James Dean or Jerry Lewis—and talk about your false choices posed in real terms, at least if you’re asking Mary-Ann Kilroy of the Kansas Expatriate.

  At any rate, when Louise set out on the motorboat with such an air of jubilation, it turned out that she was only going around the corner, so to speak, to tell her boss at the cardboard hotel where she worked that she was giving up her career as an itinerant ukulele player. The last line in the picture was this one, which my future fellow castaway delivered in breathy close-up, batting eyelashes that bore an alarming resemblance to pine needles under fresh snow, just after she’d chucked her ukulele in the harbor: “Oh—what’s making silly music matter, compared to finding the right man?”

  And even the left man, whichever one he was, agreed with her.

  Jean-Luc, you may not be surprised to hear, did not. Next to the bile he started venting the minute we hit the street, his previous outburst at me in front of Les Deux Magots was like something you’d find written in your yearbook by the shy classmate you had never guessed was such a sentimentalist.

  “Mon dieu, Mary-Ann!” he raged. “The film we saw yesterday was as much an organic masterpiece, in its way, as Way Down East. The one we saw today is an abomination, a travesty—an insult, an atrocity, a joke!” he seethed. “Clearly, the new ending was forced by the gutless distributors onto the cowardly, despicable Y. Avery Willingham, who bent to their yoke with a smile and a wink at his accountant,” he snarled.

  “And I praised his artistic courage!” he spat. “Il m’a trahi, Mar y-Ann! He has held up his tarnished mirror to my eyes, and shown me only a pathetic, useless dreamer gazing back,” he moaned. “What’s more important, he has betrayed both cinema and life, by making of his beautiful film an offering to the Golden Calf whose moo repeats the lie that cinema and life are divisible,” he said quietly but menacingly. “Do NOT forgive him, André Bazin, do NOT forgive him, Otto Preminger, for he knows all too well what he does—et tout ça me fait chier dans ta gueule, Monsieur Y. Adolf Willingham!” he yelled.

  “Pah!” he finished up.

  Spent Gauloises lay all around us. I took Jean-Luc’s trembling hands in mine.

  “The movie is a travesty,” I told him earnestly. “What you wrote is still true.”

  “But my review now hails a film that does not even exist,” he lamented. “It should exist, as you and I exist—but it doesn’t!”

  Lifting my chin and shaking my head slightly to toss back my brown hair in a brief breeze that had sprung up—or had the Lili Gang set off another bomb?—I looked directly into his disconsolate smoked glasses.

  “Prove it, Jean-Luc,” I said. “I read what I read.”

  And while, to say the least, he never did need much encouragement to be headstrong, I like to think that I, Mary-Ann, played some small part in fixing his decision. Before noon of that same day, he had the entire staff of Cailloux du Cinéma out picketing the theater, distributing mimeographed leaflets headed “Remettez Louise dans les chemins de la liberté/” and chanting “A èds Willingham!” to alert the public and the theater management to their demand that the tacked-on, in Jean-Luc’s view, final reel be destroyed and Every Girl Is an Island shown in its integral, in Jean-Luc’s view, version. As the management had long depended on the Cailloux du Cinema crowd to help drum up appreciative and respectful audiences for minor, mediocre American films, they really had no choice but to cave in. By nightfall, holding hands, Jean-Luc and I stood on the Rue St. Severin, watching a hundred eager, buzzing Parisians queue up to buy tickets to what was, in a sense, the first movie my boyfriend ever made.

  As we strolled away, we heard an explosion; turning, we saw smoke. Quite fortunately, nobody got so much as a scratch. But the O.A.S. had just bombed the theater, apparently under a confused impression that Charles de Gaulle was inside attending a private screening of Every Girl Is an Island.

  Which, events soon proved, he may well have been—and without the final reel, at that. The very next morning, every newspaper kiosk in Paris was a-blare with king-sized headlines screaming that he had granted every colony in France’s empire the right to determine its own destiny. Whatever came next, they weren’t going to be anyone’s possessions ever again.

  By afternoon, the O.A.S. had posters up all over the Right Bank denouncing the decision. They consisted of endless paragraphs of tiny type and strenuously convoluted argument, but everyone in Paris knew what they really said; and I’ve never heard more pedestrians whistling happy tunes as they walked along in my life.

  “Nous sommes foutus,” the O.A.S. posters never stopped repeating, between every line.

  “Merde,” the O.A.S. posters howled in invisible but deeply satisfying letters, which were rather larger than the graffiti on the bookstall on the Quai Malaquais had been. The characteristic rust color had also deepened noticeably.

  The retreat from Africa had begun. This time, at least from now on, almost nobody died on the way home.

  Not long after, de Gaulle annou
nced the end of the war in Algeria. Whatever became of it from now on, it too wasn’t going to be anyone’s possession ever again. But by that time, my summer program at the Sorbonne had ended, the regular students were coming back to reclaim their classrooms and, I guess, their streets—and I, Mary-Ann, had left Paris, Paris, Paris behind.

  As I now know, it was forever.

  My last full day in Paris was special for a number of reasons, that is besides the obvious one of being my last full day in Paris. For one thing, it was the first time all summer that I, Mary-Ann, went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower—whose scaffolding of aerial dentistry, you might have supposed, I had eagerly scrambled toward on my very first afternoon, but which something had told me to save for last. For another, it was also my last full day with Jean-Luc, which lasted longer than I had supposed.

  For yet another, it was, by coincidence, my twentieth birthday—the first I had ever celebrated that my daddy hadn’t had a chance to celebrate before me. Although he didn’t know the last part, Jean-Luc had promised that we’d spend all day doing whatever I liked, and not even see a single movie if such was my choice. Knowing what that cost him, I was touched.

  Yet while a promise was a promise, my boyfriend was so appalled by where I wanted to go first that his smoked glasses virtually blanched.

  “Ah, non! Surtout pas cette foutue Tour Eiffel,” Jean-Luc protested Gauloiseily, in the lobby of my soon-to-be-departed-from hotel in the Rue de Lille. “Really, Mary-Ann. It’s one thing to personify America, and quite another to exaggerate it.”

  Fists to hips, I placed my red Kansas-bought pumps well apart. “You’re sure wrong there, chum,” I sassed him, “so just think again, Jean-Luc. And we’re going to the phoo-too Tour Eiffel, because I’m only going to turn twenty once in my whole life, and that’s where I want it to happen.”

  From the grumbling that I had to listen to as we walked over there, you’d have thought my boyfriend had a peppermill for a brain. But his face grew somewhat queasy as we passed the Invalides, and by the time we two were soaring upward to the pinnacle of the Tour, he’d fallen completely and atypically silent in the elevator. And I’d been mighty slow in catching on that Jean-Luc had a fear of heights; making his many ascents, with or without me, fairly brave.

  We stood there. I looked down. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  He lit a Gauloise, its blue smoke making a contrast with his green face that any Impressionist would have killed for. “Of course it’s beautiful,” he snapped, his Gauloise-bearing hand twitching. “It’s Paris, name of God. It’s its job to be beautiful—and it’s beautiful down there, too. It’s beautiful from an outside table at Les Deux Magots. It’s beautiful at the cinema. And while, à mon avis, it would be especially beautiful in your soon-to-be-departed-from hotel room, which I have never seen, the truth is that it’s beautiful almost anywhere. So how much longer do we need to stay here, name of God, Mary-Ann?”

  “Just a little while longer,” I said, patting his non-Gauloise-bearing hand. “I know it’s corny, but so am I, and I like it.”

  At which point, with a grunt of surprise, Jean-Luc pulled his hand away, because he’d just found out he needed it. “Apparently,” he said. “And why,” he demanded, “why did you drag me up here, on our very last day before you go back to Kansas and I blow my brains out, when you’ve been up to the top of the Tour Eiffel before?”

  On a nearby bit of railing, among the initials and messages scratched there over the years, he was pointing at an inscription. You may already have guessed what its three words were.

  Kilroy Was Here, it said.

  My eyes began to smart with their special astigmatism, and not from Jean-Luc’s Gauloise smoke either. Yet you should not suppose from this that I, Mary-Ann, was living in some fantasy realm all my own. I was perfectly aware that thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of men, few if any of them named Kilroy, had scratched those words wherever there was space and they had time, from Guadalcanal to El Guettar and from I wo Jima to Remagen. And also, in letters too large and awful to be read by human eyes, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too; as I knew with, by now, some misgivings, for all I still wished the scientists had hurried. But all the same, I couldn’t help myself, for I had always liked to imagine that whoever wrote those words, anywhere—or anywhere else, anyhow—had somehow been a little bit my daddy.

  After a second, I got my nail file out of my purse, and scratched MaryAnn in front of the other three words as Jean-Luc watched me, green-faced and impatient.

  “Can we go now?” he asked.

  “In a sec,” I said, and it wasn’t much. It was more of a jerk, really, and I brought my hand back down as if I were only smoothing my hair. But I had waved.

  And down below, where a tiny but discernibly green-eyed Sukey Santoit had just pulled him up out of the Seine and untied him, my daddy, Eddie Kilroy—Corporal John G. Egan’s missing twin, who was still only nineteen, and whom I was now older than, and would now be for however long I lived—had boyishly waved back.

  Once we were back down on the ground, Jean-Luc grew less nauseated and more cheerful, as I knew as soon as he started describing the two or three things he might put into any movie he made about Paris, if he ever got to make movies. Perhaps predictably, the Tour Eiffel was not one of those two or three.

  Somewhat less predictably, neither was Les Deux Magots. Yet there our footsteps took us next, so automatically that neither of us had to say a word. We found an outside table for two between the one occupied by Sartre and de Beauvoir and another at which sat a gray-eyed American with hair as sandy as Omaha Beach, alongside his pretty wife.

  Although it was a clear day in August, we might as well have sat down in a fog. While Sartre was, as usual, smoking like a freighter, his sandy-haired opposite number smoked like a destroyer; it was almost as if they were conducting a silent duel between pipe and cigarette, in which the Marlboro man was pulling ahead. And if his conversation with his wife had left me in the smallest doubt we shared a country, which it did not, I would have needed no more confirmation of the fact than one look at their young son, a boy of three years old or so who was practicing his still fresh and therefore interesting skill at walking by coming up to his parents’ table and then wandering away again. In one fist, he was clutching a tiny Stars and Stripes.

  To my surprise, though, when he spoke in answer to a waiter’s smiling request for some room to get past him and bring Sartre another café crème, it was in piping, fluent French. “Mais c’est qui ce monsieur-là, après tout?” he asked, pointing at Sartre, which turned the waiter’s smile into a grin.

  “Junior!” his father called sharply. “Quit getting tangled up in people’s feet. They know where they’re going and you don’t. Come back here.”

  “Oui, Papa” the boy said, trotting toward them with his flag.

  “Tu sais,” Sartre was confiding to Beauvoir, giving the kid a walleyed glance as he did so, “rien de ce qui se passe dans la rue ne m’importe.” I didn’t know what that was in reference to.

  “Oh, Jack, please don’t call him ‘Junior,’ “the American woman said. Her voice had a sunny lilt of the South in it; North Carolina, I would have guessed. “I don’t know why, but I always thought that was sort of the worst of both worlds—to have no name of your own, but this strange burden to live up to,” she laughed lightly, “all the same. We women may put up with a lot, but at least we’re spared being Juniors.”

  Her husband’s answering laugh was like hearing a police squawkbox enjoy itself. “Yeah? What is it you women have to put up with? Meet me at the office sometime, and you’ll see what I put up with—that’s all I’m going to say.”

  “Jack,” his wife said gently, “I did meet you there. Maybe consular work didn’t seem all that important, comp—seem very important, to you. But there was many a night in Bonn when I watched you lock up the office across the hall, and then went back to work in mine.”

  She glanced after their son—who, upon hearing h
imself talked about as if he weren’t there, had evidently concluded that he wasn’t. In search of wherever he should be instead, he’d gone toddling off again.

  “Well, then, just be glad you’re out of it,” the man told her. “Honest to Christ, Shirl, sometimes I wish to hell I were. God damn, but I’d like to just get on a boat, and-”

  “ ‘Set sail straight for the horizon,’ “his wife quoted, fondly. Even if I couldn’t see much cause for her fondness in her husband’s alert gray eyes, it was plain she could; or else had seen it enough times, however long ago, that she didn’t need to look for it now. “I know, honey—I wish you could, too.”

  “Sorry, Shirl. Pretty hectic times around the shop these days.” While I couldn’t be positive, I thought I detected faint quotation marks around the word “shop"—quotation marks no set of non-American ears would ever be able to pick up, however good their owner’s English.

  “Et moi,” Sartre had just told de Beauvoir, “je fume ma pipe et j’espère,” with a shrug that could have toppled governments, “que nous ne nous rendrons pas ridicules encore une fois” I still had no idea what they were talking about.

  “And any-hoo, Shirl,” the American now said with a self-amused bearing-down on the word’s folksiness, having resettled himself and lit a fresh Malboro as if he needed to do all these things to give himself permission to grin cheerfully at his wife, “I haven’t heard your son complain about being called Junior. Not even once.”

  “He’s three years old, Jack, and scared of—well, it’s probably a pretty long list, come to think of it,” his wife said, with a briefly troubled look. “But believe me, it’s going to be a damn cold day in Rochester, Minnesota, before he complains about anything you do, and we’ve never even taken him back there.”