by Carson, Tom
“Why should we? The garage is sold. My dad’s in Florida. Now it’s just a name on a map. Why should he care?”
“Because you grew up there, honey. He doesn’t think we’re from anywhere.”
“Well, what the hell. If ‘Junior’ ‘s out,” her husband came back, with a slight but detectable lessening of good humor, “what am I supposed to call him? Unless I want to have to come running when he’s who you want, or sound like I’m yelling at myself to put that damn thing down right now, ‘Jack’ is taken in this family. And everywhere else soon, at least if someone I used to know gets a job he wants to get,” he laughed. “Bad luck all around. Anyway, he calls me ‘Papa,’ for Christ’s sake. Why can’t he say ‘Daddy,’ like a normal kid?”
“Honey, I don’t think it was your son’s idea to live in Paris,” his wife said. “Here, ‘Papa’ is what the normal kids say. That’s what he’s used to hearing, even if he hasn’t let go of that flag since you gave it to him. But if we’re only allowed one Jack in the family, we could try calling him by his middle name instead—which you ought to be able to remember and feel represented by, since it’s yours too.”
“Huh!” the man said in an intrigued way, putting out his cigarette. “Hey,Junior]” he called.
“Oui, Papa, j’arrive,” the little boy piped, trotting back to the table again with his tiny Stars and Stripes. Once there, he looked up at his father curiously.
Resting his large hands on the kid’s shoulders, the American’s hard and alert gray eyes peered intently into his son’s three-year-old face. “Junior, I’m going to make you a deal, starting right now,” he said. “If you’ll call me ‘Daddy’ instead of ‘Papa,’ I’ll call you-”
But he never finished that sentence, at least not then and there. For at that exact moment, we all heard the last bomb ever set off in Paris by either the O.A.S. or the Lili Gang. It wasn’t all that near, and a glance at the headlines in the newspaper kiosks that evening, after we’d made love for the first time, would tell Jean-Luc and me that no one had been injured. Even so, the noise sure upset Junior—and not only, I don’t think, because it left him nameless for now. After a stunned and wide-eyed second, he started crying, with the kind of hysterical raucousness that sounds like a klaxon inside lungs you’d think were too small to produce that much noise, and lashing out blindly with his little American flag as he lurched around us all. I think he got Sartre right on the nose, which may have been the first time the great philosopher’s eyes were ever in perfect alignment; not to mention blinking with a coordinated stunned expression, as the little boy turned and confusedly started toward the Boulevard St. Germain.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the American father said, getting to his feet with jackknife speed. All in one swift, smooth, muscular movement, a Marlboro bobbing in his mouth, he took three steps out onto the sidewalk and scooped the sobbing kid up onto his shoulder before the last of the three was done.
“For Christ’s sake, Gil! It’s just a bomb,” he said with startling rage. Then—in a pleasanter tone, as if he’d caught himself—he spoke to all of us at the outside tables. His own French, it turned out, wasn’t that bad: “Ce n’est qu’une bombe, après tout” he repeated, smiling and flipping away his Marlboro. “On en a entendu beaucoup, à l’époque.”
“Ah, oui! Nous autres, oui” de Beauvoir said to Sartre. “Et le père aussi-évidemment! Mais le gosse, non.”
The American father hadn’t heard her, but he looked at their table with a small lift and then incline of his chin. “Monsieur Sartre,” he called. “Je vous demande pardon-à cause de mon enfant, la.”
“A cause de qui?” de Beauvoir gasped under her breath. But the American had already looked away in any case.
“Hey, Mrs. Egan!” he called to his wife. “Pay the nice man and let’s get out of here. I don’t like being embarrassed in public. Can’t take you anywhere, can I?” he said, with what I presume he supposed was affection, to his son. “Except maybe back to the States, and you know something? All the kids say ‘Daddy’ there.”
Indeed we did—and needless to say I, Mary-Ann, had caught the name he shouted. But that man now waiting for his wife to pay the bill could never have written the letter I still knew by heart. Or could he? Of course, I knew that whoever had written the letter had survived the battle for Iwo Jima, or it would never have been written. Yet Corporal John G. Egan, USMC, could still have died of it, I thought suddenly, watching the small American family start down the Boulevard St. Germain. Over the man’s shoulder, the little boy was staring back at Les Deux Magots, and particularly at me for some reason. As they headed on toward God knows where, his father had already lit a fresh cigarette.
That man could have died of my own daddy’s death, I thought; which was, incidentally or perhaps not, the moment when I realized that I hadn’t.
I had been born of it instead, I saw.
But Sartre had been watching them go too, and now he nudged de Beauvoir. “Eh bien!” he snorted, with a quizzical look. “Regarde-moi notre nouveau chef! Ma foi, Castor, il est pareil que Vanden.”
As I have noted, my translation skills are not what they were. But in English, what the great philosopher had just said would go something like, “Take a look at our new boss! I swear, Simone, he’s the same as the old boss.”
And Sartre—so I remembered with some wonder, as the American
family vanished from sight—had lived through the Occupation, too.
After Jean-Luc and I had finished our cafés crème in turn, and started strolling toward the Seine, I was thoughtful. Once he finished telling me the true meaning of Howard Hawks’s Red River, which took him several blocks although I had no idea how that particular movie had even come up, he noticed.
“What are you thinking about?” Jean-Luc asked.
“Being American,” I said, moodily swinging my purse back and forth.
He ląughed. “Should I go find a taxi? I thought you had to be riding in a car to do that—a Cadillac, at least. Or on horseback, driving cattle toward Abilene. ‘Mathieu, there is a railroad in Abilene,’ “he quoted happily.
“Maybe that’s when we stopped thinking,” I said, and stopped. To my mild non-surprise, I saw that I, and therefore we, had stopped right in front of my soon-to-be-departed-from hotel in the Rue de Lille. But even though I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it, I knew I had something I wanted to say.
First.
“Jean-Luc,” I said, “I know ycuVe never been to the U.S.A., so maybe you’ll just have to trust me on this one. But there’s something so sweet about it, so nice you wouldn’t believe it—no matter how many dumb mistakes we ever made, maybe because the sweetness always makes it so easy to forget them. And I guess we always thought the sweetness would make up for the mistakes as far as all the rest of you were concerned too. But what I’m thinking now is what if we stopped being sweet—and went right on being mistaken?”
“The mistake was what you started with,” he said, shaking out a Gauloise. “Any country whose personification has the nerve to stand before me and call it sweet—and mean it, my God!—is always going to end up mistaken. And the world will suffer for it, as worlds tend to do.”
“O.K., never mind about that,” I said, snatching the cigarette from his lips and tossing it down the street. “The heck with it, this personification’s getting on a boat back to what she personifies at four P.M. tomorrow anyway.”
“Believe me, I know,” he said, irritably reaching for another Gauloise. “And”
“Upsy-daisy, Jean-Luc,” I said, jerking my chin toward the hotel door. “The rules of the game have just changed, and whether this is the end or the beginning of a grand illusion is up to you. Here’s the church, so where’s the steeple? Let’s go.”
“En français, s’il te plait, Mary-Ann,” he said.
“O.K.,” I said, and took a breath. “Baisez-moi.”
“You might at least have tutoied me when you finally said it,” he grumbled. Then, after we had gon
e upstairs—and after, glancing around my room as I demurely undressed behind him, Jean-Luc had marveled, “You never told me you were rich! Do all Americans have money?"—he showed me how everybody on the planet did it, which was lovely and interesting. As Ginger I’m not, you’ll just have to live with it if I let things go at that.
After all, it would be very un-Kansasish and non-ladylike of me to go into any details whatsoever regarding how, in spite of never having been there in his life, Jean-Luc instinctively knew how to lay I, MaryAnn, in every last church in Russell, tearing off my toreadors beneath #14’s white steeple and bumping me quick-quick and gasping up against #6’s red brick, or that one reason it was so lovely and interesting was that the whole time this was taking place he and I were in Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris PARIS parisparisparis PAAAAris Paris Paris ParrrrrrrIIIIIS parisparis Paris Paris ParararararararararararaririririririRiRIS PARIS PARIS ParisParisParis andbriefiyalmostathens,untilisaid” ohcomeoffitjeanluc"andhedidPARISS PAAAAAAAAAAARIS pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa ΡΑ-ris paRARARAris ris Paris Paris paris Paris Paris PARIS!!!!
Wouldn’t it?
If I did tell you anything of the kind, I mean. As, of course, I haven’t.
I’d never breathe it to a soul, because it’s so inadequate a description.
Yet here’s the thing, and a mystery to make my puzzlement over the ending of Every Girl Is an Island and the surprise appearance of Sukey Santoit near the Pont des Arts look like mazes on a diner place-mat by comparison. When I woke up the next morning, I was a virgin again. Virgo intacta, maidenhead of the class, hymen make yourself at home, the whole shebang. Or debang, now I think on it.
Even Jean-Luc agreed I was, and it drove him batty. “Personifying America is one thing,” he was to fume before the morning was gone. “And since I know you do, believe me I try to be understanding. But this, Mary-Ann—this is just too foutu muchl “
The night before, we had gone out after the first time we did it, and I had eaten the best meal of my life. (The service was slow, the food was awful, and the wine was pure Satan’s grape juice; I’d recommend that restaurant to anyone who’s just had lovely, interesting sex.) But then, when we had then gone back up to my hotel room to do it again, it had felt just like the first time. Exactly like it, is what I’m trying to convey, to the point that Jean-Luc had made a modestly quizzical noise and I had squinted briefly at the ceiling. But our minds, which in any case weren’t being anything much more purposeful at the moment than barnacles on the S.S . Jean-Luc Mary-Ann, soon to be rechristened the X.X. Jeanmarylucann, had soon been distracted by matters far more interesting and less puzzling. By the time, exhausted, I finally gasped, “My gosh! How do you say ‘I’m out of breath’ in French, Jean-Luc?” and he told me, and we went to sleep in each other’s arms—-actually, I think Jean-Luc stayed up awhile—I had just about forgotten that tiny, not entirely mental twinge of panic as I wondered if I was somehow, inexplicably, back at square one.
Just about.
But that morning, when we did it the third time, it was unmistakable and undeniable. After the fourth time, which was cutting it very close if I wanted to make the boat train, Jean-Luc watched it happen; it was genuinely amazing, he said, and seemed to take about five minutes. Being Jean-Luc, of course, he immediately wondered if he could film it happening—but there I put my foot down, even if I did have to take it off the wall first. Whatever the hell was going on, I told him, Christine Jorgensen I was not. Whatever the hell had gone on, I was still Mary-Ann Kilroy of Russell, Kansas.
And saying our town’s name aloud put a horrible fear in my heart, for an all too obvious reason. It was well over a decade until the next Unveiling, by which time my mother, the librarian of Russell, might well have passed on. And even then, of course, I’d only get to go back for twenty-four hours, which might be more painful than blissful even if my mother was still with us—or with them, anyway, I forced myself to tell myself unhappily. But right now, and especially if I wanted to find out whether my private dread had any foundation, I had a train to catch from the Gare du Nord to Le Havre.
By the time we reached the Gare du Nord, Jean-Luc had grown bitter, the first blow to his previous attitude of pure fascination piled atop continuing lust—whatever the hell else was going on, he had been waiting six weeks—having been my refusal to let him film me becoming a virgin again. He just kept putting out half-smoked Gauloises in his café crème and calling for another, and muttering “Merde” even after, to tease him, I started asking sea of what, for gosh sakes; mother of what? Then it was all aboard.
When I reached for his hand for the last time, he didn’t even look up as he said “Adieu, Mary-Ann.” As I had just said “Au revoir, Jean-Luc,” this caused me the worst case of special astigmatism I’d yet had as I stumbled out onto the platform, into the train—and away from Paris, Paris, Paris; for good, although I didn’t know that yet.
Looking back, I can only hope that the experience didn’t end up souring Jean-Luc on America and Americans permanently, especially since he loved our movies so. While it would perhaps be going too far to say that they had liberated him from whatever oppressed him, the messages he got from them had certainly helped him to begin his own resistance.
That’s why I hope he still thinks well of us sometimes. But all I know is yesterday, and yesterday never knows.
As I was aware that Americans traveling overseas have the benefit of all sorts of protections and reprieves that they don’t necessarily know about or understand, on the boat train I half worried—and half hoped—that becoming a virgin again and again was something that could happen to me only abroad. But assuming he is alive and track-downable, the assistant purser on the S.S. America, sister ship to the United States, can testify that I became a virgin again several times in international waters. Making the same proviso, although like the purser he’d be fairly old by now, a slick young advertising man bearing the odd name Holden Caulfield can vouch for it happening in New York, even if he was much too self-absorbed and complacently melancholy afterwards, in a bonjour comme d’habitude tristesse sort of way, and aren’t those creeps who get the sad post-coital smiles just the worst, Ging, to pay a great deal of attention to the fact that he deflowered I, Mary-Ann, twice, at both the Plaza Hotel and in his locked office on Madison Avenue, before he put a once again re-flowered me in a cab to Idlewild.
You see, I had to find out; and was still Kansas-ish enough to realize that, as far as most of my fellow Americans were concerned, neither the shipboard project nor even the Manhattan one was conclusive proof that I could become a virgin again here in the good old U.S. of A. But once I’d hopped a plane to Topeka, a saintly motorcyclist who took me up a hill on his Harley and tumbled me on the grass—in full sight of my Ellfrank alma mater, although not, as the night was moonless, of any of its current students or faculty—removed the final shadow of a doubt. Before he’d so much as kick-started his chopper and jerked his head to indicate that I, Mary-Ann, should swing a leg over behind him, his temporary inamorata-rata-rata-vroom had felt herself become a virgin again—not just in these United States, not just in any state, but in Kansas itself; smelling its very wheat, along with motor oil, under the sky of my childhood, and of my daddy’s childhood, and of all sorts of Kilroys before us.
Et in Arcadia virgo.
If that settled that, another question still pressed in on me; and was doing so like God’s own fingers on my temples by the time, having patted a greasily stubbled cheek goodbye and rented a car in Topeka—Hertz or Avis, don’t recall—I started the drive to Russell. Once I turned north toward our town off Route 40, not even a radio turned up to full volume and blasting out “Runaround Sue” could drown out the hoofbeats of my thumping anxiety. And soon and forever, I had my answer, for I had just pulled over and killed the engine in front of a sign that told all comers, just as it always had and always would, WELCOME TO RUSSELL, KANSAS, U.S.A.
Nothing besides remained. Boundless and rippling, the gol
d and level wheat stretched away to the horizon, under the same old sky.
Needless to say, I knew it was really all still right there in front of me: Main Street, Dawson’s Drug, our two movie theaters, both our right bank and our left bank, our courthouse, my old high school. I knew that our townspeople still moved about mere yards from my nose, primarily on foot except the ones from outlying farms. I knew our sixteen churches stood, and that our limestone fence posts with no railings still poked upward to give their mute and stubborn testimony of having something to do with the sky. For all I knew, my mother, the librarian of Russell, was standing right in front of me, with her gun-barrel spectacles and an armful of Sukey Santoit books to pass on to the next generation of Russell girls, who might make better use of them than I had up to now.
If so, she could see me, of course. But unless I, Mary-Ann, stayed alive long enough—and remembered—to be here at the next Unveiling, or unless they broke the rules and stepped outside the town limits in my presence, causing their instant death, I’d never be able to see or make contact with her or any of them again; for the obvious reason.
Or maybe, now I ponder it, for the less than obvious reason. Looking back through these pages, I see I may have failed to clarify as comprehensively as I might the nature of Russell’s other distinctive feature, and if so I’m sorry. But sometimes it’s hard, or possibly just too likely to bring on my special astigmatism, for me to recall that I’m addressing people who don’t already know the secret. Which is, of course, that our town only materializes, so far as what the rest of you call the real world is concerned, for one day every hundred years.
During that magic twenty-four hours, which we call the Unveiling, outsiders are at liberty to inspect Russell with both the naked eye and the shod foot, should they be in the vicinity and so desire. We will greet you, feed you, and even gladly give a hearing to your political opinions, however outlandish and poorly conceived they may be. But it all vanishes at midnight, and if you’re still inside the town limits, you’ll find yourself confronted with nothing but wheat fields and highway. Don’t worry, though: your cars will still be present. But ours, along with the pickup trucks from the outlying farms, will have disappeared along with Main Street, Dawson’s Drug, and so on.