Gulliver Quick: A Novel

Prelude

When news of Gulliver Quick’s death first reached the newspapers, there were curious rumors of five women attempting to take equal responsibility. Although these tales were intriguing, they made little sense. Then, abruptly, the case was dismissed. Secrecy shrouded the affair, and the five women, released from further investigation by the Italian police, refused to discuss his death. Reporters, foiled by the women’s silence, eventually abandoned the story.

Then, the one who was culpable died. She died flailing about in her bed, maddened with outrage that this afternoon was the end of her life.

Soon after that—already suspecting the truth—I visited one of the women. We sat outside in the sun and talked about Gulliver for a long while. He had a remarkable life, she said. His preposterous death was somehow fitting.

Was it? I asked. Are our deaths appropriate to our lives? How did he really die?

The woman smiled, then went inside to fetch water, while I waited and recalled how Gulliver once said he was not afraid of death; what he was afraid of was that the afterlife is not a myth, that indeed, there, dead, he might meet his corporeal existence once more. For although Gulliver valued his life, he had not the puissance to repeat the trial. My life, he said, is a seething madness of abundance.

Many years ago, when I first told Gulliver I wanted to write a book about him, he laughed. You want to write about the women, don’t you? He said this as if the women had been loud music he wanted to silence. A dance that had felled him. He shrugged and lit one of the black tobacco cigarettes he smoked. Wait until I die.

But we’re the same age! By the time you die I’ll be dead or as old as the world.

He looked at me for a few moments. I don’t think so. I think you’ll have many years on me. Be patient.

That same day he gave me a painting. It was of a fantastic tree, and on this tree hung fruit. On closer inspection, it was not fruit: they were crows that sat upon the branches; and upon yet closer examination the crows were women—small, curled-over women with beaks, dressed in black.

The woman returned with a jug of water and some ice. If I tell you how Gulliver died, she said, and if you write about it, then you must write about us. The women. Not just his art.

All right, I said. Go ahead. Talk.

She did, and so I take you back to the morning his body was discovered: to the small town of Portofino, on the coast of Italy just east of France. We are in a villa painted a faded shade of pink and, from many of the windows, arched and tall, you can see the waters of the bay where fishing boats of the poor and yachts of the rich anchor side by side.

Inside the house is Gulliver. He does not look anguished in his eternal sleep, does not look as if he had suffered when death struck. He looks peaceful. He was killed with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors that pierced through his back and swiftly into his heart. The doctor who arrived that morning said to the nine women who were gathered in the house, Death was probably instantaneous.

Of the nine women in that house, three had been wives to this man, two had been lovers. There are also three daughters, and a woman, old now, half blind and almost senile.

There is also a small boy of three who has dark hair, exceedingly dark hair. I want Papa! shouts this child, whose name is Daniel. Gabriella, his oldest sister, picks him up and comforts him. She herself is still crying—and her right leg is in a cast. To distract Daniel she points out of the window, at a launch that is arriving in the bay. On the deck are two men and a dog, but there are not many other people about. Today is Easter Sunday, the churches of Italy are filled.

In the same room is the old woman. She sits staring out of the window, although she can see little, only a blur of color from a stone pot of flowers outside on the patio. She tugs at her scant white hair.

What’s happened? She has asked this many times this morning. Nobody seems to answer satisfactorily—or maybe she just can’t understand what they’re trying to tell her.

That morning, in an upstairs room of this house, five of the women have assembled: the three wives and two mistresses. There are a lot of them, I know, but you don’t have to remember their names, or their roles: you’ll meet them all again.

All are pale. The large one, Arianna de Coppet, who had been Gulliver’s middle wife, offers cakes and coffee. None of the others want food, but Arianna takes a cake. Crumbs mix into the tears that have caught in the mustache over her upper lip.

For a while the women continue to sit in awful silence. From the kitchen comes the smell of roast lamb which one of them, in spite of the tragedy, put on to cook; probably out of force of habit. On the wall is an ornate wooden clock that strikes each passing half hour with irritating chimes. Arianna gets up to remove it; she disengages the mechanism at the back, throws the clock onto a chair, then turns to face the women. No one, except us, has to know the truth.

The women look at her. She is enormous. Massive.

What are you talking about? Katrina asks. Katrina is Greek, a tempestuous woman. She sits next to the pale American, Tulip, who this morning has become a widow. Gulliver Quick—until the scissors plunged into him last night—was Tulip’s husband. Only yesterday, after a year of fury, he handed her a note that read, Tulip, I love you.

Arianna walks over a Persian carpet to one of the arched windows. She turns, not intending to seem as dramatic as she does. "We know how this happened—but we could bewilder the police, we could all claim to have been responsible!"

The women stare at her.

Marika, who was Gulliver’s wife many years ago, is the first to react. Why? she asks. Marika is the oldest in the room, nearly sixty, and today, wearing no make-up and her hair unbrushed and disheveled, looks like an old woman.

Because the truth is pitiful, Arianna replies.

Marie Claudette, a plump Frenchwoman nearing fifty, glares at Arianna. I would have thought you of all people would not be the one to defend him.

I’m not defending him! Arianna almost shouts. In a way I’m defending all of us in this room. Not against his death, but against our acts while he was alive.

Tulip the widow wants to take another pill to calm herself—already this morning she has swallowed two. He wanted to die, she says.

Not this way! Arianna spits at her.

No, not this way. They all agree.

None of us did wrong, says Marika. She looks dazed. We did what we needed to do at the time. All of us.

I’m not so sure, Arianna says. She’s thinking of a day, many years ago, when she took a pair of nail scissors from a drawer and punctured a tiny hole in her diaphragm. She paces the room, then lowers herself into the sofa, next to Marie Claudette. If we all claim to have done it, what can they do? Arrest us all? Let them! Each of us could say the others are lying. She looks at each of the women in turn. Would you really like the truth to get out?

The truth is wretched, they agree.

We owe him this, Arianna says, taking another cake.

At that moment the door opens, and two girls, red-headed twins of almost seventeen, enter the room and cross to Tulip. Both are crying. Tulip puts an arm about each of her daughters.

There is a photograph of Gulliver you may recall. It shows a tall, red-headed man, heavily bearded in this photograph, lying in the garden of his home in Guatemala. With him are two beautiful young women. They’re eating oranges, and with them is a large raggedy dog who looks puzzled. The caption under this photograph reads, "Gulliver Quick Does Not Live By Art Alone. The photo was shown in many newspapers in the mid-sixties, and brought forth roars of indignation and envy. How can a man sleep with two women at once? some protested. What disgusting self-indulgence! But others said, How does he do it? How can I achieve that too?"

There is another photograph, this one used on the cover of Time magazine. In this he stands in front of an easel, his hair held back from his face with a bandanna. He stoops slightly, one hip extended, because it was late in the day when the picture was taken and he was tired. On the canvas in front of him is a painting of a woman in a yellow dress. She holds her head slightly to one side. This woman is Sophia. Sophia was not there that morning in the house in Portofino, but her presence hovered about the room, and a few times Marika thought she could smell the cologne Sophia once wore.

Who killed him?

One of these women in the house (although we cannot include the three daughters), plunged the dressmaker’s scissors into his back while he crouched on the floor of the bathroom. He was two months short of fifty-eight when he died.

When Arianna that morning, pointed out to the women in the room that any one of them could have been the murderer, she was fundamentally correct. All had sinned and been sinned against. And because they finally recognized this, and because they had all loved him and wanted now to be loyal—and because the truth was indeed pitiful—when the chief inspector of the carabinieri came back into the room, all five stepped forward with their hands outstretched, as if impatient for handcuffs, and all five said, It was I who did it.

We live, then we die. It’s really that simple. And when we die our mortal passions are buried with us. Yet even after temporal rapture has long withdrawn, those whom it has touched will be altered. Passion, like the violence of creation, leaves a stamp. All we do has significance; all determines events in the remorseless rush of time. We snatch but a moment of courage, of feeling, but in so doing, we alter.

And Gulliver Quick had certainly done some altering.

We Walk Upon Scum

Gulliver was born one humid July evening of 1932, in the bedroom of his parents in a suburb of South Boston. His aunt, the sister of his mother, delivered this child who arrived unexpectedly after dinner three weeks before anyone was ready for him.

It’s got red hair, said the aunt, holding up the baby, who was not shrivelled or underweight, and who howled with forceful lungs and waved his fists in indignation at this abrupt entrance into life.

May Quick, his mother, appalled, took the baby. How can that be? No one in our family has red hair.

But Gulliver had red hair. A deep russet red. May had pale curling hair, and both her husband and her two-year-old son Thurston had hair so colorless and skin so waxen that they were often taken for albinos.

Douglas Quick, by days a tile-layer and by evenings a saxophone player with a small jazz group, returned from the club that night, loosened the collar of his shirt and stood next to the pillow on which his new son had been placed. He gazed at the red hair, bewildered. Throughout May’s pregnancy Douglas had been bedding the red-headed wife of the club owner. For one dumfounded minute he wondered if this new son had been begat by paradox.

He’s sweet, said May, almost apologetically.

He’s early, said Douglas.

Neither of them of course had any idea they had spawned a child who was one day to become a distinguished artist. It is a tremendous thing, one man’s life, stupendous, but neither May nor Douglas thought too much about life or its implications, so to them this was merely a red-headed six-pound lump of flesh that they had conceived one morning before the sun had risen, when Douglas awoke from a startling dream about the club-owner’s wife. (May had no idea what her husband’s dream had been about.) Both May and Douglas felt that life was wholly inconsequential, although only Douglas was able to express this in contemplative terms, and only then in later years. May simply said Who’s happy?—an expression she learned from a Jewish neighbor.

When Gulliver was three, Douglas gave up his day job as a tile-layer and moved his family from Boston to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had been offered a job as a full-time musician. Here May had her third and final son, then left home after an unfortunate—and entirely avoidable—argument with her husband. Left, she told him, never to return.

But she did return. When Gulliver was eight, his mother walked up the front path one Saturday afternoon. As she stood in front of him on the top step, smiling uneasily, he stared at her shoes; they were the most violent green he had ever seen. May didn’t pick up Gulliver. She stooped briefly and kissed his face, pressed pale lipstick to his cheek. He inhaled the sweetness of her skin, and wanted her gentleness forever.

Douglas Quick did not.

There’s no place for you now, Douglas told his wife.

Gulliver flattened his ear to the kitchen wall and listened to his mother sob in the next room. His brothers were not at home. May had not asked to see them.

You left, Douglas said. You’re no longer included by virtue of having excluded yourself.

Gulliver, then, did not understand how a man could refuse a woman anything, let alone something as essential as her own home.

But you must need me to clean up, to take care of the four of you, May whimpered.

Again Douglas said no. There’s something substantial about a houseful of men. His voice sounded like a bass drum against the thin wall.

Gulliver did not think his family was substantial. His household was somehow tenuous, as if he and his two brothers were chance lodgers provided with impermanent refuge.

May’s voice trilled. Gulliver could not hear the words, just her grief floating through the wall.

I’m not beholden to you, Douglas said. Go and find another man, while you’re still young.

Gulliver wanted to kill his father. He walked with his mother to the gate. He held her hand, so slight after his father’s thick hands. Douglas had failed as a full-time musician; by days he once again laid tiles, his fingers had hard calluses at the tips. Gulliver looked up at May. I’m going to be an artist, he told her. She was the first person to whom he said this.

Can you draw?

He told her that if she came back into the house he would show her some of his drawings.

But May had no intention of going back inside. Well, I hope you succeed, she said, as if she had barely heard him.

I will!

He sounded so decisive that, for a moment, she stopped to look at his face, then her scrutiny dimmed as she recalled a clouded aspiration of her own. I used to draw, she said. But people like us don’t become artists. Look how your father messed up his life trying to be a musician. She shook her small head so that all her curls trembled. Such useless dreams!

The boy asked, What do you mean, ‘people like us’? He was still clutching her hand as if it were a life-line and he a drowning man.

May stuck her chin out to indicate the unexceptional suburban street. Normal people. Ordinary.

Gulliver knew he was once again losing her attention. Maybe I can come and live with you, he said, the urgency in his voice rising shrill, quivering like a violin.

May wanted her husband back, not necessarily her boys. I’ve got no way of supporting a child, she said as she pulled her hand away from him and wiped her nose with a colorless cotton handkerchief.

Gulliver felt fear in the core of his stomach as he saw that she was not going to take hold of his hand again. Maybe on school vacations. I could get a job delivering papers or bagging groceries. He wanted to add, Please! but was fearful of pleading with her more.

May didn’t smile. That wouldn’t work.

In later years, whenever Gulliver reflected on that parting, he realized that May was trying not to cry. But then he didn’t know that; then his young heart was lacerated as May said goodbye—it sounded eternal—then kissed her son perfunctorily and walked in her green shoes to a small car.

Gulliver touched his cheek where her powder clung. It smelled of honey. When I’m an artist, I’ll take care of you! he called, so loudly that two neighbors, tending their arid gardens, looked up and raised their eyebrows.

Artists can’t even take care of themselves, she replied, then drove away. May Quick remained the sole woman who would ever leave Gulliver without turning back.

He walked back into the house, to the room he shared with his younger brother Eric, and he moaned. His distress was so buried that he could not cry, just moan. For a long time the child lay on that bed. There was nothing he could do—nothing at all. The grief was bottomless, it would endure forever.

Our mother came to see us, he said to his brothers at dinner that evening. She wants to be with us again.

Douglas sliced a store-bought chicken pie into four unequal slices. He passed Gulliver his plate, looked at this redheaded son. Once a woman has been treacherous, she’s corrupted forever. He slammed the knife so ferociously onto the wooden table that it bounced to the floor, narrowly missing Gulliver’s foot. We’ll never discuss her again in this house.

That night Gulliver dreamed he was walking in a vast unfenced field where a thousand pairs of green shoes grew from the ground like cucumbers. In this field was a woman, whirling between the shoes, singing, Normal people! Such ordinary normal people!

The following week he saw May reflected in a store window. He spun around—but it was not May, it was a stranger who wondered why this red-headed boy was staring at her. She went on her way feeling sad for him; he looked so greatly forlorn. But if she had followed him just a while, she would have seen the young boy stop and shake himself as if he were a wet puppy, would have seen him hold his hands to his head and say, "I won’t be ordinary. I’ll become a great artist. Then I’ll take care of her."

It was precisely because May left him that she became his first—and presumably his greatest—love. His musings of his mother were futile and fabulous, and they sustained him for an interminable time. But, given the nature of romantic love, there did come a day when they paled and faded into the gloom, although this was not for a long time to come.

Douglas Quick became increasingly disappointed at his failure to accomplish his goal of full-time musician. He had an odious temper that began to erupt in violence. Often he struck his three boys, but predominately Thurston, the eldest, with his belt and fists.

Thurston encouraged Gulliver to retaliate. Punch the bastard back, Thurston told him, it’s the only way to make him stop. But Gulliver could never strike his father.

When Thurston was sixteen he attacked Douglas with a corkscrew as Douglas lunged at him with a frying pan. The corkscrew twisted into Douglas’ left forearm, slashing a muscle and causing Douglas to have a weakened hand for the rest of his life. If you attack me again, it’ll be your balls I’ll carve out! Thurston howled.

Douglas never again hit Thurston. Instead he intensified his impatience toward his youngest son, Eric, who had contracted polio in his sixth year, and who, although walking again by the age of ten, had become a withdrawn child of gentle disposition. You damned pansy! Douglas heckled this son.

Thurston asked his father, Why do you bother staying with us?

From obligation, Douglas said.

Because of this disaffection the three boys learned to become independent, and thus, to outward perception, largely unaffected by their father’s severity. Gulliver trained himself to remain in an obscure world of his own. But he ached, and he dreamed of being an adult man with a wife. His wife would be kind to him. She would take care of him, make him feel loved.

That’s not what wives do, Douglas said, when Gulliver referred to this subject. Wives want to be looked after.

Gulliver said that the mothers of his friends took care of their husbands.

It only seems that way, said Douglas. Another day, in a more candid mood, he said, I’m not good with women. Like my father before me, and his father before him.

That frightened Gulliver. I’ll learn to be good with them.

But Douglas didn’t think so—didn’t think the men of this family could get along with women.

But I will, young Gulliver said softly. You’ll see.

So now he had set himself two goals: to be an artist and to be a good husband. He told me all this one day when he was very much older. He leaned against the stone wall of his house staring at a wrinkled gray lizard frozen on the bark of a jacaranda tree. By the time I was eleven I’d already set myself two contradictory goals. He laughed, and the lizard blinked rapidly, then ran down the tree into the long grass.

The only fatherly piece of advice Douglas ever gave his sons was this: Sex subdues women, but emboldens men. And that, upon reflection, was cockeyed, for men are as easily subdued by sex as women. If not more so.

In early photographs that I have seen of Gulliver with his brothers and father, he is the only one who looks as if the photo has been developed; the other three men are so pale of skin and hair, of eyebrows and whiskers, that they look like figures in undeveloped negatives. Gulliver is taller, his shoulders broader, legs thicker. He was an isolated youth, but in these photos he smiled, obscuring his ache with private determination. In those photos he does not look solemn like his older brother and father, or the younger brother whose right leg is withered and narrow. Gulliver smiles because he is lucky. It was as if luck, having resolved that the absence of a mother was sufficient ill fortune for this middle son, then followed the boy about in an invisible cloak.

At first, luck declared herself in the guise of ingenuous flukes and windfalls. When a pick-up truck, out of control, crashed through the walls of the schoolhouse, Gulliver was one of only two children left unhurt. A year later he swung his feet down from his bed inches away from a rattlesnake coiled asleep on the floor. The snake did not move, did nothing whatsoever to Gulliver, instead arose and vaulted at Douglas when he arrived with his rifle. By the time he was fourteen Gulliver had, in four separate raffles, won a bike, a radio, a Thanksgiving turkey and a trip to the Grand Canyon. He sold the bike and the radio in order to buy art supplies.

But Gulliver’s talent for painting, furnished unbidden at birth: was that luck? Many are born with aptitude, few with original talent, and fewer still with genius. At any rate, Gulliver had this benefaction that had been awarded to no others of the Quick family. (We don’t know yet about May and her drawings; if she had talent it was undeveloped.)

Douglas didn’t take his middle son’s talent seriously until Gulliver won a thousand dollars in an art competition. This money (offered from an advertising company in New York) was his providing he accepted a scholarship to a school of commercial art.

Gulliver told his father he would not attend the school. Commercial artists are like sign-painters.

So what? bellowed Douglas.

Standing there, looking at his choleric father, Gulliver felt an inexplicable surge of liberty. From this man he would get nothing, therefore he was emancipated.

Are you completely crazy? Douglas’ colorless face puffed with rage. Go for one semester, then drop out.

Gulliver said no, he wouldn’t do that. Instead he was going to a real art school.

His father struck his fist upon the table. Real? he shouted, the muscles of his neck contracting into tight orbs. There’s nothing more real than not being able to have what you want. Try that for real!

If you want something badly enough, it will happen, Gulliver replied calmly. Opportunity will arrive.

That was the moment when Douglas realized his redheaded son was different from the other Quicks. Had he been born in the hospital instead of that Boston bedroom, Douglas would have been certain that the staff had switched babies. It was as if Gulliver was a pear that had fallen off an apple tree. In Douglas’ world, opportunity occurred only elsewhere, and hope was for imbeciles. Do what you want, he said, shifting his stare from his son’s dark eyes.

I intend to, Gulliver replied.

A few weeks later, an executive from the New York advertising company that had offered the scholarship flew to Albuquerque to meet Gulliver. Sam Rafsky, who had paid his own fare without inveigling it from his company expense account, was a plump man with a face as benevolent and almost as crimson as a cartoon sun. He was several inches shorter than Gulliver. He wore a pink bow tie that clashed brutally with the tint of his cheeks.

I’m intrigued, Sam Rafsky told Gulliver at the soda fountain to which the boy had led him. You’re the first to refuse our scholarship, yet yours was the most interesting entry we’ve received in years.

Gulliver had put tremendous effort into his entry; he had told himself that he had no choice but to win first prize, had even given himself headaches in his exertion to achieve this. In fact, one evening he had told himself that unless he won he might as well kill himself. Yet now he looked at Sam and said, I only entered on a whim. I hardly even tried.

Sam Rafsky was a supremely honest man, yet—unlike most honest men—had the gift of immediately detecting falsehood. Yes? he said, after staring at Gulliver so hard that the boy began to redden. All the more reason we should investigate your talent. What is it you want to do?

Gulliver looked across the formica table. To go to Paris and paint.

Paris, echoed Sam, wondering what a boy from Albuquerque knew of Paris.

It’s the only place I can become good, Gulliver explained. The only place with decent teachers.

Sam smiled and pulled at his bow tie. If you care so much, why do you pretend to be so casual? he asked.

Gulliver lowered his face. I don’t know, he said finally, as he looked up and saw a girl from school on the other side of the soda fountain. He looked away from the girl back to Sam’s compassionate face. He told Sam that his father was a discouraged musician with no money. Every time I mention anything about taking art seriously, my father makes fun of me.

So what? Sam said, but he felt bad for the boy.

You’re right, Gulliver said.

But take my advice. Sam put his plump hand over the boy’s long fingers. Go to art school before Paris. Get some rudiments under your belt first. Paris will still be there.

Gulliver nodded but said nothing.

But you don’t have the money, Sam said, finishing his tepid milkshake. He suggested a walk. He had never lived anywhere other than New York; Albuquerque looked like one vast used car lot to him. Sam had never so much as sat behind a driver’s wheel and had no desire to do so.

They walked in the sun, past dusty storefronts and small rectangular lawns browned by the sun, and all the way Gulliver did something he had never done before: he spoke about his family, especially his green-shod, vanished mother. Sam listened as if he were listening to a foreigner; he himself came from a boisterous family in which the women would sooner drop dead than forsake their children.

How many children do you have? Gulliver asked Sam after he had said all he had to say, which was a lot considering the two had walked almost a mile and a half.

Sam shook his head. None. My wife had two hysterical pregnancies. Each time she blew up like a beachball, but there was nothing inside except air. He shuddered, recalling the sound the air made as it whistled its way out of Molly, carrying with it his prayers for a child.

For a while they walked in silence, then Sam stopped and spread his hands. I’m going to propose something, he said, not having any idea of why he was about to say what he did. I’ll pay for you to go to school, and if you’re good, if you work hard, I’ll help you get to Paris.

Gulliver stared at Sam Rafsky.

I’m forty-four, Sam said. I have money, a depressed wife, and no children. And that’s an unhealthy balance. If it doesn’t work out we’ll shake hands, and that’ll be that. But if it does, think how we’ll both benefit.

Gulliver was still staring at Sam. How would you benefit? It felt to him as if his voice were reverberating down a concrete tunnel.

One day, Sam replied, still not sure why he’d made such a proposition, you’ll be forty-four and maybe you’ll have children and you’ll understand, or maybe you won’t. Who knows? Anyway, Sam’s red face had flushed even deeper if it works out you could be like a son to me.

Now Gulliver was shy. You hardly know me.

I don’t know you at all, Sam pointed out. But what’s to lose? Just a bit of money maybe.

Of course Sam was not entirely correct; a great deal more than mere money was at stake, but deals have been struck in even more unlikely circumstances, and later, as he boarded the flight back to New York, Sam reflected—with some astonishment—that he had acted out of character. He was exhilarated by having done so. It was as if he had flushed the ghost of a feeble tiger from his soul; if he could do this, then he could do more. His middle years would not be as wooden, as tedious as he had feared. Yes, this short, thoughtful man said to himself as the plane lunged down toward the airport at New York, I can do anything I want.

Sam Rafsky was the first of many who would act out of character around Gulliver Quick, then later pause to ponder why they had done so. And, having pondered, then decide it felt appropriate. At the moment it felt genuine.

Thus, at the age of eighteen, Gulliver left Albuquerque forever, and enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. He lived with three other art students—one continually supplanting another—in a cold-water walk-up in Greenwich Village. Gulliver was not an uncomplicated young man; neither, for one from a prosaic background, was