Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Now you’re getting the idea!” Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of
ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, “you see, you also have to enjoy the way it
looks.
Why are Americans so impulsive?”
“Well,” mumbling, “usually we don’t get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see. . . .”
“Oh, try
this,
” hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.
“Gosh, it must really be something,” doubtfully taking this nasty- looking brownish
novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and
everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so
scarce, also including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge
of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked
blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.
“Go on then,” Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to
shove it into his mouth.
“Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested.”
“And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone.”
Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored
nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center.
It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes
are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to
smoke
that stuff. “Poisoned . . .” he is able to croak.
“Show a little backbone,” advises Mrs. Quoad.
“Yes,” Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, “don’t you know there’s
a war on? Here now love, open your mouth.”
Through the tears he can’t see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the
table going “Yum, yum, yum,” and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a
marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it
tastes like gin. “Wha’s ’is,” he inquires thickly.
“A gin marshmallow,” sez Mrs. Quoad.
“Awww . . .”
“Oh that’s nothing, have one of
these
—” his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry
shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it’s tapioca, little glutinous
chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.
“More tea?” Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some
of that clove filling.
“Nasty cough,” Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops,
the Meggezone. “Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really
I can.”
The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately
begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up
the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much
to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside
the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats
in a halo of ice.
Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air. Slothrop
lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past, his groin
now against her warm bottom. The one candy he did not get to taste—one Mrs. Quoad
withheld—was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean
taste—“salted plum” to one, “artificial cherry” to another . . . “sugared violets” . . .
“Worcestershire sauce” . . . “spiced treacle” . . . any number of like descriptions,
positive, terse—never exceeding two words in length—resembling the descriptions of
poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, “sweet-and-sour eggplant”
being perhaps the lengthiest to date. The Fire of Paradise today is operationally
extinct, and in 1945 can hardly be found: certainly nowhere among the sunlit shops
and polished windows of Bond Street or waste Belgravia. But every now and then one
will surface, in places which deal usually other merchandise than sweets: at rest,
back inside big glass jars clouded by the days, along with objects like itself, sometimes
only one candy to a whole jar, nearly hidden in the ambient tourmalines in German
gold, carved ebony finger-stalls from the last century, pegs, valve-pieces, threaded
hardware from obscure musical instruments, electronic components of resin and copper
that the War, in its glutton, ever-nibbling intake, has not yet found and licked back
into its darkness. . . . Places where the motors never come close enough to be loud,
and there are trees outside along the street. Inner rooms and older faces developing
under light falling through a skylight, yellower, later in the year. . . .
Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside
her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle . . . The bedroom deepens into water
and coolness. Somewhere the sun is going down. Just enough light to see the darker
freckles on her back. In the parlor Mrs. Quoad is dreaming she’s back in the gardens
at Bournemouth, among the rhododendrons, and a sudden rain, Austin crying
Touch her throat, Majesty. Touch!
and Yrjö—a pretender but the true king, for a very doubtful branch of the family
usurped the throne in 1878 during the intrigues over Bessarabia—Yrjö in an old-fashioned
frock coat with golden galloons shining at the sleeves, bending toward her in the
rain to cure her forever of King’s Evil, looking exactly as he does in the rotogravure,
his lovely Hrisoula a step or two behind kindly, seriously waiting, around them the
rain thundering down, the King’s white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch
the hollow of Mrs. Quoad’s throat, the miracle touch, gently . . . touch . . .
The lightning
—
And Slothrop is yawning “What time is it?” and Darlene is swimming up from sleep.
When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing
up from her nape clear as day, as the concussion drives in on them, rattling the building
to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice
of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket’s rush comes swelling, elevated
express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant
cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with
it. Slothrop’s penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding
very fast, palms and fingers in fear’s pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part
of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong
flickering on the shade, she’s begun to wonder . . . about the two together . . .
but they’re fucking now, and what does it matter, but God’s sake why shouldn’t this
stupid Blitz be good for something?
And who’s that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching?
And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveillance, would you say the next one
will fall?
• • • • • • •
The very first touch: he’d been saying something mean, a bit of the usual Mexico self-reproach—ah
you don’t know me I’m really a bastard sort of thing—“No,” she went to put her fingers
to his lips, “don’t say that. . . .” As she reached, without thinking he grabbed her
wrist, moved her hand away, pure defense—but kept holding her, by the wrist. They
were eyes-to-eyes, and neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips
and kissed it then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against
the front of his chest . . . “Ohh . . .” the sound rushing out of her, and she came
in to hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told
him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time
he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica’s soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling
began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock
was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though
neither has figured out why, exactly.
Whenever it happens, though, the light always gets very red for them.
Once they met at a teashop: she was wearing a red sweater with short sleeves, and
her bare arms glowed red by her sides. She hadn’t any make-up on, the first time he’d
seen her so. Walking to the car, she takes his hand and puts it, for a moment, lightly
between her moving legs. Roger’s heart grows erect, and comes. That’s really how it
feels. Up sharply to skin level in a V around his centerline, washing over his nipples . . .
it is love, it is amazing. Even when she isn’t there, after a dream, at a face in
the street that might against chance be Jessica’s, Roger can never control it, he’s
in its grasp.
About Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother, Roger tries not to think any
more than he has to. Of course he agonizes over technical matters. She cannot possibly—can
she?—be Doing The Same Things with Jeremy. Does Jeremy ever kiss her cunt, for example?
Could that
prig
actually—does she reach around as they’re fucking a-and slide a mischievous finger,
his English rose, into
Jeremy’s
asshole? Stop, stop this (but does she suck his cock? Has he ever had his habitually
insolent face between her lovely buttocks?) no use, it’s youthful folly time here
and you’re better off up at the Tivoli watching Maria Montez and Jon Hall, or looking
for leopards or peccaries in Regents Park Zoo, and wondering if it’ll rain before
4:30.
The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to hours.
And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF memorandum. And there is
no way, first time in his career, that the statistician can make these figures mean
anything.
Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones
can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.
Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play alone for
themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her sky, with his wind
humming among the loops of barbed wire down along the beach. The Mayfair Hotel. “We
are
quite the jet-propelled one aren’t we, only half an hour late.”
“Well,” Wrens and NAAFI girls, jeweled young widows side-glancing on by, “I’m sure
you’ve
put the time to good use.”
“Time enough for several assignations,” he replies, looking elaborately at his watch,
worn WW II style on the inside of his wrist, “and by
now
, I should say, a confirmed pregnancy or two, if not indeed—”
“Ah,” she blithely jumps (but upward, not on), “that
reminds
me . . .”
“Yaaahhh!” Roger reeling back to a potted plant, among the lilting saxophones of Roland
Peachey and his Orchestra playing “There, I Said It Again,” and cowering.
“So,
that’s
on your mind. If mind is the word I want.”
They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them:
censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica
are there. It’s all shortages, songs and boy friends, films and blouses . . .
With her hair pulled back of her ears, her soft chin in profile, she looks only 9
or 10, alone by windows, blinking into the sun, turning her head on the light counterpane,
coming in tears, child’s reddening wrinkling face about to cry, going
oh, oh
. . .
One night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself,
he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia,
she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together,
hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall. Trees outside
sifting the wind, out of her sight the lorries forever rushing down the streets and
roads, behind houses, across canals or river, beyond the simple park. Oh and the dogs
and cats who went padding in the fine snow. . . .
“. . . pictures, well scenes, keep flashing
in
, Roger. By themselves, I mean I’m not
making
them. . . .” A bright swarm of them is passing by, against the low isotonic glimmer
of the ceiling. He and she lie and breathe mouth-up. His soft cock drools down around
his thigh, the downhill one, closest to Jessica. The night room heaves a sigh, yes
Heaves, a Sigh—old-fashioned comical room, oh me I’m hopeless, born a joker never
change, flirting away through the mirrorframe in something green-striped, pantalooned,
and ruffled—meantime though, it
is
quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been known also to “breathe,” yes even
wait in hushed expectancy
and that ought to be the rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures,
heavy perfume and capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with spiral stairways,
blue-petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one, however provoked or out of touch,
my dear young lady, ever, Heaves, a Sigh. It is not done.
But here. Oh,
this
young lady. Checked gingham. Ragged eyebrows, grown wild. Red velvet. On a dare once,
she took off her blouse, motoring up on the trunk road near Lower Beeding.
“My God she’s gone insane, what
is
this, why do they all come to
me?
”
“Well, ha, ha,” Jessica twirling the necktie of her Army blouse like a stripper, “you
uh, said I was afraid to. Di’n’t you. Called me ‘cowardly, cowardly custard’ or something,
’s I recall—” No brassiere of course, she never wears one.
“Look here,” glaring sideways, “do you know you can get arrested? Never mind
you,
” just occurring to him, here, “
I’ll
get arrested!”
“They’ll blame it all on you, la, la.” Lower teeth edging out in a mean-girl’s smile.
“I’m just an innocent lamb and this—” flinging a little arm out, striking light from
the fair hairs on her forearm, her small breasts bouncing free, “this Roger-the-rake!
here, this awful beast! makes me perform, these degrading . . .”