Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“I think he’s out on the beach. There’s a lot of drinking.”
“He drinks a lot?”
“No.”
“Look, you’re his friend—”
Tantivy moans. “God, Slothrop,
I
don’t know. I’m your friend too, but there’s always, you know, an element of Slothropian
paranoia to contend with. . . .”
“Paranoia’s ass. Something’s up, a-and you know it!”
Tantivy chews ice, sights along a glass stirring rod, rips up a small napkin into
a snowstorm, all sorts of bar business, he’s an old hand. But at last, in a soft voice,
“Well, he’s receiving messages in code.”
“Ha!”
“I saw one in his kit this afternoon. Just a glimpse. I didn’t try to look closer.
He is with Supreme Headquarters, after all—I suppose that could be it.”
“No, that’s not it. Now what about
this
—” and Slothrop tells about his midnight date with Katje. For a moment they might
almost be back in the bureau at ACHTUNG, and the rockets falling, and tea in paper
cups, and everything right again. . . .
“Are you going?”
“Shouldn’t I? You think she’s dangerous?”
“I think she’s delightful. If I hadn’t Françoise, not to mention Yvonne to worry about,
I’d be racing you to her door.”
“But?”
But the clock over the bar only clicks once, then presently again, ratcheting time
minutewise into their past.
“Either what you’ve got is contagious,” Tantivy begins, “or else they’ve an eye on
me too.”
They look at each other. Slothrop remembers that except for Tantivy he’s all alone
here. “Tell me.”
“I wish I could. He’s changed—but I couldn’t give you a single bit of evidence. It’s
been since . . . I don’t know. Autumn. He doesn’t talk politics any more. God, we
used to get into these— He won’t discuss his plans after he’s demobbed either, it’s
something he used to do all the time. I thought the Blitz might have got him rattled . . .
but after yesterday, I think it must be more. Damn it, it makes me sad.”
“What happened?”
“Oh. A sort of—not a threat. Or not a serious one. I mentioned, only joking, that
I was keen on your Katje. And Bloat became very cold, and said, ‘I’d stay clear of
that one if I were you.’ Tried to cover it with a laugh, as if he had his eye on her
too. But that wasn’t it. I-I don’t have his confidence any more. I’m— I feel I’m only
useful to him in a way I can’t see. Being tolerated for as long as he can use me.
The old University connection. I don’t know if you ever felt it at Harvard . . . from
time to time back in Oxford, I came to sense a peculiar
structure
that no one admitted to—that extended far beyond Turl Street, past Cornmarket into
covenants, procuring, accounts due . . . one never knew who it would be, or when,
or how they’d try to collect it . . . but I thought it only idle, only at the fringes
of what I was
really
up there for, you know. . . .”
“Sure. In that America, it’s the first thing they tell you. Harvard’s there for other
reasons. The ‘educating’ part of it is just sort of a front.”
“We’re so very innocent here, you see.”
“Some of you, maybe. I’m sorry about Bloat.”
“I still hope it’s something else.”
“I guess so. But what do we do right now?”
“Oh I’d say—keep your date, be careful. Keep me posted. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have
an adventure or two to tell you about, for a change. And if you need help,” teeth
flashing, face reddening a bit, “well, I’ll help you.”
“Thanks, Tantivy.” Jesus, a British ally. Yvonne and Françoise peek in, beckoning
them outside. On to the Himmler-Spielsaal and chemin-de-fer till midnight. Slothrop
breaks even, Tantivy loses, and the girls win. No sign of Bloat, though dozens of
officers go drifting in and out, brown and distant as rotogravure, through the evening.
Nor any sight of his girl Ghislaine. Slothrop asks. Yvonne shrugs: “Out with your
friend? Who knows?” Ghislaine’s long hair and tanned arms, her six-year-old face in
a smile. . . . If it turns out she does know something, is she safe?
At 11:59 Slothrop turns to Tantivy, nods at the two girls, tries to chuckle lewdly,
and gives his friend a quick, affectionate punch in the shoulder. Once, back in prep
school, just before sending him into a game, young Slothrop’s football coach socked
him the same way, giving him confidence for at least fifty seconds, till being trampled
flat on his ass by a number of red-dogging Choate boys, each with the instincts and
mass of a killer rhino.
“Good luck,” says Tantivy, meaning it, hand already reaching for Yvonne’s sweet chiffon
bottom. Minutes of doubt, yes yes . . . Slothrop ascending flights of red-carpeted
stairway (Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy
Your Visit Here), malachite nymphs and satyrs paralyzed in chase, evergreen, at the
silent landings, upward toward a single staring bulb at the top. . . .
At her door he pauses long enough to comb his hair. Now she wears a white pelisse,
with sequins all over, padded shoulders, jagged white ostrich plumes at the neckline
and wrists. The tiara is gone: in the electricity her hair is new snowfall. But inside
a single scented candle burns, and the suite is washed in moonlight. She pours brandy
in old flint snifters, and as he reaches, their fingers touch. “Didn’t know you were
so daffy about that golf!” Suave, romantic Slothrop.
“He was pleasant. I was being pleasant to him,” one eye kind of squinched up, forehead
wrinkled. Slothrop wonders if his fly’s open.
“And ignore me. Why?” Clever pounce there, Slothrop—but she only evaporates before
the question, re-forms in another part of the room. . . .
“Am I ignoring you?” She’s at her window, the sea below and behind her, the midnight
sea, its individual waveflows impossible at this distance to follow, all integrated
into the hung stillness of an old painting seen across the deserted gallery where
you wait in the shadow, forgetting why you are here, frightened by the level of illumination,
which is from the same blanched scar of moon that wipes the sea tonight. . . .
“I don’t know. But you’re fooling around a lot.”
“Perhaps I’m supposed to be.”
“As ‘Perhaps we were meant to meet’?”
“Oh, you think I’m more than I am,” gliding to a couch, tucking one leg under.
“I know. You’re only a Dutch milkmaid or something. Closet full o’ those starched
aprons a-and wooden shoes, right?”
“Go and look.” Spice odors from the candle reach like nerves through the room.
“O.K., I will!” He opens her closet, and in moonlight reflected from the mirror finds
a crowded maze of satins, taffetas, lawn, and pongee, dark fur collars and trimming,
buttons, sashes, passementerie, soft, confusing, womanly tunnel-systems that must
stretch back for miles—he could be lost inside of half a minute . . . lace glimmers,
eyelets wink, a crepe scarf brushes his face . . . Aha! wait a minute, the operational
scent in here is carbon tet, Jackson, and this wardrobe here’s mostly props. “Well.
Pretty snazzy.”
“If that’s a compliment, thank you.”
Let Them thank me, babe. “An Americanism.”
“You’re the first American I’ve met.”
“Hmm. You must’ve got out by way of that Arnhem, then, right?”
“My, you’re quick,” her tone warning him not to go after it. He sighs, ringing the
snifter with his fingernail. In the dark room, with the paralyzed and silent sea at
his back, he tries singing:
T
OO
S
OON
TO
K
NOW
(F
OX-TROT
)
It’s still too soon,
It’s not as if we’d kissed and kindled,
Or chased the moon
Through midnight’s hush, as dancing dwindled
Into quiet dawns,
Over secret lawns . . .
Too soon to know
If all that breathless conversation
A sigh ago
Was more than casual flirtation
Doomed to drift away
Into misty gray . . .
How can we tell,
What can we see?
Love works its spells in hiding,
Quite past our own deciding . . .
So who’s to say
If joyful love is just beginning,
Or if its day
Just turned to night, as Earth went spinning?
Darling, maybe so—
It’s TOO SOON TO KNOW.
Knowing what is expected of her, she waits with a vapid look till he’s done, mellow
close-harmony reeds humming a moment in the air, then reaches out a hand, melting
toward him as he topples in slow-motion toward her mouth, feathers sliding, sleeves
furling, ascending bare arms finely moongrained slipping around and up his back, her
tacky tongue nervous as a moth, his hands rasping over sequins . . . then her breasts
flatten against him as her forearms and hands go away folding up behind her to find
a zipper, bring it snarling down her spineline. . . .
Katje’s skin is whiter than the white garment she rises from.
Born again
. . . out the window he can almost see the spot where the devilfish crawled in from
the rocks. She walks like a ballerina on her toes, thighs long and curving, Slothrop
undoing belt, buttons, shoelaces hopping one foot at a time, oboy oboy, but the moonlight
only whitens her back, and there is still a dark side, her ventral side, her face,
that he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower
jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there’s
only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike
no telling when the light
—
She has sunk to the deep bed, pulling him along, into down, satin, seraphic and floral
embroidery, turning immediately to take his erection into her stretched fork, into
a single vibration on which the night is tuning . . . as they fuck she quakes, body
strobing miles beneath him in cream and night-blue, all sound suppressed, eyes in
crescents behind the gold lashes, jet earrings, long, octahedral, flying without a
sound, beating against her cheeks, black sleet, his face above her unmoved, full of
careful technique—is it for her? or wired into the Slothropian Run-together they briefed
her on—she will move him, she will not be mounted by a plastic shell . . . her breathing
has grown more hoarse, over a threshold into sound . . . thinking she might be close
to coming he reaches a hand into her hair, tries to still her head, needing to see
her face: this is suddenly a struggle, vicious and real—she will not surrender her
face—and out of nowhere she does begin to come, and so does Slothrop.
For some reason now, she who never laughs has become the top surface of a deep, rising
balloon of laughter. Later as she’s about to go to sleep, she will also whisper, “Laughing,”
laughing again.
He will want to say, “Oh, They let you,” but then again maybe They don’t. But the
Katje he’s talking to is already gone, and presently his own eyes have closed.
Like a rocket whose valves, under remote control, open and close at prearranged moments,
Slothrop, at a certain level of his re-entry into sleep, stops breathing through his
nose and commences breathing through his mouth. This soon grows to snores that have
been known to rattle storm windows, set shutters to swinging and chandeliers into
violent tintinnabulation, yes indee-eed. . . . At the first of these tonight, Katje
wakes up belts him in the head with a pillow.
“None of that.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m a light sleeper. Every time you snore, you get hit with this,” waving the pillow.
No kidding, either. The routine of snore, get belted with pillow, wake up, say hmm,
fall back to sleep, goes on well into the morning. “Come on,” finally, “cut it out.”
“Mouth-breather!” she yells. He grabs his own pillow and swings it at her. She ducks,
rolls, hits the deck feinting with her pillow, backing toward the sideboard where
the booze is. He doesn’t see what she has in mind till she throws her pillow and picks
up the Seltzer bottle.
The what,
The Seltzer Bottle?
What shit is this, now? What other interesting props have They thought to plant,
and what other American reflexes are They after? Where’s those
banana cream pies
, eh?
He dangles two pillows and watches her. “One more step,” she giggles. Slothrop dives
in goes to hit her across the ass whereupon she lets him have it with the Seltzer
bottle, natch. The pillow bursts against one marble hip, moonlight in the room is
choked with feathers and down and soon with hanging spray from jets of Seltzer. Slothrop
keeps trying to grab the bottle. Slippery girl squirms away, gets behind a chair.
Slothrop takes the brandy decanter off of the sideboard, un-stoppers it, and flings
a clear, amber, pseudopodded glob across the room twice in and out of moonlight to
splash around her neck, between her black-tipped breasts, down her flanks. “Bastard,”
hitting him with the Seltzer again. Settling feathers cling to their skins as they
chase around the bedroom, her dappled body always retreating, often in this light,
even at close range, impossible to see. Slothrop keeps falling over the furniture.
“Boy, when I get my hands on
you!
” At which point she opens the door to the sitting room, skips through, slams it again
so Slothrop runs right into it, bounces off, sez shit, opens the door to find her
waving a big red damask tablecloth at him.
“What’s this,” inquires Slothrop.
“Magic!” she cries, and tosses the tablecloth over him, precisely wrinkling folds
propagating swift as crystal faults, redly through the air. “Watch closely, while
I make one American lieutenant disappear.”
“Quit fooling,” Slothrop flailing around trying to reach the outside again. “How can
I watch closely when I’m in here.” He can’t find an edge anyplace and feels a little
panicky.
“That’s the idea,” suddenly inside, next to him, lips at his nipples, hands fluttering
among the hairs at the back of his neck, pulling him slowly to deep carpeting, “My
little chickadee.”