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Metzger, taking her hand as if to shake on the bet and kissing its palm instead, sending the dry end of his tongue to graze briefly among her fate’s furrows, the changeless salt hatchings of her identity. She wondered then if this were really happening in the same way as, say, her first time in bed with Pierce, the dead man. But then the movie came back.
The irrepressibly comic Metzger made crosseyes before replying, “That would be telling.” “Come on.” She nudged his nose with the padded tip of her bra cup and poured booze. “Or the bet’s off.”
Oedipa skipped into the bathroom, which happened also to have a walk-in closet, quickly undressed and began putting on as much as she could of the clothing she’d brought with her: six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch slacks, four half-slips, one black sheath, two summer
dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and old Orlon muu-muu. Bracelets then, scatterpins, earrings, a pendant.
“Depends how hot it gets in here, gang,” winked jolly Oedipa.
“You’re really mad,” he smiled.
She wasn’t, really.
Metzger came up behind her with some idea of cupping his hands around her breasts, but couldn’t immediately find them because of all the clothes.
“What did Inverarity tell you about me,” she asked finally. “That you wouldn’t be easy.” She began to cry. “Come back,” said Metzger. “Come on.” After awhile she said, “I will.” And she did.
Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive.
Fallopian twinkled. “They accuse us of being paranoids.” “They?” inquired Metzger, twinkling also. “Us?” asked Oedipa. The Peter Pinguid
reconnoitering.
“You think like a Bircher,” Fallopian said. “Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror.” “Industrial anything,” hazarded Metzger.
As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense as Oedipa’s own street clothes in that game with Metzger in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness.
peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear?
had decided to spend the day out at Fangoso Lagoons, one of Inverarity’s last big projects.
perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. Oedipa had believed, long before leaving Kinneret, in some principle of the sea as redemption for Southern California (not, of course, for her own section of the state, which seemed to need none), some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth.
They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry,
down in a helix to a sculptured body of water named Lake Inverarity.
Art Nouveau
reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino. Oedipa fell in love with it.
Metzger closed his eyes and tripped over an old anchor. “Why are you walking around,” inquired Oedipa, “with your eyes closed, Metzger?” “Larceny,” Metzger said, “maybe they’ll need a lawyer.”
said Di Presso, skulking as best a polyethylene cone can along the landing towards them.
“Adeste Fideles”:
“That pilot will never be bought, Metz, not unless you go out and do something really Darrowlike, spectacular.
“Like win the litigation I’m bringing against the estate of Pierce Inverarity.”
For weeks, a handful of American troops, cut off and without communications, huddled on the narrow shore of the clear and tranquil lake while from the cliffs that tilted vertiginously over the beach Germans hit them day and night with plunging, enfilading fire.
The water of the lake was too cold to swim: you died of exposure before you could reach any safe shore. There were no trees to build rafts with. No planes came over except an occasional Stuka with strafing in mind.
They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, “This is my body,” the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.
She could not say why, exactly, but felt threatened by this absence of even the marginal try at communication latrines are known
Certain things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud; certain events will not be shown onstage; though it is difficult to imagine, given the excesses of the preceding acts, what these things could possibly be. The Duke does not, perhaps may not, enlighten us.
Everyone onstage (having clearly been directed to do so) becomes aware of a possibility.
Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut; hung in the dark to puzzle Oedipa Maas, but not yet to exert the power over her it was to.
“Hap Harrigan comics,” Metzger now even louder, “which she is hardly old enough to read, John Wayne on Saturday afternoon slaughtering ten thousand Japs with his teeth, this is Oedipa Maas’s World War II, man. Some people today can drive VW’s, carry a Sony radio in their shirt pocket. Not this one, folks, she wants to right wrongs, 20 years after it’s all over. Raise ghosts. All from a drunken hassle with Manny Di Presso. Forgetting her first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate she represents. Not to our boys in uniform, however gallant, whenever they died.”
Oedipa nodded. She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.
“You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh.
You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.
Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?
For two hours Oedipa sat on a long bench between old men who might have been twins and whose hands, alternately (as if their owners were asleep and the moled, freckled hands out roaming dream-landscapes) kept falling onto her thighs. Around
We stay on the ground. Yoyodyne, Yoyodyne, Contracts flee thee yet. DOD has shafted thee, Out of spite, I’ll bet.
“Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”
The familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo, showing Maxwell in right profile, seemed to work best.
“No,” his voice gone funny, so that she looked up, too sharply, by which time, carried by a certain momentum of thought,
But Stanley Koteks was no longer about to be sweettalked. “Forget it,” he advised; opened a book and proceeded to ignore her.
What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that?
Oedipa sat alone and gloomy.
first of many demurs. Back at Echo Courts, Metzger in L.A. for the day on other business, she turned immediately to the single mention of the word Trystero. Opposite the line she read, in pencil, Cf. variant, 1687 ed.
She would give them order, she would create constellations;
A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel,” laughing, “as if I have been 91 all my life.
Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the bronze marker, smiled at him as granddaughterly as she knew how
