GRAVITY RAINBOW (32 page)

In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica's cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms… If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her more… if it happened when they were together- in another time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep to the jive than others-but they're apart so much…

If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy
is
the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has

ever made-that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day… Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make… Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on-how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible…

His act of faith. In the street the children are singing:

Hark, the herald angels sing:

Mrs. Simpson's pinched our King…

Up on the mantelpiece Sooty's son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Siamese, lurks waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond eating, sleeping or fucking his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother, and lie there laughing while she runs screaming around the room. Jessica's sister Nancy comes out of the loo to break up what's becoming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird's song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief comes away… "Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold."

You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me…

You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.

– merian C. cooper to Fay Wray

This morning's streets are already clattering, near and far, with wood-soled civilian feet. Up in the wind is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy, side to side, wings hung out still, now and then a small shrug, only to gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow faro shuffle off invisible thumbs… Yesterday's first glance, coming along the esplanade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray clouds, the Casino Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black sawtooth, hardly moving… But this morning the trees in the sun now are back to green. Leftward, far away, the ancient aqueduct loops crumbling, dry yellow, out along the
Cap,
the houses and villas there baked to warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth's colors, pale raw to deeply burnished.

The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings, turning the feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. Slothrop rattles his teeth at the crowd of birds aloft, shivering down on his own miniature balcony, electric fire deep in the room barely touching the backs of his legs. They have filed him high on the white sea-facade, in a room to himself. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his friend Teddy Bloat are sharing one down the hall. He takes back his hands into ribbed cuffs of a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning, the ghosts of his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a first cigarette-and perversely he waits for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket. Aware all the time he's in the wake of a great war gone north, and that the only explosions

around here will have to be champagne corks, motors of sleek Hispano-Suizas, the odd amorous slap, hopefully… No London? No Blitz? Can he get used to it? Sure, and by then it'll be just time to head back.

"Well, he's awake." Bloat in uniform, sidling into the room gnawing on a smoldering pipe, Tantivy behind in a pin-striped lounge suit. "Up at the crack, reconnoitering the beach for the unattached mamzelle or two, no doubt…"

"Couldn't sleep," Slothrop yawning back down into the room, birds in the sunlight kiting behind him.

"Nor we," from Tantivy. "It must take years to adjust."

"God," Bloat really pushing the forced enthusiasm this morning, pointing theatrically at the enormous bed, collapsing onto it, bouncing vigorously. "They must have had advance word about you, Slothrop! Luxury! They gave us some disused closet, you know."

"Hey, what are you telling him?" Slothrop forages around for cigarettes. "I'm some kind of a Van Johnson or something?"

"Only that, in the matter of," Tantivy from the balcony tossing his green pack of Cravens, "girls, you know-"

"Englishmen being rather reserved," Bloat explains, bouncing for emphasis.

"Oh, raving maniacs," Slothrop mumbles, heading for his private lavatory, "been invaded by a gang of those section 8s, all right…" Stands pleased, pissing no-hands, lighting up, but wondering a little about that Bloat. Supposed to be oldtime pals with Tantivy. He snaps the match into the toilet, a quick hiss: yet something about the way he talks to Slothrop, patronizing? maybe nervous…

"You're expecting
me
to fix you guys up?" he yells over the crash of the toilet flushing, "I thought the minute you guys get across that Channel, set foot on that France, you all turn into Valentinos."

"I hear there was some prewar tradition," Tantivy hanging plaintive now in the doorway, "but Bloat and I are members of the New Generation,
we
have to depend on Yank expertise…"

Whereupon Bloat leaps from the bed and seeks to enlighten Slothrop with a song:

the englishman's very shy (fox-trot)

(Bloat):
The Englishman's very shy,

He's none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver,

A-mericans lead the pack-

(Tantivy):
-You see, your Englishman tends to lack That recklessness transatlantic, That women find so romantic Though frankly I can't see why…

(Bloat):
The polygamous Yank with his girls galore Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits,

(Tantivy):
Though he's secretly held in re-ve-rent awe As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz…

(Together):
If only one could al-ly

A-merican bedroom know-how

With British good looks, then
oh
how

Those lovelies would swoon and sigh,

Though you and I know the Englishman's very shy.

"Well you've sure come to the right place," nods Slothrop, convinced. "Only don't expect me to put it in for you."

"Just the initial approach," Bloat says.

"Moi," Tantivy has meanwhile been screaming down from the bal

cony, "Moi Tantivy, you know. Tantivy.":

"Tantivy," replies a dim girl-chorus from outside and below.

"J'ai deux amis, aussi, by an odd coincidence. Par un bizarre coincidence, or something, oui?"

Slothrop, at this point shaving, wanders out with the foamy badger brush in his fist to see what's happening, and collides with Bloat, who's dashing to peer down over his compatriot's left epaulet at three pretty girls' faces, upturned, straw-haloed each by a giant sun-hat, smiles all dazzling, eyes mysterious as the sea behind them.

"I say ou," inquires Bloat, "ou, you know, dejeuner?"

"Glad I could help you out," Slothrop mutters, lathering Tantivy between the shoulderblades.

"But come with us," the girls are calling above the waves, two of them holding up an enormous wicker basket out of which lean sleek green wine bottles and rough-crusted loaves still from under their white cloth steaming in little wisps feathering off of chestnut glazes and paler split-streaks, "come-sur la plage…"

"I'll just," Bloat half out the door, "keep them company, until you…"

"Sur la plage," Tantivy a bit dreamy, blinking in the sun, smiling down at their good-morning's wishes come true, "oh, it sounds like a painting. Something by an Impressionist. A Fauve. Full of light…"

Slothrop goes flicking witch hazel off his hands. The smell in the

room brings back a moment of Berkshire Saturdays-bottles of plum and amber tonics, fly-studded paper twists swayed by the overhead fan, twinges of pain from blunt scissors… Struggling out of his sweatshirt, lit cigarette in his mouth, smoke coming out the neck like a volcano, "Hey could I bum one of your-"

"You've already got the pack," cries Tantivy-"God almighty, what is
that
supposed to be?"

"What's what?" Slothrop's face nothing but innocent as he slips into and begins to button the object in question.

"You're joking, of course. The young ladies are waiting, Slothrop, do put on something civilized, there's a good chap-"

"All set," Slothrop on the way past the mirror combing his hair into the usual sporty Bing Crosby pompadour.

"You can't expect us to be
seen
with-"

"My brother Hogan sent it to me," Slothrop lets him know, "for my birthday, all the way from the Pacific. See on the back? under the fellows in that outrigger canoe there, to the left of those hibiscus blossoms, it sez SOUVENIR OF honolulu? This is the authentic item, Mucker-Maffick, not some cheap imitation."

"Dear God," moans Tantivy, trailing him forlornly out of the room, shading his eyes from the shirt, which glows slightly in the dimness of the corridor. "At least tuck it in and cover it with something. Here, I'll even lend you this Norfolk jacket…" Sacrifice indeed: the coat is from a Savile Row establishment whose fitting rooms are actually decorated with portraits of all the venerable sheep-some nobly posed up on crags, others in pensive, soft close-ups-from whom the original fog-silvered wool was sheared.

"Must be woven out of that barbed wire," is Slothrop's opinion, "what girl'd want to get near anything like that?"

"Ah, but, but would any woman in her right mind want to be within ten miles of that-that ghastly shirt, eh?"

"Wait!" From someplace Slothrop now produces a gaudy yellow, green and orange display handkerchief, and over Tantivy's groans of horror arranges it in his friend's jacket pocket so as to stick out in three points. "There!" beaming, "that's what you call
real sharp!"

They emerge into sunlight. Gulls begin to wail, the garment on Slothrop blazes into a refulgent life of its own. Tantivy squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, the girls are all attached to Slothrop, stroking the shirt, nibbling at its collar-points, cooing in French.

"Of course." Tantivy picks up the basket. "Right."

The girls are dancers. The manager of the Casino Hermann Goe-

ring, one Cesar Flebotomo, brought in a whole chorus-line soon as the liberators arrived, though he hasn't yet found time to change the place's occupation name. Nobody seems to mind it up there, a pleasant mosaic of tiny and perfect seashells, thousands of them set in plaster, purple, pink and brown, replacing a huge section of roof (the old tiles still lie in a heap beside the Casino), put up two years ago as recreational therapy by a Messerschmitt squadron on furlough, in German typeface expansive enough to be seen from the air, which is what they had in mind. The sun now is still too low to touch the words into any more than some bare separation from their ground, so that they hang suppressed, no relation any more to the men, the pain in their hands, the blisters that grew black under the sun with infection and blood- only receding as the party now walk down past sheets and pillowcases of the hotel, spread to dry on the slope of the beach, fine wrinkles edged in blue that will flow away as the sun climbs, six pairs of feet stirring debris never combed for, an old gambling chip half bleached by the sun, translucent bones of gulls, a drab singlet, Wehrmacht issue, torn and blotted with bearing grease…

They move along the beach, Slothrop's amazing shirt, Tantivy's handkerchief, girls' frocks, green bottles all dancing, everyone talking at once, boy-and-girl lingua franca, the girls confiding quite a lot to each other with side glances for their escorts. This ought to be good for a bit of the, heh, heh, early paranoia here, a sort of pick-me-up to help face what's sure to come later in the day. But it isn't. Much too good a morning for that. Little waves are rolling in, breaking piecrust-wise along a curve of dark shingle, farther off foaming among the black rocks that poke up along the
Cap.
Out at sea wink twin slivers of a boat's sails being sucked along in the sun and distance, over toward Antibes, the craft tacking gradual, cockle-frail among low swells whose touch and rowdy hiss along the chines Slothrop can feel this morning, reminded of prewar Comets and Hamptons sighted from the beach at Cape Cod, among land odors, drying seaweed, summer-old cooking oil, the feel of sand on sunburn, the sharp-pointed dune grass under bare feet… Closer to shore a
pedalo
full of soldiers and girls moves along-they dangle, splash, sprawl in green and white striped lounge chairs back aft. At the edge of the water small kids are chasing, screaming, laughing in that hoarse, helplessly tickled little-kid way. Up on the esplanade an old couple sit on a bench, blue and white and a cream-colored parasol, a morning habit, an anchor for the day…