Gravity's Rainbow (33 page)

“Slothrop!” Here’s Bloat ten feet away offering him a large crab.

“What th’ fuck . . .” Maybe if he broke the bottle on the rock, stabbed the bastard
between the eyes—

“It’s hungry, it’ll go for the crab.
Don’t kill it, Slothrop.
Here, for God’s sake—” and here it comes spinning through the air, legs cocked centrifugally
outward: dithering Slothrop drops the bottle just before the crab smacks against his
other palm. Neat catch. Immediately, through her fingers and his shirt, he can feel
the reflex to food.

“O.K.” Shaking Slothrop waves the crab at the octopus. “Chow time, fella.” Another
tentacle moves in. Its corrugated ooze touches his wrist. Slothrop tosses the crab
a few feet along the beach, and what do you know, that octopus goes for it all right:
dragging along the girl and Slothrop staggering for a bit, then letting her go. Slothrop
quickly snatches up the crab again, dangling it so the octopus can see, and begins
to dance the creature away, down the beach, drool streaming from its beak, eyes held
by the crab.

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not
in good mental health, though where’s his basis for comparing? But there is a mad
exuberance, as with inanimate objects which fall off of tables when we are sensitive
to noise and our own clumsiness and don’t
want
them to fall, a sort of wham! ha-ha you hear that? here it is
again
, WHAM! in the cephalopod’s every movement, which Slothrop is glad to get away from
as he finally scales the crab like a discus, with all his strength, out to sea, and
the octopus, with an eager splash and gurgle, strikes out in pursuit, and is presently
gone.

The frail girl lies on the beach, taking in great breaths of air, surrounded now by
the others. One of the dancers is holding her in her arms and speaking, r’s and nasals
still French, in a language Slothrop, moseying back into earshot, can’t quite place.

Tantivy smiles and flips a small salute. “Good show!” cheers Teddy Bloat. “I wouldn’t
have wanted to try that myself!”

“Why not? You had that crab. Saaay—where’d you
get
that crab?”

“Found it,” replies Bloat with a straight face. Slothrop stares at this bird but can’t
get eye contact. What th’ fuck’s going on?

“I better have some of that wine,” Slothrop reckons. He drinks out of the bottle.
Air goes splashing upward in lopsided spheres inside the green glass. The girl watches
him. He stops for breath and smiles.

“Thank you, lieutenant.” Not a tremor in the voice, and the accent is Teutonic. He
can see her face now, soft nose of a doe, eyes behind blonde lashes full of acid green.
One of those thin-lipped European mouths. “I had almost stopped breathing.”

“Uh—you’re not German.”

Shaking her head no emphatically, “Dutch.”

“And have you been here—”

Her eyes go elsewhere, she reaches, takes the bottle from his hand. She is looking
out to sea, after the octopus. “They are very optical, aren’t they. I hadn’t known.
It
saw
me. Me. I don’t look like a crab.”

“I guess not. You’re a swell-looking young lady.” In the background, delighted Bloat
nudges Tantivy. That recklessness transatlantic. Slothrop takes her wrist, finds no
problem now reading that ID bracelet. Sez
KATJE BORGESIUS
. He can feel her pulse booming. Does she know him from someplace? strange. A mixture
of recognition and sudden shrewdness in her face . . .

So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin to take on a
touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before,
is less able to illuminate . . . it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind
the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in. Pale lines of force whir in the
sea air . . . pacts sworn to in rooms since shelled back to their plan views, not
quite by accident of war, suggest themselves. Oh, that was no “found” crab, Ace—no
random octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the conniving
around him now he feels instantly, in his heart.

They all stay a bit longer on the beach, finishing breakfast. But the simple day,
birds and sunlight, girls and wine, has sneaked away from Slothrop. Tantivy is getting
drunk, more relaxed and funnier as the bottles empty. He’s staked out not only the
girl he first had his eye on, but also the one Slothrop would be no doubt sweet-talking
right now if that octopus hadn’t shown up. He is a messenger from Slothrop’s innocent,
pre-octopus past. Bloat, on the other hand, sits perfectly sober, mustache unruffled,
regulation uniform, watching Slothrop closely. His companion Ghislaine, tiny and slender,
pin-up girl legs, long hair brushed behind her ears falling all the way down her back,
shifts her round bottom in the sand, writing marginal commentaries around the text
of Bloat. Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not,
keeps an eye on her. She looks over only once, and her eyes grow wide and cryptic.
He’d swear she knows something. On the way back to the Casino, toting their empties,
and the basket full of the debris of the morning, he manages a word with her.

“Some picnic, nessay-pah?”

Dimples appear next to her mouth. “Did you know all the time about the octopus? I
thought so because it was so like a dance—all of you.”

“No. Honestly, I didn’t. You mean you thought it was just a practical joke or something?”

“Little Tyrone,” she whispers suddenly, taking his arm with a big phony smile for
the others. Little? He’s twice her size. “Please—be very careful. . . .” That’s all.
He has Katje by the other hand, two imps, contrary, either side. The beach is empty
now except for fifty gray gulls sitting watching the water. White heaps of cumulus
pose out at sea, hard-surfaced, cherub-blown—palm leaves stir, all down the esplanade.
Ghislaine drops away, back down the beach, to pick up prim Bloat. Katje squeezes Slothrop’s
arm and tells him just what he wants to hear about now: “Perhaps, after all,
we were meant to meet. . . .”

• • • • • • •

From out at sea, the Casino at this hour is a blazing bijou at the horizon: its foil
of palms already shadows in the dwindling light. Deepening go the yellowbrowns of
these small serrated mountains, sea colored the soft inside of a black olive, white
villas, perched châteaux whole and ruined, autumn greens of copses and solitary pines,
all deepening to the nightscape latent across them all day. Fires are lit on the beach.
A faint babble of English voices, and even occasional songs, reaches across the water
to where Dr. Porkyevitch stands on deck. Below, Octopus Grigori, having stuffed himself
with crab meat, frisks happily in his special enclosure. The reaching radius of the
lighthouse on the headland sweeps by, as tiny fishing craft head out to sea. Grischa,
little friend, you have performed your last trick for a while. . . . Is there any
hope for further support from Pointsman, now that Porkyevitch and His Fabulous Octopus
have done their part?

He gave up questioning orders long ago—even questioning his exile. The evidence linking
him to the Bukharin conspiracy, whose particulars he has never heard, might somehow
be true—the Trotskyite Bloc might have known of him, by reputation, used him in ways
forever secret . . .
forever secret:
there are forms of innocence, he knows, that cannot conceive of what that means,
much less accept it as he has. For it might, after all, be only another episode in
some huge pathological dream of Stalin’s. At least he had physiology, something outside
the party . . . those who had nothing but the party, who had built their whole lives
upon it, only to be purged, must go through something very like death . . . and never
to know anything for certain, never to have the precision of the laboratory . . .
it’s been his own sanity, God knows, for twenty years. At least they can never—

No, no they wouldn’t, there’s never been a case . . . unless it’s been hushed up,
you’d never read it in the journals of course—

Would Pointsman—

He might. Yes.

Grischa, Grischa! It’s come true. On us so quickly: foreign cities, comedians in broken
hats, cancan girls, fountains of fire, a noisy pit band . . . Grischa, with the flags
of all the nations curled in your arms . . . fresh shellfish, a warm pirozhok, hot
glasses of tea in the evenings, between performances . . . learn to forget Russia,
to take comfort from what mean, falsified bits of her we wander across. . . .

Now, the sky stretches to admit a single first star. But Porkyevitch makes no wish.
Policy. Signs of arrival do not interest him, nor even signs of departure. . . . As
the boat’s engine goes full ahead, their own wake goes lifting, pink with sunset,
to obscure the white Casino on shore.

Electricity is on tonight, the Casino back in France’s power grid. Chandeliers shaggy
with crystal needles flare overhead, and softer lamps shine among the gardens outside.
Going in to dinner with Tantivy and the dancers, Slothrop is brought to a round-eyed
halt by the sight of Katje Borgesius, hair in one of those emerald tiaras, the rest
of her rigged out in a long Medici gown of sea-green velvet. Her escort’s a two-star
general and a brigadier.

“RHIP,” sings Tantivy, shuffling off sarcastic buffaloes along the carpet,
“oh
, RHIP indeed.”

“You’re trying to get my goat,” Slothrop smiles, “but it’s not working.”

“I can tell.” His own smile freezes. “Oh, no, Slothrop, please, no, we’re going in
to dinner—”

“Well, I know we’re going in to dinner—”

“No, this is very embarrassing, you’ve got to take it off.”

“You like that? She’s genuine hand-painted! Look! Nice tits, huh?”

“It’s the Wormwood Scrubs School Tie.”

In the main dining room they merge into a great coming and going of waiters, officers
and ladies. Slothrop, young dancer by the hand, caught up in the eddying, manages
at last to slide with her into a pair of seats just vacated: to find who but Katje
his left-hand partner. He puffs out his cheeks, crosses his eyes, brushes his hair
industriously with his hands by which time the soup has showed up, which he goes at
as if disarming a bomb. Katje is ignoring him, talking earnestly instead across her
general with some bird colonel about his prewar profession, managing a golf course
in Cornwall. Holes and hazards. Gave one a feel for terrain. But he did like most
to be there at night, when the badgers came out of their sets to play. . . .

By the time the fish has come and gone, something funny is happening. Katje’s knee
seems to be rubbing Slothrop’s, velvet-warm, under the table.

Weeell, opines Slothrop, watch this: I will employ some of that
subterfuge
, I mean I’m in that Europe, aren’t I? He raises his wineglass and announces,” ‘The
Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick.’” Cheers go up, bashful Tantivy tries not to smile.
It’s a song everyone knows: one of the Scotsmen goes dashing down the room to the
grand piano. César Flebótomo, twirling his slick mustache in a saber-point, nips behind
a palm in a tub to turn the lights up a notch, sticks his head back out winking, and
hisses for his maître d’hôtel. Wine is gargled, throats are cleared and a good number
of the company commence singing

T
HE
B
ALLAD
OF
T
ANTIVY
M
UCKER
-M
AFFICK

Oh Italian gin is a mother’s curse,

And the beer of France is septic,

Drinking Bourbon in Spain is the lonely domain

Of the saint and the epileptic.

White lightning has fueled up many a hearse

In the mountains where ridge-runners dwell—

It’s a brew begot in a poison pot,

And mulled with the hammers of Hell!

(
Refrain
): Oh—Tantivy’s been drunk in many a place,

From here to the Uttermost Isle,

And if he should refuse any chance at the booze,

May I die with an hoary-eyed smile!

There are what sound like a hundred—but most likely only two—Welshmen singing, tenor
from the south and bass from the north of the country, you see, so that all conversation
sub rosa or not is effectively drowned out. Exactly what Slothrop wants. He leans
in Katje’s direction.

“Meet me in my room,” she whispers, “306, after midnight.”

“Gotcha.” And Slothrop is upright in time to join in again right on bar one:

He’s been ossified in oceans of grog,

In the haunts of the wobbly whale—

He’s been half-seas over from Durban to Dover,

Wiv four shaky sheets to the gale.

For in London fog or Sahara’s sun,

Or the icebound steeps of Zermatt,

Loaded up for a lark to ’is Plimsoll mark

He’s been game to go off on a bat!

Yes, Tantivy’s been drunk in many a place . . . &c.

After dinner Slothrop gives Tantivy the high-sign. Their dancers go off arm in arm
to the marble lounges where the toilet stalls are equipped with a network of brass
voice-tubes, all acoustic, to make stall-to-stall conversation easier. Slothrop and
Tantivy head for the nearest bar.

“Listen,” Slothrop talking into his highball glass, bouncing words off of ice cubes
so they’ll have a proper chill, “either I’m coming down with a little psychosis here,
or something funny is going on, right?”

Tantivy, who is feigning a relaxed air, breaks off humming “You Can Do a Lot of Things
at the Sea-side That You Can’t Do in Town” to inquire, “Ah, yes, do you really think
so?”

“Come on, that octopus.”

“The devilfish is found quite commonly on Mediterranean shores. Though usually not
so large—is it the
size
that bothers you? Don’t Americans
like
—”

“Tantivy, it was no accident. Did you hear that Bloat? ‘Don’t kill it!’ He had a crab
with
him, m-maybe inside that musette bag, all set to lure that critter away with. And
where’d he go tonight, anyhow?”