The Crying of Lot 49 Read online

  “You didn’t use to look guilty, as I remember,” Oedipa said. They often went to the same group therapy sessions, in a car pool with a photographer from Palo Alto who thought he was a volleyball. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  “You might have been one of Perry Mason’s spies,” said Roseman. After thinking a moment he added, “Ha, ha.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Oedipa. They looked at each other. “I have to execute a will,” she said.

  “Oh, go ahead then,” said Roseman, “don’t let me keep you.”

  “No,” said Oedipa, and told him all.

  “Why would he do a thing like that,” Roseman puzzled, after reading the letter.

  “You mean die?”

  “No,” said Roseman, “name you to help execute it.”

  “He was unpredictable.” They went to lunch. Roseman tried to play footsie with her under the table. She was wearing boots, and couldn’t feel much of anything. So, insulated, she decided not to make any fuss.

  “Run away with me,” said Roseman when the coffee came.

  “Where?” she asked. That shut him up.

  Back in the office, he outlined what she was in for: learn intimately the books and the business, go through probate, collect all debts, inventory the assets, get an appraisal of the estate, decide what to liquidate and what to hold on to, pay off claims, square away taxes, distribute legacies . . .

  “Hey,” said Oedipa, “can’t I get somebody to do it for me?”

  “Me,” said Roseman, “some of it, sure. But aren’t you even interested?”

  “In what?”

  “In what you might find out.”

  As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce she’d happily pulled out the pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shim, he’d slipped the lock on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he’d have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

  2

  She left Kinneret, then, with no idea she was moving toward anything new. Mucho Maas, enigmatic, whistling “I Want to Kiss Your Feet,” a new recording by Sick Dick and the Volkswagens (an English group he was fond of at that time but did not believe in), stood with hands in pockets while she explained about going down to San Narciso for a while to look into Pierce’s books and records and confer with Metzger, the coexecutor. Mucho was sad to see her go, but not desperate, so after telling him to hang up if Dr. Hilarius called and look after the oregano in the garden, which had contracted a strange mold, she went.

  San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce’s domicile, and headquarters: the place he’d begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much. She thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job. Was it something like this he felt, looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to; did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in, knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn’t believe in it?

  She gave it up presently, as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened, and so broken the “religious instant,” whatever it might’ve been; started up and proceeded at maybe 70 mph along the singing blacktop, onto a highway she thought went toward Los Angeles, into a neighborhood that was little more than the road’s skinny right-of-way, lined by auto lots, escrow services, drive-ins, small office buildings and factories whose address numbers were in the 70 and then 80,000’s. She had never known
numbers to run so high. It seemed unnatural. To her left appeared a prolonged scatter of wide, pink buildings, surrounded by miles of fence topped with barbed wire and interrupted now and then by guard towers: soon an entrance whizzed by, two sixty-foot missiles on either side and the name YOYODYNE lettered conservatively on each nose cone. This was San Narciso’s big source of employment, the Galactronics Division of Yoyodyne, Inc., one of the giants of the aerospace industry. Pierce, she happened to know, had owned a large block of shares, had been somehow involved in negotiating an understanding with the county tax assessor to lure Yoyodyne here in the first place. It was part, he explained, of being a founding father.

  Barbed wire again gave way to the familiar parade of more beige, prefab, cinderblock office machine distributors, sealant makers, bottled gas works, fastener factories, warehouses, and whatever. Sunday had sent them all into silence and paralysis, all but an occasional real estate office or truck stop. Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn’t. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.

  Still, when she got a look at the next motel, she hesitated a second. A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air; the sign, lit up despite the sun, said “Echo Courts.” The face of the nymph was much like Oedipa’s, which didn’t startle her so much as a concealed blower system that kept the nymph’s gauze chiton in constant agitation, revealing enormous vermilion-tipped breasts and long pink thighs at each flap. She was smiling a lipsticked and public smile, not quite a hooker’s but nowhere near that of any nymph pining away with love either. Oedipa pulled into the lot, got out and stood for a moment in the hot sun and the dead-still air, watching the artificial windstorm overhead toss gauze in five-foot excursions. Remembering her idea about a slow whirlwind, words she couldn’t hear.

  The room would be good enough for the time she had to stay. Its door opened on a long courtyard with a swimming pool, whose surface that day was flat, brilliant with sunlight. At the far end stood a fountain, with another nymph. Nothing moved. If people lived behind the other doors or watched through the windows gagged each with its roaring air-conditioner, she couldn’t see them. The manager, a drop-out named Miles, maybe 16 with a Beatle haircut and a lapelless, cuffless, one-button mohair suit, carried her bags and sang to himself, possibly to her:

  Miles’s Song

  Too fat to Frug,

  That’s what you tell me all the time,

  When you really try’n’ to put me down,

  But I’m hip,

  So close your big fat lip,

  Yeah, baby,

  I may be too fat to Frug,

  But at least I ain’t too slim to Swim.

  “It’s lovely,” said Oedipa, “but why do you sing with an English accent when you don’t talk that way?”

  “It’s this group I’m in,” Miles explained, “the Paranoids. We’re new yet. Our manager says we should sing like that. We watch English movies a lot, for the accent.”

  “My husband’s a disk jockey,” Oedipa trying to be helpful, “it’s only a thousand-watt station, but if you had anything like a tape I could give it to him to plug.”

  Miles closed the door behind them and started in with the shifty eye. “In return for what?” Moving in on her. “Do you want what I think you want? This is the Payola Kid here, you know.” Oedipa picked up the nearest weapon, which happened to be the rabbit-ear antenna off the TV in the corner. “Oh,” said Miles, stopping. “You hate me too.” Eyes bright through his bangs.

  “You are a paranoid,” Oedipa said.

  “I have a smooth young body,” said Miles, “I thought you older chicks went for that.” He left after shaking her down for four bits for carrying the bags.

  That night the lawyer Metzger showed up. He turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor. He stood at her door, behind him the oblong pool shimmering silent in a mild diffusion of light from the nighttime sky, saying, “Mrs. Maas,” like a reproach. His enormous eyes, lambent, extravagantly lashed, smiled out at her wickedly; she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling, but there was only himself and a debonair bottle of French Beaujolais, which he claimed to’ve smuggled last year into California, this rollicking lawbreaker, past the frontier guards.

  “So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in there, can’t I?”

  Oedipa had planned on nothing more involved that evening than watching Bonanza on the tube. She’d shifted into stretch denim slacks and a shaggy black sweater, and had her hair all the way down. She knew she looked pretty good. “Come in,” she said, “but I only have one glass.”

  “I,” the gallant Metzger let her know, “can drink out of the bottle.” He came in and sat on the floor, in his suit. Opened the bottle, poured her a drink, began to talk. It presently came out that Oedipa hadn’t been so far off, thinking it was an actor. Some twenty-odd years ago, Metzger had been one of those child movie stars, performing under the name of Baby Igor. “My mother,” he announced bitterly, “was really out to kasher me, boy, like a piece of beef on the sink, she wanted me drained and white. Times I wonder,” smoothing down the hair at the back of his head, “if she succeeded. It scares me. You know what mothers like that turn their male children into.”

  “You certainly don’t look,” Oedipa began, then had second thoughts.

  Metzger flashed her a big wry couple rows of teeth. “Looks don’t mean a thing any more,” he said. “I live inside my looks, and I’m never sure. The possibility haunts me.”

  “And how often,” Oedipa inquired, now aware it was all words, “has that line of approach worked for you, Baby Igor?”

  “Do you know,” Metzger said, “Inverarity only mentioned you to me once.”

  “Were you close?”

  “No. I drew up his will. Don’t you want to know what he said?”

  “No,” said Oedipa, and snapped on the television set. Onto the screen bloomed the image of a child of indeterminate sex, its bare legs pressed awkward together, its shoulder-length curls mingling with the shorter hair of a St. Bernard, whose long tongue, as Oedipa watched, began to swipe at the child’s rosy cheeks, making the child wrinkle up its nose appealingly and say, “Aw, Murray, come on, now, you’re getting me all wet.”

  “That’s me, that’s me,” cried Metzger, staring, “good God.”

  “Which one?” asked Oedipa.

  “That movie was called,” Metzger snapped his fingers, “Cashiered.”

  “About you and your mother.”

  “About this kid and his father, who’s drummed out of the British Army for cowardice, only he’s covering up for a friend, see, and to redeem himself he and the kid follow the old regiment to Gallipoli, where the father somehow builds a midget submarine, and every week they slip through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and torpedo the Turkish merchantmen, the father, son, and St Bernard. The dog sits on periscope watch, and barks if he sees anything.”

  Oedipa was pouring wine. “You’re kidding.”

  “Listen, listen, here’s where I sing.” And sure enough, the child, and dog, and a merry old Greek fisherman who had appeared from nowhere with a zither, now all stood in front of phony-Dodecanese process footage of a seashore at sunset, and the kid sang.

  Baby Igor’s Song

  ’Gainst the
Hun and the Turk, never once do we shirk,

  My daddy, my doggie and me.

  Through the perilous years, like the Three Musketeers,

  We will stick just as close as can be.

  Soon our sub’s periscope’ll aim for Constantinople,

  As again we set hopeful to sea;

  Once more unto the breach, for those boys on the beach,

  Just my daddy, my doggie and me.

  Then there was a musical bridge, featuring the fisherman and his instrument, then the young Metzger took it from the top while his aging double, over Oedipa’s protests, sang harmony.

  Either he made up the whole thing, Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it’s all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot. O Metzger.

  “You didn’t sing along,” he observed.

  “I didn’t know,” Oedipa smiled. On came a loud commercial for Fangoso Lagoons, a new housing development west of here.

  “One of Inverarity’s interests,” Metzger noted. It was to be laced by canals with private landings for power boats, a floating social hall in the middle of an artificial lake, at the bottom of which lay restored galleons, imported from the Bahamas; Atlantean fragments of columns and friezes from the Canaries; real human skeletons from Italy; giant clamshells from Indonesia—all for the entertainment of Scuba enthusiasts. A map of the place flashed onto the screen, Oedipa drew a sharp breath, Metzger on the chance it might be for him looked over. But she’d only been reminded of her look downhill this noontime. Some immediacy was there again, some promise of hierophany: printed circuit, gently curving streets, private access to the water, Book of the Dead. . . .

  Before she was ready for it, back came Cashiered. The little submarine, named the “Justine” after the dead mother, was at the quai, singling up all lines. A small crowd was seeing it off, among them the old fisherman, and his daughter, a leggy, ringletted nymphet who, should there be a happy ending, would end up with Metzger; an English missionary nurse with a nice build on her, who would end up with Metzger’s father; and even a female sheepdog with eyes for Murray the St. Bernard.