Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  From the station they found their way uphill to a cemetery dedicated to soldiers fallen in colonial engagements of the nineteenth and what had elapsed of the twentieth centuries, none of the monuments ever quite plumb, a crazy, blown-about field of mineral stumps. Quotations from Henry Newbolt’s cricket masterpiece “Vitaï Lampada” seemed to occur on every other slab, though what Arturo had come for was something rather different.

  “Here.” They had paused before a sentimental sort of military pietà, in which a life-size infantryman with a nearly unbearable sweetness to his face lay dying with his head in the lap of a hooded young woman, rendered in black marble, a pair of predators’ wings emerging from her back, who gently consoled him, one hand touching his face, the other raised in a curious half-beckoning, half-commanding gesture. “One of my better A.O.D.’s,” commented Arturo.

  By which it seemed he meant “Angel of Death.” Dally came close, peered beneath the hood. She saw a face you could encounter at any time, turning a city corner or boarding the omnibus, and then it’d be Katie bar the door, wouldn’t it—the face of a girl this dying boy had dreamed about, the girl who tended the hearth in a home grown impossibly distant, who promised unvoiceably carnal delights, at the same time that she prepared to conduct his spirit to shores unvoiceably far beyond the sunset.

  “Fiona Plush,” said Arturo, “lovely girl. Became fascinated regrettably with a variety artist who fancied them curvaceous. Was presently observed bringing her lunch to work in a Pegamoid traveler’s satchel with a faux alligator grain. The more she ate the more she wanted to eat. Drapery issues arose. If you look closely in there at the eyeball treatment you’ll see I’ve caught the hunger there—rather nicely, I think—that false compassion which is of the essence in the A.O.D. trade, if you can keep a secret.”

  “And now—let me just jump ahead here—you’re in the market for a new model.”

  “Perhaps a new approach as well. You must have noticed how people admire your hair.”

  “Guess you’re fixing to do away with the hood.”

  “Well. Tradition has been to hide the face, I mean, it’s Death isn’t it. The best you ’d expect is a skull, and depending how nightmare-prone you are, it only gets worse from there.”

  “But this Angel here is—”

  “True, but that’s old Fiona, not her fault she’s presentable, though I finally did have to slim her down a bit.”

  In the days following, they were to visit other graveyards, and the more of Naunt’s A.O.D.’s Dally had a look at, the stranger matters became. There were perverse intentions at work here, procreative as much as mortal. In the complicated drapery of the A.O.D.’s garment, at certain times of day, beneath the duress of the prevailing light, one saw clearly in the shadows of the gown the shape of an infant, or sometimes more than one, clinging to what might have been an indifferent body. When the clouds thickened, drifted or passed, or the day drew to evening, these figures disappeared, or sometimes modulated to something else that likewise did not invite close inspection.

  Dally had put in a little time as a sculptor’s model. Back in New York, in one of the capitalist temples downtown, among the allegorical statues lining a particular marble corridor, she could still be found as The Spirit of Bimetallism, face correct as a face on a ceremonial urn, garlanded, chiseled onto each iris a wedge of radiant attention aimed at her right hand, which held suspended a symbolic sun and moon as Justice holds her scales . . . like the other models, little chance, in the expression she had assumed, of wistful regret for what she’d come to. What had they been like as girls, Supply, Demand, Surplus Value, Diminishing Returns? Had any of them sat on a porch at the edge of some prairie, riding a store-bought rocker through the pearl afternoon, into the evening, imagining her family gone off without her, the house a shell, taken over by these slow, wood rhythms? Was she from even farther west, say up in the mining country, freezing through her days and nights in some shack above the snowline, was that how she’d come to be a child of gold and silver? Noticed by a mine owner, or an owner’s lieutenant, brought to the city, some city, introduced to some sculptor fellow, some smoothie who’d been to France, veteran of artists-and-models shenanigans, knew his way around the salons down in Kipperville. . . .

  Unlike others in the modeling line, she had taken the actress’s approach and actually read up on the abstractions she was instructed to embody, as a way of “getting inside the character.” What was the point in trying to incarnate Bimetallism unless you could learn everything you could about It? So with Arturo Naunt and his A.O.D.’s. This job of riding herd on military souls—Dally couldn’t help seeing it from the Angel’s point of view. Maybe the hood had been there not to conceal but to protect, the way the shawl of a classic semeuse was sometimes drawn over her head for the sun—against something from above, potent yet deflectable, some radiance or unsuspected form of energy . . . God’s grace?— Why should the Angel of Death, acting as agent for God, need to be screened from grace? What other, unsuspected dark energy, then? What anti-grace?

  There was friction from the beginning. Arturo wanted repose, stillness—what Dally gave him was a dynamic athlete, surrendered to a wind only she could feel, mindlessly orgasmic from its velocity. “Well. I’m not Charlie Sykes, am I,” he was often heard to mutter. Like the face of Fiona Plush before her, Dally’s was too specific for prolonged viewing. We have seen these faces, at the changes of daylight, against the long, featureless walls of suburban warehouses, on days of fog or of distant fires whose ash drops unseen, steadily, accumulating white as frost . . . their faces seem to require this derangement in the light, and perhaps a willingness to see them, however anxiously denied by those of us who do.

  MEANTIME ’PERT, who had been busy trying, with little success, to plant doubts about the girl in Hunter’s mind, had also learned through elements of the T.W.I.T. something of his earlier adventures and the frailties resulting, and appointed herself a sort of anti-muse, hoping out of meanness to provoke Hunter at least into work unlikely to endear him to the British public. Her history was soon to undergo a certain adjustment, however. In September, Hunter would invite her to accompany him to Gloucester Cathedral, where as part of that year’s Three Choirs Festival, a new work by Ralph Vaughan Williams would be having its first performance. Ruperta, who despised church music, must have seen some irresistible opening for idle mischief, because she went along wearing a sportive toilette more appropriate to Brighton, with a hat she had always found particularly loathsome but kept handy for occasions just such as this. The composer was conducting two string orchestras set like cantores and decani facing each other across the chancel, with a string quartet between them. The moment Vaughan Williams raised his baton, even before the first notes, something happened to Ruperta. As Phrygian resonances swept the great nave, doubled strings sang back and forth, and nine-part harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance, very slowly Ruperta began to levitate, nothing vulgar, simply a tactful and stately ascent about halfway to the vaulting, where, tears running without interruption down her face, she floated in the autumnal light above the heads of the audience for the duration of the piece. At the last long diminuendo, she returned calmly to earth and reoccupied herself, never again to pursue her old career of determined pest. She and Hunter, who was vaguely aware that something momentous had befallen her, walked in silence out along the Severn, and it was hours before she could trust herself to speak. “You must never, never forgive me, Hunter,” she whispered. “I can never claim forgiveness from anyone. Somehow, I alone, for every single wrong act in my life, must find a right one to balance it. I may not have that much time left.”

  Ordinarily he would have humorously disputed her theory of moral book-keeping. But later he would swear he had seen her surrounded then by a queer luminous aura he knew he could not banter away. Possessing one of those English ears on which flatted-seventh sonorities are never lost, Hunter had of course immediately fallen for the Tallis Fantasia, wo
uld always love it, but the change of heart he himself needed would have to proceed from some other source. The time was rising like a river in a season of storm to rush in waves and whitecaps through the alleyways and plazas of his soul, and he did not know if he could climb high enough to escape it.

  When his paintings had started to get peculiar, Dally noticed immediately. In the compositions appeared deliberate vacancies—a figure would be over on one side of the canvas looking at, or gesturing toward, the other side as if there were someone there—but there was no one there. Or two subjects would be likewise engaged, crowded together on one side while nearby, close enough to touch, opened this somehow blazingly luminescent space, as if an essential term had been left out. Sometimes in the empty part of the composition, even the background would be missing, and it would be the raw imprimatura which assumed the quality of a presence, demanding to be observed. . . .

  “What is it?” Dally wanted to whisper, afraid for him. “What is it you don’t show?”

  He usually referred questioners in this vein to the immoderate light-space appearing in Turner’s Dido Building Carthage, then hanging in the National Gallery. “If one must steal, it’s always advisable to steal from the best.”

  “Not buying that one, Hunter, sorry.”

  “Or perhaps having a solid background now in Angel of Death work, you might want to come round and pose for one of these empty spaces, should things over at Arturo’s shop ever grow tiresome.”

  “A little creepier than that, actually.” She told him about the latest episode at the Chelsea atelier. Naunt the other day had requested her to dispense with the usual A.O.D. drapery and wear instead only a pair of military jack-boots. Then, from a back room, emerged what was known in the business as a Well Set-Up Young Man, likewise unclothed except for a dark blue line-infantry helmet. “You know the position, Karl,” instructed Naunt. Karl without comment got on all fours and presented his—Dally couldn’t help noticing—presentable bottom. “Now Dahlia, if you’d just get behind him, gripping him by the hips in rather a firm, no-nonsense way—”

  “You said she’d be wearing a dildo,” Karl reminded him somewhat breathlessly.

  “What’s going on, Arturo,” Dally inquired, “if you don’t mind sharing your thoughts here?”

  “Maternal tenderness,” Naunt explained, “is certainly one of the A.O.D.’s attributes, but hardly the only one. Anal assault, not unknown in the military imagination, is an equally valid expression of her power, and the submission she expects, as well as a source of comfort, indeed at times provides pleasure, to the object of her attentions.”

  “So then I’m supposed to . . .”

  “Don’t worry about the penis element, I can put that in later.”

  “I should hope so,” muttered Karl.

  “These artistic types,” Hunter sighed, when she told him. “So. Did you two, ehrm . . .”

  “Must be my puritanical American upbringing,” she said. “Sodomizing idiots has never been my cup of tea.”

  As destiny would have it, whom did she run into out on the town that very evening but her old admirer the American impresario R. Wilshire Vibe, for whose product in recent years the West End had been proving more congenial than Broadway.

  “Well, Je-hosaphat, saw that hair all the way from Shaftesbury Avenue, thought the place was on fire. You may be in a position to do me such a mitzvah, young lady.” It turned out that he’d been looking for a “typical Irish lass” to decorate his latest effort, Wogs Begin at Wigan, and nobody who had showed up at casting calls so far had quite filled the bill. Even better, the part was a first-act walk-on, and one of the figurantes in the big third-act number in Roguish Redheads just a few doors down was leaving, so if Dally could sprint along the Strand fast enough to get into costume and makeup in time, why she’d be a perfect replacement.

  “What you call a twofer,” she said.

  “There you go. You aren’t committed elsewhere or anything, are you?”

  “Oh, a sort of amateur religious pageant, but I think I can get out of it.”

  From doing walk-ons, she soon had a couple of lines, then eight bars of a duet with a character juvenile whose vocal range was half an octave, well inside Dally’s own, and before she quite knew what was going on, she found herself celebrated as one of the wonders of the world as defined by Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand, Haymarket, and Kings Way, though recognized as well by suburban audiences from Camberwell Green to Notting Hill Gate, often by quite peculiar people who were not above calling out to her in the street, offering Scotch eggs and digestives, snapping photos, asking her to sign theatre programs, bits of chip-shop newspaper, husbands’ cheerfully inclined heads. Understanding that none of this could last much beyond one season, almost in innocence amazed that she could watch so calmly the ardor of others as if from inside some glacial and lucid space, Dally was invited to weekends at some of the more sizable manor houses of the British countryside, required to do nothing but look the way she looked—as if her appearance possessed a consciousness, and must be allowed to obey its impulses—attended by domestic staff, puzzled by extravagant acts of abasement from young men whose names she did not always hear, let alone remember. They begged for items of her intimate apparel to sew into their hats. Her toes became objects of adoration, not always in private, requiring her to change soaked or laddered stockings sometimes three or four times in the course of an evening. Men were not her only admirers. Grown women, mad poetesses, beauties of photogravuredom, offered to abandon husbands, ponying up fistfuls of currency which even on a per-hour basis Dally couldn’t make sense of. She was given jewelry which had reposed in the vaults of distinguished families for centuries, as well as rare orchids, stock-market advice, Lalique creations in opal and sapphire, invitations to far-off sheikhdoms and principalities. Always, not exactly lurking, but obstinately staring from behind some Himalayan rhododendron or swiftly melting ice sculpture, never out of his habitual uniform of tropical white dittoes and Panama hat, persisted the figure of her newest faithful suitor Clive Crouchmas, into whose gravitational field Ruperta had been able to steer the girl with no more than a twitch of her cigarette.

  From Turkish railway intrigues, Crouchmas had by now grown into one of the world authorities in the dark arts of what was becoming known as “borrowing in quasi-perpetuity.” He was the one the various Powers preferred to consult—when they could get an appointment. Government spending being not altogether disconnected from arms procurement, he was in communication as well, if not especially intimate, with the likes of noted death merchant Basil Zaharoff. Indeed it was the fabled arms magnate’s reported desire for Dahlia Rideout, because of her hair color, to which Zaharoff was notoriously susceptible, that had got Clive himself interested in the first place.

  “Yes I suppose that’s so,” Ruperta had shrugged, “even if one doesn’t care for the type.”

  “And she isn’t . . .”

  “Spoken for? Whatever that might mean in her case, you could always make arrangements. These girls. Always another. It’s like a florist’s inventory, isn’t it, cheaper toward the end of the day.”

  Clive sat there, among the pure white napery, the perfectly shining silver and spotless glassware, his mouth slightly open. Once, when they were small children, Ruperta had offered him a pound for one of his lead soldiers, and upon his handing it over she had picked up a nearby cricket bat and begun, rather solemnly, to pound him with it. He should have been crying but later recalled feeling only admiration, while perhaps making a note to try this on someone else. A horrible little girl whom, over time, he came to regard as the expediter of his less-confidable dreams.

  WELL, IT WAS that Principessa all over again, it seemed to Dally. Were procuresses the only sorts of women Hunter knew? As it turned out, being a kept crumpet was not nearly the sordid horror she might have imagined. Crouchmas himself was just a breeze. Mostly he liked to watch her masturbating—so sweet, really. Nothing to go to the police about, was it. He played
as fair as he could, respected her feelings, didn’t try to set her up in some dismal little bed-sit in Finsbury or someplace, nor, when they did rendezvous, was it in shabby hotel rooms but in actually quite swell surroundings, right out on Northumberland Avenue, in the full dazzle of the great city and all it offered—the Métropole, the Victoria sorts of place, always fresh flowers, vintage Champagne—the soiled opacity of his daily business, its hundreds of small weaselly arrangements with go-betweens who did not always remember which name they were supposed to be using, transmuted to clarity and grace and herself in expensive déshabillé and a warm fog of self-pleasure, while he sat at his safe distance, watching.

  DALLY HAPPENED TO MEET Lew Basnight at a weekend party at Bananas, the sumptuous Oxfordshire manor of Lord and Lady Overlunch. She was wearing a gown made of printer’s muslin, enjoying just then a great chic among the bohemian of spirit. The pressmen in Fleet Street used it to clean the type after each day’s run—you fetched it out of the bins and took it to a Clever Seamstress in Regent Street you knew, and showed up at your function looking like the day’s Globe or Standard, and spent the entire evening deciding whether people were admiring your toilette or only trying to read it.

  There were T.W.I.T. in attendance tonight, for these days there were T.W.I.T. everywhere, as if something fateful were in progress that made their attendance indispensable. Dally had recently had a Tarot reading done, Earl’s Court, nothing fancy, nothing swell, the same reading a shopgirl might pay sixpence for, so when Lew explained what kind of detective he was, she at least knew her way around the twenty-two Major Arcana.

  “You’re one of these T.W.I.T. folks?”