Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  Imagine their mutual dismay on learning the real situation. Far from the Channel 13 upper-class dynasty he expected, Rocky discovered in the Thrubwells a tribe of nosepicking vulgarians with the fashion sense and conversational skills of children raised by wolves, and with a collective net worth Dun & Bradstreet barely acknowledged. Cornelia was equally stunned to find that the Slagiattis, most of whom were distributed along a suburban archipelago well east of the Nassau line, and for whom the closest thing to an Italian feast was to order in from Pizza Hut, did not “do warmth,” even among themselves, regulating the children, for example, not with the genial screaming or smacking around one might have expected from an adolescence spent at the Thalia watching neorealist films but with cold, silent, indeed one must say pathological glaring.

  As early as their honeymoon in Hawaii, Rocky and Cornelia were exchanging What-have-we-done gazes. But it was heaven there, with ukuleles for harps, and sometimes heaven has its way. One evening, as they watched a postcoital sunset, “WASP chicks,” declared Rocky, an adoring note already throbbing in his voice. “Well.”

  “We are dangerous women. We have our own crime syndicate, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Muffya.”

  A sort of compassionate clarity dawned, and grew. Cornelia went on insisting dramatically that for Thrubwells most of the Social Register was rather too impossibly ethnic and arriviste, and Rocky went on singing “Donna non vidi mai” while ogling her in the shower, often eating a Sicilian slice as he sang. But in growing closer they also came to know who it was they thought they were kidding.

  “Your husband tends to run to extra dimensions,” Maxine supposes.

  “Down in K-Town they call him ‘4-D.’ He’s also psychic, by the way. He thinks you’re having some trouble at the moment, but he’s reluctant to what he calls ‘put in.’” Cornelia with one of those WASP eyebrow routines, possibly genetic, sympathy with a subtext of please, not another loser to deal with…

  Still, however unintended, a potential mitzvah should be looked into. “Without getting too cute, it’s some video I’ve come across. I wouldn’t even be wondering how worried I should get, except it’s political in the worst way, maybe international, and I guess I’m to the point where I really could use some advice.”

  With no hesitation Maxine can see, “In that case you must get in touch with Chandler Platt, he has a genius for facilitating outcomes, and he’s really very sweet.”

  Which sets off a game-show buzzer, actually, for if Maxine’s not mistaken, she’s already run into this Platt customer, a financial-community big shot and fixer of some repute with upper-echelon access and what strikes her as a sense, finely calibrated as an artillery map, of where his best interests lie. Over the years they’ve met at various functions at the junction between East Side largesse and West Side guilt, and as it’s coming back to her now, Chandler may even once have grabbed her tit briefly, more of a reflex than anything, some cloakroom situation, no harm no foul. She doubts he even remembers.

  And, well, there are fixers and fixers. “This genius of his—it extends to knowing how to dummy up?”

  “Ah. One cannoli hope, as the Godfather always sez.”

  • • •

  CHANDLER PLATT HAS a roomy corner office midtown, at the high-muzzle-velocity law firm of Hanover, Fisk, up in one of the glass boxes along the Sixth Avenue corridor, with a view conducive to delusions of grandeur. Dedicated elevator, a traffic-flow design that makes it impossible to tell how much, forget what kind of, business is afoot. There seems to be a lot of deep amber and Czarist red in the picture. An Asian child intern shows Maxine into the presence of Chandler Platt, who is installed behind a desk made of 40,000-year-old New Zealand kauri, more like a piece of real estate than a piece of furniture, leading the casual observer, even one with a vanilla view of these matters, to wonder how many secretaries might fit comfortably beneath it and what amenities the space would be furnished with—restroom conveniences, Internet access, futons to allow the li’l cuties to work in shifts? Such unwholesome fantasies are only encouraged by the smile on Platt’s face, uneasily located between lewd and benevolent.

  “A pleasure, Ms. Loeffler, after how long’s it been?”

  “Oh… last century sometime?”

  “Wasn’t it that clambake at the San Remo for Eliot Spitzer?”

  “Might be. Never could figure you at a Democratic fund-raiser.”

  “Oh, Eliot and I go back. Ever since Skadden, Arps, maybe longer.”

  “And now he’s Attorney General and he’s going after you guys as much he ever went after the mob.” If there’s a difference, she almost adds. “Ironic, huh?”

  “Costs and benefits. On balance he’s been good for us, put away some elements that would have eventually turned and bit us.”

  “Cornelia did imply that you have friends all over the spectrum.”

  “In the long run, it’s less to do with labels than with everyone coming out happy. Some of these folks really have become my friends, in the pre-Internet sense of the term. Cornelia, certainly. Long ago I briefly courted her mother, who had the good judgment to show me the door.”

  Maxine has brought Reg’s DVD and a tiny Panasonic player, which Platt, not sure of where the wall outlets are exactly, allows her to plug in. He beams at the little screen in a way that makes her feel like a grandchild showing him a music video. But about the time the Stinger crew get set up,

  “Oh. Oh, wait just a minute, is this the pause button here, would you mind—”

  She pauses it. “Problem?”

  “These weapons, they’re… Stinger missiles or something. A bit out of my ground, I hope you appreciate.”

  And if she wanted a runaround, she’d be over in Central Park. “Right, I keep forgetting, you people tend to be Mannlicher-Carcano types.”

  “Jackie and I were dear friends,” he replies coolly, “and I’m not sure I oughtn’t to resent that.”

  “Resent, resent, please, I knew this was a mistake.” She’s on her feet, picking up her Kate Spade bag, noticing an unaccustomed lightness. Naturally, the one fucking day she probably should have brought the Beretta. Reaches to eject the DVD. By now Platt’s diplomatic reflexes have taken over, or maybe WASP control freakery. Murmuring something like “There, there,” he hits a hidden call button, which rapidly brings in the intern with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cookies. Maxine wonders if Girl Scouts were inappropriately involved in this. Platt watches the rest of the rooftop footage in silence.

  “Well. Provocative. Perhaps if you could spare me a couple of minutes?” Withdrawing to an inner office and leaving Maxine with the intern, who is leaning in the doorway now gazing at her, she wants to say inscrutably, but that would be racist. Absent a full ingredient list, she is of course not about to start scarfing cookies.

  “So… how’s the job? your first step in a legal career here?”

  “I hope not. What I really am is a rap artist.”

  “Like uh, who, Jay-Z?”

  “Well, actually I’m more of a Nas person. As you may know they’re in this feud at the moment, that old Queens-versus-Brooklyn thing again, hate to take sides, but—“The World Is Yours,” how can anything even compare?”

  “You perform in public, like clubs?”

  “Yeah. Got a club date coming up soon, in fact, here, check this out.” From somewhere he has produced a TB-303 clone with built-in speakers, which he now plugs in and powers up, and starts fingering a major pentatonic bass line. “Dig it,”

  Tryin to do Tupac and Biggie thangs

  With red velvet Chairman Mao piggy banks,

  like Screamin Jay in Hong Kong

  jumpin to wrong conclusions

  old-movie confusions, yo who be dat

  Scandinavian brand of Azian

  ya dig wid some Sigrid be

  the daughter of Kublai Khan,

  Warner Oland, Charlie Chan, General Yan

  bitter tea, for her stupidity pullin
rank

  Bette Davis shanked by Gale Sondegaard

  like they was on the yard

  or down in some forgotten cell

  far, far from the corner of

  Mott and Pell—

  “Yes oh and Darren,” Chandler Platt reentering a little brusquely, “when you have a chance, could you please bring me those copies of the Braun, Fleckwith side letter? And get Hugh Goldman for me over there?”

  “Mad cool, yo,” unplugging his digital bass and heading for the door.

  “Thanks, Darren,” Maxine smiles, “nice song—from what little Mr. Platt has allowed me to hear.”

  “Actually, he’s unusually tolerant. Not everyone in his demographic goes for what we like to think of as Gongsta Rap.”

  “Y— I thought I might have caught one or two, I’m not sure, racial overtones…”

  “Preemptive. They gonna be give me all rice-nigga remarks and shit, this way I beat ’em to it.” He hands her a disc in a jewel case. “My mix tape, enjoy.”

  “He gives them away,” Chandler Platt blinking his eyes at regular intervals and without motive, like faces in low-budget cartoons. “I made the mistake of asking him once how he expects to make money. He said that wasn’t the point, but has never explained what is. To me, I’m appalled, it strikes at the heart of Exchange itself.” He reaches for and sits contemplating a chocolate-chip cookie. “Back when I was getting into the business, all ‘being Republican’ meant really was a sort of principled greed. You arranged things so that you and your friends would come out nicely, you behaved professionally, above all you put in the work and took the money only after you’d earned it. Well, the party, I fear, has fallen on evil days. This generation—it’s almost a religious thing now. The millennium, the end days, no need to be responsible anymore to the future. A burden has been lifted from them. The Baby Jesus is managing the portfolio of earthly affairs, and nobody begrudges Him the carried interest…” Suddenly, and from the cookie’s point of view, rudely, chomping into it and scattering crumbs. “Sure you won’t have one, they’re quite… No? All right, thanks, don’t mind if I…” Grabbing another, two or three actually, “I just spoke with some people. A most puzzling conversation, I have to say. At least they picked up.”

  “Not the standard corporate chitchat, then.”

  “No, something else, something… peculiar. Not out loud, or in so many words, but as if…”

  “Wait. If you don’t want to tell me—”

  “… as if they know already what’s going to happen. This… event. They know, and they’re not going to do anything about it.”

  Is this all yet another exercise in freaking out the common folk so we’ll keep bleating and begging for protection? How scared is Maxine supposed to feel? “I didn’t get you in any trouble, I hope.”

  “‘Trouble.’” She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for. “In trouble with that bunch? Never that easy to tell, really. Even if there were to be unpleasantness, I could rely without hesitation upon young Darren, who’s board-certified in everything from nunchaku up through… well, Stinger missiles, I’m sure, and beyond. Rest easy as to my safety, young lady, and look instead to your own. Try to avoid terrorist-related activities. Oh, and would you mind going out the back way? You weren’t here, you see.”

  The back exit happens to be near Darren’s cubicle. Maxine glances in and finds him standing by a window, turned away in quarter profile, looking, sighting, down fifty stories into New York, down into that specific abyss, with an intensity she recognizes from the DeepArcher splash screen. Should she run in, break his concentration with questions like, Do you know Cassidy, did you pose for the Archer, provoking him into who knows what don’t-be-in-my-face-bitch gongsta displeasure… Is she that desperate for a literal link between this kid and some screen image? when she knows all the time there is none, that the figure was there, has always been there, that’s all, that Cassidy thanks to some intervention nobody knows how to name found her way to the silent, stretched presence at the edge of the world and copied what she remembered and immediately forgot the way back there… .

  Jangling with unquiet thoughts, Maxine emerges onto the street and notices it’s only a short walk to Saks. Maybe a half hour of fashion-related fugue, don’t call it shopping, will soft-sell her back down. She cuts across to Fifth Avenue by way of Forty-Seventh Street. It being the Diamond District, who wouldn’t? Not only on the chance however remote of glimpsing from afar exactly the stones, the setting she’s been looking for all her life, but also for the general air of intrigue, the feeling that nothing, nobody on this block is positioned where they are by accident, that saturating the space, invisible as the wavelengths that carry soap operas into the home, dramas of faceted intricacy are teeming all around.

  “Maxine Tarnow? Isn’t it?” Seems to be Emma Levin, Ziggy’s krav maga teacher. “Just down here to meet my boyfriend for lunch.”

  “So you two are what—shopping for diamonds? maybe… the diamond? Oh! What’s that… dingdong sound I hear? Could it be…” No. She didn’t actually say this out loud. Did she? is she really turning into Elaine, nonconsensually as Larry Talbot into the Wolf Man, for example?

  Naftali, the ex-Mossad boyfriend, works security for a diamond merchant here on the street. “You’d think we’d’ve met years ago on the job, field guy in on a visit to the office, kaplotz! Magic! but no, it was a fixer-upper. Same lightning bolt, however…”

  “Ziggy’s been bringing home Naftali stories since he started krav maga. Big impression, which on Ziggy it’s hard to make.”

  “There he is. My dreamboat.” Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God. According to Ziggy, the first time Naftali visited the studio, Nigel immediately asked him how many people he’d killed, and he shrugged, “I lost count,” and when Emma glared, added, “I mean… I can’t remember?” Maybe a case of kidding a kidder, but Maxine wouldn’t want to have to find out. Flabless and close-cropped, a black suit, a face amiable from half a block away reacquiring as it comes into focus its history of laceration and breakage and feelings kept at a professional distance. Though for Emma Levin he makes exceptions. They smile, they embrace, and for a second they’re the two brightest sparklers on the block.

  “Ah, you’re Ziggy’s mom. The tough guy. How’s his summer going?”

  Tough? her little Ziggurat? “He’s somewhere off in Iowa, Illinois, one of them. Practicing his moves every day, I’m sure.”

  “Good place to be,” Naftali speeding his beat a little, and Emma flashing him the look.

  As an ex-blurter, Maxine can relate, but still, wondering what he’s almost saying, she tries, “Wish I could figure a way to get out of town for a while.”

  He’s watching her intently, not exactly smiling but pleased, like somebody who’s been in on enough interrogations to appreciate the etiquette. “Out here in the open, you know, you get all these stories. The problem is, most of it’s garbage.”

  “Which doesn’t help that much, if you’re a worrier.”

  “You’re a worrier? I wouldn’t have thought.”

  “Naftali Perlman,” Emma growls, “now you stop hustling her, she’s married.”

  “Separated,” Maxine batting her eyelashes.

  “See, how possessive,” Naftali beaming. “We’re going to lunch, you want to join us?”

  “I’m due back at work, but thanks.”

  “Your work… you’re… a model?”

  In a very precise way, Emma Levin draws one foot to the side, cocks an elbow, puts on her kung fu–movie face.

  “My kinda woman!” An explicit squeeze which Emma cannot be said to avoid.

  “Behave, guys. Shalom.”

  27

  The boys call in one night from Prairie du Chien or Fond du Lac or someplace to tell her they’ll be home in two d
ays.

  All, as Ace Ventura sez, and even sings, righty then. Maxine wanders uneasily around the place, convinced she has left evidence of misbehavior out in glaringly plain sight that will, not exactly get her in trouble with Horst, but oblige her to be heedful of his feelings, which despite appearances, he may actually have. She runs through the company she’s kept—aside from Windust—since Horst left town. Conkling, Rocky, Eric, Reg. In every case she can claim legitimate work reasons, which would be fine if Horst was the IRS.

  Though Heidi is likely to be less than helpful, “Maybe you and Carmine could drop by, say, accidentally?” Maxine wonders.

  “You’re expecting trouble?”

  “Emotions, maybe.”

  “Mm-hmm?… so what you’re really saying is you want Horst to see me in a relationship with another person, because you’re paranoid Horst and I may still be an item? Maxi, insecure Maxi, when will you be able to just let it go?”

  Heidi seems on edge these days, even for Heidi, so Maxine isn’t too surprised when her girlhood chum makes a point of not showing up, with Carmine or without, when the Loeffler menfolk at last come roughhousing home again, loud and sugar-high, down the hall and through the door.

  “Hey Mom. Missed you.”

  “Oh, guys.” She kneels on the floor and holds the boys till everybody gets too embarrassed.

  They’re all wearing red Kum & Go ball caps and have brought Maxine one too, which she puts on. They’ve been everywhere. Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana. Duck Creek Plaza in Bettendorf. Chuck E. Cheese and Loco Joe’s. They sing her the Hy-Vee commercial. More than once.

  Arriving in Chicago, they promptly got a tour down memory lane, which for Horst was the LaSalle Street canyon, his first and oldest home turf, where he’d been one of those handjiving adventurers who dared the pit every trading day. Started at the Merc trading three-month Eurodollar futures, both for clients and for himself, wearing a custom trader’s jacket with tastefully muted green and magenta stripes and a three-letter name tag pinned to it. After the pits closed around three in the afternoon, he shifted to civvies and walked over to the Chicago Board of Trade and checked in at the Ceres Cafe. When the CME decided to ban double trading, Horst joined a good-size migration over to the CBOT, where no such qualms existed, though Eurodollar activity was noticeably less intense. For a while he shifted to Treasuries, but soon, as if answering some call from deep in the tidy iterations of Midwest DNA, he had found his way into the agricultural pits, and next thing he knew, he was out in deep American countryside, inhaling the aroma from handfuls of wheat, scrutinizing soybeans for purple seed stain, walking through fields of spring barley squeezing kernels and inspecting glumes and peduncles, talking to farmers and weather oracles and insurance adjusters—or, as he put it to himself, rediscovering his roots.