5 Months, Newsweek (11 small features on trends and entertainment until her Executive Editor, with whom she was in love, left Newsweek and took her with him);
1 Year, Ladies Day (personality and medical-cosmetic features — some research first-hand — until one week in which the Executive Editor reconciled with his wife and H.P.S. got mugged and purse-snatched on W. 62nd and vowed never again to live in Manhattan);
15 Months-Present, Moment magazine, Southwest Bureau, Erythema AZ (medical, soft sports, personality, and home-entertainment-trends reporting, masthead byline, contributing-editor status).
Thereafter proceeding first to the Upper Brighton and now to the cooperative Back Bay-edge brownstone she had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to Molly Notkin, today’s party’s guest of honor and hostess in one, as of yesterday enjoying A.B.D. pre-doctoral status in Film & Film-Cartridge Theory at M.I.T., having cleared the notorious hurdle of Oral Examinations on that day by offering her examination committee a dramatically rendered and if she did say so herself devastating oral critique of post-millennial Marxist Film-Cartridge Theory from the point of view of Marx himself, Marx as pretend-film-cartridge theorist and scholar. Still dressed as K.M. a day later, in celebration — the glued beard matted and pubic-black, Homburg ordered direct from Wiesbaden, soot from a terribly obscure British souvenir-filth shop — she has no idea that Joelle’s been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B., has no idea what she and Jim Incandenza were even about for twenty-one months, whether they were lovers or what, whether Orin left because they were lovers or what,[80] or that Joelle even now lives hand-to-lung on a grossly generous trust willed her by a man she unveiled for but never slept with, the prodigious punter’s father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he’d claimed to have had it locked away. Joelle’s never seen the completed assembly of what she’d appeared in, or seen anyone who’s seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he’d stuck that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he’d said the thing he’d always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up.
Climbing to the third-floor, stairs pale from wear, still trembling from the A.M.’s interruptus, Joelle finds herself having a hard time, climbing, as if the force of gravity goes up as she does. The party-sounds start around the second landing. Here is Molly Notkin dressed as a crumbling Marx again greeting Joelle at her door with the sort of delighted mock-surprise U.S. hostesses use for greetings. Notkin secures Joelle’s veil for her during removal of the beaded coat and poncho, then lifts the veil slightly in a practiced two-finger gesture to deliver a double-cheek kiss that is sour with cigarettes and wine — Joelle never smokes when veiled — asking how Joelle got here and then without waiting for an answer offering her that odd kind of British-Columbian apple juice they’d found they both liked so, and that Joelle at home’s abandoned and gone back to the Big Red Soda Water of childhood, which Notkin doesn’t know, and still cluelessly considers extra-sweet Canadian juice to be pretty much both her and Joelle’s biggest vices. Molly Notkin’s the kind of soul you want desperately to be polite to but have to hide it with because she’d be mortified if she suspected you were ever just being polite to her about anything.
Joelle makes a get-out~of-here gesture. ‘The really really good kind?’
‘The kind that looks muddy it’s so fresh.’
‘Where’d you get it this late this far east?’
‘The kind you just about have to strain it’s so fresh.’
The living room is full and hot, campy mambo playing, walls still the same off-white but all the trim now a confectioner’s rich brown. Or plus there’s wine, Joelle sees, a whole assortment on the old sideboard it took three men with cigars in gray jumpsuits to get up the stairs when they got it, an assortment of bottles of different shapes and dim colors and different levels of what’s inside. Molly Notkin has one dirty-nailed hand on Joelle’s arm and one on the head of a chair of Maya Deren brooding avant-gardedly in vivid spun-glass polymers, and is telling Joelle about her Orals in a party’s near-shout that will leave her hoarse well before this big one’s sad end.
A good muddy juice fills Joelle’s mouth with spit that’s as good as the juice, and her linen veil is drying and beginning once again comfortingly to flutter with her breath, and, perched alone and glanced at covertly by persons who don’t know they know her voice, she feels the desire to raise the veil before a mirror, to refine some of her purse’s untouched Material, raise the veil and set free the encaged rapacious thing inside to breathe the only uncloth’d gas it can stomach; she feels ghastly and sad; she looks like death, her mascara’s all over the place; no one can tell. The plastic Pepsi bottle and glass cigar tube and lighter and packet of glycine bags are a shape in the corner of the rain-darkened cloth purse that rests on the floor just below her dangling clogs. Molly Notkin is standing with Rutherford Keck and Crosby Baum and a radically bad-postured man before the school-supplied Infernatron viewer. Baum’s wide back and pompadour obscure whatever’s on the screen. Academics’ voices sound nasal, with a cultivated stutter at sentences’ start. A good many of James O. Incandenza’s films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he’d just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow. An old Latin-revival CD issues at acceptable volume from the speakers screwed into planters and hung with thin chains from each corner of the cream ceiling. Another large loose group is dancing in the cleared space between the cluster of directorial chairs and the bedroom door, most favoring Y.D.A.U.’s Minimal Mambo, this autumn’s East Coast anticraze, the dancers appearing to be just this side of standing still, the subtlest possible hints of fingers snapping under right-angled elbows. Orin Incandenza, she has not forgotten, had a poor mottled swollen elbow above a forearm the size of a leg of lamb. He had switched
neatly from arm to leg. Joelle was Orin Incandenza’s only lover for twenty-six months and his father’s optical beloved for twenty-one. A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis — hired by M.I.T. after her time. The better dancers’ movements are so tiny they are evocative and compel watching, their near-static mass curdled and bent somehow subtly around one beautiful young woman, quite beautiful, her back undulating minimally in a thin tight blue-and-white-striped sailorish top as she alludes to a cha-cha with maracas empty of anything to rattle, watching herself almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it’s the west wall’s framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames Notkin thinks she’s been retroironic by having the frames themselves framed, in rather less ornate frames, in wry allusion to the early-Experialist fashion of making art out of the accessories of artistic presentation, the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side of the mirror he’d cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he’d made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she’d gone on to use on-air; the girl stands transfixed in alternating horizontal blue and white, then vertically sliced by bar-cut sunlight, diced, drunk, so wrecked on good vintage her lips hang slack and the reflected cheeks’ muscles have lost all integrity and the cheeks jiggle like the outstanding paps in her little sailor’s top. Apocalyptic rouge and a nose-ring that’s either electrified or is catching bits of light from the window. She is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom. This absence of shame at the self-obsession. Is she Canadian? Mirror-cult? Not possibly a U.H.I.D.: the bearing’s all wrong. But now, whispered to by a near-motionless man in an equestrian helmet, she turns abruptly falling away from her own reflection to explain, not to the man so much as no one in particular, the whole dancing mass: I was just looking at my tits she says looking down at herself aren’t they beautiful, and it’s moving, there’s something so heartbreakingly sincere in what she says Joelle wants to go to her, tell her it is and will be completely all right, she’s pronounced beautiful like the earlier interested in four syllables, splitting the diphthong, betraying her class and origin with the heartbreaking openness Joelle’s always viewed as either terribly stupid or terribly brave, the girl raising her striped arms in triumph or artless thanks for being constructed this way, these ‘tits,’ built by whom and for whom never occurring, artlessly ecstatic, she is not drunk Joelle now sees but has taken Ecstasy, Joelle can see, from the febrile flush and eyes jacked so wide you can make out brain-meat behind the balls’ poles, a.k.a. X or MDMA, a beta-something, an early synthetic, emotional acid, the Love Drug so-called, big among the artistic young under say Bush and successors, since fallen into relative disuse because its pulverizing hangover has been linked to the impulsive use of automatic weapons in public venues, a hangover that makes a freebase hangover look like a day at the emotional beach, the difference between suicide and homicide consisting perhaps only in where you think you discern the cage’s door: Would she kill somebody else to get out of the cage? Was the allegedly fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing Jim alleges he made out of her unveiled face here at the start of Y.T.S.D.B. a cage or really a door? Had he even cut the tape into something coherent? There was nothing coherent in the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she’d repeated over and over, inclined over that auto-wobbled lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram. He never let her see it, not even the dailies. He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman’s kitchen’s walls. How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens? The woman in love with her own breasts is being congratulated with the subtlest possible allusions to clapping hands from barely animate dancers with their glass tulips held between their teeth, and Vogelsong of Emerson College tries suddenly to stand on his head and is immediately ill in a spreading plum-colored ectoplasm the dancers do not even try to evade the spread of, and Joelle applauds the Xtatic woman as well, because they are, Joelle admits freely, the paps, they are attractive, which in the Union is designated Compelling Within Compatible Relative Limits; Joelle has no problem seeing beauty approved, within compatible relative limits; she feels not empathy or maternal nurture any longer, just a desire to swallow every last drop of saliva she will ever manufacture and exit this vessel, have fifteen more minutes of Too Much Fun, eliminate her own map with the afflatus of the blind god of all doorless cages; and she lets herself slide forward from Méliès’ lap, a tiny fall, leading with her lumpy purse and glass of matte apple juice toward the door beyond the lines of a becalmed conga and door-way’d huddles of a warm and well-felt theoretical party. And then, again, delays, dithers, and the easement to the bathroom is blocked. She is the only veiled woman here, and an academic generation ahead of most of these candidates, and rather feared, even though not many know she is an Aural Personality, feared for quitting instead of failing, and because of the connection of the memory of Jim, and she is given a certain wide social berth, allowed to delay and orbit and stand unengaged at the fringes of shifting groups, obliquely glanced at, veil going concave at each inbreath, waiting with hip-shot nonchalance for the bathroom off the bedroom to clear, lac-carino the Chaplin-archivist and a jaundice-yellow older man have gone into Molly’s bedroom and left the door ajar, waiting nonchalantly, ignoring the foreign academic who wishes to know where she works with that veil, turning from him, rudely, brain heaving in its bone-box, memorizing every detail like collecting empty shells, sipping cloudy juice under neatly lifted corners of veil, now looking at instead of through the translucent cloth, the Improbably Deformed’s equivalent of closing the eyes in concentration on sound, letting the Very Last Party wash over her, passed gracefully by different mingling guests and once or twice almost touched, seeing only inrushing and then billowing white, listening to different mingling voices the way the unveiled young taste wine.