Bilocations, Chapter Four: What We Talk about when We Talk about Loathe!

We're back with Lake and Deuce; whee. Although this chapter I suppose gives us our best opportunity yet and probably ever to answer, not the book's central question (if there is one), but definitely it's most baffling to me: WHY DOES LAKE STAY WITH DEUCE? I mean, I get why she married him in the first place. That's easy enough; an effort to push away from her family and defy her father? But what good is he now? WHAT, I ask you? And this is something that I just don't know if the novel adequately addresses. I'll save my final judgment 'til the end of the book, but to me, now, it sure doesn't look that way.

The context of this chapter is that they've been moving around, and now they're living in the same area as Deuce's sister Hope and her husband Levi. What are they doing, workwise? It is extremely unclear. But the focus is on their relationship and its, ah, vicissitudes. So let us catalogue those.

"For a day or two after they got married, Deuce had kept repeating to himself, I'm not alone anymore. It became a formula, something to touch to make sure." This seems to be a recurring theme with Deuce: sort of wanting things to organize themselves according to prefabricated narratives like this. Obviously, they don't really fit, but he has no other way to conceptualize the world, is his problem. Modernity is bearing down upon him--a destabilized world where old narratives have proven themselves inadequate--and he is not equipped for it. To put it mildly. "He had also found himself engaged in pursuit of her forgiveness" (474). He's not even one hundred percent sure that she knows he did in her dad, but he still has this idea of "forgiveness" which just isn't operative under the circumstances.

For another example of this kind of thing, let's see how he reacts when he learns about Sloat's death:

Deuce's eyes were filling unexpectedly with salt water, some outrush of emotion trapped prickling just behind his noses, as he imagined himself on out to some picturesquely windswept grave, head bowed, hat off, "Big slow lummox, couldn't get out of your own way, they were bound to find you, shouldn't even been you, you were just along for the job, coverin your pardener's back . . . you old fool--damn, Sloat, what'd you think you were doing? (478)

Deuce may not be a good person, but you know, fair's fair; we can probably accept that he would feel some sort of emotion at his partner's death.  He's not T****. But at the same time, he only can think about this in these sort of cinematic terms, the "picturesquely windswept grave" and then the sort of gruff, Western-movie-style regret.

After this, he goes off in an effort to find Sloat's killer (whose identity he doesn't know); naturally, nothing comes of this. But when he comes back, things start to clarify between him and Lake "once it was clear to him that she knew, and to her that he knew she knew and so forth, once they found themselves passed somehow through the fatal gate they'd both been so afraid of" (484). He starts begging her forgiveness and trying to justify Webb's murder in what seem like transparently insincere ways--but is thinking about Deuce's motive in these terms even meaningful? Not that he isn't contemptible regardless.

But let's double back for a moment to treat of Lake, whose motives are REALLY hard to suss out here in any coherent way. Deuce wants her forgiveness, sure, but "what he didn't quite see was how little it mattered to her by now" (474). Why not? What if anything does matter to her? When she hears about Sloat's death, "she knew she shouldn't but guessed she felt more happy than otherwise to hear the news" (478). She engages in a certain amount of what I would call exploratory self-flagellation regarding having married her father's killer, but not in a way with much conviction: "Guess somethin's really wrong with me, isn't it. . . . Pa's dead and gone and I haven't stopped hating him" (479). But she's glad one of his killers is dead, anyway!

They definitely don't like each other, "having to live with somebody she had come to hate everything about, except when he put his hands onto her, and then. Oh, then" (483). Is that it? Just sex? That would be a disappointingly banal answer, but clearly not. She writes in her diary: "And I can never leave him...no matter what he does to me, I have to stay, it's part of the deal. Can't run..." (483), and SERIOUSLY, what is this nonsense? "Part of the deal" my ass. You know I'm a huge fan of Pynchon, but in this case I'm just not buying what he's selling. This doesn't work for me.

The two of them want to have children--yeah, that'll work out well. Obviously, this is all very symbolic: a desire for this relationship to prove to be productive and fruitful and future-oriented. But it ain't, and the fact that they're unable to conceive even when they try enlisting the help of various sorts of witchcraft is too freighted with meaning too obvious to belabor. So I won't.

Deuce makes the amazing claim that they need to have children because of Webb: "I just feel like it's somethin maybe that we owe him" (486). This doesn't go well, all the less so when he claims that Webb was already so devastated by his daughter's loss that he and Sloat were just finishing up what was bound to happen. So, she bashes him with a frying pan and then again with a shovel, which is a little cathartic, but would be more so if she actually offed him and escaped this very unfair situation that Pynchon has put her in. And THAT is it for this chapter.