Against the Day, Chapter Twelve: Dahlia Rideout and the Angels of Death!

Dally and Hunter in London, the situation in Venice having become a little too hot for comfort. Ruperta there, too, who is feeling jealous of Dally even though there's no romantic attachment between her and Hunter. To get rid of her, I guess, she introduces her to a man called Arturo Naunt, for whom she becomes a model posing for his "Angel of Death" statues in cemeteries.

There's a very odd scene with Ruperta at a concert of Vaughan Williams music:

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.

After this, she is shaken: "You must never, never forgive me, Hunter....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" (896). So...good for her, I guess? I suppose this is another little bit of doubling--wrong acts/right acts--but I don't know what else to make of it apart from a bit of magical realism. I think this is her last appearance, but don't quote me on that.

Arturo's work starts to get weird, and she draws the line when he wants to model her pegging some guy: "Must be my puritanical American upbringing. Sodomizing idiots has never been my cup of tea."

Who should she meet next but R. Wilshire Vibe, who is finding more success with his work in the UK than he was in the US, including his latest, Wogs Begin at Wigan, and she finds herself a musical theater (theatre, I should say) star. She meets Clive Crouchmas, whom you may remember as the former (current?) T.W.I.T. guy who was trying to contact dead agents in Turkey. Apparently he knew Ruperta when they were children. I don't know what to say about that.

Well, anyway, here's something I Don't Much Fancy:

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. (900)

Do my objections here all down to MY puritanical American upbringing? Obviously there's nothing wrong with sex work per se. I think what my issue boils down to is that it doesn't feel like an organic character trait. There's no denying it, really: Pynchon...let's say, has a great deal of trouble writing women without these fetishy sexual identities. It ain't great! And this passage in particular, all this "oh, he was so sweet and nice, nothing wrong with old guys watching young girls masturbate"--I mean, I don't suppose this is the case, but that REALLY looks like he's trying to convince someone of something. I'm not saying; I'm just saying.

She meets Lew Basnight, who now has a private practice doing basically what he'd been doing before, keeping an eye on these Tarot people (you remember, the ones who are represented by the major arcana). Could Dally be the Star, currently? Maybe. He suggests to her that if she could get information about Crouchmas, some unnamed parties would be extremely interested and pay handsomely.

When he finds out that she's playing him, he is not overjoyed: "'I'll shop the bitch to a harem, is what I'll do.' That this was no longer an option in the New Turkey did not at the moment occur to him" (905-906).

There are things going on in Japan, it seems: they have a weapon they want to sell. "The item doesn't even have a name anyone agrees on, except for a Q in it somewhere I think. Something they came into possession of a few years ago and now have up for sale on most attractive terms, almost as if...they're afraid of it" (906). So yeah, the Quaternion Weapon, if that isn't obvious, though we still don't really know what that is.

Crouchmas isn't letting on that he knows Dally's double-crossing him, and Lew's clients think it would be just ducky if she went to Constantinople with him to find out any ol' thing. So that is where she is off to, and the chapter concludes. I must say, I remembered none of this before rereading it. You'd think there'd be something, but nope. Interesting to see if there are any others like that, though it's also worth noting that we really are almost done here: less than two hundred pages. Phew!