Pages 227–240
The party, rejoined and played through to its end. Joelle, veiled, at Molly Notkin's celebration — Notkin passed her Orals yesterday costumed as Karl Marx, critiquing Marxist film theory as Marx — in a third-floor brownstone Joelle herself once lived in with Orin, and where Jim later filmed her. Around her, film-cartridge academics chatter; inside her, the plan from pp. 219–226 proceeds, through the bedroom, into the bathroom, all the way. Be told plainly: the scene follows the deliberate overdose from inside, in procedural detail, and it is the longest sustained interior voice the book has attempted so far. The lyric recursiveness is the register; let it carry you.
Terms, in order of appearance
- A.B.D. (p. 227) — real academia: "all but dissertation," Notkin's new status.
- Y.T.S.D.B. (p. 228) — Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar: year (3) on p. 223's list, five years back — also the year the p. 64 dossier gave for Jim's death.
- glycine bags (p. 236) — small translucent dealer's envelopes (the standard word is glassine; the book's spelling is its own).
- Kinski as Paganini / Léaud as Doinel (pp. 234–235) — real cinema: Klaus Kinski's demonic violinist; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's recurring alter ego.
- Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' (p. 235) — real sculpture: the saint mid-rapture as an angel aims a dart; Joelle's image for the spike's tip.
- afflatus / afflated (pp. 231, 235) — real word: divine in-breathing, inspiration; here applied to the heart.
- Paducah (p. 237) — real western-Kentucky city, home of the childhood movie-plex and "her own personal Daddy."
After you read: three things
1. The paragraph of what Notkin doesn't know (pp. 228–231). Joelle has been "in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B."; she lives "hand-to-lung" on Jim's trust; she never slept with him; and she has "never seen the completed assembly of what she'd appeared in, or seen anyone who's seen it." Her own questions: was the "fatally entertaining" thing made of her unveiled face "a cage or really a door?" — and "Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?" Hold these; they're stated nowhere else.
2. The party chatter is carrying news (pp. 233–234). Amid the Heidegger and Brady Bunch talk, someone describes a rumored cartridge, "an aesthetic pharmaceutical"; a scholar has "lost contact with three colleagues"; "a good bit of Berkeley isn't answering their phone"; a skeptic scoffs that it's a recycled ecstatic-death legend. You — who've read pp. 33–37, 78–79, and 87–93 — know more than anyone in the room, including that the woman it was allegedly made of is sitting among them, veiled, listening.
3. Watch the prose enact the hit (pp. 234–240). First the pre-suicide's ache to confess — "Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything," and the bare "I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out" (set that beside p. 3's "I am in here"). Then the cook, done with terrible care — the veil unpinned for an oven-mitt, "Too Much Fun for anyone mortal to hope to endure" — and as she smokes, the sentences stop ending. The scene closes knelt over the tub, helicopters overhead, a knock at the door, "rather a queer scent."
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.