IJ study archive

Scene 077: marathe steeply betrayal

Scene
77
Pages
375–375
When
night of 30 April / 1 May YDAU (2009) — text header p. 375; all the mountainside installments are this one night
Where
mountainside shelf/outcropping above Tucson, Arizona — U.S.A. Sonora Desert (the Marathe/Steeply night-dialogue serial)in: Mountainside outcrop above Tucson
POV
3rd person via Marathe (his syntax inflecting the narration)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 5)

Summary

A brief installment of the mountainside serial, all stagecraft and tradecraft: the two agents' "choreography of interface" has settled — Steeply smoking and bobbing on the toes of his high heels, bare arms crossed; Marathe hunched under his plaid blanket in the practiced posture that lets him half-sleep while missing nothing — as the Sonora Desert's day-heat rises past them into the stars. Marathe reflects that he still does not know what, exactly, Steeply and U.S.O.U.S. want to learn or verify through Marathe's betrayal of the A.F.R. Near midnight Steeply has disclosed that he is back from Marital Leave after his divorce and newly assigned, in prosthetic breasts and woman-journalist credentials, to cultivate the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker's relatives and inner circles — and Marathe has mocked first the unoriginality of a journalistic cover, then the cover name itself, doubting that Steeply's "meaty electrolysized face" could launch even one ship.

What to notice

Alone among the mountainside installments, this one has a night of talk to stage and stages none of it live: everything arrives in pluperfect summary — the choreography "had settled", the mockery "had made gentle fun" — a night of talk compressed into a case file updating itself. In that file's idiom even grief is intelligence: Steeply's divorce is logged as "the datum", a marriage's end entered beside prosthetic breasts and credentials. And notice who is running whom — the ostensible betrayer half-dozes in a posture built for "wearisome surveillance" while missing nothing, and it is the professional handler who volunteers the personal disclosure; Marathe's slide from "gentle fun" to "less gentle fun" is an agent testing exactly how hard he can needle his case officer and keep the channel open.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 375: date header; the settled choreography — Steeply's heel-bobbing smoking vs. Marathe's rounded-shouldered attentive doze; blanket to the chest; chill at the shelf's altitude; desert heat felt rising "into the clotted spangle of stars"; the deadpan negative detail that Marathe's undershirt "was not of Hawaiian type".
  • p. 375: Marathe's uncertainty about what his betrayal is for — what Steeply wishes "to learn from him, or verify"; the near-midnight datum of Steeply's divorce, Marital Leave, and return to the field as a woman journalist tasked with the filmmaker's family; Marathe's two-stage mockery, ending in the Helen-of-Troy crack at the name "Helen Steeply."

Themes in this scene

Connections — backward & forward

Forward

  • Serial continuity: picks up the 30 Apr/1 May night begun at pp. 87-97 (scene 029 ff.) and threaded through pp. 105-109; the dialogue resumes at pp. 418ff (choosing-your-master/Entertainment test arguments) — cite the ruling rather than re-dating.
  • "Helen Steeply, the journalist from Moment" is the cover under which Steeply interviews Orin (the n.145 transcript, 3 Nov YDAU, digested with scene 078; also nn.234/269 correspondence-orbit) and later embeds at E.T.A. (pp. 651ff Hal-Stice gallery, pp. 658ff with deLint) — this paragraph is that cover's origin-point in the discourse.
  • Marathe's mockery of the cover's plausibility is ironized later: Orin is precisely seduced ("intimidatingly intelligent," n.145), proving the meaty face launches at least one punter — and through him, arguably, the A.F.R.'s copy of the Entertainment.
  • Marathe's unresolved question — what exactly Steeply "wished to learn from him, or verify, through Marathe's betrayal" — deepens in the Fortier chapters (pp. 721ff, scene 145+) and resolves into his Ennet House arrival (pp. 729ff, scene 149) — where Joelle, Steeply's other target, resides.
  • Steeply's divorce/Marital Leave humanizes the figure ahead of his father-and-MAS*H confession (pp. 638ff, scene 123), the serial's own entertainment-obsession case study.

Notable passages (2)
  • p. 375: "The choreography of interface had settled into the form of Steeply smoking… while Marathe hunched slightly in his metal chair…" — the serial's tableau formalized; the frame for the whole night.
  • p. 375: "expressing humored doubts that the meaty electrolysized face of Steeply would be responsible of launching even one ship or vessel." — Marlovian Helen joke in Marathe's Québecois English; names the Helen-cover theme.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (12) · Passages quoted here (17) · Motifs (1)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs