Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“My office,” announces Tallis. A vintage George Nelson desk but also one of his Omar the Owl wall clocks. Uh-oh. Cute Alert.

Tallis has perfected the soap-opera trick of managing through all the daylight hours to look turned out for evening activities. High-end makeup, hair in a tousled bob with every strand expensively disarranged, taking its time, whenever she gestures with her head, to slide back into its artful confusion. Black silk slacks and a matching top unbuttoned halfway down, which Maxine thinks she recognizes from the Narciso Rodríguez spring collection, Italian shoes that only once a year are found on sale at prices humans can afford—some humans—emerald earrings weighing in at a half carat each, Hermès watch, Art Deco ring of Golconda diamonds which every time she passes through the sunlight coming in the window flares into a nearly blinding white, like a superheroine’s magical flashbang for discombobulating the bad guys. Who, it will occur to Maxine more than once during their tête-à-tête, maybe includes herself.

A downstairs maid of some kind brings a pitcher of iced tea and a bowl of root-vegetable chips of different colors including indigo.

“I love him forever, but Gabe is a weird guy, I’ve known it since we first started dating,” Tallis in one of these small, sub-Chipmunk voices fatally charming to certain kinds of men. “He had all these, not creepy, but to me, unusual expectations? We were only kids, but I could see the potential, I told myself, honey, get with the program, this could be the perfect wave, and it’s been… the worst it’s been is educational?”

Me, I want a hula hoop.

Tallis and Gabriel met at Carnegie Mellon back in the golden age of the computer-science department there. Gabe’s roommate Dieter was majoring in bagpipes, which CMU happened to offer a degree in, and even though the kid was allowed only a practice chanter in the dorms, the sound was enough to drive Gabe out to the computer cluster, which still wasn’t far enough. Soon he was out gazing at student-lounge television screens or using the facilities at other dorms, including Tallis’s, where he quickly slipped into a tubelit clustergeek existence, often unsure if he was awake or dreaming in REM, which might have accounted for his early conversations with Tallis, which she remembers nowadays as “unusual.” She was his dream girl, literally. Her image became conflated with those of Heather Locklear, Linda Evans, and Morgan Fairchild, among others. She went around anxious about what might happen if he ever got a good night’s sleep and saw her, the real Tallis, without the tubal overlay.

“So?” with a look.

“So what am I complaining about, I know, exactly what my mother used to say. When we were talking.”

One concept of raising a topic, Maxine supposes. “Your mom and me, we’re neighbors, it turns out.”

“Are you a follower?”

“Not too much, in high school they even thought I had leadership potential.”

“I meant a follower of my mother’s Weblog? Tabloid of the Damned? Not a day passes without her flaming us, Gabe and me, our company, hashslingrz, she’s been on our case forever. Obvious mother-in-law trip. Lately she’s throwing around these wild accusations, massive diversions, a covert U.S. foreign-policy scam, of money overseas bigger than Iran/contra back in the eighties. According to my mother.”

“I take it she and your husband don’t get along.”

“No more than she and I do. We basically hate each other, it’s no secret.”

The estrangement from March and her father Sid apparently began Tallis’s junior year. “Spring break they wanted us off on some horror vacation to witness them screaming, which there was enough of already at home, so Gabe and I went to Miami instead, and apparently there was some footage of me topless that found its way on to MTV, tastefully pixelated and all, but it just got worse from there. And they got so busy fucking with each other’s brain, by the time that was sorted out, Gabe and I were married and it was all too late.”

Maxine keeps wanting to mention that she doesn’t put into family dynamics, even if this is what March has her over here doing. But miles across the parquetry between them, some inertia of resentment is carrying Tallis along. “Anything bad she can find to say about hashslingrz, she’ll post it.”

But wait. Did Maxine just hear one of those implicit “buts”? She waits. “But,” Tallis adds (no, no, is she going to—Aahhh! yes look she’s actually putting her fingernail in her mouth here, ooh, ooh), “it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. About the money.”

“Who does your auditing, Mrs. Ice?”

“Tallis, please. That’s part of… the problem? We use D. S. Mills down on Pearl Street. Like, they actually do wear white shoes and stuff? But do I trust them? mmmh…?”

“Far as I know, Tallis, they’re kosher. Or whatever WASPs have for that. The book on these guys is the SEC loves them, maybe not enough to be the mother of its children, but enough. I can’t see what problem they could be giving you.”

“Suppose something’s going on that they’re not catching?”

Suppressing the urge to scream “Al-vinnn?” Maxine gently inquires, “Which… would be…?”

“Ooh, I dunno… something weird about the disbursements after the last round? Considering the prime directive in this business is always be nice to your VCs?”

“And somebody at your company is being… mean to its?”

“The money is supposed to be earmarked for infrastructure, which since all that… second-quarter trouble last year has been going dirt cheap… Servers, miles of dark fiber, bandwidth there for the grabbing.” Seeming to ditz over the technical stuff. Or is it something else? Just a skip, like you get from a blemish on a disc, nothing you’d ordinarily notice. “I’m supposed to be the comptroller, but when I bring any of it up with Gabe, he gets evasive. I’m beginning to feel like the babe in the window.” Out with the lower lip.

“But… how do I put this tactfully… you and your husband have certainly had a grown-up chat, maybe even two, on this subject?”

A mischievous look, a hair toss. Shirley Temple should take notes. “Maybe. Would it be a problem if we didn’t?” Did she say “pwobwem”? “I mean…” An interesting half a beat. “Until I know something for sure, I figure why bother him?”

“Unless he’s in it up to his eyeballs himself, of course.”

A quick inhale, as if just occurring to her, “Well… suppose you, or a colleague you might recommend, could look into it?”

Aha. “I hate matrimonials. Tallis. Sooner or later a firearm comes out. And this here, I can smell it, could turn matrimonial faster than you can say, ‘But Ricky, it’s only a hat.’”

“I’d be very appreciative.”

“Uh huh, I’d still have to bring in your auditors.”

“Couldn’t you—” With the fingernail.

“It’s a professional thing.” Feeling all at once, in this obscenely overpriced interior, like so totally a sucker. Is Maxine slowing down? OK, maybe she can invoice this virtual bimbo any fee she wants to, the price of a high-ticket vacation far, far away, but not till later, deep in the winter months, as she relaxes on a tropical beach, will the rum concoction in her tall frosted glass suddenly curdle in her hand, as crashing in on her, too late, there arrives a freak wave of understanding.

Nothing in this fateful moment is what it seems. This woman here, despite her M.B.A., ordinarily a sure sign of idiocy, is playing you, smart-ass, and you need to be out of this place as quick as possible. A theatrically stressed glance at her G-shock Mini, “Whoa, lunch with a client, Smith & Wollensky, meat intake for the month, call you soon. If I see your mom, should I say hi?”