Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Didn’t mean to—”

“No, actually you could help me distract them a little, not feel so self-conscious.”

“Wouldn’t want to compromise your cred, I’m weeks overdue at the colorist, this whole puttogether here ran me under a hundred bucks at Filene’s Basement—”

“Don’t think that’s what they’ll be checkin out.”

Well. When was the last time anybody suggested even this obliquely that she qualified as… maybe not arm candy, but arm popcorn maybe? Should she be offended? How little?

Tracking from one group of attendees to another, locating presently a normal-enough-looking citizen with an interest in migratory-bird hunting and conservation stamps, known to collectors as duck stamps, and his perhaps-less-involved wife, Gladys—

“… and my dream is to become the Bill Gross of duck stamps.” Not only federal duck stamps, mind you, but every state issue as well—having wandered with the years into the seductive wetlands of philatelic zealotry, this by-now-shameless completist must have them all, hunters’ and collectors’ versions, artist-signed, remarques, varieties, freaks and errors, governors’ editions… “New Mexico! New Mexico issued duck stamps only from 1991 through 1994, ending with the crown jewel of all duck stamps, Robert Steiner’s supernaturally beautiful Green-Winged Teals in flight, of which I happen to own a plate block…”

“Which someday,” Gladys announces chirpily, “I am going to take out of its archival plastic, compromise the gum on the back with my slobbering tongue, and use to send in the gas bill.”

“Not valid for postage, honeybunch.”

“You staring at my ring?” A woman in a beige eighties power suit entering the shot.

“Attractive piece. Something… familiar…”

“I don’t know if you’re a Dynasty person, but that time Krystle had to pawn her ring? this is a cubic zirconia knockoff, $560, retail of course, Irwin always pays retail, being the 301 point 83 in the relationship, I’m just the supportive partner. He drags me to these things every year, and I end up pigging my way into a mid-two-figures dress size ’cause there’s never anybody to talk to.”

“Don’t listen to her, she’s the one who has all two hundred–whatever episodes on Betamax. Focused? you have no idea—sometime in the mid-eighties, she actually changed her name to Krystle. A less understanding husband might call this unnatural.”

Reg and Maxine find their way eventually to the onboard casino, where people in ill-fitting tuxedos and gowns are playing roulette and baccarat, chain-smoking, leering back and forth, and grimly waving fistfuls of make-believe money. “Jujubes,” they’re informed, “Generic Undiagnosed James Bond Syndrome, whole different support group. Hasn’t made it into the DSM yet, but they’re lobbying, maybe the fifth edition… always welcome here at convention time mostly for the stability, see what I’m saying.” Actually, Maxine didn’t, but bought a “five-dollar” chip and walked away from the table with enough, had it been real money, for a short trip to Saks if and when she was lucky enough to get back off of this.

At some point a face rosy with drink, fatefully belonging to one Joel Wiener, appears in the viewfinder. “Yeah, I get it, you recognize me from the news coverage, and now I’m just camera fodder, right? even though I was acquitted, in fact for the third time, on charges of that nature.” Proceeding to unstopper a lengthy epic of injustice, somehow related to Manhattan real estate, that Maxine has trouble following in all of its nuances. Maybe she should have, it could’ve saved her some trouble down the line.

Borderlines by the boatload. Eventually Maxine and Reg find a quiet few minutes out on deck watching the Caribbean glide by. Cargo containers tower everywhere, stacked up four or five high. Like being in certain parts of Queens. Not yet mentally all the way on board this cruise, she finds herself wondering how many of the containers are dummies and what the chances might be for some seagoing inventory fraud in progress here.

She notices Reg hasn’t made any attempt to get her on videotape. “I didn’t have you figured for a borper. Thought you might be staff, like a social director or something.” Surprised that it’s been, oh, maybe an hour or more since she last thought about the Horst situation, Maxine understands that if she gets so much as a toenail’s worth into that subject, Reg’s camera will come on again.

The long-standing practice at these AMBOPEDIA get-togethers is to visit literal geographical borderlines, a different one every year. Shopping tours at Mexican maquiladora outlets. Gambling-addiction indulgence at the casinos of Stateline, California. Pennsylvania Dutch pig-outs along the Mason-Dixon Line. This year the destination borderline is between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, uneasy with melancholy karma dating back to the days of the Perejil Massacre, little of which has found its way into the brochure. As the Aristide Olt sails into picturesque Manzanillo Bay, things rapidly grow unfocused. No sooner has the ship tied up to the pier at Pepillo Salcedo than passengers preoccupied with large fish are excitedly chartering boats to go out after tarpon. Others, like Joel Wiener, whom real estate has driven from curiosity into obsession, are soon cruising local agencies and being dragged into the fantasies of those from whose motives greed, not to mention fuck-the-yanqui, must not be ruled out.

Folks ashore talk a combination of Kreyòl and Cibaeño. At the end of the pier, souvenir stands have quickly materialized, snack vendors selling yaniqueques and chimichurros, practitioners of voodoo and Santería with spells for sale, purveyors of mamajuana, a Dominican specialty which comes in gigantic glass jars in each of which what looks like a piece of a tree has been marinating in red wine and rum. For a cross-borderline cherry on the sundae, there’s also been an authentic Haitian voodoo love spell laid on each jar of Dominican mamajuana. “Now you’re talking!” cries Reg. He and Maxine join a small group who have begun drinking the stuff and passing jars around, presently finding themselves a few miles out of town at El Sueño Tropical, a half-built and for the moment abandoned luxury hotel, screaming through the corridors, swinging across the courtyard on jungle vines, which have found a purchase overhead, chasing lizards and flamingos not to mention one another, and misbehaving on the moldering king-size beds.

Love, exciting and new, as they used to sing on The Love Boat, Heidi was right on the money, this was Just the Ticket all right, though later Maxine would not be so sure of the details.

Picking up memory’s remote now, she hits PAUSE, then STOP, then POWER OFF, smiling without visible effort. “Peculiar cruise, Reg.”

“You ever hear from any of those folks again?”

“An e-mail now and then, and every holiday season of course AMBOPEDIA’s after me for a donation.” She peers at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Reg, did we ever, um…”

“I don’t think so, I was mostly with that Leptandra from Indianapolis, and you kept disappearing with the real-estate obsessive.”

“Joel Wiener,” Maxine’s eyeballs, in semi-horrified embarrassment, scanning the ceiling.

“I wasn’t gonna bring that up, sorry.”

“You heard about them pulling my license. That was indirectly Joel. Who, without meaning to, did me such a mitzvah. Like when I was a CFE I was cute, but a defrocked CFE? I’m irresistible. To a certain type. You can imagine what comes in the door, nothing personal.”

The big selling point about a Certified Fraud Examiner gone rogue, she guessed, is a halo of faded morality, a reliable readiness to step outside the law and share the trade secrets of auditors and tax men. Having run into cultists who’d been expelled from their cults, Maxine was afraid for a while it would be that kind of social badlands. But word had gotten around, and soon Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em had more business than ever, more than she could handle. New clients were not of course always as reputable as they’d been in her licensed days. Darkside wannabes oozing out of the damn wallpaper, among them Joel Wiener, for whom she found herself cutting what turned out to be way too much slack.