Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Maxine hears spasmodic sniffling and looks in the front seat to find Misha and Grisha both with tears in their eyes and quivering lower lips. “They, ah, like that one too?”

Igor shakes his head impatiently. “Hedgehogs, Russian thing, don’t ask.”

“This writing on the battery cap, what’s it say, can you read it?”

“Pashto, ‘God is great,’ maybe legit, maybe CIA forgery to look like mujahedeen, covering up some caper of their own.”

“Well now that you’ve brought it up, there’s another…”

“Let me read your mind. Spetsnaz knife, right?”

“With the flying blade, that allegedly did in Lester Traipse—”

“Poor Lester.” A strange mixture of compassion and warning in his face.

“Uh-oh.” Yet another relationship here, it figures. “The knife story is a frame-up, I gather.”

“Spetsnaz don’t shoot knives through air at people, Spetsnaz throw knives. Ballistic knife is weapon for chainik , with no throwing skills, afraid to get close up, wants to avoid gunshot noise. And—” pretending to hesitate “—blade they took out of Lester, OK, my distant cousin works downtown at Police Plaza, he saw it in property room, guess what. Fucking podyobka, totally, ain’t even Ostmark blade, maybe Chinese, maybe cheaper. Let’s hope someday I tell you more, but it still ain’t what Flintstones call page right out of history. Too much payback to deal with right now.”

“Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, of course, Igor. Meantime, what are we supposed to be doing about the other weapon? The hi-tech one on the roof? Suppose there’s a clock on this?”

“Mind letting me watch DVD? Simple nostalgia, you understand.”

Cornelia rings up and as previously threatened wants to go shopping. Maxine is expecting Bergdorf’s or Saks, but instead Cornelia hustles her into a cab and next thing she knows they’re headed for the Bronx. “I’ve always wanted to shop at Loehmann’s,” Cornelia explains.

“But they never let you in because you… have to be accompanied by somebody Jewish?”

“I’m offending you.”

“Nothing personal. Little history, is all. You realize, I hope, that this is not the Loehmann’s of legend. That one moved, back in, I don’t know, late 80’s?”

When Maxine and Heidi were girls, the store was still on Fordham Road, and every month or so their mothers would take them up there to learn how to shop. Loehmann’s in those days had a no-returns policy, so you had to get it right the first time. It was boot camp. Gave you discipline and reflexes. Heidi took to it as if in a previous life she had been a rag-trade superstar. “I feel like I’m weirdly home, that this is who I really am, I can’t explain it.”

“I can,” Maxine said, “you’re a compulsive shopper.”

For Maxine it was less cosmic. The changing room was short on privacy, what people liked to call “communal,” crowded with women in different stages of undress and attitude trying on clothes half of which didn’t fit but nevertheless offering free fashion advice to whoever looked like they needed it, meaning everybody. Like the locker room back at Julia Richman without the envy and paranoia. Now here’s this pearl-wearing WASP wants to drag her back into it all again.

The new Loehmann’s has been moved northward, into a former skating rink, it seems, almost to Riverdale, right up against the relentless roar of the Deegan, and Maxine has to struggle not to let out a scream of recognition—same endless aisles of heaped and picked-over garments, same old notorious Back Room as well, stuffed, she bets, with the same buyers’ mistakes and horror-story prom gowns with sequins shedding everywhere. Cornelia, on the other hand, the minute she steps in the store, is under its spell. “Oh, Maxi! I love it!”

“Yes, well…”

“Meet you by the registers, say around one, we’ll go have lunch, OK?” Cornelia disappearing into a miasma of whatever formaldehyde product retailers put on garments to make them smell this way, and Maxine, feeling not exactly claustrophobic, more like flashback-intolerant, wanders outside again, into the streets, at least to see what’s what, and then remembers that only a little way up the Deegan, just over the Yonkers line, is Sensibility, the ladies’ shooting range she’s just mailed in another year’s membership dues to, and that for this excursion to Loehmann’s she has somehow remembered to bring along the Beretta.

Hey. Cornelia will be hours. Maxine finds a cab letting off a fare, and twenty minutes later she’s all signed in at Sensibility, on the firing line in goggles, earplugs, and head muffs, with a convenience-store cup full of loose rounds, blasting away. Let the gamer have his zombies, Han Solo his TIE fighters, Elmer Fudd his elusive rabbit, for Maxine it has always been the iconic paper target figure known to cops as The Thug, here rendered in fuchsia and optical green. He has the look of an aging juvenile delinquent, with one of those shiny high-fifties haircuts, a scowl, and a possibly nearsighted squint. Today, even with his image cranked all the way back to the berm, she manages to place some nice groups in his head, chest, and, actually, dick area—which long ago may have been an issue, though after a while it seemed to Maxine the number of trouser wrinkles the artist shows radiating from the target’s crotch could be read as an invitation to shoot there as well. She takes some time practicing double taps. Pretends briefly—only a bit of fun, you know—that it’s Windust she’s shooting at.

In the lobby on the way out, she’s at the pay phone calling a cab when who does she run into but her old partner in wine theft, Randy, last seen driving away from the parking lot at the Montauk lighthouse. He seems a little preoccupied today. They withdraw to a settee beneath a mural-size screen grab from the opening of The Letter (1940) in which Bette Davis is pretending to pump six rounds into an uncredited though perhaps not altogether unthanked “David Newell.”

“Guess what, that son of a bitch Ice? Pulled my access to his house. Somebody must’ve took a wine inventory. Got my license plates off the closed-circuit video.”

“Bummer. No legal follow-ups, I hope.”

“Not so far. Tell the truth, I’m just as happy to be clear of the place. Been hearing about some weird shit lately.” Strange lights at dark hours, visitors with funny-looking eyes, checks that bounce and come back with unreadable writing all over them. “Film crews showing up around Montauk suddenly from the paranormal channels. Cops pullin all kinds of overtime, working mysterious incidents includin that fire at Bruno and Shae’s place. I guess you heard about ol’ Westchester Willy by now?”

“On the run’s the last I heard.”

“He’s out in Utah.”

“What?”

“The three of em, I got some snail mail yesterday, they’re getting married. To each other.”

“They didn’t just skip, they eloped?”

“Here, check this out.” An engraved card featuring flowers, wedding bells, cupids, some kind of not-all-that-easy-to-make-out hippie typeface.

Maxine, beginning to feel nauseous, reads as far as she has to. “This is an invitation to their shower, Randy? It’s what, legal in Utah for three people to get married?”

“Probably not, but you know how it is, run into somebody in a bar, bullshit level starts to rise, pretty soon, crazy impulsive kids, they’re hoppin in the rig and headin out yonder.”

“You’re, ah, planning to attend this get-together?”

“It’s tough enough figuring out what to give them. A His, His, and Hers bath ensemble? A triple-sink vanity?”

“Thirty-piece set of cookware.”