Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

In which case, Maxine, enough with the date-night ditzing around, she can feel a cold draft through some failing seam in the fabric of the day, and there is no payoff here worth any further investment beyond, “Let’s see, you had how many, three? Gigaccinos, and then the bagels…”

“Three bagels, plus the Denver omelet deluxe, you had the plain toasted…”

Out on the sidewalk, neither can find a formula that will let them separate with any grace. After another half minute of silence, they end up nodding and turning in different directions.

On the way home she passes the neighborhood firehouse. They’re in working on one of the trucks. Maxine recognizes a guy she sees all the time in the Fairway buying huge amounts of food. They smile and wave. Cute kid. Under different circumstances…

Of which as usual there are not enough. She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard.

If it isn’t the pay, isn’t the glory, and sometimes you don’t come back, then what is it? What makes these guys choose to go in, work twenty-four hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?

Whatever it is, would Windust even recognize it? How far has he journeyed from working realities? What sanctuary has he sought, and what, if any, given?

AS THANKSGIVING APPROACHES, the neighborhood, terrorist atrocities or whatever, reverts to its usual insufferable self, reaching a peak the night before Thanksgiving, when the streets and sidewalks are jammed solid with people who have come in to town to view The Blowing Up Of The Balloons for the Macy’s parade. Cops are everywhere, security is heavy. In front of every eatery, there are lines out the door. Places you can usually step inside, order a pizza to go, and wait no more than the time it takes to bake it are running at least an hour behind. Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism “Excuse me.”

This evening Maxine finds herself abroad in this pageant of classic NYC behavior, having made the mistake of offering to spring for a turkey if Elaine will cook it, and compounded it by putting in an advance order at Crumirazzi, a gourmet shop down toward 72nd. She gets there after supper to find the place jammed tighter than a peak-period subway with anxious citizens gathering supplies for their Thanksgiving feasts, and the turkey line folded on itself eight or ten times and moving very, very slowly. People are already screaming at each other, and civility, like everything on the shelves, is in short supply.

A serial line jumper has been making his way forward along the turkey line, a large white alpha male whose social skills, if any, are still in beta, intimidating people one by one out of his way.

“Excuse me?” Shoving ahead of an elderly lady waiting in line just behind Maxine.

“Line jumper here,” the lady yells, unslinging her shoulder bag and preparing to deploy it.

“You must be from out of town,” Maxine addressing the offender, “here in New York, see, the way you’re acting? It’s considered a felony.”

“I’m in a hurry, bitch, so back off, unless you want to settle this outside?”

“Aw. After all your hard work getting this far? Tell you what, you go out and wait for me, OK? I won’t be too long, promise.”

Shifting to indignation, “I have a houseful of children to feed—” but he’s interrupted by a voice someplace over by the loading dock hollering, “Hey asshole!” and here cannonballing over the heads of the crowd comes a frozen turkey, hits the bothersome yup square in the head, knocking him flat and bouncing off his head into the hands of Maxine, who stands blinking at it like Bette Davis at some baby with whom she must unexpectedly share the frame. She hands the object to the lady behind her. “This is yours, I guess.”

“What, after it touched him? thanks anyway.”

“I’ll take it,” sez the guy behind her.

As the line creeps forward, everybody makes sure to step on, not over, the fallen line jumper.

“Nice to see the ol’ town gettin back to normal, ain’t it.” A familiar voice.

“Rocky, what are you doing over in this neck of the woods?”

“It’s Cornelia, she can’t get through Thanksgiving without this one brand of stuffing mix she grew up with, Dean & DeLuca ran out of it and Crumirazzi’s is the only other place in NYC.”

Maxine squints at the giant plastic sack he’s carrying. “‘Squanto’s Choice, Authentic Old-Tyme WASP Recipe.’”

“Uses antique white bread.”

“‘Antique’…”

“Wonder Bread from back before they started sellin it sliced?”

“That’s seventy years, Rocky, it doesn’t get moldy?”

“It gets hard as cement. They have to take jackhammers and break it up. Gives it that extra something. Why are you waiting in this line, I took you for more of a Swift Butterball person.”

“Thought I’d try and help my mom out. Wrong as usual. Look at this fuckin zoo. Karmic crime scene. You think it won’t find its way into the food?”

“Family all gettin together this year, huh?”

“You’ll be seeing it in the Post . ‘Among those being held for observation…’”

“Hey, your friend from Montreal? That Felix guy with the antizapper? We’re givin him some bridge money, Spud Loiterman has a sixth sense, he says go.”

“So you want to hire me now, or wait till Felix is what Bobby Darin calls ‘beyond the sea’?”

“Yeah, OK, he’s working a hustle, so what, I was like that once, I can relate, and anyway who am I to second-guess the Dean Martin of Dissonance?”

As things turn out, Thanksgiving is not so horrible after all. Probably 11 September has something to do with it. There is an empty space set seder fashion at the table, not for the prophet Elijah but for one or any of the unknown souls whom prophecy failed that day. The sound ambience is subdued, edgeless. Ernie and the boys settle in in front of the annual Star Wars marathon, Horst and Avi talk sports, smells of cooking fill the rooms, Elaine glides in and out of dining room, pantry, and kitchen, a one-woman army of woodwork-dwelling elves, Maxine and Brooke by the end of the afternoon have reached zinger parity with no lethal weapons appearing, the food is, as so often with Elaine, a form of time travel, the turkey mercifully unjinxed despite its Crumirazzi origins, the pastries somehow escaping Brooke’s fatality for the overelaborate and even including what Otis in a rave review calls a normal pumpkin pie. Ernie spares everybody a speech and only gestures at the empty chair with a glass of apple cider. “Everybody who should’ve been celebrating today but isn’t.”

As they’re leaving, Avi draws Maxine aside. “Your office—is there some kind of a back entrance?”

“You want to drop by without anybody seeing you. Maybe… should we do breakfast someplace?”

“Um…”

“Too public, OK, here’s what you do, go around the corner, there’s a delivery gate that’s usually open, go in the courtyard, bear to the right, you’ll see a door painted with red lead, the service elevator’s right inside, I’m on three. Call first.”