GRAVITY RAINBOW Read Online Free PDF Page B

Junior Athenaeum, got them both 86'd feinting with the beak of a stuffed owl after the jugular of DeCoverley Pox whilst Pox, at bay on a billiard table, attempted to ram a cue ball down Slothrop's throat. This sort of thing goes on dismayingly often: yet kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans, Tantivy always there blushing or smiling and Slothrop surprised at how, when it's really counted, Tantivy hasn't ever let him down.
    He knows he can spill what's on his mind. It hasn't much to do with today's amorous report on Norma (dimply Cedar Rapids subdeb legs), Marjorie (tall, elegant, a build out of the chorus line at the Windmill) and the strange events Saturday night at the Frick Frack Club in Soho, a haunt of low reputation with moving spotlights of many pastel hues, off limits and NO jitterbug dancing signs laid on to satisfy the many sorts of police, military and civilian, whatever "civilian" means nowadays, who look in from time to time, and where against all chance, through some horrible secret plot, Slothrop, who was to meet one, walks in sees who but both, lined up in a row, the angle deliberately just for him, over the blue wool shoulder of an en-gineman 3rd class, under the bare lovely armpit of a lindy-hopping girl swung and posed, skin stained lavender by the shifting light just there, and then, paranoia flooding up, the two faces beginning to turn his way…
    Both young ladies happen to be silver stars on Slothrop's map. He must've been feeling silvery both times-shiny, jingling. The stars he pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day, blue on up to golden. Never to rank a single one-how can he? Nobody sees the map but Tantivy, and Christ they're all beautiful… in leaf or flower around his wintering city, in teashops, in the queues babushkaed and coatwrapped, sighing, sneezing, all lisle legs on the curbstones, hitch-
    hiking, typing or filing with pompadours sprouting yellow pencils, he finds them-dames, tomatoes, sweater girls-yes it is a little obsessive maybe but… "I know there is wilde love and joy enough in the world," preached Thomas Hooker, "as there are wilde Thyme, and other herbes; but we would have garden love, and garden joy, of Gods owne planting." How Slothrop's garden grows. Teems with virgin's-bower, with forget-me-nots, with rue-and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.
    He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don't know about fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls.
    The map does puzzle Tantivy. It cannot be put down to the usual loud-mouthed American ass-banditry, except as a fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can't help, barking on into an empty lab, into a wormholing of echoing hallways, long after the need has vanished and the brothers gone to WWII and their chances for death. Slothrop really doesn't like to talk about his girls: Tantivy has to steer him diplomatically, even now. At first Slothrop, quaintly gentlemanly, didn't talk at all, till he found out how shy Tantivy was. It dawned on him then that Tantivy was looking to be fixed up. At about the same time, Tantivy began to see the extent of Slothrop's isolation. He seemed to have no one else in London, beyond a multitude of girls he seldom saw again, to talk to about anything.
    Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious. At its best, it does celebrate a flow, a passing from which-among the sudden demolitions from the sky, mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laborings of nights that for himself are only idle-he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer's breasts inside cold sweater's wool held to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he'll never know the daytime despondency of… cup of Bovril a fraction down from boiling searing his bare knee as Irene, naked as he is in a block of glass sunlight, holds up