Read Online GRAVITY RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon - Free Book Online

Beyond her, the white fracture of the rain passes. "Why does he go out and pinch all his dogs in person? He's an administrator, isn't he? Wouldn't he hire a boy or something?"
    "We call them 'staff,' " Roger replies, "and I don't know why Pointsman does anything he does, he's a Pavlovian, love. He's a Royal Fellow. What am I supposed to know about any of those people? They're as difficult as the lot back in Snoxall's."
    They're both of them peevish tonight, whippy as sheets of glass improperly annealed, ready to go smash at any indefinite touch in a whinning matrix of stresses-
    "Poor Roger, poor lamb, he's having an awful war."
    "All right," his head shaking, a fuming b or p that refuses to explode, "ahh, you're so clever aren't you," raving Roger, hands off the wheel to help the words out, windscreen wipers clicking right along, "you've been able to shoot back now and then at the odd flying buzz bomb, you and the boy friend dear old Nutria-"
    "Beaver."
    "Quite right, and all that magnificent esprit you lot are so justly famous for, but you haven't brought down many rockets lately have you, haha!" gurning his most spiteful pursed smile up against wrinkled nose and eyes, "any more than I, any more than Pointsman, well who's that make purer than whom these days, eh mylove?" bouncing up and down in the leather seat.
    By now her hand's reaching out, about to touch his shoulder. She rests her cheek on her own arm, hair spilling, drowsy, watching him.
    Can't get a decent argument going with her. How he's tried. She uses her silences like stroking hands to divert him and hush their corners of rooms, bedcovers, tabletops-accidental spaces… Even at the cinema watching that awful Going My Way, the day they met, he saw every white straying of her ungauntleted hands, could feel in his skin each saccade of her olive, her amber, her coffee-colored eyes. He's wasted gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo, its charred wick, virility giving way to thrift, rationed down to a little stub, the blue flame sparking about the edges in the dark, the many kinds of dark, just to see what's happening with her face. Each new flame, a new face.
    And there've been the moments, more of them lately too-times when face-to-face there has been no way to tell which of them is which. Both at the same time feeling the same eerie confusion… something like looking in a mirror by surprise but… more than that, the feeling of actually being joined… when after-who knows? two minutes, a week? they realize, separate again, what's been going on, that Roger and Jessica were merged into a joint creature unaware of itself… In a life he has cursed, again and again, for its need to believe so much in the trans-observable, here is the first, the very first real magic: data he can't argue away.
    It was what Hollywood likes to call a "cute meet," out in the neat 18th-century heart of downtown Tunbridge Wells, Roger motoring in the vintage Jaguar up to London, Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle, murky wool ATS skirt hiked up on a handle bar, most nonregulation black slip and clear pearl thighs above the khaki stockings, well-
    "Here love," brakes on in a high squeak, "it's not backstage at the old Windmill or something, you know."
    She knew. "Hmm," a curl dropping down to tickle her nose and put a bit more than the usual acid in her reply, "are they letting little boys into places like that, I didn't know."
    "Well nobody's," having learned by now to live with remarks about his appearance, "called up the Girl Guides yet either, have they."
    "I'm twenty."
    "Hurrah, that qualifies you for a ride, in this Jaguar here you see, all the way to London."
    "But I'm going the other way. Nearly to Battle."
    "Oh, round trip of course."
    Shaking hair back out of her face, "Does your mother know you're out like this."
    "My mother is the war," declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
    "That's a queer thing to say," one muddy