Read Online Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - Free Book Online

it he could find a way, security or
     not. His reluctance is not Pirate’s own over the machinery of Operation Black Wing.
     It looks more like shame. Wasn’t Mexico’s face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted?
     eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer’s reflex . . .
     hmm. Knowing Bloat, perhaps that’s what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young
     man, several poses—more wholesome than anything this war’s ever photographed . . .
     life, at least. . . .
    There’s Mexico’s girl, just entering the room. He spots her immediately, the clarity
     around her, the absence of smoke and noise . . . is he seeing auras now? She catches
     sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enormous . . . dark-lashed, no make-up or none
     Pirate can see, her hair worn in a roll down to the shoulders—what the hell’s she
     doing in a mixed AA battery? She ought to be in a NAAFI canteen, filling coffee cups.
     He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for
     them both that asks nothing but their safety, and that he’ll always manage to describe
     as something else—“concern,” you know, “fondness. . . .”
    In 1936, Pirate (“a T. S. Eliot April” she called it, though it was a colder time
     of year) was in love with an executive’s wife. She was a thin, speedy stalk of a girl
     named Scorpia Mossmoon. Her husband Clive was an expert in plastics, working out of
     Cambridge for Imperial Chemicals. Pirate, the career soldier, was having a year or
     two’s relapse or fling outside in civilian life.
    He’d got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered
     with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq,
     restricted to quarters after sundown—98% venereal rate anyway—one sunburned, scroungy
     unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east
     of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating
     under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time—even so there
     had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by.
    Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical fantasies about the
     glamorous silken-calved English realworld he’d felt so shut away from. They got together
     while Clive was away on a trouble-shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein.
     The symmetry of this helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties
     as strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight of
     him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone’s employee). She found
     him touching in his ignorance of everything—partying, love, money—felt worldly and
     desperately caring for this moment of boyhood among his ways imperialized and set
     (he was 33), his pre-Austerity, in which Scorpia figured as his Last Fling—though
     herself too young to know
that
, to know, like Pirate, what the lyrics to “Dancing in the Dark” are
really
about. . . .
    He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But there are times when it’s agony
     not to go to her feet, knowing she won’t leave Clive, crying
you’re my last chance . . . if it can’t be you then there’s no more time. . . .
Doesn’t he wish, against all hope, that he
could
let the poor, Western-man’s timetable go . . . but how does a man . . . where does
     he even begin, at age 33. . . . “But that’s just
it,
” she’d have laughed, not so much annoyed (she
would have
laughed) as tickled by the unreality of the problem—herself too lost at the manic
     edge of him, always at
engage
, so taking, cleaving her (for more than when jerking off into an Army flannel in
     the Persian Gulf was some collar of love’s nettles now
at
him, at his cock), too unappeasable for her not to give in to the insanity of, but
     too