Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Page B

Gordita Beach. Above them somewhere another couple were screaming at each other, out of control. Their voices, punctuating, helped to calibrate Zoyd and Frenesi’s own, though they could share no smug look meaning, “at least we’re not that bad,” because they knew better.
    Zoyd couldn’t help wondering, almost aloud, where Brock Vond, her charismatic little federal boyfriend, might be. Hiding under the bed in her room, copping rays down on the beach at Waikiki? Zoyd didn’t want to be disappointed. It was ignorance of U.S. Attorney Vond’s whereabouts, after all, a kind of reverse presence, that had helped fetch Zoyd across the Pacific Ocean in a plane whose airworthiness only grew, in memory, more doubtful.
    Sasha had been no help either. “You can’t bring me into this. I’m not going to fink on my own daughter, am I? Even if I knew anything in the first place, which I don’t—why would she tell me?”
    â€œWell—you’re her mom.”
    â€œYou got it.”
    â€œOK then, how about Brock Vond, who we both know for what he is, exactly the kind of criminal fascist you’ve been takin’ honest shots at all your life—are you gonna be loyal to somebody like that? All’s I’m askin’,” dropping into gentler, con-man tones, “is didn’t you ever meet him? See him face-to-face?”
    Sasha could hear the pleading, close enough to whining to make her careful. This poor sap could too easily settle for any least shadow of pain, seemed to want to suffer every hurtful detail. Dummy. Why waste his time so? He looked old enough to’ve been through it before, but who knew, maybe this was his maiden voyage into the green seas of jealousy. She might have asked him, but her job these days, it seemed, was just to hold her tongue, keep it sharpened and ready but withheld in a sheath of silence. Doubly frustrating because she was furious as hell with her daughter. Frenesi’s involvement with Brock, politically, was appalling enough, but she’d also once again failed to take care of business, and Sasha was as angry as she’d ever been at Frenesi’s habit, developed early in life, of repeatedly ankling every situation that it should have been her responsibility to keep with and set straight. Far as Sasha could make out, this eagerness to flee hadn’t faded any over the years, with its latest victim being Zoyd.
    Who at the moment was pretending to have a look around Honolulu. “So—I don’t see Superfuck anyplace, what happened, Steve McGarrett couldn’t solve a case, had to call him in on it?”
    â€œZoyd, better lay off, we don’t want any trouble.”
    That she could have said “we” so easily had him suddenly short of breath, numb, drawing blanks. “Trouble? Me? Hey—” unbuttoning the native shirt he’d bought, flapping his arms, “I’m clean, lady! I ain’t gonna shoot some asshole just ’cause he’s fuckin’ my wife, ’specially if it’s a federal rap,” while he really wanted just to double over in a clenched bodyfist right in front of her face . . . except that she would only shift away those eyes of blue painted blue, as the Italian oldie goes, shift them away to sea, weather, any prop in visual reach, for deploying that blue whammy was just as good—she knew it—as touching, or taking touch away.
    She withdrew into her room, slid the glass door shut, pulled the drapes. He stayed outside, contemplating the airspace between him and the ground. He was almost pissed off enough to do the deed on himself, almost. . . . He finished off the beer in his hand and with what he imagined as cold scientific interest dropped the empty can, observing it all the way down, particularly the convergence of its path with that of a pedestrian far below, a surfer carrying a board over his head. Seconds after the beer can