The introduction to our protagonist, a linguaphile and NYU (? presumably) professor who is also nameless, which I'm sure is on purpose but I'm not sure what it means. Here she discusses her class:
But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it.
On getting home and finding Detective Malloy's card in her mailbox and why she doesn't plan on calling him:
I used to keep a shopping bag full of the things that had been left on the stoop or pushed into my mailbox until the bag finally ripped at the sides. It had in it, among other things, a demo cassette of an elderly Welsh poet reciting eighteenth-century Cockney rhymes; a nude barbie doll bound and gagged that my landlord brought upstairs to give to me-it had been on the Greek Revival doorstep all afternoon, he said warily, was it mine?-and a box of condoms, each one engraved or, more accurately, embossed with my name, the letter i dotted with a heart, a gift which I knew was meant for me, which I could not with absolute certainty say about the other gifts, and which I assumed had been left by someone I'd once dated.
So, needless to say, I threw Detective Malloy's card away.
I admire the economy of words in the book, how much Moore is able to get across about the protagonist while saying so little. This is one of the few times she mentions her mother yet it tells you volumes:
He looked at the jade hairpins again, each a different shape. They had belonged to a Chinese maid in my grandmother's house in San Francicso, whom I think of tenderly as the only person, as far as I know, that my mother ever loved.
Alas, the hairpins will later be stolen by her student Cornelius following a failed, awkward sexual encounter.
On her first encounter with Malloy:
He sighed in dismissal and stood up, the chair swaying beneath him. "My ex-wife collects dolls," he said. He put the hairpins back on the table, lining them up absentmindedly, and I suddenly wondered if he was neat. I imagined that he, too, had a collection of dolls. Lined up neatly.
The poetry on the subway is a running theme. This line will turn up later, significantly:
I noticed that the Poetry in Motion poem was new. An excerpt from "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage." Walter Raleigh. "Give me my Scallop shell of quiet."
BTW, the poem's text is here (and I'm sure, many places.) It was written around 1603. The first stanza goes:
GIVE me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage ;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage ;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.
It sounded better out of context.
I love this scene where she leaves Pauline's apartment to find her student Cornelius waiting for her outside which manages to be funny and disturbing, like many parts of the book:
"Well," I said slowly, "I think that there is. Something wrong with that."
"I got words for you and shit."
I did not necessarily disbelieve him, but I still did not think it a good idea that he had followed me. And waited for me. Three hours. To give me words.
"You might not want them 'cause they be words for--you know," he said slyly.
"What?" I asked.
"You know."
"I don't know. What are you talking about?"
"Words for that. What you calls sex."
I wanted to ask him what he called it.
More Subway poetry and creeping dread:
As I walked home, I thought about the new poem in the Number Four subway. I have become so paranoid in the last month that I believe that the Poetry in Motion placards are messages for me. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally selected for me by someone who has managed to gain influence over the Transit Authority Selection Committee. The new poem is a haiku by Yosano Akiko. "Come at last to this point/I look back on my passion/And realize that I/have been like a blind man/Who is unafraid of the dark." For me, right?
.......
I'm getting better. I don't assume that every man with a moustache, wearing a suit, is a detective. I do not think the new poem in the subway is meant for me. It is a Seneca Indian song. "It's off in the distance. It came into the room." Clearly not for me.
After finding Pauline, so revealing in the way your mind reconfigures itself after a tragedy:
I was so ashamed by the things that used to make me unhappy. That I was upset because he lied to me about his wife and then went on vacation with her. That Yale University won't give me permission to use the letters of C.K. Whitney. That my father forgot me in Geneva.
And the ending which shocked me, partly because I'd seen the shitty movie and partly because, damn. Spoilers if anyone is actually reading and cares:
My face. My throat. My breasts. My breastesses. Malloy would know when he saw my hands. My arms. he would know. How I fought.
He lifted himself from me. I heard him unlock the door. For a moment, I felt the cool air from the river, smelling of fish. Smelling of Eve [reference to the old, unfunny joke Rodriguez told her a page ago about God never getting the smell out of the fish.] It made me shudder. I was cold.
There is an essay on the language of the dying. The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death. And I will be lucky if I die before he returns.
Give me my Scallop shell of quiet.
You know, they did not print the whole of the Indian song in the subway. Only a few lines. But I know the poem.
"It's off in the distance. It came into the room. It's here in the circle."
I know the poem.
She knows the poem.
I also loved the McGuffin with the rubber hand someone left below her mailbox. The killer takes souvenirs. She (and the reader) think, hands? It's a message? Nope, he takes something else, something worse. What did the hand mean, then? Dunno but sufficiently diverting and disquieting.
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