The deceased auteur's colleagues and relations were under consistent surveillance. Their concentration of place worked in the favor of this. An employee at the Academy of Tennis of Enfield had been recruited and joined the Canadian instructor and student already inside for closer work of surveillance. In the Desert, the redoubtable Mile. Luria P----- was winning necessary confidences with her usual alacrity. An expensive source in the Subject's former department of the M.I.T. University had reported the Entertainment's probable performer's last known employment — the small Cambridge radio station which Marathe and Beausoleil had pronounced Weee — where she had donned the defacing veil of O.N.A.N.ite deformity.728-729: Lenz, running with the stolen "treasure-heavy" bags from the Chinese women.
Attentions were to be focused on the cartridge's performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur's estate.
729-735: Remy Marathe, wearing a veil, is at Ennet House, waiting to be interviewed for residency. "Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately." (He is actually on assignment trying to find the actress who starred in the Entertainment.) He takes note of the various residents. A man talks to him, asking if he is real and noting that the others in the room are actually machines, "metal people".
736-747: "Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean." Extensive background on Joelle and her relationship with Orin, her first dinner with the Incandenzas, and her thoughts on JOI's films, and on Avril I.
It had started with Orin Incandenza, the cleaning. When relations were strained, or she was seized with anxiety at the seriousness and possible impermanence of the thing in the Back Bay's co-op, the getting high and cleaning became an important exercise, like creative visualization, a preview of the discipline and order with which she could survive alone if it came to that. She would get high and visualize herself solo in a dazzlingly clean space, every surface twinkling, every possession in place. ...747-751: Marathe, posing as a drug-addicted and deformed Swiss person, meets with Pat Montesian at Ennet House. He is told that there is a veiled woman in residence. He also notices some unmarked cartridges in Pat's filing cabinet.
Orin felt Jim disliked him to the precise extent that Jim was even aware of him. Orin had spoken about his family at length, usually at night. On how no amount of punting success could erase the psychic stain of basic fatherly dislike, failure to be seen or acknowledged. ... The Orin she knew first felt his mother was the family's pulse and center, a ray of light incarnate, with enough depth of love and open maternal concern to almost make up for a father who barely existed, parentally. Jim's internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father's face any room's fifth wall. ... Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. ...
Orin hadn't been anything like her own personal Daddy. When Orin was out of the room it had never seemed like a relief. When she was home, her own Daddy never seemed to be out of the room for more than a few seconds. ... He kind of trailed her around from room to room, kind of pathetically, talking batons and low-pH chemistry. It was like when she exhaled he inhaled and vice versa. He was all through the house. He was real present at all times. His presence penetrated a room and outlasted him there. Orin's absence, whether for class or practice, emptied the co-op out. The place seemed vacuumed and buffed sterile before the cleaning even started, when he went. She didn't feel lonely in the place without him, but she did feel alone, what alone was going to feel like, and she, no one's fool, was erecting fortifications real early into it. ...
It was Orin, of course, who'd introduced them. He'd had this stubborn idea that Himself would want to use her. In the Work. She was too pretty for somebody not to want to arrange, capture. ... Joelle'd protested the whole idea. She had a brainy girl's discomfort about her own beauty and its effect on folks, a caution intensified by the repeated warnings of her personal Daddy. Even more to the immediate point, her filmic interests lay behind the lens. She'd do the capturing thank you very much. She wanted to make things, not appear in them. ... Worst, Orin's idea's real project was developmentally obvious: he thought he could somehow get to his father through her. That he pictured himself having weighty, steeple-fingered conversations with the man, Joelle's appearance and performance the subjects. A three-way bond. It made her real uneasy. ...
The man's Work was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother — the unretarded one — lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness — no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones ...
But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work — flashes of something. Very hidden and quick. Almost furtive. She noticed them only when alone, watching ...
Orin Incandenza had been only the second boy ever to approach her in a male-female way. The first had been shiny-chinned and half blind on Everclear punch, an All-Kentucky lineman for the Shiny Prize Biting Shoats team back in Shiny Prize KY, at a cookout to which the Boosters had invited the Pep and Baton girls; and the lineman had looked like a little shy boy as he confessed, by way of apologizing for almost splashing her when he threw up, that she was just too Goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror. The lineman'd confessed the whole team's paralyzing horror of the prettiness of varsity Pep's top twirler, Joelle. ...
At Joelle's first interface with the whole sad family unit — Thanksgiving, Headmaster's House, E.T.A., straight up Comm. Ave. in Enfield — Orin's Moms Mrs. Incandenza ('Please do call me Avril, Joelle') had been gracious and warm and attentive without obtruding, and worked unobtrusively hard to put everyone at ease and to facilitate communication, and to make Joelle feel like a welcomed and esteemed part of the family gathering — and something about the woman made every follicle on Joelle's body pucker and distend. ... Joelle had a weird half-vision of Avril hiking her knife up hilt-first and plunging it into Joelle's breast. ... Joelle had the queerest indefensible feeling that Avril wished her ill; she kept feeling different areas of hair stand up.
751-752: Joelle, cleaning in her upstairs room at Ennet House.
752-755: Marathe apparently is given a spot at Ennet House by Pat Montesian. He is unsure how to proceed. Also Marathe has to decide who he will give his information to (when he acquires some solid information): the AFR or Steeply? Or perhaps a little information to one and a little bit to the other?
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