As things
developed, she was to have all manner of revelations. Hardly
about Pierce Inverarity, or herself; but about what remained
yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the
sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of
an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of
focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently
conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive
girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs
of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.
When it turned out to be Pierce she'd happily pulled out the
pins and curlers and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty
avalanche, only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely
hair turned, through some sinister sorcery, into a great unanchored
wig, and down he fell, on his ass. But dauntless, perhaps using
on of his many credit cards for a shim, he'd slipped the lock
on her tower door and come up the conchlike stairs, which, had
true guile come more naturally to him, he'd have done to begin
with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never
escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City they somehow
wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish
exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled
"Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail
girls with heartshaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners
in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry
which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly
to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures,
all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained
in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse,
had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed;
she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered
if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the
tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never
dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that
way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those
specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important
ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known,
then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only
been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower,
was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken
her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so
desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time
to think, soon realized that her tower, its height and architecture,
are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her
where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her
from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except
gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to
understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count
its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take
up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk
jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance
no proof against its magic, what else?
