From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Friday, May 11, 2001 11:47 PM Twenty-first post Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 1 of 3) Now that the ODV has been gotten out of the way, Banks can return to the story. This chapter again begins with the narrator's history, presumably as a dream of Orr's. Andrea moves into her mother's house; it's a good time in the narrator's life. She gets him to like some classical music. He forgoes hang-gliding and goes parachuting. He goes into partnership with two other people and they start their own business. His politics are getting less radical, too; he joins the Labor Party and writes letters for Amnesty International. His friend's wife catches his friend in an affair; the narrator tries to smooth things over. It seems strange to him to try to persuade her not to leave him over sleeping with another woman "almost unreal, almost comical at times." After all, both he and Andrea are still regularly sleeping with other people. "Was it the slip of paper that made the difference, the living together, the children, or just the belief in the vows, the institution, in a religion?" What pathos. His friend and his friend's wife are certainly not described as the kind of people who have much belief in institutions, religion, slips of paper, or any of the other bogeymen that the narrator throws up. Hidden in that list are all the life experiences the narrator doesn't have: the living together, the children, the acknowledged commitment to each other. Still, he thinks that it shows "how fragile even the most secure-seeming relationship could be, if you went against whatever rules you'd agreed." In other words, it scares him off of trying to change the rules with Andrea. We finally find out the genesis of the handkerchief. He's cleaning out his car and he finds the silk scarf she'd given him to use that day at the tower; it has a blood stain dried on it in a rough circle. He tries to clean it but can't, offers it to her, she tells him to keep it, changes her mind, takes it and returns it, cleaned spotlessly, with his initials monogra mmed on it. She wouldn't tell him how she and her mother cleaned it: it's a "family secret". He keeps it carefully ever after. This is a potently symbolic scene; Banks is back to writing excellently once again. The circle of dried blood is an O, the same as the wound on Orr's chest that defines him, the same O that Arrol monograms on the handkerchief in the dream of The Bridge, the same O that her lipstick leaves on that handkerchief. In real life, it's the mark of sex, a female mystery, a lunar mystery, a female "family secret". She knows how to wipe it away as if it had never been. He can not. Therefore, she has control over his identity -- his initials -- he has no control over hers. She calls him a fetishist for keeping it so carefully. Meanwhile he's thinking of it as a symbol of their past history, their love, their unstated commitment, like a knight's favor -- but it's also a symbol of his fear of a woman using sex to trap or confine him, to control him; the wound that takes away his strength. Anyways, I could go on for pages about that handkerchief -- one probably could write a Ph.D. thesis on it -- so I'll just stop.