murmured, 'Darling, we're being so heuristically creative,' at the penultimate moment of ecstasy, Baby, feeling nothing, could reply, 'Constating, my baby,' in unison with her prototype the ancient Gwendolen on page 185, and thus maintain quite literally the fiction that was the essential core of Piper's being.
But if Baby met Piper's requirements as the ideal lover the reverse was not true. Baby found it unflattering to know that she was merely a stand-in for a figment of his imagination and not even his own imagination but that of the real author of Pause. Knowing this, Piper's ardour took on an almost ghoulish quality so that Baby, staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, had the horrid feeling that she might just as well not have been present. At such moments she saw herself as something that had coalesced from the pages of Pause, a phantom of the opus which was Piper's pretentious name for what he was now doing in Work In Regress and intended to continue in another version. Her future seemed destined to be the recipient of his derived feelings, a sexual artefact compiled from words upon pages to be ejaculated into and then set aside while he put pen to paper. Even the routine of their days had altered. Piper insisted on writing each morning and driving through the heat of the day and stopping early at a motel so that he could read to her what he had written that morning and then relate.
'Can't you just say 'fuck' once in a while?' Baby asked one evening at a motel in Tuscaloosa. 'I mean that's what we're doing so why not name it right?'
But Piper wouldn't. The word wasn't in Pause and 'relating' was an approved term in The Moral Novel.
'What I feel for you...' he began but Baby stopped him.
'So I read the original. I don't need to see the movie.'
'As I was saying,' said Piper, 'what I feel for you is...'
'Zero,' said Baby, 'absolute zero. You've got more feelings towards that ink bottle you're always sticking your pen in than you have towards me.'
'Well, I like that...' said Piper.
'I don't,' said Baby and there was a new note of desperation in her voice. For a moment she thought of leaving Piper there in the motel and going off on her own. But the moment passed. She was tied by the irrevocable act of the fire and her disappearance to this literary mongol whose notion of great writing was to step backwards in time in futile imitation of novelists long dead. Worst of all, she saw in Piper's obsession with past glories a mirror-image of herself. For forty years she too had waged a war with time and had by surgical recession maintained the outward appearance of the foolish beauty who had been Miss Penobscot 1935. They had so much in common and Piper served to remind her of her own stupidity. All that was gone now, the longing to be young again and the sense of knowing she was still sexually attractive. Only death remained and the certainty that when she died there would be no call for the embalmer. She had seen to that in advance.
She had seen to more than that. She had already died by fire, by water, by the bizarre circumstances of her own romantic madness. Which gave her something more in common with Piper. They were both nonentities moving in a limbo of monotonous motels, he with his ledgers and her body but she with nothing more than a sense of meaninglessness and a desperate futility. That night while Piper related, Baby, inanimate beneath him, made up her mind. They would leave the beaten track of motels and drive down dirt roads into the hinterland of the Deep South. What happened to them there would be beyond her choosing.
What was happening to Frensic was definitely beyond his choosing. He sat at the Formica-topped table in Cynthia Bogden's kitchen and tried to eat his cornflakes and forget what had occurred towards dawn. Driven frantic by Cynthia's omnivorous sexuality he had proposed to the woman. It had seemed in his whisky-sodden state the only defence against a fatal coronary and a means of getting her to tell him who had sent her Pause. But Miss Bogden had been too overwhelmed to discuss minor matters of that sort in the middle of the night. In the end Frensic had snatched a
