BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 3: What Dreams May Come

I've just started reading New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer. Entries about Twilight, the first book can be found in sidebar. Previous entries for New Moon can be found in the directory (now with pull-quotes).

Chapter 2: Stitches

So that stuff about the “six suddenly ravenous vampires,” alliterative though it was, bothered me a little. I think the problem was I immediately started doing vampire math: there are seven members of the Cullen family, and six of them are ravenous. So I just assumed Edward was the one she was leaving out. But we know that Alice was able to be around Bella when she was bleeding to death in Phoenix (and we will see shortly that she mostly keeps her head on straight in this fiasco). But neither of them seem to be the vampire Bella had in mind, because the first sentence of the next chapter is: “Carlisle was the only one who stayed calm.” So make that “four feverishly ravenous vampires,” one calm vampire, one Edward and one Alice. I know that doesn’t stand out on the page as much, but it has the advantage of being true at least.

The next sentence is the Big Love Season 1 poster of sentences: “Centuries of experience in the emergency room were evident in his quiet, authoritative voice.”


There’s only one thing wrong with these pictures! Centuries of experience! I mean, I don’t think they had ERs in the 1600s, but whatever! I like it anyway!

MACDUFF:
Oh, horror, horror, horror!
Banquo, awake and call thou 911!

The room clears of extraneous Cullens—Emmett and Rosalie drag the still-crazy Jasper outside and Esme excuses herself because of all the blood. Alice tries to help Carlisle as he and Edward carry Bella to the kitchen table. (She runs for Carlisle’s doctor bag and is back before they get in the room—if the Cullens move around their house at super-speed all the time, do they ever smash into each other in the hallways?) Edward is pissed off, and basically stands around doing nothing and seething, trying to nobly resist the urge to kill Bella (glass fucking houses, am I right?) until Alice and Carlisle finally persuade him to leave and go find Jasper. Bella is simultaneously in shock and humiliated—one of those understandably inexplicable reactions most people have to situations like this one (okay, situations not exactly like this one).

Carlisle numbs up Bella’s arm and starts taking the glass shards out of the gash. Bella notices Alice smile apologetically and slip out of the room too, leaving her alone with Carlisle. Bella is amazed at his Buddha-like calm and ability to resist the blood even Alice couldn’t stand to be around. “Clearly, this was much more difficult than he made it seem.” It’s almost like Bella is disappointed that he can resist killing her so easily! You don’t want to kill me? Why not? My blood is so sexy! Bella’s developing a weird complex.

She continues to fail to understand why Carlisle doesn’t just murder people and be done with it. “It didn’t make sense to me—the years of struggle and self-denial he must have spent to get to the point where he could endure this so easily.” Um, what kind of vampire is Bella going to become if all this moral stuff doesn’t make any sense to her? It would be kind of awesome if someone finally vamps Bella and she turns into a psycho killer and the Cullens have to kill her at the end of these books. Okay, that’s probably not going to happen. Don’t tell me if I’m right. But wouldn’t it be cool if I was right? I hope Mike Newton gets it first.

So Bella asks a lot of questions and Carlisle gives a lot of answers. For a while he’s pretty reasonable. He enjoys when his “enhanced abilities”—sometimes even his sense of smell—can help save a person who otherwise would have died. He finishes pulling the glass out and starts stitching Bella up. She tells him he tries “very hard to make up for something that was never [his] fault.” Carlisle didn’t choose this lifestyle, after all. Whoops, that’s an unintentional parallel to the gay community! Or like, the David Fisher gay community, at least!

“I don’t know that I’m making up for anything,” he disagreed lightly. “Like everything in life, I just had to decide to do with what I was given.”

Okay. Given by whom, you might be asking. That’s right: Carlisle is about to get religious on us. He starts talking about his proto-Pat Robertson father as he puts all of the bloody gauze in a crystal bowl and sets it on fire. Interesting imagery going on here.

“So I didn’t agree with my father’s particular brand of faith. But never, in the nearly four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other.”

Note the capital-g “God.” Also, huh? Bella is just as shocked as we are that the conversation has taken such a turn, and we get a paragraph of Bella’s religious history. It’s pretty stereotypical—almost deliberately so. Bella is the standard non-denominational teen of the aughts. Charlie calls himself a Lutheran, “but Sundays he worshiped by the river with a fishing pole in his hand” (Bella was channeling Tom Waits for a second there). Renee tries out churches like some people try fad diets. It feels like we’re being set up for a religious conversion here. Secular girl finds God through the vampires? I worry about where this is going.



Carlisle goes on to say that “by all accounts we’re damned regardless. But I hope, maybe foolishly, that we’ll get some measure of credit for trying.” By all accounts? By what accounts? Maybe I haven’t read the Bible enough, but I can’t think of a single section that even touches on the eventual fate of vampires. Even in the Talmud! Also, uh, aren’t you guys fucking immortal? The afterlife is not so much a concern for you, right?

Bella says she doesn’t think it’s foolish to hope for heavenly rewards for vampires in the hereafter. Well, that makes one of us, Bella! Apparently even the other Cullens don’t agree—“Edward is with me up to a point,” Carlisle says. Which means Alice IS an atheist! I was right!


So where is the schism between Carlisle and Edward? Edward believes in God, heaven, and hell. But not for vampires. (And not because they are immortal and therefore it’s beside the point.) “You see,” Carlisle explains, “he thinks we’ve lost our souls.”

Hey, Edward—you’re a nice guy and all, but that is maybe the dumbest fucking thing I have ever heard. I mean, okay, there is a rich history of semi-batshit religious philosophy you can use to back up your ideas about the existence in the first place of souls, but your notion in the second place that becoming a vampire somehow gets rid of your soul is totally made up! It’s based on nothing! Bella should just say that she believes becoming a vampire gives you an EXTRA SOUL, so you can go to heaven TWICE, because such an opinion is just as valid as Edward’s.

Still, Bella is like, well, fuck, no wonder he doesn’t want to make me a vampire. Carlisle says he has to believe there is “something more” for someone like Edward. Being a nearly invincible super-powered vampire for all time isn’t good enough for you? You also need heaven? If you give a mouse a cookie, huh?

There’s some weird punctuation going on as Carlisle articulates the new wrinkle in our Central Philosophical Issue.

“But if I believed as he does…” He looked down at me with unfathomable eyes. “If you believed as he did. Could you take away his soul?”

It’s also a weird echo of the “would you want me to kill myself?” argument from the last chapter, but it makes even less sense. Edward is apparently some kind of scientist in the field of souls. Soulologist. Souloist. Ha.

Then Carlisle tells a weird story about how Edward’s mom told him to save Edward as they were both dying of the Spanish Influenza (it wiped out his whole family). We learn that his mom was named Elizabeth Masen and Edward once had green eyes. (It’s a three page story, and there’s very little to take away from it!) Carlisle didn’t exactly know how to make Edward a vampire, so he sort of had to improvise. This is after a few decades with the Volturi, right? Nobody ever brought it up, at a cocktail party or something? The moral of the story is that despite Edward’s stupid ideas about souls, Carlisle doesn’t regret saving him.

Speaking of our resident Souloist, he reappears to take Bella home. Alice takes her to change clothes first—her shirt is covered in blood. “I’ll get you something less macabre to wear,” Alice says. Vocab points for Alice! Upstairs, Bella tries to get a read on the severity of the situation, and Alice tells her Jasper is embarrassed. Bella wants him to know she’s not mad at all. Diplomacy points for Bella! Edward is all weird and dead-eyed and dead-voiced when they return. Alice makes sure Bella takes her presents—points to Alice for not being upset that her party got ruined. Nobody is happy, of course; when she and Edward get in the truck Bella rips the bow off her new stereo and throws it on the ground. Ouch.

Bella tries to apologize for bleeding, and Edward gets angry. He launches into this speech about how if she’d been dating Mike Newton none of this would have happened. Bella’s like, fucking Mike fucking Newton? “Mike Newton would be a hell of a lot healthier for you to with,” Edward says. Bella counters that she’d rather die.

“Don’t be melodramatic, please.”
“Well, fuck you,” I replied.

Okay, well, that’s what she should have said. The melodramatic pot is calling the melodramatic kettle melodramatic, you know? Edward doesn’t want to stay the night (melodramatic much?) So Bella invokes her birthday. They kiss, and it seems to cheer him up. She goes in the front door, and he sneaks to her room. After Bella talks to Charlie, she goes to the bathroom where she keeps her special pajamas for nights when Edward is around. Don’t get too excited—it’s nothing you’d see on Ashley Greene, say—just a “matching tank top and cotton pants.” Boring. If Alice slept, she’d go to bed in something involving straps and lace. And handcuffs, obviously. Bella goes to her room where Edward is waiting:

“Hi,” he said. His voice was sad. His eyes were wallowing.

Is this what you thought of, too?

She opens her presents: Carlisle and Esme bought her vouchers for plane tickets so she and Edward could visit Renee in Jacksonville. How is that going to be feasible? Bella points out that Edward will have to stay inside all day, it’s so sunny—he says he doesn’t mind. I think Renee probably will though, right?

Then she opens the present from Edward (and presumably Alice). It’s an unmarked CD; Edward puts it on.

I listened, speechless and wide-eyed. I knew he was waiting for my reaction, but I couldn’t talk. Tears welled up, and I reached to wipe them away before they could spill over.

Edward made a CD of his piano compositions! Awwwww! Good to see Alice found a use for her four-track recorder she bought back in the late 70s to make Yoko Ono-style field recordings. Bella’s arm starts hurting, and Edward shoots off super-fast to get her some painkillers.

People keep predicting Charlie’s death in this chapter—Edward wanted Bella to change out of her blood covered shirt a few pages ago because he’s worried she’ll “give Charlie a heart attack.” Now, Bella doesn’t want Edward to leave her bedroom for the Tylenol—“Charlie wasn’t exactly aware that Edward frequently stayed over. In fact, he would have had a stroke if that fact were brought to his attention.” Why does everyone think this dude is so fragile? He’d be pissed if you and Edward were actually fucking, but if he found out you just cuddled every night he’d probably just be confused.

Charlie doesn’t catch Edward anyway; he leaves and returns with pills and a glass of water so fast that the door he left open hasn’t swung back and closed yet. I get that vampires are fast, but they can also make water come out of a faucet at super speed too?

Edward seems distracted—he tells Bella he’s been thinking about “right and wrong.” Uh-oh. You know you’re in trouble when this motherfucker starts getting all moral. Bella tries to take his mind off it—they start making out and Bella pushes it further. “I was clearly beginning to cross his cautious lines.” So what does that mean exactly? Are clothes coming off? Details, Bella! “His body was cold through the thin quilt, but I crushed myself against him eagerly. Dry humping! We’re getting somewhere! Bella possibly has an orgasm:

I collapsed back into my pillow, gasping, my head spinning. Something tugged at my memory, elusive, on the edges.

Is Bella flashing back to some prior sexual experience? Has it been that long since she’s gotten off? She tries to get Edward to start up again, but he’s having self-control (read: erection) problems. “Which is tempting you more, my blood or my body?” Bella asks. That’s literally the most overtly sexual line we’ve seen so far. Bella puts her sore arm against Edward’s cold, ice pack body and tries to sleep—but then she realizes what was tugging at her memory before.

Last spring, when he’d had to leave me to throw James off my trail, Edward had kissed me goodbye, not knowing when—or if—we would see each other again. This kiss had that same almost painful edge for some reason I couldn’t imagine. I shuddered into unconsciousness, as if I were already having a nightmare.

Okay, so probably not an orgasm.