BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 14: You've Made Your Bed Now Fuck In It

Dana Stevens recently referred to the experience of watching Sex And The City 2 as "wallowing in a luxurious abyss." I don't know that any of New Moon is particularly luxurious (without the Cullens around we've been free of ostentatious displays of wealth, which is probably something I should appreciate but it will likely be one of those situations Joni Mitchell was taling about) but we have definitely been wallowing in an abyss for a while. For some reason I feel like we're climbing out, though. The Jacob/Sam/Cult situation is reaching a climax (at least I hope it is) and this new Victoria thread hints at something other than a lot of cock-teasing and adrenaline-chasing. We have been getting our cocks teased for too long. I'm not going to make reference to climaxes again, thank you very much. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 11: Cult

Part of the reason I feel better about this chapter is because it has a nice elliptical structure. This is basically what happens:

1. Bella fears Victoria
2. Bella tries to tell Charlie about Sam Uley
3. Jacob confronts Bella
4. Bella tries to tell Charlie about Sam Uley again
5. Bella fears Victoria again

So points for that. But like Bella's recurring nightmare, we're not out of the woods yet. The chapter opens with an awkward rhyme:

Each time that I opened my eyes to the morning light and realized I'd lived through another night was a surprise to me.

The bizarre phrase "to the morning light" and the general meter of the line make the rhyme sound intentional, which is scary. Accidental rhyme happens all the time. But doing it on purpose is kind of a mystifying choice.

Bella is very preoccupied with the Victoria thing hanging over her head; admirably she seems more concerned with Charlie's safety than her own. She can't run away because she can't be sure Victoria won't follow her scent back to Charlie's house anyway, and she can't go to Renee because that would put her at risk too. She should just start hanging out with her enemies, right? Put in some double shifts at Newton's. Call up that bitch Lauren!

The worry was eating a hole in my stomach. Soon I would have matching punctures.

She's referring to the metaphorical chest hole, but I think this new thing might actually be an ulcer, Bella. Get that checked out.

She's also been missing Jacob more than ever: "It was bad enough before I was scared silly," she says. That's barely an admission of the fact that she overreacted to the whole Edward/breakup situation, an admission that things are finally serious and worthy of anguish now, but let's pretend it is so that we can all start to like Bella again, okay? Also, "scared silly?" Why does Bella talk like a youth pastor? You're not selling Bella as Ms. Secular USA, S. Meyer. That is not how we talk!

It was bad enough before I was fucking scared shitless, but now that I had this cunt Victoria to deal with I needed Jacob more than ever.

Her theory that Jacob has been distant because he's been doing an intervention with Embry falls apart when he continues to not call. She doesn't want to believe that he's given up on her. Well, I do! You are such an asshole, Bella! You've fucked with Jacob's head and dick for months (and as rape-y and terrible I find Jacob, that doesn't excuse your behavior), you've essentially admitted as much (in your occasional moments of lucidity, when you're not burying the truth in layers of denial), and now you have to deal with the consequences!

Except not really, because obviously Jacob is not ignoring Bella because he's realized that she isn't worth the trouble; it's probably quite the opposite. But if there was any justice in this book, that would be why! I know, I just said we should forgive Bella. But it is so hard sometimes! That's what she said!

(Bella is assured by the fact that since she has a huge target on her back Jacob is safer staying away, but she only feels like this for about 30 seconds before elaborately justifying that possibility away in order to visit him.)

One day Bella's subconscious comes back (remember that asshole?) and delivers "a verdict it must have been working on for some time without my knowledge." That's some brain you got there, Bella.

"Not just a hat rack, my friend."

(Thanks for the tip, Kim. That's what she said.)

Bella's brain has concluded that Jacob must have fallen in with Sam Uley and his gang of merry men. Well, yeah. I never know if we're supposed to be solving these mysteries along with Bella or if we're supposed to be way ahead of her. It's probably the latter, since I doubt we should be thinking of our narrator as a moron. But why is our narrator such a moron? To be fair, Bella confesses that her conclusion is "embarrassingly obvious." She also says "Holy crow, I knew exactly what was going on with Jacob." Holy crow, Batman?

I get that S. Meyer is a Mormon, and when she hits her hand with a hammer she probably yells "sugarplums and daisies!" But she must know that the rest of us don't. (She must know now, having hung out with Kristen Stewart for more than a few seconds.) In the interest of writing a believable character then, can we get some fucking curse words in here or just cut it with the Leave It To Beaver euphemisms altogether? Similarly:

He hadn't given up on me at all, I realized with a rush of feeling.

Why doesn't S. Meyer have the guts to just come out and admit that Bella had an orgasm? Or is that not what that is?

Bella decides to go to La Push, potentially to kidnap Jacob. "I'd once seen a PBS show on deprogramming the brainwashed," she says. I know there's a lot of bullshit on public TV, Bella, but are you sure that wasn't an article on Prison Planet or something?

She calls Charlie at the police station first, and when she tells him her suspicions about what's going on at La Push he seems to take her seriously. But when she implicates Sam Uley, Charlie rises to his defense, the same way he used to defend the Cullens. Charlie doesn't get enough credit for being particularly intuitive. Even with incomplete information he comes to the right conclusion. As we say in the social sciences, he is a skilled user of heuristics. (The other day it occurred to me that I now have a Bachelor of the ARTS degree in Political SCIENCE, a sort of unconscious admission of Poli-Sci's place as a particularly dubious science.)

Charlie is busy anyway, he says "two tourists have gone missing off a trail outside crescent lake." That's funny, we have a Crescent Lake in my hometown too, but we capitalize proper nouns there. Every town is different, I guess. But there's blood on the tracks this time, so the hunt for the wolves has intensified.

He hangs up and this happens:

I stared at the phone for a long minute. What the hell, I decided.

She says hell? Hooray! I should start counting the scarce and precious swears. Maybe YA fiction is like a PG movie - are you allowed a set number of swears? Or do you think S. Meyer has personally set a number she finds acceptable? She seems like the type. It's not like YA Fiction has an analogue to the MPAA to regulate such a thing, so the latter is more likely.

She calls Billy, who actually answers, but gets the expected reply that Jacob isn't in. So she drives to La Push, determined to wait him out. Once on the Rez, she runs into Quil walking down the side of the road. She picks him up, and I half expected Quil to offer oral sex in exchange for the ride, or at least make jokes about getting a "ride" from Bella, but he's too depressed. He'd gone looking for Jacob, but lost the Uley Gang's trail in the woods. That's right: Jacob is one of them now. According to Quil he adapted rather quickly, not disappearing for days like the others. So perhaps he is very good at being a wolf? Quil and Bella speculate that it might be drugs, but neither of them can really believe it. Like Jacob once was, Quil is afraid he'll be next.

I can't wait for all of this to stop being mysterious; I feel like we've been solving this case for years. This investigation is like a season of The Wire, only not as good and with no Omar. If this story had an Omar it was Laurent, and we've (probably) seen the last of him. I think in this analogy, Edward is Bunk, Emmett is McNulty, Alice is Kima, and Bella is Stringer Bell (heh, but really). Sam Uley is Chris Partlow and Jacob is Michael. Carlisle is too morally upright to exist.

Bella drops off Quil and parks outside Chez Black; she didn't bring anything to do, which kind of confounds me. I generally carry a bag full of books and magazines and paper and pens at all times, so great is my fear of having to sit somewhere for very long with only my thoughts to occupy me. It's actually stupid because I come up with my best ideas when I am doing nothing, but maybe on some level I am afraid that won't be true anymore if I force it. It ends up not being an issue for Bella, because Jacob shows up after a few minutes.

He cut his hair. I'd actually forgotten his hair was ever long, given how inundated we've been with Eclipse stills, so it wasn't as significant to me as it perhaps should have been? What does a haircut signify? He also appears to have aged a few years, he's all veins and tendons, but the important thing is he looks much more like an asshole. His facial features have somehow rearranged to make him look harsher, like Heidi Montag, post-op. "There was a darkness to Jacob now," Bella says.

One less shitty wig for Summit Entertainment to fuck up, am I right?

Mistah Kurtz is flanked by his gang banger buddies, and everyone is staring at Bella like "fuck you, cunt." Everyone but Sam Uley, who apparently looks like he doesn't want to kill Bella at all. So naturally he's the one she concentrates her anger on. (Bella hates people who don't want to hate-fuck her.) She thinks about how much she'd like to kick the shit out of him and for once she wants to be a vampire solely for the purpose of getting some vengeance. Now might be a good time to draw a parallel between Bella and Victoria, but since S. Meyer doesn't I won't either! Bella requests a private audience with Jacob, and everyone looks to Sam for permission. Boss Wolf gives the okay, and the boys head into the house while Bella and Jacob walk around the corner.

Jacob tells Bella he was wrong about the Sam situation, but he can't tell her what is really going on. He says they can't be friends anymore, and it plays like a mirror image of the breakup scene with Edward earlier in the book. In terms of the Monomyth, maybe this isn't Edward's Refusal Of The Call so much as it is everyone's Refusal Of Bella. I would feel bad for her again, but this time she deserves it.

"It wasn't like I thought it was. This isn't Sam's fault. He's helping me as much as he can." His voice turned brittle and he looked over my head, past me, rage burning out from his eyes.

"He's helping you," I repeated dubiously. "Naturally."

But Jacob didn't seem to be listening.

Uh, it doesn't seem like YOU are listening, Bella! Jacob might have a mild form of epilepsy - he keeps shaking and can't seem to control himself. That's domestic abuse parallel #2,415 if you weren't uncomfortable enough already. Eventually Jacob tells Bella that if she wants to blame someone, she should blame the "filthy, reeking, bloodsuckers" she loves so much. So clearly Jacob has come a long way from being blissfully skeptical of his father's beliefs. But Bella pretends not to know what he is talking about, and Jacob tries to clarify while still avoiding the word "Cullen" out of deference to Bella. Which is kind of weird. He's being a jerk to Bella, seemingly on purpose a la Edward, but not on this one subject? Emma "people can imagine breasts but not asses" logic going on here.

Bella wonders if the Uley Gang has formed around mutual hatred for vampires, and interestingly Jacob's rhetoric does reflect that of groups formed in opposition to some other group or race: Know-Nothings, White Supremacists. Bella asks what he's blaming the Cullens for, and he replies "for existing."

Edward's imaginary disembodied voice shows up, urging Bella to calm Jacob down. She doesn't understand why the hallucination is happening now; "There was no adrenaline, no danger." But on some level obviously she knows she is in danger, since she Ghost Edward is a product of her "unconscious mind." So she knows he is dangerous but doesn't want to believe it (#2,416). Bella mentions Quil and Jacob gets angrier.

"He won't be next," Jacob muttered to himself. "He can't be. It's over now."

He ends up punching a tree, and it breaks and falls over. I know I said there is no phallic imagery in this book, but this is an interesting moment, don't you think?

Jacob tells Bella to go home, and she asks if they are breaking up. Jacob laughs, so maybe he understands the situation better than I gave him credit for. "Loneliness" chokes in Bella's throat.

"I'm sorry, Bella," Jacob said each word distinctly in a cold voice that didn't seem to belong to him.

What the hell could that sound like? "I'm. Sorry. Bella." She briefly entertains the idea of leaving him alone to deal with his shit before resorting to using sex as a weapon instead, saying maybe she could change how she feels about Jacob after all. Luckily Jacob still kicks her sorry ass off his property, though he seems very angry with himself. "I'm not what I was before," he says. "I'm not good."

"What?" I stared at him, confused and appalled. "What are you saying? You're much better than I am, Jake. [No one is contesting that!-Ed.] You are good! Who told you that you aren't? Sam? It's a viscous lie, Jacob!"

Oy at that last sentence. Who the hell employs a phrase like that in the heat of the moment? Talk about the gentle cadences of an earlier century, huh? Jacob leaves, and he has enough of a lead on Bella that when she gets back to the house only Billy is still there. He seems to feel really bad but he still more or less kicks her out.

Bella gets rained on a lot on her way home, and if constant references to being wet weren't TWSS-worthy enough, there's this:

I'd thought Jake had been healing the hole in me - or at least plugging it up...He'd just been carving out his own hole.

Charlie's waiting for Bella on the porch, and "a kind of horrified recognition" registers on his face as he understands what happened. She tells him Sam Uley said she and Jacob can't be friends anymore, which is really not true at all, but it prompts Charlie to call Billy. Bella overhears a tense conversation in which Billy seems to be blaming Bella and her cock-teasing for the breakup. Charlie doesn't want Bella getting all depressed again, and he comes close to threatening to kick Jacob's ass. Team Charlie!

Bella goes to bed perplexed and depressed. She breaks her own rules and thinks of Edward until she cries herself to sleep. Then she has a dream in which the new, asshole Jacob shows up in the forest and then gradually morphs into Edward. Sure, now that Jacob has become a moody prick intent on hurting Bella "for her own good" he kind of reminds me of Edward, too.