BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 4: Windowstill

I've been reading Eclipse by S. Meyer. Part 3, the first half of this chapter, is here.

Chapter 2 (cont'd): Evasion

Edward and Bella leave the tense scene with Charlie, and Bella says she'd like to go visit the rest of the Cullens. She implies that maybe Edward is pushing for the Florida trip because he knew about the big party happening this weekend down La Push way. Mr. Cullen denies the accusation, but maintains that Bella is not allowed to go there. Of course. Edward holds Bella down, right when she's finally coming up for air. (When I can, I try to keep my metaphors as close to sounding like a blowjob in a hot tub as possible.) Bella likens the experience (Edward's treatment of her, not a blowjob in a hot tub) to being treated as a “misbehaving child,” which is exactly what it is like. It should really trouble her that this is coming from her boyfriend. That said, I don't think he's wrong: Bella's odds of getting raped and/or killed on the Rez are probably as good as in Port Angeles, the rape capital of the Northwest. It continues to weird me out that Port Angeles embraces the publicity garnered from Twilight, but it's a recession out there, so whatever. Desperate times call for desperate cashing in on your reputation as a place where fictional heroines almost get raped.

We flash forward a few hours to Edward driving Bella home. She tells him not to go inside just yet (you are welcome) and he promises to come later (you are more welcome still). Inside, Charlie asks if Bella had “a nice time.”

He seemed ill at ease. I looked for hidden meanings in his words before I answered.

Let me read between the lines for you, Bella: he's asking if you have a good time banging Edward senseless earlier. But obviously that's not what she did. Bella says she spent the night hanging out with Alice and Jasper; they played chess. Here, S. Meyer comes the closest she has ever come to the inspired creative whimsy of say, Harry Potter:

Edward and Alice playing chess was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. They'd sat there nearly motionless, staring at the board, while Alice forsaw the moves he would make and he picked the moves she would make in return out of her head. They played most of the game in their minds; I think they'd each moved two pawns when Alice suddenly flicked her king over and surrendered. It took all of three minutes.

See, now this is the kind of compelling exploration of siblings who can see the future and read minds I want to see! Too bad it took two books to get there! I'd also still like to know what they do about having sex in Chez Cullen. Is there some kind of concrete bunker Alice and Jasper can retreat to to block everyone else out?

Speaking of sex, I'd like to officially welcome the actual word “sex” to the Twilight books. Because in the next scene Charlie tries to have “the talk” with Bella. It's moderately awkward (though S. Meyer could have really gotten some squirm out of it if she wanted to, and she didn't) but more notable for simultaneously shattering and perpetuating the weird sexlessness of these books.

Bella's desire for Edward has never really had a sexual component. It's no small wonder that she uses so much statue and painting imagery; she treats the dude like a LITERAL work of art. To paraphrase Kevin Malone: no one wants to bang a painting. I'm not saying I want Bella to say:

I took in the smooth marble span of his forehead and wanted it inside me.

But so far kissing has been the HEIGHT of sexual passion! The whole thing about Edward trying to maintain his self control doesn't explain the curious absence of any desire on Bella's part. Girl is 18, shouldn't she be rubbing up against every hard surface? After a while the sexlessness starts to feel like an intentional aspect of world-building, like Forks is this town where no one thinks about sex, no guy ever gets a hard-on, no one ever masturbates, and babies are literally flown in via stork. Your soul mate is someone who holds your hand and closed-mouth kisses you and cuddles with you in bed every night but never tries to slip his hand down your pajama pants even once. And I guess I could accept that world, if that seemed like that's what S. Meyer was trying to do. But it isn't.

There was that conversation toward the end of Twilight when Edward and Bella talked about sex without ever saying the word, using “marriage” as a kind of terrifyingly Freudian euphemism. There was Quil Ateara. The sexual undertones appear here and there, almost seeming to pop up where S. Meyer doesn't have the time or reflexes to Whack-A-Mole them back down. But again, that can't be what's really happening.

Now Charlie is explicitly talking about sexual intercourse, so one would hope this picture would clear up a little – we would start to get an idea of this series's perspective on sex. But Bella is basically only mortified by the whole exchange. When Charlie tells her “there are a lot of important things you need to know when you... well, when you're physically involved with –” Bella cuts him off yelling “Oh please, please no!”

She says she already got the overview from Renee years ago, but Charlie points out that she didn't have a boyfriend then. “I don't think the essentials have changed that much,” Bella says. (Somehow Bella strikes me as someone who would be an unimaginative sexual partner.) She and Charlie spend a while longer mumbling and looking away from each other, and Charlie doesn't seem to believe Bella when she says Edward is “old fashioned.” Finally she just says the v-word. No, not that one.

“I am a...virgin, and I have no immediate plans to change that status.”

Charlie doesn't ask the obvious question: why not? He brings up Jacob again as she flees upstairs, and Bella starts thinking about that instead of the conversation that just occurred. It's nice that she has this distraction so she doesn't have to ask herself why not either. Sex is, for the most part, apparently still too icky to contemplate for S. Meyer and Bella.

But anyway, that happened.

So Bella wanders around her room all antsy; Edward won't be coming back until Charlie has gone to bed. She thinks about calling Renee, thinks about rubbing one out (kidding), thinks about calling Angela, and then realizes she wants to go see Jacob. She decides she can get there and back before Edward notices and bolts out of the house; naturally Charlie doesn't mind she's leaving so late when he hears where she's going. Dude is so Team Jacob, he would let Bella get away with anything as long as Jacob was coming too.

“Hey dad Jacob and I are going to Seattle to join the murder gang,” I said, pulling on my jacket.
“Have a nice time, Bells.”

But she gets out to her truck in the dark and this happens.

“Gah!” I gasped in shock when I saw that I was not alone in the cab.

Edward is sitting there, holding some piece of Bella's engine. Guess he does know his way around a car after all!

“Alice called,” he murmured.

Double-crossed by Alice! Given that this situation involves Jacob it's hard to feel betrayed (by Alice) on Bella's behalf. Still, taking apart her car, Edward? Passive aggressive much? At least he realizes he's being a dick: he tells Bella her car will be operational in the morning if she doesn't want him to give her a ride. Stand back guys: Edward is becoming self-aware.

Alice maybe did not intend to screw Bella over anyway – she panicked when Bella's future disappeared a few minutes ago. Apparently Carlisle and Edward have been speculating as to why Alice's visions are obscured by the wolves. “Carlisle theorizes that it's because their lives are so ruled by their transformations. It's more an involuntary reaction than a decision. Utterly unpredictable, and it changes everything about them,” Edward says. Okay, but we've only seen two or maybe three involuntary transformations. The rest of the time it seems pretty deliberate! As Jacob and the gang get better with the self control, wouldn't Alice's visions also improve? It's totally fine that S. Meyer wants to have a bunch of strange rules and exceptions to those rules on which to build her story; that's what Inception does too. But her explanations are so flimsy, and always voiced by characters as maybes: this could be what is going on, but we're not really sure. Nobody's really sure, least of all S. Meyer.

Bella goes back to her room frustrated, and slams her window shut in the most suggestively symbolic gesture we have seen yet. The store is CLOSED, Edward. You're not getting any (cuddling, but still) tonight. But then she hesitates, sighs, and opens the window “as wide as it would go.”

You know what? I'm not even going to touch that one.

As it happens, I forecasted the conversation between Charlie and Bella back in March. My fan fiction is here.