BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 25: The Denial Twist

We're coming up on the end of New Moon, just in time for everyone to be sick of Eclipse already. Good timing, Zac. I know we lost a few people a few weeks back when we were hurtling at breakneck speed through all the wolf bullshit, but we'll be on the same page soon, and I've got a few ideas in terms of format changes that will make it a little easier to keep up and to read this blog in general. So look forward to that! No Reasonable Adult Left Behind is my new motto.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 22: Flight

Last time our heroes, or rather our fucking cowards, stood idly by while the Volturi killed a few dozen people. Demetri now orders them to wait inside Volturi HQ until sundown, to sit and think about what they've done. Edward's voice is “rough – if velvet can be rough – with anxiety” (oy vey) as he asks if Bella is all right. She's having a bit of a breakdown, a worse one than normal – her teeth are chattering and the room is spinning and she's describing a “ripping sound” she eventually realizes is herself, sobbing.

“I think she's having hysterics. Maybe you should slap her,” Alice suggested.

Alice is already earning my favor back, but I couldn't stay mad at her for long anyway. Bella is angry at herself for being so upset about the deaths of dozens of people. “Who knew how much time I had to look at [Edward's] face?” she says. I thought Alice was going to slap her?

This chapter is maddeningly stupid. As our characters journey back to Forks, Edward makes increasingly clear gestures of love and affection toward Bella, who does everything in her power to rationalize said gestures away. There is literally no way everyone reading the book does not understand that Edward loves Bella, that his departure was a misguided attempt at protecting her. Yet our narrator is still under the impression that he'll take off when the plane lands. Everyone reading the book knows the air-clearing conversation will happen whenever Bella or Edward opens her or his mouth. But S. Meyer is determined to drag it out. (Edward spends most of their day in the Volturi waiting room talking to Alice instead of, you know, the girl he loves and thought was dead. “Oh, wow, Bella, you're alive? Cool. Anyway, I'm going to go talk to my sister.”) Bella's extended cock-teasing of Jacob is now mirrored by this very chapter, except where Jacob expected sex at the end, all we are expecting is a tedious scene of exposition. We're getting cock-teased by someone we don't even really want to fuck! Can we get this over with, please?

But anyway, back at Volturi HQ Bella is lamenting the fact that her tears are clouding her vision when she should be looking at Edward. FUCK YOU BELLA.

“All those people,” I sobbed.
“I know,” he whispered.
“It's so horrible.”
“Yes, it is. I wish you hadn't had to see that.”

Right, because that's what is important, you self-absorbed pieces of shit. Jesus! The above conversation is the closest we get as far as absolution goes on the gigantic, catastrophic moral failure of the last chapter; Bella keeps reminding herself that she probably only has so much time left with Edward, after all. We don't got time to feel no guilt! Except we do, because Edward is not going to leave Bella anyway. So really it's even worse.

I wrapped my arms around his neck – what was the worst he could do? Just push me away – and hugged myself closer to him. “Is it really sick for me to be happy right now?”

Yes. Yes. God yes. Of course it is, Bella. Edward tells her she should be happy they are alive and together. Together! Bella says she knows “he did not place the same weight on that consideration as I did.” Yep. That's what I'm talking about. Bella says something like this every five or six lines, for pages and pages and pages. Alice informs them that they will probably get out of Volterra alive.

“The outlook is quite good,” Alice assured me. She'd been so quiet, I'd almost forgotten her presence. “I'll see Jasper in less than twenty-four hours,” she added in a satisfied tone. “And in 24 hours and 15 minutes... well, I'll spare you that.”

Bella stares longingly at Edward, he returns the stare, and she says she's going to pretend that it means he feels the same way. There are so many layers of crazy here! “It really seems like you love me, in basically every word and gesture, but obviously you don't, so I am just going to pretend that your every word and gesture mean what they look like they mean, which they don't even though they seem like they do.”

Here in his arms, it was so easy to fantasize that he wanted me.

And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. Finally Alec returns and tells them (nicely) that they are free to go. The human secretary shows them out, and Alice gives her “a dark look” in a random act of bitchiness that only endears her to me further. Then she departs to steal another car. Rock.

Out on the streets of Volterra, they pass vampires cavorting in the streets,wearing the same fake plastic fangs Bella saw on children earlier. It pisses Edward off. Like he's in the position to judge right now. Is that a tail between your legs or are you just happy to leave Volterra, Edward? It's hard to keep up the moral outrage though – what can you do? When Edward tells Bella that Alice has gone to retrieve her bag (and commit the aforementioned theft) and Bella says the realization that she has a toothbrush “brightened my outlook considerably,” I couldn't help but smile at that line. Alice shows up, disappointed that she couldn't find another yellow Porsche.

She sighed. “I may have to acquire one of those legally. It was fabulous.”
“I'll get you one for Christmas,” Edward grinned.

Oh, those Cullens and their ostentatious displays of wealth! Not to be nitpicky, but if we are to believe that the Cullens make their money from Alice's stock market predictions, she's the one who is really buying the car, right? I know that might upset some of Edward's notions about males being breadwinners and traditional patriarchal hierarchies being maintained, but it needs to be said.

Bella refuses to sleep on the ride to the airport and on the plane, for fear of losing time with Edward, but they don't talk at all, either. They just look at each other. I would not recommend that for staying awake! When Christy and I go on long drives (in 2007 we had to do Philadelphia, PA to Wolfeboro, NH several times, once or twice overnight) I've found that talking is really the only way to stay awake. That, and getting out of the vehicle and running around it a few times but you can't do that on a plane. Bella admits as much, and tries to explain her logic.

My reasoning was probably flawed by exhaustion, but I hoped by postponing the discussion, I could buy a few more hours with him at some later time – spin this out for another night Scheherazade-style.

Clearly your mental literary-reference stockpile isn't flawed with exhaustion, Bella! A million teens just ran to their favorite search engine to look up “Scheherazade.” So it's an Arabian Nights reference, as it turns out; the four-semester Arabic student in me feels like a schmuck for not knowing that.

The Cullens are waiting at the airport in Seattle. Bella sees Jasper, who completely ignores her. “His eyes were only for Alice,” Bella says:

They didn't embrace like other couples meeting there. They only stared into each other's faces, yet, somehow, the moment was so private that I still felt the need to look away.

My guess is all Jasper had to do was decide what he was going to do to Alice as soon as they got home and let her visions do the talking. Well played, Jasper. In fact, as Bella stumbles sleepily out of the airport in Edward & Esme's arms, she mentions not being sure if Alice & Jasper are even with them anymore. So maybe he decided to stop off in a janitor's closet or something!

Emmett and Rosalie are out in the parking lot, and on the ride home Rosalie apologizes to Bella. It's actually the first time, Bella notes, that Rosalie has ever addressed her directly, a testament to how thin her character is and how little we know about her this late in the game! It seems like a sincere enough apology though, so maybe that will change.

Bella falls asleep in the car and wakes to the sound of Charlie shouting her name. When Edward drags her half-conscious ass out of the car, Charlie gets even more hostile. There's a kind of funny exchange where Edward tries to pass Bella into her father's arms, but she won't let go of him. Then he puts her on the ground.

I could see that I was upright, but I couldn't feel my legs. I trudged forward anyway, until the sidewalk swirled up toward my face. Edward's arms caught me before I hit the concrete.

I have to say, that's a pretty good image. I flinched a little bit, like those half-awake dreams where suddenly, before you can even remember how you got to a flight of stairs or some steep cliff you're falling, and you snap the remaining 50% awake right before you hit whatever it was you were going to hit – you can't remember where you were or what flimsy justification your brain came up with to put you there in the first place. Reading this book is a similar experience, now that I think of it.