Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon

the essential problems of identity -not of the self so much as an identity of place and what right you really had to be anyplace. He got to the bar and went inside and there was little Buttercup waiting for him.
    "I got us a car," she smiled. He was aware all at once that she had a slight Rebel accent. "Hey," he said, "what y'all drinking?"
    "Tom Collins," she said. Levine drank scotch. Her face got serious. "Is it bad out there?" she said. "Pretty bad," Levine said. She smiled again, brightly. "At least it didn't do anything to the college."
    "It sure did something to Creole," Levine said.
    "Well, Creole," she said. Levine looked at her.
    "You mean better them than the college," he said.
    "Why sure," she grinned. He tapped his fingers on the table. "Say'out'," he said.
    "Oot," she said.
    "Ah," said Levine. They drank and talked for a while, mostly on collegiate topics, until finally Levine expressed a desire to see what the bayou country looked like under a sky without stars. They left and he drove, toward the Gulf, the night muffled around them. She sat close to him, aroused, impatient, touching him. He was quiet until she indicated a dirt road which led into the swamp. "In here," she whispered, "there's a cabin."
    "I was beginning to wonder," he said. Around them thousands of frogs chanted to themselves in an inexplicable set of chord changes, to the glory of certain ambiguous principles. Mangrove and moss closed in on them. They drove for a mile until they came to a dilapidated building, out in the boondocks of nowhere. It turned out there was a mattress inside. "It's not much," she said between breaths, "but it's home." She quivered against him in the dark. He found Rizzo's stogie and lit up; her face trembled in the light of the flame and there was in her eyes something that might have been a dismayed and delayed acknowledgement that what was hazarding this particular plowboy was deeper than any problem of seasonal change or doubtful fertility, precisely as he had recognized earlier that her capacity to give involved nothing over or above the list of enumerated wares: scissors, watches, knives, ribands, laces; and therefore he assumed toward her that same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels, or for the burned out but impotent good guy rancher in a western. He let her undress apart from him; until, standing there in nothing but T-shirt and baseball cap, puffing placidly on the stogie he heard her from the mattress, whimpering.
    Around them frogs intoned a savage chorus, gradually it seemed to them — spasmodic as they were, blinded yet curiously aware of this as little more than an entwining of little fingers, a touching of beer mugs, a McCall 's togetherness —working itself into a pedal bass for a virtuoso duet of small breathings, cries; he puffing occasionally at the cigar throughout the performance, the ball cap tilted carelessly, she evoking a casually protective feeling, a never totally violated Pasiphae; until at last, having subsided, assailed still by stupid frog cries they lay not touching. "In the midst of great death," Levine said, "the little death." And later, "Ha. It sounds like a caption in Life . In the midst of Life . We are in death. Oh god."
    They drove back and at the truck Levine said, "See you around the quad." She smiled weakly. "Come on around and visit me when you get out," she said and drove away. Picnic and Baxter were playing blackjack under the headlights. "Hey Levine," Baxter said, "I got laid tonight."
    "Ah," Levine said. "Congratulations."
    The next day the lieutenant came around and said, "You can take that leave, Levine, if you want. Everything's set up now. You're just an extra body."
    Levine shrugged. "All right," he said. It was raining. Back at the truck Picnic said, "Jesus Christ I hate rain."
    "You and Hemingway," Rizzo said. "Funny, ain't it. T. S. Eliot likes rain."
    Levine slung his bag over one shoulder. "Rain is pretty weird that way," he