- Oedipa returns home from a Tupperware party to find that she has been named executrix of the estate of her ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity, who was a wealthy California real estate mogul before dying.
- She stands in her living room and remembers her time with Pierce—at a hotel in Mazatlán, sitting outside the library at Cornell University, sleeping with him beneath a bust of Jay Gould that he kept over his bed.
- She wonders: "Was that how he'd died... among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house?" (1.1).
- The thought makes her laugh out loud.
- The letter comes from a law firm called "Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitzchek and Mcmingus" in Los Angeles, and identifies a lawyer named Metzger as co-executor of the estate (1.2).
- Oedipa notes that she was named executor a year ago and, as she goes through her day in her hometown of Kinneret-Among-the-Pines on the Peninsula of California, she wonders what might have caused Pierce to name her executrix at that time: "She wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn't she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer's deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye" (1.2).
- Then she remembers that Pierce called her in the middle of the night a year ago while she was lying in bed with her husband, Wendell ("Mucho") Maas.
- Pierce spoke in a series of different accents—first Slavic, then "comic-Negro" (whoa, racist), then Pachuco, then German, "and finally his Lamont Cranston voice" (Lamont Cranston was an alter ego of the hero on the popular radio show The Shadow in the 1930s and 1940s) (1.2).
- That's the last time Oedipa ever heard from Pierce, and she wonders if he was originally calling to tell her about the estate.
- "She felt exposed, finessed, put down. She had never executed a will in her life, didn't know where to begin, didn't know how to tell the law firm in L.A. that she didn't know where to begin" (1.6).
- Oedipa's husband Mucho, who currently works as a DJ, enters the house and begins to complain about his day before realizing that she also has something to say. But he's not a jerk.
- Actually, Oedipa thinks that Mucho is too sensitive. We learn that Mucho used to work as a used car salesman, but was so disgusted with his profession that he did everything he could not to look and act like a salesman.
- In fact, "the sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions" (1.11).
- Through his work in used cars, Mucho used to see all sorts of poor people come in to trade their cars, and it made him miserable.
- As he cleaned out cars, he found the residue of people's lives "like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes—it made him sick to look, but he had to look" (1.12).
- Mucho had quit the lot and taken a job as a disk jockey at the station KCUF two years before he met Oedipa, but absurdly he was still tormented by his time at the lot the way some husbands are tormented by their time in war (Hint: Spell the radio station backwards to discover Pynchon's mischievous side. Oooh, Pynchon. You're bad.)
- Back in the present, Mucho pours himself a drink and begins telling Oedipa about a conflict with his boss, Funch.
- Yes. All these names are ridiculous.
- Mucho claims that Funch thinks he flirts with young girls on the phone and now insists on editing all calls before they go on the radio.
- Oedipa interrupts Mucho to show him the letter from Metzger, and he "withdrew along a shy string of eye-blinks" (1.16).
- Mucho suggests that Oedipa call their lawyer, Roseman, to see what he has to say.
- That night, the Maas's phone rings at three in the morning, just as it did the last time Pierce called before he died.
- Oedipa picks it up to find that it is her crazy psychotherapist, Dr. Hilarius, but "he sounded like Pierce doing a Gestapo officer" (1.21).
- Hilarius asks if Oedipa has been taking some pills he prescribed her, which he claims are tranquilizers. She tells him that she has not. Oedipa doesn't trust Hilarius.
- Hilarius tries to recruit Oedipa for an experiment he is doing on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs: LSD-25, mescaline, and psilocybin.
- Oedipa refuses, and then hallucinates Uncle Sam above her bed, pointing at her: We want you!
- Hilarius proceeds to act like Oedipa called him and asks if there is anything else she wants to discuss. She says no and hangs up.
- Oedipa thinks of Hilarius's theory that you can cure patients by making weird faces at them. She remembers a strange one Hilarius called the Fu-Manchu, where he pulled his eyes back and stuck his tongue out at her.
- Ew. Racist moment #2.
- In the morning, Oedipa goes to see her lawyer Roseman.
- We learn that Roseman is obsessed with a television trial lawyer named Perry Mason, whom he is both jealous of and wants to undermine.
- When Oedipa enters he is trashing a rough draft of "The Profession v. Perry Mason, a Not-so-hypothetical Indictment" (1.38).
- We learn that Roseman and Oedipa go to the same group therapy sessions.
- Oedipa tells Roseman that she has to execute a will, and he says, "Oh, go ahead then, don't let me keep you" (1.42).
- Oedipa explains the situation over lunch. Roseman tries to play footsie with her, and asks her to run away with him.
- She asks "Where?" which shuts him up (1.49).
- Back at the office, Roseman tells Oedipa she is going to learn about the business of executing an estate.
- She asks if he can just do it for her, but he is surprised that she is not interested in what she might find out.
- As things develop, the narrator tells us that Oedipa will have all sorts of revelations: "Hardly about Inverarity, or herself, but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away" (1.55).
- Oedipa imagines herself as Rapunzel with Pierce coming to save her.
- She remembers a time when they were in Mexico City and saw a triptych by Remedios Varo in which a bunch of young girls were trapped in a tower surrounded by a void.
- The girls are weaving a tapestry that hopelessly attempts to fill the void: "for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world" (1.55).
- The painting had made Oedipa cry because she felt that by running away with Pierce to Mexico she was like the young girls weaving a fantastic tapestry in a hopeless attempt to fill the void.
- Oedipa realizes that what ultimately keeps her in place and prevents escape is "magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all" (1.55).
- The narrator's last thought: "If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else" (1.55)?
- Good question.