Thornton's

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Grafton Street, then as now the most upscale shopping arcade in Dublin (the closest competition is Henry Street), stretches from the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green to the southeast corner of College Green. The poshness of the shop is suggested immediately as the young female employee places "rustling fibre" in the bottom of a "wicker basket," places a "bottle swathed in pink tissue paper and a small jar" in the bottom, and then arranges plums and peaches above them.

The scene also immediately becomes charged with Boylan's rakishly seductive sexuality. The wicker basket is "bedded" with fiber. The girl "bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe shamefaced peaches," as Boylan walks about the redolent shop, "lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells." When he comes back to the counter to pay, food and sexuality are again linked: "Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet." Flowers are pulled into this orbit too, as he extracts a red carnation from a glass and suggests that it might be included as a lagniappe: "This for me?" Flowers held coded symbolic meanings for Victorians and Edwardians, and Boylan ensures that the carnation will be regarded sexually by putting it in his mouth for the blushing shopgirl's benefit: "Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches. / Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth." He looks at the girl's breasts with "more favour" because she has agreed to give him the flower, and later in the book both Miss Douce and Molly will be enticed to wonder "who gave him that flower."

Boylan also rattles coins in his pants, "merry money," as he stands at the counter, adding a jingling sound to the sexual synesthesia. The richness of shop windows on Grafton Street has already made Bloom think, in Lestrygonians, of men buying things for their lovers: "Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints, silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing.... All for a woman, home and houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the world." All of this sensual seductive wealth is precursor to Molly being plowed by the "well off" Boylan.

Ithaca and Penelope sketch the aftermath. The pantry shelves in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street hold "an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper." In addition to various everyday foodstuffs that were no doubt on the shelves before the basket's arrival, the catalogue in Ithaca appears to identify the nature of the "small jar" that the shopgirl put in next to the port: Bloom sees an "empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat" on the shelves. When he gets into bed at the end of the chapter he finds some crumbs scattered on the new clean sheet, and also some flakes of potted meat. Molly recalls a final bout of lovemaking "after we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes."

In section 5 of Wandering Rocks several narrative fragments interrupt the symphony of food, flowers, money, and sex. As Boylan strolls about the shop, "H. E. L. Y.'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane, plodding towards their goal." This feels like an interpolation, but the sandwichboard men are said to be passing "before" Boylan, so they must be visible through the shop windows. Tangier Lane is a short dingy alley between numbers 61 and 62 Grafton Street, so obscure that Google Maps has not heard of it. (This is the first of several moments in Wandering Rocks in which readers will be asked to navigate through obscure urban corridors.) In Lestrygonians Bloom saw the men at the bottom of Westmoreland Street, near the river. Now they have worked their way south and are nearing the end of Grafton Street, passing first Thornton's and then Tangier Lane. Their "goal" is identified in section 7: when they reach the corner of St. Stephen's Green, they will turn around and go back the way they came.

In James Joyce's Dublin, Clive Hart observes that the narrative does not make clear whether Boylan actually looks through the window and sees the plodding advertisers, but "The passage in which they appear in this section has the character of an interpolation without in fact being one; like the description in section 2 of Conmee's boarding the tram, it belongs on the fringes of the context into which it is introduced. That it is indeed a minor part of the context is suggested by Corley's remarks in Eumaeus, in which he reveals that Boylan acts as an agent for sandwichboard men and that he has approached Miss Dunne in vain in the hope of finding employment as one. Those advertising Hely's are presumably supplied by Boylan" (49). He may be wrong about this last point: in Lestrygonians Bloom has thought, "They are not Boyl: no, M'Glade's men." But since he does make some of his money by hiring miserably poor wretches to perform this demeaning work, their sad parade provides a telling counterpart to his lavish displays of wealth.

Shortly afterward comes a true interpolation: "A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's cart." This is Leopold Bloom, seen in section 10 thumbing through a bookseller's wares before finally discovering The Sweets of Sin, which describes a beautiful woman conducting an affair with the exotically named Raoul and spending her husband's money on rich clothes to entice him. The story sexually excites the soon-to-be-cuckolded Bloom, so the intrusion strongly echoes the action in section 5. Boylan has just asked the shopgirl, "Can you send them by tram? Now?" Both he and Bloom are spending money to feed Molly's carnal appetites and in the process experiencing arousal themselves. Gunn and Hart note that sending things by tram was "a regular way of sending parcels in Dublin at the time. The cost would have been 2d" (49).

Section 5 concludes with Boylan asking the shopgirl for one more favor: "— May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly." Section 7 will show this call taking place, presumably a minute or two later, as Miss Dunne picks up the phone in Boylan's office and conducts several items of business with her employer. Other than this not-quite-simultaneous connection, and Boylan's wish to have the basket delivered "Now" (so that it will arrive in advance of his planned 4:00 meeting with Molly), section 5 contains no temporal markers.