Raymond Pippigass’s Paternity-Suit Deposition

Raymond Pippigass’s Paternity-Suit Deposition is a legal examination that strips Raymond Peepgass of the privacy and self-protective story he has tried to keep around his affair with Sirja Tiramaki. Questions about Finnish art, a hotel suite, a fertilized-egg cocktail, and a condom turn an intimate encounter into a public record, while the cry of Sirja’s baby makes the paternity dispute physically present in the room. The episode’s decisive shift is Raymond’s recognition that, in court and in the eyes of others, his version of events will contend not only with Sirja’s testimony but with the force of her visible role as a mother.

Setting and Stakes

The deposition takes place in a windowless back room at the offices of Morton Tennenbaum, where a court reporter records the proceedings on a stenotype machine. The room’s lurid imitation-wood door hangs short of the floor; on the other side, Sirja’s baby, Master Pietari Paivarinta Peepgass, is left with a secretary while Sirja participates in the questioning. Even before the child cries, the room’s arrangement makes the proceeding feel both confined and exposed: the stenographer preserves each answer, and the sounds from beyond the door leak into the formal account.

The dispute concerns Raymond’s relationship with Sirja and the paternity suit through which she is seeking access to his assets. Raymond is forty-six, financially strained, and represented by Sandy Dickens, whose bored manner offers little comfort as the questioning grows more explicit. The proceeding is only a deposition, not a trial, but Raymond already experiences it as an ordeal. He imagines the details escaping the room and reaching his children, his former wife Betty, or anyone else who might hear them. The legal record threatens to turn private embarrassment into durable public knowledge.

Raymond’s Account of the Affair

Morton Tennenbaum begins by testing Raymond’s explanation for inviting Sirja to dinner at the Hotel Grand Tatar. Raymond says he knew nothing about Finnish art at the time, but that PlannersBanc had an art program and he was interested in exploring its possibilities; Sirja, he says, seemed knowledgeable. Tennenbaum recasts the invitation as a decision to bring a twenty-seven-year-old Finnish notions buyer to the hotel as an art consultant. Raymond tries to correct the characterization, but Dickens does not intervene effectively, and the questioning establishes the gap between Raymond’s account and the lawyer’s pointed formulation.

Tennenbaum then makes Raymond revisit the meal and the sequence that followed. Raymond recalls that Sirja rubbed his leg under the table, complained that the dining room was too noisy, suggested finding somewhere quieter to discuss Finnish art and look at her slides, and proposed his suite. Raymond’s answers are presented under oath, but he is too demoralized to defend each detail with conviction. He also recalls a bamboo cocktail made with a fertilized egg yolk instead of a maraschino cherry, supposedly intended to enhance sexual energy. Asked why he liked the idea, he denies either liking or disliking it and calls it a novelty. The unusual drink becomes another piece of evidence the lawyers can use to make his account seem tawdry and calculated.

When Tennenbaum asks whether Raymond led Sirja to his king-size bed and made love to her, Raymond initially objects to the phrasing, then gives up and answers yes. The phrase makes the encounter sound more tender than his own recollection allows: he regards it as an act of sexual desire, not an expression of love. Tennenbaum’s next question is whether they used a condom. Raymond is appalled by the question and looks toward Dickens for protection, but his lawyer’s expression makes clear that he has already warned Raymond he will have to answer such questions. The examination exposes not only the intimate facts but Raymond’s inability to control how they are described.

Sirja’s Testimony and the Cry Outside

The deposition also brings Sirja’s account into contrast with Raymond’s. She maintains that she spoke about Finnish art at dinner, while Raymond repeatedly asked where she lived, whether she had a boyfriend, and other personal questions. When Dickens asks who provided the condom, Sirja answers that Raymond did; she insists that she certainly did not provide one. Dickens presses the question of who put it on Raymond. The exchange revisits an especially intimate detail that Raymond had told his lawyer, including his account that Sirja put it on him herself. Her response to Dickens’s question is not completed before the scene is interrupted.

A series of sobs comes from beyond the imitation-wood door. The baby’s crying falters into a breathless pause, and the room’s attention turns from the lawyers’ questions to the child’s struggle to draw breath. Sirja rises, calls for Pawy, and rushes through the door. Once the baby begins bawling, the immediate crisis is over, but Sirja remains with him, calling his name and soothing him in Finnish. The deposition’s tightly controlled interrogation is briefly displaced by an unambiguous act of care.

The narration marks the contrast in Raymond’s perception: Sirja is no longer reduced to the sexual role he has assigned her in his defense, but appears as a mother responding to her child. Raymond concludes that he has little chance against this image in a DeKalb County courtroom—or anywhere else—and fears that he could lose even if he won the legal contest. The baby’s presence makes the stakes larger than the question of who initiated an encounter. Raymond imagines the child growing up as a Georgia boy, occupying space and demanding recognition, rather than remaining an abstract consequence of an embarrassing affair.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The scene ends without resolving the paternity suit. Instead, it leaves Raymond feeling defeated by the prospect of the case being played out in open court. His fear is not limited to the legal or financial claim: he dreads his children and Betty learning the sexual details, and he sees his reputation and remaining resources being consumed together. The deposition makes the affair’s consequences concrete through the baby outside the door, while keeping the legal outcome unsettled.

Raymond’s humiliation also runs alongside the threat to his position at PlannersBanc. He recalls having joined Harry Zale and others at PDK to confront Charlie Croker and take control of Croker’s G-5; the bank has also acquired Croker’s N. C. Wyeth painting. Raymond hopes this display of resolve will help him press Croker to hand over the deeds to his plantation in lieu of foreclosure. The contrast is sharp: Raymond has tried to exert authority over a debtor, yet in the deposition he cannot direct the questions, protect his privacy, or determine how his affair will be interpreted. As the baby cries beyond the door, Raymond calls the whole situation ludicrous and understands sex as a cosmic joke played on a middle-aged man whose financial power and personal control are both slipping away.