WHEN YOU FINALLY DECIDE to try to sell your soul, the only way to do it is with enthusiasm, right? Am I right?
Or is that just another piece of bull-tonk like, say, “The easiest kind of lie to remember is the one that is true”?
Architects have mock-Georgian; Chelonia have mock-turtle; why shouldn't Samson have mock-profound?
I got home well after two, having been sustained only by the knowledge that time is one-dimensional and unidirectional and that all human events will end no matter how much one's intense misery makes them seem endless.
The butler was the murderer, by the way, in league with Quentin, the Brit. Quentin was in Indy as a “writer in residence” and it was he who had written the party scenario. He had been here more than four months, since the first of January. It was time for him to make a unidirectional move too.
Home was dark when I arrived. A timer switches my neon sign— “Albert Samson Private Investigator”: snazzy, huh?—off at midnight. There were no lights in either Mom's or Norman's room.
When I got inside, I called my woman. “No matter what the time,” she'd said. “As soon as you get home. I'm dying to know how it went.”
“So how do you think it went?” I asked, as soon as she woke up enough to remember who I was.
“I'm sure you did wonderfully.”
“It was distilled humiliation. The pure stuff. Sheer essence.”
“But did the Vivien woman pay you?”
“Yes,” I said, “she paid me.”
“Well, that's terrific! It puts you weeks ahead on your financial projections.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in my new business as a performing sea lion. Great.”
Just for the one evening. Name your price, Charlotte Vivien had said to me. I closed my eyes and dreamed and named a price. It's a deal, she'd said.
“It wasn't nearly enough,” I said.
“Oh, come off it, Al,” my sympathetic beloved said. “Stop moaning. Be . . . be anything! Relieved it's over. Angry at social inequality based on money. Filled with desire. Anything but sorry for yourself.”
“I sneezed while I was applying the fingerprint dust. It went everywhere. Everybody laughed.”
My woman giggled.
“I'm not joking,” I said. “I really sneezed. Well, what can you expect? I've never taken a fingerprint in my life. Not for real.”
“You should have practiced more.”
“I should have practiced doing it bent down behind a couch—oh, excuse me, a love seat—with twenty people and a cameraman watching me.”
She laughed again.
“Try to control yourself. Prove you're compassionate no matter what they say about social workers.”
“I'll try,” she said.
She failed.
“Your compassion is why I stay with you, you know.”
“Why you stay with me? So why do I stay with you?”
“If you'd seen me tonight, you wouldn't.”
“Don't you get a copy of the tape?”
“I told her not to make me one.”
“I'll call her.”
“Please don't,” I said. Suddenly I was tired. “God. Suddenly I am exhausted.”
“Good,” she said. “That's good, Al.” And then, “Come on now. Remember it was your idea to `go for it.’|”
I remembered. I said, “Yeah.” I must have said it funny. The bitch laughed some more.