The advice is good, but Sam doesn’t think to tell me how to make the million.
He has bigger things on his mind.
“I’ll never forget what she looked like when she got her clothes off, and was lying there on the bed showing her cunt and waiting for me to do something about it. She wasn’t backward about asking for it, either … only she was saying it in Russian. What a hell of a language to talk about fucking in! I’d rather hear her speak French … at least I can get the sense of what things are about. But when she looked at my cock, spread her legs, and looked at me through her knees, she could have used any language and it would have sounded the same… .”
“Suppose,” Sam says later when we’re in a bar, “that I might have expected her to be like that. After all if the girl is so easy, the mother must have hot pants too … . it’s in the blood. But listen, Alf, I’m going to be seeing a lot of Alexandra from now on … so any time that I call you up and say something about a card game, you’ll know that I’m going to be out all night and want you to cover me up with Ann. Just tell her anything if she asks you about it … she won’t be interested enough to ask for details.”
“Look, Sam, I’m not so sure about this… .”
“Oh, nonsense. It’s all right, I tell you. All you have to do is remember that you and I go out and play poker sometimes. By God, Alf, I came to Paris to have some fun … . you’re not going to let me down, are you?”
“No, I don’t want to let you down, Sam, but still I don’t think… . .”
“Well, hell, if that’s the way you feel, all right … I suppose I can get Carl to do it;… .”
“No wait a minute, Sam, don’t get me wrong … … I didn’t say that I wouldn’t do it … I was just… .”
“Then let’s have another of these and forget about it. Hey, Alf, listen to my accent, see if I say this right … Garçon! La même chose! How was that? Better?”
Sam is doing all right … he’s learned to ring with his spoon … to call an order across the terrace so he can be heard without seeming to call hogs … even his accent is right, at least for ordering drinks. Now he wants to know all the forms of the verb foutre… . .
Ann has rented a few rooms in my neighborhood, and she gets me out of bed one morning to come and see them. I don’t know why the concierge can’t be trained not to let anyone in before noon, but the most astonishing assortment of people are allowed to walk up the three flights to my place at any time of the day or night. Anyway, I’m allowed to stop a few minutes for breakfast, for which I am thankful.
Ann has found herself a regular little nest, a real hideaway, tucked up under the eaves of a rickety old joint a few blocks from my place. And it’s very cheap, very very cheap, she tells me again and again while she shows me around, explains how things work. They told her that Verlaine lived here once, she says, that it was here he wrote some of his finest sonnets. Do I believe that? I tell her that I suppose he did … . after all, the poor son of a bitch had to live someplace, and only a broke poet or a million-dollar American ass could afford the atmosphere of a hole like this.
She decided to rent it, Ann confides, the morning after she came back from my place. Where do I suppose Sam was while she was there being fucked? Where?
Shit, I don’t tell her … well, she doesn’t know either, but she knows that he wasn’t playing cards with me … not when I was screwing her all evening.
“Yes, that’s what he told me … that you and he were out playing cards! And he simply reeked of some other woman! Well, I’ll show him! Two can play that sort of a game … so I’m going to have this place to come to and do exactly as I choose…
.”
She shows me how she’s fixing it up … nothing fancy, because she won’t keep it very long, but very bohemian. She wants some dirty pictures to hang on the walls … do I know anyone who does that sort of thing well? She wants watercolors, she thinks, perhaps an engraving or two in the seventeenth-century style. And she’s going to have albums of those photographs which one can buy …
. in short, a whole cozy part of her life will be tucked away here… …
Who’s going to come here, I want to know… Well … friends … or perhaps no one. It’s just to have a place, do I see? She might use it only to put Sam out … let him find out that she has it, and then try to find out what goes on here. She’ll teach him to bring her such stories about card games!
Something else comes up … . do I know where Sam might have been that night? I? Of course not! Perhaps he really was playing cards with someone, perhaps it was only an accident that he said he’d been with me instead of somebody else. Ann merely sniffs at that. He was with a woman, she insists …
it’s not hard for another woman to tell… . .
I’m all for putting the place to use right then and there, but Ann avoids it. It’s all right if I feel her up a little bit, if I raise her skirt and slap my hand on her bush while we’re talking, but that’s as far as she’ll let things go. No, she tells me, it’s no use to take that thing out of my pants because she isn’t going to do anything about it … she won’t even touch it … . well … she’ll feel it just a bit, but nothing else. She won’t take off her pants and she won’t let me take mine off, so there’s no use hanging around there after we’ve seen the place. Besides, I have things to do, so I put her into a taxi and send her back to her husband for lunch… .
There’s nothing doing at the office, so I spend some time composing letters to the editor, which I will post on my way out with company stamps. I suppose that some of them are printed occasionally … I never think to look… .
At two I meet Ernest and Arthur at a place where, if you don’t like the food and aren’t drinking, you can go upstairs and lay the proprietor’s wife … hence, a most respectable place, because none of the whores will go there … it’s unfair to their trade, they complain … certainly they don’t try to sell you something to eat when you take them to a hotel. But it’s a quiet place to sit when you don’t want to be disturbed … . without any whores there aren’t any journalists either.
Ernest wants to know what about all the rumors he’s heard about me. Is it true that I’m taking some American around, showing him all the whorehouses so that he can go back to America and open a big chain? Is it true that some nutty art collector has lost his daughter and we’re going through the sewers of Paris looking for her? Is it true that I’m working with some bunch of American financiers to start a new paper which I will edit? Well, what the fuck is true?
“You shouldn’t disappear that way Alf,” he says. “I’ve tried to find you a couple of times … we’ve been taking Anna out and fucking her, but you never were around.”
Perhaps it’s just as well that I wasn’t around … Arthur has been playing with that Kodak he bought, and he has a mess of some of the rattiest pictures I’ve ever seen … . Anna and Ernest, Sid and himself with their pants down and their pricks up . . I’m not so sure that I’d care for that kind of advertising even if it is strictly private.
“I only show them when I’m trying to make some virgin,” Arthur explains fondly as he puts the pictures away. “You see, the way these pictures came out, it looks as though I had a prick twice as big as anybody else… .”
I remember that Raoul wanted to meet a Spanish cunt, and I ask Ernest about it. Hell yes, Ernest knows plenty of Spanish cunts; what kind does Raoul want?
“Listen,” he says, “I’ve got one that’s a real Spanish Fly … … one bit of her and your cock stays stiff for a week. What does he have to trade?”
“Aw, now look, Ernest, he don’t want any trades … . all he wants is to meet some nice cunt
