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Show Acting Alone pa g e 19 past it already - where he always wanted to impregnate and marry the people whom he fell for. But there happened to be another reason for his cultivation of the child, having to do with the hostage crisis thing, which overrode whatever halfhearted need he felt to get away from her. So, when he escaped to Nebraska to achieve distance from Shannon, he found himself in the paradoxical position of inviting her along - or rather convincing her to invite him along. It was a fairly complicated state of affairs. You see, Shannon had a cousin, a Marine sergeant, who'd been a hostage of the Iranian students. And Sam really really wanted to get himself hired on as ghostwriter to this new American saint, wanted it so bad he could taste it - could taste the five- or six-figure advance check from one of Gulf Oil's Hollywood-novelizing subsidiaries that would lift him bodily up out of his Kanorado basement and into the immortal paradise of publication. He wanted, needed endorsement of his non-life, too, just like the pouting academics back in the Department of English. Sam had been waking up in the middle of the morning just bubbling with lists of Things to Do. Never before in his whole life had Sam been the type of guy to draw up lists of Things to Do. But now his jacket pockets were littered with Ding Dong wrappers and pages of student themes covered with lists like the following: - broach subject delicately to Shanny after class when everybody else is gone, ask, is your cousin that Missouri hostage, name of Sickman? (let her think your interest is so casual that you've allowed yourself to be misinformed) |