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Show Acting Alone Page 422 reasons which are unimportant, and I'm sorry I mentioned it. Anyway, wait'11 you taste this shit. It's real good. Those caterers must have a real Mexican locked up in their kitchen. Just like me - I mean, just for me." He had effectively changed the subject. He had diverted even the powerful Sister Polycarpana from her chosen topic of conversation. "Chili con queso, yes," she said with deep indifference. Sam had to play a balancing game here: not to let her onto anything that might be dangerous for her to know, even if it never went beyond this room - which was undoubtedly as full of bugs as Caroline Kennedy's personal linen; and, at the same time, not to insult her intelligence, not to let her get angry or bored or something so that she stopped coming. Because when she wasn't here to distract him, Sam looked around at this place, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and its huge chrome and black glass desk covered with all the electronic appurtenances of everything corporate that had always turned his stomach even more violently than the cheaper appurtenances of academe, and he realized that he was high up and all alone in the last place in the universe a sane person would ever want to be. So he tried to keep her around by dangling in front of her face what were to him the most interesting, even seductive objects in the world: his writerly notebooks. He pretended idly to flip through, even peruse them, as he expressed out loud to the nun the writerly sorts of thoughts he'd lately been thinking and reciting to himself and recording on the Sony and even memorizing for later use in these conversations and also for bolstering his courage when alone. Apropos of everything that seemed important, Sam now casually said, "Yes, Sister Polycarpana. People, or scholars, open a dead writer's |