it has little to do with the conventional notion of addiction. We’ve just completed the protocols for the largest clinical trial of so-called pornography addicts ever attempted.” ::::::What? Since when?:::::: “This will not be in the usual laboratory setting, however. We’re sending each patient home with the equivalent of a Holter monitor, and we’ll have a steady stream of data in real time as they—shall we say—surrender to their ‘addiction’ in complete privacy. The results should be monographic within eighteen months.”
“Monographic?” said Ike Walsh.
“Yes. A monograph is a treatise—you are familiar with treatise, aren’t you, Ike?”
“Yehhhs…” said the famous Inquisitor. He said it somewhat warily, as if afraid Norman were about to put him on the spot and ask him to define this word treatise, like a schoolboy.
It went on like that. Norman kept battering the Grand Inquisitor with forty-foot, fifty-foot waves of great good humor, affability, crashing laughter, and mile-high enthusiasm, glistening, flashing waves that rose and fell and masked the riptide, the undertow of condescension that swept Ike Walsh away to he knew not where from below. One of Walsh’s specialties was talking right over an interviewee who was taking the conversation down a path he didn’t like. But how do you walk right over towering, absolutely overpowering waves? After “You are familiar with treatise, aren’t you, Ike?” Ike Walsh never got control of his own show again.
The Grand Inquisitor spent the rest of the interview curled up in Norman’s lap. He got up every now and then to lob a nice fat softball of a question… and Norman hit home run after home run after home run.
What had gone on between Magdalena and Norman earlier, moments before the 60 Minutes crew arrived, still troubled her. There was something weird about it, something perverse. But my God, Norman was quick! He was brilliant! And my God, he was strong! He was a real man! He had pissed all over the fiercest, most feared interrogator in all of television… and reduced him to a little pussy.
6
Skin
His office on the French Department floor at the University was a hotel lobby compared to his office here at home, but the one here at home was a little jewel, an Art Deco jewel, to be exact, and Art Deco was French. The floor was only twelve feet by ten feet to begin, and now it looked narrow because someone had built in sets of chest-high amboyna-wood bookshelves—amboyna!—absolutely stunning!—on either side to within a few feet of the desk long before he bought the place… whose mortgage he was still struggling struggling! to pay off… you can’t imagine how hard the struggle has become! Anyway, his office at home was Lantier’s inviolate sanctuary. When he was in his office at home with the door closed, as he was at this moment, interruptions of any sort were absolument interdites.
He consciously kept this room looking monastic… no knick-knacks, no memorabilia, no clutter, no pretty little things, and that went for lamps, too… no lamps sitting on the desk, no lamps standing on the floor. The room was lit entirely by downlights in the ceiling… Austere, but this was elegant austerity. It wasn’t antibourgeois, it was haute bourgeois, streamlined. Behind Lantier’s desk was a four-foot-wide window in the form of a pair of… French… doors that swept all the way from the floor to the ceiling cornice ten feet above. The cornice was massive but smooth—streamlined instead of comprising fussy amalgamations of Vitruvian scrolls, rolls, fillets, and billets that spelled ELEGANCE in nineteenth-century haut bourgeois design, Art Deco haute bourgeoise ELEGANCE substituted the grand gesture: windows as tall as the wall… smooth massive cornices that cried out the Art Deco motto “Elegance through Streamlined Strength!” The only chair besides the one at Lantier’s desk was a small white one-piece fiberglass number by a French designer named Jean Calvin. If you insisted on being picky, Calvin was Swiss, but the name, pronounced Col-vanhhh, told you he was French Swiss, not German, and Lantier chose to regard him as French. After all, even though Lantier was by birth Haitian and had been appointed an associate professor of French (and that damnable Creole) because he was Haitian, he had proof that he was in fact a descendant of the prominent de Lantiers of Normandy in France from at least two centuries ago, maybe more. One had only to look at his pale skin, no darker than, say, a café latte, to see he was essentially European… Well, he was