By
coincidence, Karyn having a similar discussion across town, with
Frank. She brought up the same Stanley Kubrick story, ending with the
question, “How do you think the author came up with the details of
the story?”
Frank was
not especially creative, and he inferred that other people were not
creative either. “Either something like it happened to him, or
someone else it happened to, just told him about it,” Frank
responded.
“You don't
think the author might have read something hat gave him the idea, or
maybe he just figured it out, by watching people and odd
occurrences?” Karyn pursued.
“If he
read a book about it, he wasn't even original,” Frank decided.
“There's not really that much to figure out.”
Karyn dug in
her heels at this. “What if he was disagreeing with someone else's
theory, Frank?” she reacted. “What can you possibly think is
simple about it?”
“Straight
up, Karyn? It's about a bunch of horny old fossils, going through
mid-life crisis, and using money to try and get laid,” Frank
adjudged. It was a motive he could relate to.
Karyn was
far from satisfied. “What if it was just the tip of the iceberg,
Frank?” she inquired frostily. “What if it was just a press leak
that momentarily exposed a Society of Illuminati?”
Frank was
unmoved. “I guess I'd just try and join the club,” he rejoined.
“It would probably be a good political connection.”
Karyn
regarded Frank like a fly in her soup. “Well, OK. What if it's
true,” she erupted. “What makes you so sure they would want you?”
Frank gazed
at Karyn in disbelief. “With what I bring to the table?
Babe, all I'd have to do is show up, and Dad would hook me up
with them!”
Karyn
pondered this, in light of reality. It had an unassailable quality to
it, but she could not disagree more. “That don't impress me much,”
she finally commented.
“Shania
Twain, right?” Frank glinted. “I'll have to buy you that album.”
“Thank
you, Frank, that's real big of you,” Karyn retaliated. “I'll have
to get you one of those extra sensitive joy-sticks, in return.”
“Now why
would you go and spoil the surprise?” Frank reacted, incredulously.
He was oblivious to the fact that his own comment had suffered the
exact same deficiency.
“So your
feeble mind won't be taken unawares,” Karyn flashed. Without
another word, she got up and left, leaving Frank to bus the table.
For his own
part, Frank had experience of this kind of thing, and he correctly
anticipated that it would be a while, before Karyn was friendly
toward him again.
Bitch, Frank
thought to himself.
If he had
stopped even for a moment, to ask himself why, instead, Frank would
have instantly shaved days off of his penance. He began casting
about for someone to bed, while he figured Karyn out. There was a bar
about three miles off campus, and Frank knew that if he could get one
of the denizens drunk enough, she would do a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g. Maybe he
could score some cocaine. That served the same, somewhat derelict,
purpose.
Nicholas
Maelstrom, Frank's dad, knew that Frank employed cocaine to bring
women to heel, but he didn't want Frank to marry a “coke whore.”
Nicholas wanted Frank to learn about cultured women, in the same way
he wanted Frank to learn business management, and how to win at games
of strategy.
However,
Nicholas could not teach what he did not fully know. The urgent
demands of work superseded the important tasks of rearing his son,
and Frank's mother, Heather, fought with her husband to cut off the
money supply. Frank made a game of thwarting her. If this was the
West Point Academy of the war between the sexes, Frank was not doing
his homework. He was fighting battles with winning tactics, but
losing a strategic war.
Frank
predictably blew up in a temper every time he felt trapped into
admitting he was wrong, and it wasn't hard to provoke the same
sentiment in his father, Nicholas. It would be a miracle, if Frank
did not fall prey to cocaine addiction.
Karyn was
angry too, but for different reasons, and did not seek solace in sex.
