for Veronica Geng.
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country.”
—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
“Potato I have.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses
It was one of those rainy L.A. afternoons that smell of liquor, betrayal, and morning breath. The liquor and morning breath I had brought with me to my shoebox of an office. I’d also been sure to bring my potato. Which meant that only betrayal hadn’t shown up to the party yet—but I knew that she wouldn’t be long.
I was opening the curtains to the only window, letting in all the gray daylight that I could, which proved to be a little difficult with a hefty potato in one hand. I heard the rattling of the doorknob even before I looked up and saw her silhouette reflected in the glass. I turned around.
She was wearing a blazer jacket that you could tell had been starched stiffer than a corpse; even in the rain it had maintained its sharp lines. Her makeup, though, had proven not so waterproof. “I was beginning to think you’d miss the party,” I said coolly. I squeezed the potato in my hand a little tighter. I rolled it between my palms.
“I’m leaving you,” she said. “And before you ask, Marlowe, yes, it’s the potato. It’s just the last straw. Everything else I could handle. Even your absurd predilection for strained metaphor.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped back quicker and hotter than a rubber duck in a toaster. Glancing over my shoulder I could see a wave of fog roll in and swallow the city from the second story down. I began tossing the potato a few inches in the air and catching it on the back of my hand, then tossing it and catching it in my palm again, back and palm, back and palm, again and again like that. “But now that you’ve unbagged the cat, you might as well tell me what’s really on your mind. I know it’s not some potato.”
“No it really is,” she said. “Every day I—now what are you doing now?”
I picked the potato up off the floor and checked it for dents. “Why do you think it is that you can’t dribble a potato,” I asked her, “the same way that you can dribble a basketball?” I rubbed the rough stubble on my jaw in contemplation. “Or maybe it’s just the carpeted floor.”
“God you really are a dumb one, aren’t you,” she muttered.
“What was that?” I wasn’t listening. I had positioned the potato between my thumb and index finger and curled the other three fingers in so that the whole potato-plus-hand shape roughly resembled a gun, and I was pointing it at her and making “pew, pew” noises.
“Listen Marlowe, I know that it’s been hard for you, what with no one hiring private detectives these days, and I know how you had to sell your real gun, and how you had to give up that house in the country you had your eye on too, and how that potato’s just about the only thing you’ve got left, but—”
“Pew, pew.”
“Forget it, I’m leaving.” She slammed the door closed behind her.
It was just as well. I turned back to the window. Outside, the rain had just let up and the grimy streets were glistening, almost pretty, although there wasn’t much room in my business for “pretty.” I struck a match on my potato to light a cigarette, then realized that I would have to put the potato down in order to pick a cigarette up.
I blew the match back out.
- AK ’21