A Snippet Of Dialogue On DSK

A group of moderately successful fiction writers sit around and muse on the circumstances that Dominique Strauss-Kahn allowed to happen that led to his downfall.

This fragment of an imaginary script has our writers revelling in their mastery of knowing how (and when) to relegate to fiction their basest impulses, ones that would make DSK’s Sofitel indiscretion as mundane as a visit to the bank.

[Fragment from an imaginary script] :

. . .

POMPOUS OLDEST WRITER [writes mostly essays]: I’ll stress that I, a lowly blogger from the netherworld, have no issue with Mr. DSK, apart from his lack of artistry of manhood.

[THE GROUP SIP THEIR DRINKS SILENTLY, WAITING FOR CLARIFICATION]

POMPOUS OLDEST WRITER [continues]: My empathy and sorrow for the circumstances of both he and his victim at the Sofitel Hotel in New York four years ago bypass knowing that no introvert who is not a psychopath, as I think DSK is neither, would have allowed it to happen as he had.

[HE TAKES A DRAG ON HIS Marlboro Red AND A SIP OF HIS Bols Genever]

[A few seconds pass]

MIDDLE-AGED WRITER [writes mostly poetry]: I think what you’re trying to say, Stan, is that we might forget our phones on the window sill behind the curtain as The Great Man did, and create a sticky mess on the walls —

[LAUGHTER]

MIDDLE-AGED WRITER (continues): — but we’d be more likely to do it in our imaginations than act it out with a real hotel housekeeper in a uniform.

POMPOUS OLDEST WRITER (annoyed): What I’m saying, Werner, is that I’d rather see the consequences of my impulses as a published story in a paperback than on the front page of a tabloid.

. . .

[LATER, THESE MEN WILL TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE IRONY PRESENTED BY THE NEW IMMIGRANT — A HOUSEKEEPER (NAFISSATOU DIALLO) OF THE NEW YORK HOTEL WHERE DSK MET HIS END AS HEAD OF THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND — WHO COMES TO THE LAND OF IMMIGRANTS AND ENDS UP A HEROIN AGAINST STRIFE, A WOMAN DESPERATE TO SURVIVE (AND WHO ISN’T?) AND DOES.]

. . .

THE 29-YEAR-OLD WRITER [a new friend of the MIDDLE-AGED-WRITER, and who works part-time as an usher at Radio City Music Hall]: Yeah, he should’ve known that she’ll take him down if he crossed her, because that’s part of her survival mode. He made a fool of her by not giving her anything for her trouble, and that did him in.

POMPOUS OLDEST WRITER: She’d’ve known where he was most vulnerable, yes, as unfortunates do. As any desperate newly-arrived member of America, who comes with the dream of being forgiven for being born in an insignificant place, she knows a fool when she sees one.

THE 29-YEAR-OLD WRITER: You should write that down, man!

[MORE LAUGHTER]

JOURNALIST [whose apartment they are in]: I mean, shit, forty minutes before a lunch with your daughter and while your elegant wife thinks you’re busy with important work, it pops into your head and crotch that you, potentially the next president of France, are going to do this? As Andy Warhol used to say, ‘Gee’.

[SMIRKS. MORE DRINKS ARE POURED]

POMPOUS OLDEST WRITER: As you guys were talking I wrote this out. “As every introspective scribbler knows better than any head of a bank, the radar of an extravert will cost him if he doesn’t grovel back to the uncomfortable place of his private insecurity before anyone else sees it; we introverts know how to hide, and so buy our books so we can continue to provide our cheap advice.

MIDDLE-AGED WRITER: It’s a good sentiment, Stan, but probably too late for DSK. I hear you, brother introvert. By the way, where do you do your banking?

[LAUGHTER]

. . .