How to dine alone

So my new book on a revolt against the Inquisition in medieval France is in the final throes of readying itself for a readership rivaling Lady Gaga’s fan base in numbers. Or thereabouts.

New York e-mails regularly with slings-and-arrows queries about such-and-such a passage, such-and-such a quote. As the story concerns fourteenth-century monks hurling insults at each other from various pulpits and ox carts, thereby causing burghers and burghesses to run over the cobblestones in joyous riot, à la – take your pick – Pamplona or Vancouver, there is a lot of colorful language and overheated rhetoric from the men in the dresses. And their references have to be nailed down, identified, explained, as required in any book of non-fiction histoprose.

A young person of my acquaintance came over for dinner last night. She admired my goldfish, my air-conditioning unit, my attempts to keep squalor at bay. Then she saw my desk. On it sat my computer and an edition of the Holy Bible.

Nothing else.

She looked at me. “What’s with that?”

“It’s for the book,” I said, unthinking. “I’m doing a lot of fact-checking.”

Horror crept across her beautiful Blue-State features. Her gaze darted nervously about the room, as if looking for carry-on bags packed for the Rapture.

“Fact… checking?!”

I then knew what it was like to be damned.