Synonymy III

"Hey, Caligula," I said, "are you thinking of going out to look for a job?"
"Are you looking to get rid of me," Cal asked, "as if friendship and relative proximity count for nothing?"
"I was wondering if you might consider coming down to Mexico with me for a little while, and it'll be my treat." Yeah, and I can keep my eye on you until such time as I find a way to dispose of your annoying presence. I knew if I offered him a couple of hundred bucks to make him go away, he would just return after I had gone, so I only saw one solution. Besides, I was fairly certain I could pack him off to Acapulco and he would get distracted enough, in some get-rich-quick scheme not to want to come back to where I'd be staying.

Synonymy II

Cal told me all about how Jay-Jay was doing with her schooling; he knew I would be interested in that, and that he had seen Diana in concert—never so bored in his life. "I mean she is my sister, fer crissake, but all that opera twaddle leaves me cold." Why'd he go, I wanted to know, and he said, who wouldn't on free tickets, but mostly he went to get bombed at the after party, which didn't turn out quite the way he'd foreseen. "The kid and the nanny were there to help mom celebrate. You know she's always been a bigger hit over in Europe, and I guess she considered it a form of victory to be performing here in New York even in a secondary role." He did not mention whether or not he had hit her up for "something to tide him over" as was his usual m.o., but he said she headed back to the continent shortly thereafter, and since he was in the city, he hopped on a ferry and came over to the Island looking for me.

Synonymy

I decided about two weeks into the thing that my original plans were not the best choice. I wanted to do it right, and that meant asking for a few days off to fly up to New York, gathering together all my papers, and returning in a way that I could hold my head up and not walk around preparing for a hand to come down on my shoulder by someone telling me I would have to take a hike. The flight up was non-eventful, but imagine my surprise on finding someone living in my house in my absence! My ex-brother-in-law Calvin was drinking the last of my private stock, sitting in his boxers and watching television in my favorite chair, and after I squelched the desire to rap him on the head, mostly because I quickly recalled the devious reactions he was capable of, I asked him why he wasn’t working. He simply replied that his last good job had ended six weeks earlier, he had coming looking for me to hang out with, and on finding the house empty of me but not my stuff, decided to await my return. He declined to say how he had entered, but I figured that part out when I discovered I had to clean up the bits of glass from one of the panels on the back door, bits he hadn’t bothered about after discovering the full larder.