There is a wife he has not lived with in years, and the odd one-night stands with preoccupied actresses; but Paris' routine is as hollow as Philip Marlowe's: the dismal bedsitter .
Small wonder that both come to resent the turtles' aquarium, that "little bedsitter of an ocean" as William calls it, as yet another abridgement of natural law.
For a large bedsitter, I paid the princely sum of 6 a week, a big amount for someone who had stopped earning.