Selina Kyle answers reader questions.
I was just wondering how you and Harvey 'Twoface' Dent became such good
friends?
Dear
Harvey, he’s such a sweetie. The thing you must understand about
Harvey Dent is that he was never in his element with the rogues.
Magna cum laud at Stanford, Political Science, then Harvard Law. By
contrast, Hugo’s hobby at that time was trying to hypnotize the Iceberg
waitresses with the glint off the goldfoil on beer bottles – no really,
he had a thing going with Crane that if he succeeded they would make her
afraid of bottlecaps. So Harvey just didn’t have much in common
with the Iceberg crowd, if you know what I mean.
We’d
seen each other a few times, here and there, but just to nod, say Hi,
nothing memorable. One night he was at the Berg, grumbling into his
drink about something or other. He’d been talking to Jervis and it
wasn’t going well.
Jervis was
saying something about a tempest in a teapot jangling the Jabberwock.
When he walked off, Harvey made a joke, said it was no way to spend an
evening but it was better than sitting home alone, wasting away like the
heroine of an 18th century poem. “And we sure as hell aren’t the
fucking lady of shallot.” I heard, I laughed and that seemed
to surprise him. We got to talking. For the
Berg, he seemed like a nice lonely guy, different from other rogues –
like I was myself – the connection was pretty natural.
He said he
didn’t expect anybody in that godforsaken hellhole to recognize the
allusion, he didn’t know what pleased him more, that someone had or that
she was wearing leather. I was used to it from rogues, I
explained the rules like always, and when he got mouthy I pointed out the
scorch marks on Jonathan’s hat. Anyway, we concluded that while the
Iceberg certainly wasn’t the Algonquin Roundtable, you could never expect
to get a really cold Igloo in a plastic Penguin glass there.
Personally,
I don’t think it had anything to do with having read a book or wearing
purple leather. I think what Harvey really needed was someone who
didn’t judge him for sharing his body and psyche with a criminal, and
yet wasn’t a homicidal psychotic or a cheap henchwench. I’m not
exactly “normal” but by Iceberg standards, I’m as close to the
normal life he’d lost as he was going to get in that world where he
found himself after the acid.
Ciaomeow,as
we say in the real neighborhood,
Catwoman
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