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musical theater of integrated book, music, and lyrics, was restless and looking for a number like “The Rain in Spain,” while Monica was loving the musical’s showmanship.
    “Isn’t it fantastic?” she said.
    “I figured it out. This really is about cats.”
    This time she permitted him to go back to her apartment for “a quick nightcap.”
    “I feel I should tell you,” she said as they were finishing their drinks, “I don’t go to bed with everybody. I have to love a man first.”
    “What is love anyway? Love is like a moment’s madness.”
    “What?”
    “That’s from a song.”
    “Oh.”
    He looked around the place, a studio apartment apparently without a bed.
    “Monica, where do you sleep when you sleep?”
    “The chair opens up into a bed.”
    “God, single life is getting minimalist. Well, they’re opening chairs at night, but not for me …”
    “What?”
    “That’s also from a song, in part. Thank you for the show.”
    “I mean it about doing a commercial.”
    “It’s not one of my goals, but I appreciate the thought,” he said.
    She was cute and rather pleasant in her way. He knew the virtues of going out with younger women, their soft skin and unwrinkled faces, their flat stomachs. You could feel young yourself with such a young thing, and wasn’t that the Main Idea? They were teaching that to Karen in school, how to extract the Main Idea from material she read. Surely I, a 47-year-old man, watching my weight and my hair, can grasp the Main Idea. And yet, apart from the fact that Monica and her age group had no personal reference to World War Two, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Korea, the Kennedys, or Grace Kelly, she didn’t know love is like a moment’s madness either. After sex with one of these young bodies he was whimsically singing “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and when he suggested that it was one of the best ways of saying “I love you” in the history of popular music, the girl didn’t know what he was babbling about. You are babbling with them. They don’t know Ira Gershwin. They couldn’t hum the verse to “Star Dust” if a Caribbean holiday on a game show depended on it, and they probably never heard of the Harry James solo from “Sing, Sing, Sing.” They wouldn’t know Irving Berlin wrote “Better Luck Next Time” and they couldn’t hum that either. How can you be involved with women who don’t even know your songs?

3
    “G OOD DAY, DOUG,” THE message on his monitor began. “We had an understanding. One column. America waits. Robby.” He envisioned an electronic nightmare: he would turn on the television set in his bedroom one night and find a message from Reynolds leaking in on the cable, “You cannot hide from me or wrestling, Doug. We will track you down.”
    Obliged to file the column, he avoided the overexposed stars of wrestling, and covered a minor-league card in Trenton, New Jersey. He wrote that this was wrestling with the ribs showing. One wrestler was kayoed by a flying leap that missed him by three feet, another knocked himself out, a turn that must have looked good in the pre-match editorial session, he wrote, but did not play well in a small arena. The featured performer was “Mafia Joe Falco.” He worked in a wide-striped suit with black shirt and silk tie and took advantage of the referee’s wandering attention to remove from his clothing, variously, a knife, a gun, and a rope, and feigned strangling his opponent, the unfortunate “Little Filipino Mike.” Gasping, Mike was counted out, holding his throat, appealing to the crowd, Mafia Joe wildly jeered for his scurrilous behavior. For the young and naive, Doug wrote, this was theater, not a sport, and concluded the piece by saying of Falco, “His is a performance that can give the Mafia a good name.”
    “Nicely done,” Reynolds said to him on the phone. Reynolds had been in South America and had called Doug on his return. “We’re getting some outstanding reader