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first one."
    "Well, make yourself at home. I'll be a couple of minutes, and then we'll phone Nana." He disappeared.
    Hearing its name, the phone began to ring again. I wondered how he stood it. Mine rang only once or twice a day. I wondered how I stood it. I looked at the coke for a moment and then got up quickly and walked to the other end of the room.
    Above the bookcase the wall was hung with a series of bright, four-color magazine covers, maybe twenty in all. Toby's face was on every one of them.
    He had a beaming, ingenuous, boyish smile. His expression was open, healthy, friendly. He looked about twenty-seven in most of the photographs.
    TV Guide was the only one I recognized. The others all had names like Fab and Rave and For Teens Only, TOBY VANE OF “HIGH VELOCITY” —HIS SECRET SORROW, one shouted. WIN A DATE WITH “HIGH VELOCITY'S” TOBY VANE shrilled another. TOBY VANE TELLS ALL; TOBY VANE'S WEDDING WISH LIST; THE FAN TOBY VANE WILL NEVER FORGET; "WHY ME?" TOBY VANE CRIES.
    Other magazines lay heaped on top of the bookcase. Toby's picture graced these, too, but he'd either gotten tired of cutting them out or he hadn't gotten around to it yet. I picked up one on which he looked particularly boyish and turned to page 28, which promised to tell me 100 THINGS TOBY DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT HIM.
    Toby apparently didn't want much known about him. Among the riveting nuggets the magazine's crackerjack investigative team had unearthed were the facts that his favorite color was blue, that he cried at sad movies, that he'd had a German shepherd named Sam when he was a boy, and that his ideal girl was one with a lot of self-respect.
    I was mulling that last one over when he called from the kitchen. "Simeon? Are you sure you don't want a beer?"
    I dropped the magazine guiltily. "I'm fine," I said. "Just looking around." I partially straightened the stack of magazines, which was leaning forward alarmingly. "Is blue really your favorite color?" I shouted.
    "What?"
    I went to the kitchen door and leaned against it. He was leaning over a sink, holding a washcloth against his mouth. The washcloth was wrapped around something that might have been an ice cube. "Do you really cry at sad movies?"
    He started to grin, and then he winced. "Don't," he said. "Don't make me laugh. They just make that stuff up. All I do is pose for the pictures."
    "That's a fictitious character, the Toby Vane in those magazines?"
    "All the Toby Vanes are fictitious characters. My real name is Jack Sprunk."
    "What a peculiar way to live."
    "I couldn't agree more. Now go away and let me work on my wounds."
    I went back into the living room and straight to the magazines. They had a kind of horrid fascination. The one I picked up this time had a sincere-looking Toby on the cover and the headline TOBY VANE'S NEW YEAR WISHES FOR YOU. I decided I wasn't up to it and dropped the magazine onto the top of the tilting stack, and the whole slippery batch of them slid forward lazily and fell to the floor.
    Beneath them was a cheap satin-covered photo album on which was written, in flowery script, "Precious Memories." Beneath that was another, inscribed "Loved Ones."
    "Give me another minute," Toby shouted. "Then we can call Nana. Maybe we'll even go get her, if she's forgiven me." Even though I knew he was loaded to the gills on at least two kinds of dope, he sounded healthy and happy.
    I opened the top album.
    At first the shapes didn't make sense to me: they were just abstract patches of color and shadow. Then I realized what I was seeing. They were pictures, the kind of pictures you normally see only in magazines with names like Pain and Punishment or Whipcrack. But these hadn't been cut out of magazines.
    They were Polaroids.
    Many of them had been taken in the room I was in.
    Women were tied into impossible positions. Women were gagged and handcuffed. A woman lay naked on her back with the photographer's shoe pressing into her chest. A very young girl, no