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“I’d say you’ve got a way with words.”

“Is this your fantasy of all time, to walk into a place, looking, and have someone just take you home and screw you limp? And I talk dirty, too, better than those phone-in things. I talk so dirty, you can come from my talking. So what about it, Doug? You can be coming inside me minutes from now.”

“Frankly—”

“I ask just once. It’s your last chance.”

“It’s a fantasy, all right, but it’s not mine.”

She scowled at him and walked away.

“So, you’re having a good time here?” the social director said as he was heading for the door.

“This is a very peppy group.”

As Karen recounted it, the Karen line of clothing was still in a preliminary stage. For all her research, none of her drawings had yet to be converted into samples. The private office she was promised turned out to be a desk within the bookkeeping department. Doug could have told his daughter Broeden was being inconsistent, hedging on his offer, but she was still very enthusiastic, and the price of scoring points against Broeden was too high.

Sports Day
passed the
San Francisco Chronicle
in circulation and at 560,000 was thirteenth of all newspapers in the country, second to the
Wall Street Journal
in the special-interest category. A celebration lunch for staff members was held in Houston and Doug was one of the honorees, Reynolds awarding lighthearted gifts, in Doug’s case a jogging outfit with the words “Middle-Age Legs” on the back.

“That was very responsible of you, Doug, boy,” Reynolds said after the lunch. “Doing that column without my prodding you.”

“I’m a team player, Robby,” he said, in a droll tone.

“But you’re still on TV, I understand.”

“You don’t want anybody to be excessively a team player.”

“Five hundred and sixty thousand. Am I entitled to say, ‘I told you so’?”

“I suppose.”

“You know we’re picking up women readers. Not quite enough. How about going to one of those expensive health spas and writing about it?”

“Robby—”

“I just think it would be fun reading you in that situation.”

“It’s not sports.”

“But to read it
would
be entertainment. Isn’t there a thin line between the two? Doug Gardner Goes to a Spa. Just a suggestion, Doug. Make that a recommendation.”

A piece in
The New York Times
on local sportscasters mentioned Doug in passing, citing “his intelligent weekly commentaries.” Following the
Times
article, Frank Cotton, the general manager, offered him another two minutes on the air and an additional fifty dollars a week.

“Is there something you’d like to do?” Cotton asked. “Interviews? More commentary?”

“Well, there are people who don’t even know who the Splendid Splinter was.”

“Who?”

“Ted Williams.”

“Oh, of course.”

“If I can get the footage, I’d do a couple of minutes each week on some of the great athletes of the past.”

“Doug Gardner’s Memory Lane. You’ve got it.”

I’ve reached the point where I’m old enough to have a Memory Lane.

With the additional time on the air he considered himself a minor cable television personality, at seven minutes a week, very minor. People would sometimes look at him on the street, having trouble placing the face. No, I’m not David Brinkley. Sometimes he stared at women first, a game from adolescence when he would look at girls on sidewalks, testing if they would lock glances with the stud that he was. He started to do this again in the barren period after Nancy, a crazy thing, staring, testing his attractiveness, his recognition factor. Some women exchanged the glance, most looked away first. Some of the younger women, while processing his stare, had a look of annoyance. What are you looking at me for? One pretty young woman appeared to be worried and he took her expression to mean, Why is that old guy ogling? Is he going to expose himself? And he terminated this behavior.

Nancy’s pretext for calling Doug was that she never returned the news clippings she used for the collection of his articles. She didn’t want to put them in the mail, she said, and the early part of the conversation was about the clippings.

“Nancy, how are you doing?”

“Busy. Single-busy-lawyer-woman. There could be a magazine about me.”

“Maybe we could have a drink sometime.”

“And I could give you the clippings.”

“That would be good.”

“Meet me halfway?” he said.

“For the drink, you mean? I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Plaza at seven-thirty tomorrow.”

They approached each other with uncertainty and paused, measuring whether to kiss, embrace, shake hands, and they managed a small kiss. At the table, Nancy turned over the clippings, Doug thanked her for the clippings. They had done clippings. She asked about Karen and Andy, he asked about her work, she asked about his. They went around again, on her work, his work.

“Do you know how boring this is?” he said, and for the first time they both smiled.

“A man who’ll tell me I’m boring when I’m boring.”

“Nancy, it hasn’t been great lately.”

“Not for me, either.”

“At first I thought, This is better for her in the long run. Let’s hope for her sake she’ll meet someone. But the idea you might actually
be
with somebody—”

“There’s a statute of limitations on that kind of concern. In the world we live in it’s about a week,” she said.

“I miss you.”

“I miss
you.
”

“So if we’re not happy away from each other, why are we doing this to ourselves?”

“Because it’s better in the long run?”

“We have to see each other again.”

“I’d do that—possibly.”

“Then it’s settled.”

“Easy, Doug. A little more has to be discussed, such as what’s going to happen. Do we go back to where we were?”

“Of course. We’d be together again.”

“And?”

“And we’d be happy.”

She waited. He did not volunteer anything else.

“There wasn’t a marriage proposal in here that I missed, was there?” she said puckishly.

“There wasn’t,” he answered softly.

“Doug, I want to be married and have a child. If I didn’t know that about myself, or I was past the point, it would be different.”

“Doing all that just seems beyond me,” he said in sadness. “I wish you could understand that. I’ve had my children.”

“I know. You’ve been very clear. I’ve been very clear. Two wonderfully clear, direct people.”

“Maybe if we had a moratorium on
talking
about the relationship.”

“I’m sure that would be fine, for a while.”

“All right. I won’t bring it up if you won’t,” he joked.

“How long do you think that would last? We’d always get back to the same place. We just did. A few minutes and we were right back on
the
issue again.”

“Come on, kiddo. We’ll live together. That’s not a bad commitment to make.”

“It is enticing. If I accept it your way, it’s better than an affair with a married man. I get Thanksgiving.”

“Well?”

“Answer me honestly,” she said. “Has anything changed?”

“We know how much we miss each other.”

“But has anything changed? Really?”

“No,” he was obliged to say.

“Doug, it can’t work. I’d bring up marriage and children. Over and over. I know I would. We’d end up not liking each other very much.”

They were both silent, dispirited.

“This is for the best,” she said without conviction. “This way we’ll always have something good we can remember.”

Neither could say anything more. She rose, kissed him on the cheek, looked at him for a long time, a last look, and left.

Disconsolate, he forced himself to use the phone numbers he had been given, a fashion coordinator from Jeannie, a nursery school teacher from Sarah. His lack of enthusiasm affected the evenings. First dates. What are your interests? He saw each woman once and not again.

“I don’t think I can handle blind dates any longer,” he said to Jeannie after a movie. “I’m too old for blind dates. I’m too old to date.”

“Call it something else, but you’ve got to keep going. I tell that to myself as I keep turning up lemons.”

He went to the Kleinmans for dinner, finding it disquieting to be in their company with his knowledge of Bob’s activities. Being with them had an unpleasantness for Doug as though
he
was betraying Sarah, and he avoided further dinners with them.

Reynolds sent a message on the computer, “Take a whirlpool, try the mudpack. I’m buying.” He sent Reynolds back a handwritten note: “Dear Robby. Sportswriters can’t go to spas. It’s a contradiction in terms.” He then set out to do a column which had been eluding him. Billy O’Shea was the first professional football player from John Jay College, the New York City police academy. He played for a year as offensive guard with the Birmingham Stallions of the USFL. A knee injury on artificial turf ended his career, and Doug wrote two columns about him, one during the time of his tryout with the Stallions, another when he had to leave football. He had seen O’Shea in the Blarney a few times and O’Shea kept referring to a good story, if he ever got around to telling it. Doug called O’Shea periodically and finally O’Shea said he was ready to talk. He asked Doug to come to his garden apartment in Bayside, Queens. O’Shea was a person who seemed to have been constructed out of a kit: in his early 30s, he was five feet eleven, weighed about two hundred seventy-five pounds, his neck, shoulders, arms and torso were so muscular they did not appear as if they could be moving parts.

“Billy, how have you been?”

“Married,” he said proudly, leading Doug into his living room furnished with matching leather pieces. “Honey!” he called out and a red-haired, freckle-faced woman in her 20s came into the room. “This is Megan. Doug Gardner.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.

“First of all, Doug, this is on the record.”

Doug nodded and removed a tape recorder from his briefcase and placed it on a glass table between them.

“The superstars, they usually get the ink, but you wrote about me, which is why I’m coming to you with this. You can’t have a good marriage without honesty and you can’t have honesty unless you’re honest,”

In a painfully rendered, careful narrative, O’Shea admitted he had been a heavy user and a dealer of anabolic steroids while playing professional football. The drugs, synthetically producing the male hormone testosterone, were favored by body builders, weight lifters, and, evidently, football players for the additional strength the user felt he obtained. They were theoretically to be used only by prescription.

“The black market was so accepted in pro football, you couldn’t even call it a black market anymore. It was like handing a guy a drink.” He looked over at Megan, who nodded her head to encourage him. “The bad part is—I had been a cop. And I found a good source and ended up dealing.”

When he was injured and stopped playing football, he withdrew from using or selling steroids. O’Shea was currently running a bodyguard service with several other former police officers. He had been clean, but ethically he did not feel “really, clean,” he said, unless he made this confession. Apart from coverage in
Sports Illustrated,
little had been written about illegal steroid use in professional football, and Doug told the O’Sheas he would definitely do a column about this. The column appeared, the material was picked up widely by other newspapers, and O’Shea had the opportunity in interviews to restate his contrition. In gratitude the O’Sheas sent Doug a gift basket of fruit, nuts, and chocolate, huge, expensive, and charming in its naiveté.

“Hi, Doug. How’s our New York guy?”

“Hello, Robby. How’s our Houston guy?”

“I’d like to talk to you a little about that O’Shea column. I can understand why you did it, I like that the other papers quoted us, but personally I didn’t appreciate it much.”

“Oh—”

“Too down. Too dark. We did a survey. I’ll let Bill Wall fill you in. Here he is.”

“Doug, people don’t want to read about drugs anymore. Sixty-nine percent of our readers, when asked if they wanted to learn more about athletes and drug use, said no.”

“They’re oversaturated with drug stories,” Reynolds said. “At some point, it’s more of the same. And they don’t want to see their heroes that way.”

“If it’s a legitimate story you have to run it.”

“No argument. You had the O’Shea thing. You did right. But you don’t have to go out of your way to look for such dark stories.”

“Eighty-four percent of our readers said they’d like to read more about the positive side of America,” Wall said.

“That was the positive side,” Doug replied. “A man confronting his guilt.”

“You probably feel good about yourself for writing that column,” Reynolds said. “But it was a downer. Optimism, Doug.”

“I should interview Lee Iacocca on his fitness habits. That would cover just about everything.”

“If you were serious, you’d have something. Look for uplifting stories about our heroes. They’re out there in this great land of ours,” Reynolds said in a facetious tone. “So find them, Doug. It’s your price of admission for feeling good about yourself.”

The current period in the office had been typical in the number of unsolicited inquiries from people looking for publicity in his column. The lists reminded him of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” five public-relations people selling clients, four manufacturers promoting products, three athletes promoting themselves, two wrestling promoters, and Rosselli in a shiny brown suit.

Doug was working on a column about trends in salary negotiations for athletes. He interviewed Steve Macklin, a successful lawyer who represented several prominent ballplayers. Macklin was outspoken, stating that athletes gave good value to the public, and that they deserved as much money as they could get. A tall, hulking man, Macklin had the physical characteristics of a thug, a description kinder than what he had been called by some of his adversaries among ball-club owners. “If athletes are so rich,” he said to Doug, “How come they don’t own ball clubs?”