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“Let me ask you something,” Doug said over lunch. “Do you ever masturbate?”

“What?” Bob became very concerned with his image and looked around the Chinese restaurant to see if anyone could hear.

“Shall I define my terms?”

“I understand the word. Why are you asking me?”

“Who am I supposed to ask, Dr. Ruth?”

“Are you talking—regularly?”

“I’m talking—ever.”

“Look, I have a decent marriage.”

“Bob—”

“Well, let’s say we’ve gone a while without having sex. We’ve been tired. Sarah’s been sick, flu, a cold—”

“I’m familiar with upper respiratory illnesses in New York.”

“And I might see somebody at a dinner party. There’s one incredible-looking Israeli girl we know, and you sort of fantasize under the circumstances of not having sex lately, I mean, in that circumstance.”

Bob looked very uncomfortable and was adjusting his tie.

“Just don’t quote me.”

“At least I know I’m not the only man in America my age doing it,” Doug said. “I’ll tell you what inhibits me. That I’ll have a coronary right in the middle and when they discover my body I’ll be found caught in the act and without a date on a Saturday night.”

“If I ever got found that way, Sarah would probably count what I did as cheating on her.”

“Here’s the jackpot question. After you split up with Helena, did you ever masturbate fantasizing about
her?
”

“You’ve masturbated to Susan?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So have I,” he whispered.

“You have? Behind my back?”

“Only after you were divorced.”

They were laughing at the absurdity.

“But did you ever do it to Helena?”

“Never,” he said, still laughing. “I wouldn’t want to give her the satisfaction.”

Robby Reynolds called Doug from Houston. “How ya doing up there in Noo Yawk? Must be real busy not to give the publisher what he’s looking for. Where’s wrestling, Doug?”

“It’s in the paper. I see you’re running wrestling standings, just as you said you would.”

“Do you know what ranks among the highest in total attendance among spectator sports in your very state?”

“You’re leading me to say wrestling, but it’s not a spectator sport.”

“Then what are all those people watching?”

“Scripts. I think we ought to straighten this out, Robby. I don’t want you to keep looking for wrestling columns from me. I don’t write about variety acts.”

“You write so many columns. I don’t understand why you can’t do a piece now and again.”

“I just told you why, Robby. I’m a
sports
columnist.”

“I understand. Integrity. I’m for integrity. And I respect your integrity. It’s a commodity on the paper.”

“My integrity is a commodity?”

“It’s popular with readers. So you keep your integrity, Doug, and I’ll work around it. Let’s do it this way. Give me one wrestling column. I’m not telling you what to write. I’m only asking you to address yourself to the subject.”

“Why is this so important to you?”

“Because wrestling’s become important. And we haven’t heard from you about it.”

“With good reason.”

“We just want to hear your voice here. People want to know what you have to say about it.”

“What I have to say would be negative. You’re not looking for that.”

“All I’d like is one wrestling column from Doug Gardner. Now is that a deal breaker? Am I being unreasonable? One column.
Anything
you want to say. How can you possibly object to that?”

“I can’t,” Doug said, finessed. “I guess this is why I work for you and you don’t work for me.”

He slept poorly that night, too, and decided if you have work stress and money stress and ex-wife stress you shouldn’t be sleeping alone. He phoned Monica Davidson, a woman he had met recently at an ABC Sports press party who worked for a casting office. She was in her early 30s, a bouncy blonde with her hair in a ponytail. On their first evening together they had gone to a Mexican restaurant on Third Avenue she had recommended where he was among the oldest in the place and the noise level was so high the waiter shouted the dinner specials like a racetrack announcer. Monica ended the evening abruptly saying she had to be at work early in the morning, and took herself home by taxi. When he called this time she seemed pleased to hear from him, though, and invited him to join her in seeing the musical
Cats.
She was interested in a few of the cast members for television commercials. Monica claimed that in an instant she could tell who was headed for success and who was not, and he was fascinated by her youthful certainty. How much she actually knew, he questioned. On their first evening together they passed a store which had a poster of Clark Gable and Grace Kelly, a black-and-white blowup as they appeared in
Mogambo.
She knew who Clark Gable was, having seen
Gone With the Wind.

“Who is she?” Monica asked.

“Grace Kelly.”

“Oh, that’s Grace Kelly. I thought so. She was before my time.”

Casting executives making decisions that can influence people’s careers and they can’t identify Grace Kelly.

They sat in the theater and Doug put on his new glasses to read the program.

“Ever consider doing commercials?” Monica asked, studying his face.

“
Moi
? as Miss Piggy might say.”

“We keep an eye out for ordinary-looking people.”

“Ordinary-looking?”

“You don’t look like an actor is what I mean. You’re an ordinary person.”

“This is getting worse as we proceed.”

“I’m not saying it right. You have an interesting face and you don’t look like a professional actor.”

“Thank you. Let’s hold it right there.”

Cats
began and he sensed they were having different responses to the show. Doug, brought up on the traditional American 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?

“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 response. Wrestling fans aren’t too happy. As if you said there’s no Santa Claus.”

“I imagine that’s next. A guy will come out with the long beard and red outfit and knock people out with his belly or gift-wrapped boxes.”

“You could put that in the next column.”

“There is no next column.”

“There has to be now, Doug. We’ve got about three hundred letters. We’re going to run a Wrestling Mailbag with the best of them. Then we’re sure to get letters on the letters. We can keep this going a long time. You’ve got to do a follow-up.”

“We agreed to one column.”

“That was before you did such a good job. You can’t let this kind of response just sit there.”

“Yes, I can.”

“Doug, I’m not asking you to do another column from scratch. All I’m asking is that you respond to the readers who bothered to respond to you. It’s an update. A responsible journalist has to do this.”

“Really now—”

“If you were a political columnist you would. You’d respond to a ground swell from your readers. This is your journalistic responsibility.”

“I’ll take a letter or two and I’ll answer them in print.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“Okay, Robby.”

“Then a month or so later on, I think you should look in on Mafia Joe and do a column on how he’s faring. Just as a follow-up to what you’ve already written. It’s simply good, solid journalistic procedure. Nice talking to you, Doug.”

He wrote the column quickly, trying to convince himself that the speed with which he did it would neutralize the fact that his new publisher had manipulated two columns on a subject he did not wish to write about and was now expecting a third. On the day the second column appeared he received a call from Tony Rosselli, apparently recovered from the wolf girl saga.

“Doug, this is for you since you’re such a wrestling fan these days.”

“That is a misreading.”

“I haven’t talked to anybody else about it.”

“I’m not interested.”

When Doug left the building that evening, Tony was waiting outside in a shiny black suit.

“I realize this is nervy of me, but trust me. This is a great story.”

“Sorry, Tony.”

Rosselli motioned toward a car parked at the curb and a small, wiry Oriental man, barefoot, in a white belted robe came bouncing out.

“This is Kwan Doo Duk.”

The man bowed.

“He is the world’s tallest midget wrestler. A master of the art of Hinsai wrestling. It’s very rare. So rare it’s never been seen in this country.”

“Probably with good reason.”

Doug walked away. Suddenly, there was a loud shout “
Hayaii!
” and the man grabbed Doug around the leg. He was curled up in a ball and locked around Doug’s leg with his arms and legs.

“What the hell is this?”

Doug was shaking his leg, trying to get the man off, but he would not come loose.

“This is the beauty of it. There’s no known answer for the Hinsai leg grip,” Rosselli said, now partly addressing the crowd that was gathering.

“Call him off, Tony!”

Rosselli pried him away.

“Do you speak English?” Doug said to the man. He shook his head no. “Your first lesson in English is to learn a useful phrase. ‘This-is-not-the-way-to-get-into-print.’ ”

“We went a little overboard here, Doug, but this is a class performer. We’re going to do it with gongs, the works.”

“I don’t even think he’s a midget. How tall is he?”

“Five five.”

“Tony?”

Undaunted, Rosselli smiled broadly. “That’s what makes him the world’s tallest.”

Jeannie Martins had been the youngest in the Amagansett summer house with Doug and Bob; she was now a middle-aged woman with frizzy red hair and a slender figure for which she said she brutalized herself at exercise classes. She had divorced her stockbroker husband at the height of the women’s movement, when she and Susan were in the same consciousness-raising group. Jeannie held a party in her office to celebrate the anniversary of her company. Doug stood to the side with Bob and his wife, Sarah, an unfashionable woman, chunky, with plain features, brown hair and eyes, wearing an unstylish dark dress. The three were the most conventionally dressed people there. Doug was expressing his feelings to them about his recent experience with Monica and the night of
Cats.

“Doug, you’re crazy,” Bob said.

“Crazy rhythm, you go your way …”

“I mean it. If you tell me a woman is talking about love before she goes to bed with you, I can understand a problem. But if you tell me you don’t plan to see her again because she doesn’t understand the merits of Ira Gershwin—”