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“What do you do?” a fairly good-looking blonde in her 30s asked him over the din.

“I write a sports column.”

“I’m looking for a job in advertising. I’m a copywriter.”

“Do you use a word processor?” he said lamely, trying to get
something
started.

“I don’t use anything. I’m unemployed.” And she moved on. He looked at the networking throng, buzzing bees, and the awful part was that several of the women, happy to alight elsewhere, looked attractive to him. Listen out there. I have something a lot of these young guys might not have. I have experience. I have some wit, some intelligence. I love dogs. Eavesdropping, he decided that for all the exchange of business cards and contacts, “networking” in a public place was another word for pickups, and he wasn’t picking up and it wasn’t his network.

He called a service that advertised video dating. Perhaps he could find a terrific woman so committed to her meaningful work that she hadn’t the time or the inclination to meet men in the ordinary rituals. For one hundred dollars you received three phone numbers obtained after viewing videos of women talking about themselves. You, in turn, submitted a video of yourself which they could judge. Doug sat in a room with the video camera on for his interview with Mrs. Patterson, in her 40s, stylishly dressed, who, in the preinterview, exhibited a condescending manner which suggested to Doug that she was saying, “You’re needy.
I’m
married.”

“What are looking for in a mate?” she asked with the camera running.

“I never articulated it so baldly. Someone who can adjust to a man having teenage children. Who can accept sports and knows the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not from an Errol Flynn movie. Who knows who Errol Flynn
was.”
He paused, beginning to feel ridiculous. “Someone who is as personally degraded by this as I am. Who sympathizes with the need to meet a kindred spirit that would lead you to make a video so someone can gape at you in this electronic meathook.”

“Sir? Our customers are not negative about our service and we’re not promoting negativism here.”

“
That’s
the woman I’m looking for, the one who’s negative about your service!”

“We’re going to return your money. We reserve the right to do so.”

“No, I want all this in. This is my presentation.”

“The interview is concluded. Cut.”

“That was possibly a great dating video,” Doug said. “It might have gotten into a museum.
Video vérité.
”

“How is it done?” he said to Jeannie at dinner. “I don’t know how you connect with anybody.”

“I don’t know what you do, either. Some women start to go out with younger men. I’ve got to wonder about the men who go out with women too much older than they are. After you do that, then what? Already I see myself dressing younger than what’s appropriate. I was Audrey Hepburn. I’m turning into Blanche DuBois.”

“You look wonderful, Jeannie.”

“What do you know? You look at me like I’m a sister.”

“Younger sister.”

“I appreciate that.”

“What’s the forum? Sports columnist. Has half a dog, half of two children, good seats for sports events, subscribes to nineteen periodicals.”

“Nineteen? Really?”

“Actually, I sound terrific.”

“We both are. It’s the system that’s no good. The thing is, marriage doesn’t work. But not being married doesn’t work either.”

The Day. Susan and Broeden were getting married in Paris. The children flew over with them as did members of the immediate families. This was Susan’s custodial time and by extension the dog’s time with her, and Susan asked Doug if he would take the dog. If not, she would arrange to place him in a kennel. Doug kept Harry with him and on the wedding day took him jogging in Central Park. He was back at the apartment by 11
A.M.
He had another thirty hours or so before the children were to be returned to Manhattan by a cousin of Broeden’s while the newly weds honeymooned in Europe.

“What are you doing today?” Bob said to him on the phone.

“I’ve got some articles to read.”

“What you need is a steam bath, a massage, a movie, then dinner.”

“What is this about?”

“We start with the steam bath and the massage.”

“You want me to go to a massage parlor?”

“This is not dirty. This is the real stuff. Al Butteroni at the Saint George Hotel.”

“I never had a massage.”

“All the more reason. Doug, your ex-wife is in Paris getting married and you’re home alone with your dog.”

Bob persisted and Doug made arrangements with a handyman in the building to feed and walk the dog later in the day. Bob arrived for Doug in a chauffeured limousine, grinning widely, insisting he was paying for the excursion. They went to Brooklyn Heights to the St. George. Doug thought the steam room and the massage were wonderful; several older men were taking the steam, their girth making him feel undeniably slim. They returned to Manhattan and saw a revival of
Red River
at the Bleecker Street Cinema, then they went to City Island for dinner and sat overlooking the water, drinking wine and eating lobster.

“This is such a great day,” Doug said.

“We should do this every once in a while, get together on a weekend without women. You get older, the weekends come, and you don’t hang around with a buddy anymore.”

“I used to spend so much time, when I was a kid, hanging around with friends.”

“I spend most of mine working. That’s my biggest regret. I haven’t spent enough time with my daughters. I envy you for that, for all the time you spent with your kids.”

“Many hours.”

“It’s going to change for me. I’m working on a deal where I’m going to walk away with big dollars. At least a million. Then I’m going to buy a house in the Hamptons and spend more time with everybody. Helena would have liked a house in the Hamptons,” he said with a distant tone in his voice. “Anyway, I’m going to be more like you, get involved with my kids. I regret I haven’t done that. What about you, Doug, any regrets? And I don’t mean Susan. This is one day we can leave her out of it.”

“I remember a night in Amagansett, when we were in the house with Jeannie and this pretty girl came to a party on the deck. She was young, a senior in college, and she thought we were big-time stuff, working men. She was obviously coming on to me, she was very lovely, and I passed. I thought she was too young. And now
she’s
a middle-aged woman.”

“There can’t be any real regrets for you, Doug. The way you are with your kids, the kind of things you write about, it’s all clean. I’m in with the dirt.”

“Maybe,” Doug said without force.

“You have to know that what you’re doing is valuable,” Bob said, upset.

“What is it?”

“My entire position is that morally I’m all right because I represent
you.
”

They returned to Manhattan and drank beer from the bar in the limousine. Tipsy and silly, they were singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” knowing that was silly, singing it to be silly. They stopped the car a few blocks from Doug’s apartment and walked, the driver following them slowly along West End Avenue as they strolled with their beers. They approached the apartment house and Doug looked at his watch.

“Trying to figure out what it is, Paris time?” I was.

“She’s married.”

“Somehow the divorce doesn’t make you as officially finished as the remarriage,” Doug said.

“You’re going to be all right.”

Bob had orchestrated the elaborate day to see Doug through this. Doug put his arms around Bob and hugged him. He could feel Bob’s belly pressing against his, and the whiskers on his cheek. He had never held a man so close—his father when he was little, not anyone as an adult. Doug and Bob stood on the sidewalk hugging, in a zone of intimacy neither was familiar with, and they did not want to let go, they held each other a long time, holding onto the moment, not caring who might see.

A few weeks later Doug met Jerry Broeden, Susan’s new husband, for the first time. On a Sunday night Doug was returning from the supermarket, and as he was about to enter the building the children arrived with the dog for their two weeks. Broeden had driven them there, and he came out of the car to introduce himself. Doug had expected a movie star. Broeden was a slim, unexceptional-looking man of five feet eleven, light brown hair, brown eyes, dressed seriously in Ralph Lauren, the tweed sports jacket, the Shetland sweater, the twill slacks, the Ralph Lauren loafers Doug knew to be out of his price range. And Broeden was young. This may have been the Main Idea here. He appeared to be several years younger than Doug, possibly younger than Susan. He looked 40, nearly.

“I’m Jerry Broeden.”

“Doug Gardner.”

“I guess we’ll be seeing each other now and then.” He called out to Karen and Andy, “So long, guys.”

They waved, carefully watching the interchange between Broeden and their father. Aware of their concern, Doug played it elegantly and gave Broeden a warm smile and a handshake.

“Good to meet you,” Doug said.

“Same here.” And Broeden returned to his car.

Doug didn’t have a car and had never owned a car. I could have a car, I suppose, but I don’t really need one. Since Doug didn’t own a car and didn’t care at all about cars, he didn’t know exactly which model of Mercedes Broeden owned. It was black and large, as large a Mercedes as Doug had ever seen. The kind of Mercedes he imagined would have been used by Hermann Goering.

S
USAN AND BROEDEN APPEARED
so frequently in
Women’s Wear Daily,
Doug wondered if their marriage was being represented by a press agent. Jeannie mailed him clippings, Susan Brook creating a Mexico Week for Saks, Broedenco commissioning designers to create a high-fashion look in denim, Jerry Broeden and Susan Brook at the opening of Sparta, the new hit nightclub in SoHo.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be letting you know about these things,” Jeannie said to him.

“No, I’d like to read about these whiz kids. I’m not sure why, exactly.”

He changed his mind when Jeannie sent him yet another clipping, Susan gorgeous in a sumptuous gown with Broeden in a tuxedo at a fashion-industry fete, and he decided he knew enough about their stardom. Susan continued to use the name Brook in business but was now Mrs. Broeden in her personal life. Doug phoned the apartment for the children and a Spanish-accented female voice said, “Mrs. Broeden out. Children back soon.” This was Carmen, the Broedens’ live-in housekeeper from Venezuela. Andy said he spoke Spanish to her and this was going to help him with Spanish for school. Doug was preoccupied with the live-in aspect.

“How big an apartment is that?”

“Twelve rooms,” Andy said.

Apparently even Harry had his own room, a separate laundry room in the apartment, and the dog slept there at night.

“He’s so cute,” Karen said. “He just gets up at some point at night and walks all the way to the other end of the house and goes to sleep.” Doug attempted to visualize the size of an apartment where you would say, “All the way to the other end of the house.”

“Flash Broeden” he was now referred to in the media. Susan and Broeden expanded from
Women’s Wear
and now were mentioned in column items in the
New York Post
and the
Daily News.
Broeden opened several retail stores, calling them “Flash,” stores projecting exactly that. Doug had to pass one every day on the way to the subway, Broeden’s investment invading Doug’s landscape. Flash on Broadway was on a site that had been a supermarket, the place now a tribal gathering place for young people, largely teenagers and slightly older, shopping for the brightly colored clothing, punk styles and costume jewelry that characterized the Flash look. People shopped as rows of television sets played rock videos, the sound augmented by disco-quality sound systems. A Flash opened on Forty-second Street, another in Greenwich Village, and Broeden was quoted as saying he planned to take the concept nationwide.

When Doug was first prescribed glasses he could still read a newspaper in the morning without them, although holding the pages at a distance. Now he was beginning to inch the newspaper away
with
his reading glasses. He was disinclined to see the charmless young Dr. Jeffrey Weiss for a follow-up examination and he asked John McCarthy for a recommendation, Weiss having been suggested by Bob Kleinman. McCarthy gave him the number of Dr. Max Rothstein, a man who immediately inspired confidence in Doug. He spoke with a slight European accent and was possibly 70 years old. Now this was a doctor. A bald little man in a lab coat, Dr. Rothstein moved around the office with rapid steps, making adjustments in the testing equipment. The consultation took place in a brightly lit room, Doug’s confidence beginning to ebb when he saw Dr. Rothstein squinting over his notes.

“So. You use your eyes much?” he asked Doug.

“Yes.”

“Your eyes are slightly weaker. You need a more emphatic prescription.”

“It’s only been a few months.”

“This is normal. And it must be said, once you wear glasses, the condition is irreversible.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t expect your eyes to get stronger. When you reach our age—”

Our age? You see us as the same age? I’ve come for an eye examination to Mr. Magoo!

Doug took the prescription, had the lenses changed, and despite his waning confidence in the squinting Dr. Rothstein, who called him “Mr. Garner” as Doug was leaving, he noted the improvement when he now read. But “irreversible.” That’s not a word you want to hear at this point in your life. What else is “irreversible”?

Karen and Andy arrived at Doug’s on a Sunday night with fresh luggage tags on their suitcases. “You were in Montreal?”

“Jerry and Mom wanted to go for the weekend,” Karen said.

“Was this for business?”

“No,” Andy said. “For a restaurant. They wanted to try it.”

“You flew to Montreal to try a restaurant?”

On their next school vacation, they were going to Antigua the first week; Doug had to work during the second.

“We’ll have sort of a vacation in New York,” he said. “Go to the theater, restaurants, movies, a ball game.”