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“Robby, I spent over twenty years covering sports to reach the point where I can trust my instincts, write about what I’m feeling and have a pretty good idea that people will respond to it. That’s my craft.”

“Nobody’s tampering with your craft,” Reynolds responded. “Write your columns any way you want. All we’re telling you is to be guided by the scientific data. You’ve got carte blanche.”

“That’s a very loose interpretation of carte blanche.”

“Doug, this is not a debate. When you see the newspaper moving up the list and you see your column racking up even better readership results, you’ll know this is the way to go.”

“You’ll be receiving the first guidelines in two weeks,” Wall said.

“And use them, Doug! It’s going to be a great combo, that Gardner style and integrity directed at what we know people want to read about. It’s a no-lose situation. So there we are. It was great to see you.”

“A pleasure,” Wall said, fixing Doug with a hard look.

“Gentlemen—”

“Thanks for dropping by,” Reynolds said, the way one might to a person who had merely stopped in from down the hall.

He would have thought, considering the length of the day and with traveling between cities, that he would have fallen asleep easily that night out of fatigue. He was kept awake by speeches he never made to Reynolds about this new computerized journalism, speeches he could not afford to make. This is what Doug did for a living, there were few jobs in the field at his salary, none he knew of that were available. He couldn’t walk away on principle. Susan could afford to do that, Susan, who was supposed to pay her share of child care, and one day—when would that be?—pay half the tuition, Susan was free to leave her job and start a new business. When he was growing up the absence of money in the Gardner household was like an insufficient supply of oxygen, and they all had trouble breathing. He would sometimes awaken in the night and go into the kitchen for juice and see his father, awake, hunched and exhausted at the kitchen table, bills scattered in front of him. Doug, reflecting on the events of the day, took a deep breath in his anxiety, trapped by money like his father before him, as if it were in the genes.

D
OUG ATTENDED A PRESS
reception for advertising personnel and the media presenting “Jocks,” a new modeling agency featuring professional athletes as the models. Several women were introduced as “Jockettes.” These were not the Pete Roses or Chris Evert-Lloyds of the endorsement field, this was the bench.

He brought Jeannie Martins to the party; they provided an escort service for each other, they passed along information about parties, and sometimes accompanied each other so neither would feel any more single than they really were. Scheduled for the cocktail hour, this event, at the Roosevelt Hotel, was well attended; the placed throbbed with people socializing, young men and women and a fair number of middle-aged men.

“Madame Jeannie, telepathist. I can look across a room and pick out the married men.”

“The ones wearing wedding rings.”

“Sometimes they take them off. I can tell by their moves. They’re in a big hurry and very aggressive.”

Near them was a woman in her 30s in a working-girl’s outfit, tailored suit, white blouse with a ribbon tied in front, high heels, her Reebok sneakers protruding from a canvas bag. She was sturdy and vigorous-looking with a pug-nosed, all-American face.

“Do you think this Jocks idea will go over?” Doug asked her.

“Absolutely. It’s a solid marketing concept.”

He wondered how one used words like “solid marketing concept” and pretended they were part of the language. But she followed up with a smile. “Cathy Vindell,” she said.

“Doug Gardner.”

“What brings you here, Doug?” she asked, and with a nod, Jeannie smiled knowingly, waved goodbye and dissolved into the crowd. Cathy was employed by Merrill Lynch, and Doug managed to find a common ground with her: of his nineteen subscriptions, two were for business magazines, and they went from discussing the “solid marketing concept” to market conditions to Reagan’s economic policies, which carried them to dinner in a ribs restaurant. She invited him to her apartment for a drink, a one-room place on Columbus Avenue, a renovation of an old walk-up. Doug knew the neighborhood from his childhood, and he imagined an Italian shoemaker and his wife had lived there before he lost his store and apartment to gentrification and this was the result, a stock analyst with color television pouring wine for a man she met at a media event. They began to kiss, mouths open, tongues, he was intrigued how quickly they went from economics to tongues and he was fondling her naked body on her Yves Saint Laurent sheets. He was going to focus on her, take time to explore with his fingertips and tongue the light fuzz on her body and the moistness inside her. Time stops, Reynolds stops, the column stops, the tuition stops, Susan’s share of the expenses stops. This must be what it’s like to be on drugs. He was concentrating on nothing but her body. He lasted longer than he usually did and then he entered her again after a while, no complexity, no particular tenderness from her or from him, just physical sex and finally he dozed off next to her. “Hey, tiger.” She was poking him on the shoulder. “I’ve got an early meeting tomorrow. You better go.” He dressed, jotted down her number from the phone and she gave him a perfunctory kiss on the forehead, much as a working girl might give to the butcher for having saved her a nice chicken. “Call me sometime,” she said. Not “Call me tomorrow.” “Sometime.” He did call her a couple of days later. Her secretary took a message. She did not call back. After several days he called again and she spoke to him.

“Hi, how are you? Look, I’m in a relationship. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll get in touch with you.”

In a relationship? Since him? Before him? This was his best shot. He had set aside everything else in his mind to focus on her body. He couldn’t screw any better than that. Did she get laid like that all the time? When he was in his 20s the younger kids seemed to be having more sex than he ever had when he was a kid. They were a sexual revolution ahead of him. And now this. You miss one sexual revolution and you never catch up.

One of the first survey guidelines from Houston indicated a high percentage of people interested in reading about Pete Rose. Doug had no objection to doing a piece on Rose even though the world could live without another one. Rather than interview Rose on himself—Doug thought that might be number 4,000 on the subject—he called Rose in Cincinnati and asked how he regarded some of the new hitters in the league. Doug did a follow-up column after talking to the hitters about Rose’s comments. The columns were not technically about Rose, but Doug felt they were close enough and that he was covered in Houston for a while.

Jeannie offered Doug the phone number of a woman she had met in her exercise class. Phone numbers were not uncommon for him, Jeannie was a source, Sarah Kleinman met people at various discussion groups she attended and Sarah, too, was a source. He wondered if it was better simply to be a sex object with someone like Cathy Vindell than the matrimonial object he often was with “the hysterics.” These were the never-married middle-aged morose, or the formerly married middle-aged morose he encountered on the singles circuit. Their passivity was painful, the hysterical eagerness to please, the listening so hard to the dumbest, most banal things he had to say. Throw out twenty years of women’s liberation and all the back copies of
Ms.
magazine. Men are wonderful. And he used Scope, his clothes were clean, he was clean, straight, he had a job, he wasn’t on drugs or booze. This was Eligible.

The woman Jeannie suggested, Vicki Moss, owned an American crafts shop in SoHo. He called for her at the store, a small, bright place with handcrafted objects. He liked the store. He thought he was going to like her, a brunette in her early 40s, a bit overweight, with luminous brown eyes and long black hair. They went to dinner at a nearby restaurant and he was off. One of those nights. You can’t buy a base hit. If he tried to be witty the remark came up empty. He talked about work, far too much about work, falling into a monologue about Reynolds. Boring. An 0 for 5 night, go home and try again another time, and yet she sat there for it, her eyes wide with the wonder of him, or the eligibility of him. He asked questions about her work, how did she find the pieces she sold, were the new craftsmen markedly different from the old craftsmen? He even cringed at the quality of his questions, which he also found to be boring, and she answered succinctly, letting him do the talking, and he filled the spaces with more inane chatter about the newspaper and market research. She looked interested in what he had to say. I am a boring man tonight. How can you be interested? What I am looking for is someone who wouldn’t be interested. Who would have asked to go home an hour ago. Someone I’d have to show up for with a marching band for her ever to see me again.

“I apologize for tonight,” he said, as they walked to her apartment. “I’ve been too preoccupied with work lately.”

“What do you mean?” she said, the hysteria at the corners of her eyes. The evening didn’t go well, you won’t call again, we won’t get married within a year? What do I mean? he thought, pained for her. That’s what I mean.

“I probably get hysterical myself sometimes,” Jeannie said to him. They had gone to see a revival of
The Seventh Seal
and were having hamburgers at the Blarney. “You’re at a cocktail party, you look around the room and you think, it’s over. There is not one more surviving healthy single male in the world. As of this minute the species is extinct. But the one who’s crazy is that Merrill Lynch girl who went to bed with you. To just pick up a guy—”

“Not just a guy. Me.”

“You could be anybody. I do it myself. Crazy stuff. I was at a bar a while back with some women from business and I went home with the bartender. Big, good-looking Irish guy. Why do men think they’re so fascinating?

“There are off nights.”

“They really should just have their mothers listen to them.”

“Sexism, Jeannie?”

“Right. All those consciousness-raising sessions and all that intensity. I’m forty-four. Maybe I made some progress in my career, but I’m not in a relationship and I screw a bartender whose idea of a deep discussion is to tell me how he makes a perfect Kir Royale.”

“Maybe you made some progress?”

“So I have my own business. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the gains. I got rid of Buddy. I never should have married him. But once I married him, maybe I shouldn’t have divorced him. They say it’s lonely at the top. I’m here to tell you it’s lonely in the middle, too.”

They were quiet for a few moments, then she said, “I had lunch with Susan the other day.”

“You did?”

“She asked if I’d get together with her. It felt peculiar. Basically, I got you in the settlement. She wants me to do PR for her, get her into
Women’s Wear,
do what I can, and she’d pay me. I didn’t want to give her an answer until I talked to you.”

“I don’t have any objections. Anything that can help.”

“She really is Miss Driftwood, isn’t she? But this new business has possibilities. She has a retainer from Filene’s.”

“Take the account. It’s in the public interest.”

“She was wearing a great outfit, all put together from odds and ends. A waiter’s jacket over a lacy blouse, silk pants, and she had on a skimmer. She
has
style.”

“So I recall.”

On the way home he thought about Susan and her style. Sometimes I’m in a store and I can’t make up my mind about a jacket or a tie and I want to turn to you and say, “Susan, what do you think?” Susan …

On a Friday night Doug was watching a Knicks basketball game on the television set in his bedroom. Karen, who sometimes watched weekend sports programs with Doug, looked in intermittently. Andy came and sat next to Doug and asked a few questions about the game, which was unusual for him. A few nights later the Knicks were playing again and Andy watched with his father. Over the succeeding weeks Andy became a Knicks fan and started following the team’s progress in the newspapers. Doug wondered if the sudden interest came from school, if he had been playing basketball there, but he had not, nor did he want to now when Doug offered to shoot baskets with him. The Knicks were playing a Saturday afternoon game and Doug arranged for tickets for the three of them. At dinner that night, Doug, the old-timer, talked about previous Knicks teams and their championship years.

“It was a wonderful time to be writing sports, the line disappeared between being a writer and being a fan. It all became one during the playoffs, the city, the crowds at the Garden, people watching at home and in bars. The last game in the playoff against L.A. in 1970, you’d never forget it. Willis Reed could barely walk and he limped on the court, made his first couple of baskets and L.A. was in shock. When the game was over and we won, people spilled out onto the streets, out of bars, out of apartments, strangers standing around on sidewalks as though they were friends, congratulating each other.”

Doug caught himself. He was talking as if they were at a campfire.

“I feel like an old man of the mountain and this is our folklore. But it is, the old Knicks.”

“I’m glad you got to see it,” Karen commented with affection.

“I love the way you said, ‘And we won.’ It must have been something,” Andy added.

You’re something, both of you. He knew that Andy was saying, I can’t play ball, Dad, but I can do this. I can be a fan for you like other kids. Doug put his arms around them and hugged them both. Andy wouldn’t have been comfortable with it alone, but both at the same time, Doug was able to get the hug in. “We’re the new Knicks,” Doug said.

Reynolds came to New York for a publishers’ conference and passed through the
Sports Day
offices. He paused to look over Doug’s shoulder at the monitor of his computer while Doug was working on a column about the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Doug had taken his dog, Harry, to the show as a “researcher,” the column a view of the all-pedigree show as a mutt like Harry might perceive it.