"My age exactly. Perhaps I should be scared."

An older woman. Hmmm.

I told her not to worry, that academics never die young because it defeats the whole purpose of tenure. She forced a smile and asked me how old I was.

"Thirty-three. Bad age for guys. Jesus Christ. John Belushi."

"Who is John Belushi?"

For the next two hours we went at each other in a clash of ancient knowledge and popular culture, neither of us knowing anything the other knew, guzzling bad wine until the time came to clear out that theater.

We were both loaded. We piled into a cab and as soon as Doris gave the driver her address, we went at it in the backseat. I'm not a hump-in-public kind of person, but that time we came pretty close. The cabbie kept the meter running after we stopped, patient as a priest while Doris and I b.u.t.toned and zipped ourselves up. Then we raced up to her apartment to complete what we'd begun on the ride uptown.

It was nasty s.e.x, I'm-better-than-you s.e.x, take-that s.e.x. In other words, it was excellent s.e.x for first-time s.e.x, so exhausting that I didn't have the strength to be annoyed when Doris wrapped herself around me before falling asleep.

I can't sleep like that. I gave her a few minutes to conk out all the way, then carefully disengaged myself from her grasp, got dressed, and tiptoed to the door. A pair of startled cats crisscrossed the living room, a cluttered place with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves against every wall. I was careful not to let the cats escape, and once outside I actually ran the mile or so to my apartment, though I was dead tired.

My feet must have known something that had not yet reached my brain. Flee, said the feet-flee before you get tangled up in something you'll regret.

I fled, but I came back the next night, and the night after that, if only to try and get the last word in a conflict with no end. Somehow, with n.o.body's consent, Doris and I became a couple, a "you say to-may-to, and I say to-mah-to" couple. I brought her to my world of knuckle-walking, side-of-the-mouth newspapermen, and she took me for supervised visits into the world of academic dinner parties, where people who'd actually died years earlier managed to show up to eat and drink, buoyed by tenure, the only force in the universe greater than death itself.

I wasn't having a good time. On the other hand, I wasn't having a bad time, either. That was the problem. We didn't fight-we grumbled. That's not such a good thing, because you never really blow your pipes clean the way you do with a knock-down, drag-out fight. So here I was, a man who'd never had a real relationship before, seriously involved for the first time with a woman who couldn't have been more wrong for me-all because we didn't have the steam to build up to a flashpoint fight.

It was maddening. It was frustrating. There seemed to be no legitimate way out. We mocked each other's worlds, little suspecting that we were actually mocking each other. That kind of thing never becomes evident until you're a few months into it and the s.e.xual stuff has begun to lose steam.

It came to a head one night at one of those academic dinner parties. These things were always held in the book-lined homes of professors who were usually married to other professors. Doris was a rarity among her brethren, the academic who'd hooked up with a civilian. Often I was the only person at the table who didn't have a Ph.D, or wasn't angling to get one.

I was also the only one who turned out a complete product in the s.p.a.ce of a day, day after day. The academics seemed to have weeks, months, even years to complete whatever the h.e.l.l they were working on. They used semicolons and wrote sentences that went on as long and as senselessly as the Crusades. n.o.body ever forced them to boil anything down to ten paragraphs. They didn't have to hit the mark, the way I did every time out.

They had grants, scholarships, endowments. They had six-month sabbaticals, yearlong sabbaticals. They taught three days a week, two days a week, once a week. They had off on Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, Veterans Day, Flag Day, Gay Pride Day, Doris Day Day...it wasn't exactly a killing pace, which is why their pensions were so d.a.m.n important. They knew they were going to need extensive medical coverage for the endless ailments of people who live too long.

They could barely believe that Professor Perez was involved with a reporter from the New York Star. New York Star. None of them actually admitted to None of them actually admitted to reading reading the the Star, Star, of course-but like Doris, they did see those jaw-dropping headlines every time they went to buy the of course-but like Doris, they did see those jaw-dropping headlines every time they went to buy the New York Times. New York Times.

"Good Lord. Do you actually work work there?" there?"

The guy speaking to me was seated to my left at a table for eight in an overfurnished, overheated apartment on the Upper West Side. He was a white-haired fellow with the thickest gla.s.ses I'd ever seen and a vest that bunched up over his bulging belly. He always wore this vest and was known, behind his back, as The Vest.

He might have been sixty, and he might have been ninety. He was drinking a great deal of red wine but didn't seem to be getting especially drunk, so it was clear that he did this a lot. He taught contemporary American fiction at Columbia and he'd just buried his third wife, the only one of his wives he hadn't had to divorce. He looked as if he could be dead in an hour, but on the other hand he had tenure, which meant he could live long enough to marry two or three more times.

"Yes," I said to him, drinking Budweiser beer straight from the bottle, "I write for the New York Star." New York Star."

"What's that like?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I mean..." His empty hands hovered in the air, like pudgy helicopters with no place to land. He let his hands drop, grabbed his winegla.s.s, took a long swallow. "What I mean is, it's such a...noisy publication." publication."

I had to laugh. I'd never heard anybody put it that way before. "Yeah, it is is a noisy publication." a noisy publication."

"All those horrible stories! The terrible things that happen to people!"

"What can I tell you? Terrible things happen every day."

"Yes, but-"

"But what?" what?"

The Vest didn't like being challenged. He wasn't used to it. He couldn't intimidate me with a failing grade or the refusal of a recommendation, so he had no muscle over me. All he could do was clear his throat and drink more wine.

"It just seems so unnecessarily cruel cruel at times," he said meekly. at times," he said meekly.

That was a hot one, coming from him. Academics were capable of intracampus feuds and cruelties that would make a Mafioso lose his lunch.

I put a hand on The Vest's shoulder. "Hey, let's face it. Life is cruel."

"Yes, well...I must confess that those headlines do do make me laugh." make me laugh."

"Yeah? You should see the ones that don't don't make it into print." make it into print."

His eyes widened. "Really? Do you mean to say that there's such a thing as a headline that's too offensive too offensive for the for the New York Star?" New York Star?"

"Absolutely!" I swigged more beer, straight from the bottle. I was very deliberate about it, because I wanted Doris to see me do it. She was seated directly across from me, beside an ancient professor in a wheelchair who was plugged into an oxygen supply, the tubes running from a tank behind his wheelchair into each of his nostrils. Because of this guy n.o.body at the table was allowed to smoke, as he apparently had throughout the decades of his youth-three packs per day, unfiltered. Right now the old coot was fast asleep, so Doris had little to do but stare at me, glare at me.

Before we went to parties Doris always reminded me to drink beer from a gla.s.s, not a bottle-"We're not going to one of your bucket of blood saloons!"-and I always grudgingly obliged.

Not tonight. This was a special night. This was the night I was going to break up with Doris, once and for all, and I knew it would help me to trigger a fight to get the process rolling. I wanted her to throw the first punch. A cowardly strategy, but one that had proven extremely effective throughout my turbulent love life.

Doris called to me across the table, in a sickly sweet voice. "There's a gla.s.s in front of you, Samuel."

I grinned at her. "You can use it. I don't need it."

I took another swig from the bottle.

The Vest patted my arm impatiently. "Come, then, tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"Tell me a headline that didn't get printed because it was deemed too offensive."

"Well, a bunch of angry Hasidic Jews were threatening to block the runners in the New York City Marathon one year because the streets of Williamsburg needed paving. We had a photo of these guys standing side by side in the street, shoulder to shoulder, with their arms crossed. You ready for the headline?"

"Go ahead."

"Yidlock!"

"Oooh," chuckled The Vest. "Ooh, that's good!"

I guzzled more beer and looked at Doris, who was now ignoring me, which is to say she was furious with me. We'd had six months of courtship, or whatever it was we were doing, and that was longer than I'd ever been monogamously involved with anyone-longer by five and a half months, to be precise. I didn't hate her but I didn't love her, and where does that leave you? What's the point? You look at somebody and you feel that hollow sense of free fall and you realize that the only thing to do is get yourself out, first of all, and then take it from there, even if there's no place to go from there. At least you're out.

"Excuse me," said a whispery female voice, and I turned to face the woman seated to my right. She was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, with straight blond hair that rolled down her shoulders like avalanche snow. A mountain beauty, young and rough. Without looking at her feet I knew they had to be clad in sandals, even though it was the dead of winter, for this was the standard-issue footwear for the standard-issue graduate student, a must at any academic party.

"Excuse me," she repeated, "I couldn't help overhearing that you write for the New York Star." New York Star."

"Guilty as charged."

"It shames me to say that I'm a big fan of the headlines." She giggled, her sky-blue eyes twinkling with shy mischief. By this time the oxygen gulper had awakened and was trying to converse with Doris, who continued to pretend to ignore me.

The graduate student offered her hand and introduced herself. I held her hand longer than I had to, and she was in no hurry to pull it away. She was an earnest plodder struggling toward that elusive Ph.D, and without doubt she was doing research for one of the professors at the table, and possibly having s.e.x with him (or her) in exchange for being taken under their wing. Terrible things can happen to a person under a wing, where n.o.body can see you....

I leaned back on my chair so I could speak with both The Vest and the grad student. This chair-leaning habit of mine was another of Doris's no-no's, but by this point I knew I was already in as much trouble as I could be in. The minute we got outside, I'd be getting it with both barrels. Good. Good. It was long overdue.

But first, I had a story to tell my two closet fans of New York Star New York Star headlines. I drained my beer, set the bottle on the table with a flourish. headlines. I drained my beer, set the bottle on the table with a flourish.

"So," I began, "do you remember when Andy Warhol died some years back?"

"Certainly," said The Vest. "He was in the hospital!"

"That's right," I said. "Something went wrong after surgery, and he dropped dead."

"Yes, I remember it!"

"We had a headline that was all ready to go, set up in type and everything, but it was killed at the last minute, and I mean the very very last minute. Are you ready for this?" last minute. Are you ready for this?"

The Vest nodded with genuine eagerness. I turned to the graduate student. "Are you ready?"

She nodded uncertainly but enthusiastically. I took a deep breath, and did a drumroll on the tabletop with my fingertips. "Pop Goes the Warhol!"

The Vest threw his head back and howled with laughter. He knocked over his gla.s.s, and a river of red wine rolled across the table onto Doris's lap.

Doris jumped to her feet and glowered at me as if I'd planned it to happen exactly this way. She was interrupted by racking coughs from the guy in the wheelchair-she'd inadvertently yanked his oxygen hose loose. He struggled to breathe as Doris and three other dinner guests tried frantically to connect the hose back onto the tank.

The Vest kept laughing, totally unaware of the drama playing out right across from us.

"Pop goes the Warhol!" he roared. "Priceless!" "Priceless!"

Doris finally got the hose back onto the tank. The old coot took deep breaths, and everybody settled back into their chairs. In the midst of this The Vest had pa.s.sed out, his cheek to the tablecloth, a smile on his face. Through it all, the graduate student hadn't made a sound. At last she cleared her throat and leaned close to my ear.

"Who's Andy Warhol?" she whispered.

Doris dried herself as best she could with a napkin and told me to get our coats. Thirty seconds later we were out on the street on Upper Broadway, struggling into our coats as a light snow began to fall. She waited until she was b.u.t.toned up to the neck before opening fire.

"You complete a.s.shole." a.s.shole."

"Didn't you have a good time tonight, Doris?"

"The things you do, merely to antagonize me!"

She began walking home. I stayed with her, shoulder to shoulder.

"Don't yell at me, yell at The Vest. He's the one who spilled wine all over you."

"You pride pride yourself on behaving like an ape, don't you?" yourself on behaving like an ape, don't you?"

"Well, I don't know, Doris. Is an ape even aware aware that he's an ape? Can an ape feel pride? If he could, would he truly be an ape, or just an that he's an ape? Can an ape feel pride? If he could, would he truly be an ape, or just an imitation imitation of an ape?" of an ape?"

She glowered at me, and I couldn't help laughing.

"See how much I've learned from you, Doris? Six months ago I could never have come up with a bulls.h.i.t a.n.a.lysis like that. Now it's second nature to me, after all these friggin' intellectual dinner parties."

Doris quickened her pace. It was easy to keep up with her. "Your hatred for women knows no bounds, does it?"

"Oh, I hate women now, is that it? I can't get along with you, so I must must hate women." hate women."

"Your mother must have done some job on you."

"Shut up about my mother. You don't know anything about my mother."

"That's right, I don't. And I don't know anything about you, either. Nothing that matters, at any rate."

She was getting in some good shots, but that was all right. The angrier she was, the easier the breakup would be. She hugged herself against the cold, skidded on the sidewalk, and pushed me away when I moved to catch her.

"Why don't you just go back to the party, Samuel? Go back and f.u.c.k Leona."

"Who's Leona?"

"The little chippie you were flirting with."

"I wasn't flirting with her."

"The h.e.l.l you weren't!"

"She doesn't even know who Andy Warhol was."

"As if that would stop you! I didn't know who Lou Gehrig was, and look at where we've we've wound up!" wound up!"

"Yeah, Doris, just look at us." I grabbed her arm, brought her to a skidding halt, looked her right in the eye. "Are you happy, Doris? Tell me, are you happy?"

She stood and stared at me, her hair dusted with snowflakes in a way that made her look almost angelic. She sighed, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. "What is it you want, Samuel? Obviously you've got some kind of plan."

It was time. I looked around, as if to fix the scene in memory. We were at Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway, and very few people were around. A skinny, bearded guy was walking a dachsund on a leash, the dog wrapped inside a plaid, tube-shaped sweater. Another lonely New Yorker, turning a pet into a partner to obsess over...

Doris waited for me to speak. The temperature had dropped severely since we'd left the party-it was cold, unbelievably cold. The snow was already sticking to the sidewalk like dust, with no wetness beneath it. There was an odd silence to the night, a silent but far from holy night. And then I spoke.

"I've had enough, Doris," I all but whispered. "I want to end this thing."

She continued staring at me and through me. Her eyes were steady but not tearful. She was waiting for more. I had a million complaints about Doris, but somehow, all I could think of was my own limitless list of flaws, and suddenly here they came, tumbling from my mouth.

"I'm a mess, Doris. I don't really know how to be in a relationship. I don't feel like half of a whole with you...I've never felt like half of a whole with anyone. anyone." I swallowed, stamped my half-frozen feet. "You say I hate women...all I know is, I'm better off alone. That's what I want. That's what I've always always wanted." wanted."