Not that he lacked sensuality: he simply lacked the strength to give (an) order. There are things that can only be accomplished by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Cease striving,

Then there will be self-transformation.

Chang Tse Book xi

In the late spring of 1978, my employer, Winston Stone, purchased the prestigious but smaller brokerage firm of Pass, Wansworth, for fifty million dollars. Pass Wansworth was suffering from a wealth of problems resulting from a mishandled expansion but it was a comfortable place to work and their employees had not seen the true extent of their problems. It was soon apparent that the main attraction to Winston Stone had been the chance to buy the smaller firm's banking and trading facilities in Europe and that little thought had been given to the difficulties of integrating the domestic offices of the two firms. I was pulled from my job in the main Chicago office and became one of the fifteen young managers assigned to handling the problems that arose when the Pass Wansworth domestic offices were converted to Winston Stone's systems. I became a particularly frantic sort of business traveler, visiting five cities in the first six weeks and nearly two cities a week for the next eight. By then it was becoming clear that the merger was a disaster. The European division had been sold off for $30 million when the SEC refused to allow it to be merged into Winston Stone and upper management had turned their attention to other matters. The situation seemed to deteriorate by the week. A bitter comment began to spread through the lower level people like myself who were charged with the task of holding together what remained of the domestic Pass, Wansworth offices. "Twenty million," we said, "wasn't a lot to pay to destroy a major competitor." There was a stark logic to the statement that was hard to ignore. A level of cynicism descended on us that comes only to people who had hoped for more. The more experienced managers did everything they could to disassociate themselves from the merger.

The weeks of continuous travel, of long days spent among tense and frustrated strangers and of too many nights in impersonal hotels, of too many hours sealed into planes and too much rushing through too many airports were taking a heavy toll on me. One late Friday evening toward the end of the summer, I found myself walking briskly down an airport concourse, carrying my carefully packed bags, wearing my best blue suit. I caught a glimpse of the bland flat land beyond a narrow window and I realized with shock that I had no idea where I was. After a moment I sorted it out. I was in O'Hare. Chicago was nominally my home. I was back for a quick weekend that would prove long enough to handle the huge collection of mail but far too short to repair the loose ends of my life. I was suffering heavily from the anomie and depression known to the constant traveler and I knew that at this point in my career I could not afford any real sign of weakness. A rise to the top of a firm like Winston Stone required a long string of victories, an unbroken demonstration of nerve, strength, wit and perhaps ruthlessness and though I knew it was unlikely that I would not make the full journey I had no intention of being knocked out at the first real test.

Soon after my weekend in Chicago I called Harvey Knox who was technically my superior and requested a week's vacation. I hoped to spend some time basking in the Caribbean sun, gradually reviving and recovering some sense of myself. I received the mixed blessing of a response that I had made myself too valuable to be let loose just then.

I spent the next week in Seattle preparing the office for a Winston Stone man out of Boston to run. I was rushed to Salt Lake City for three days to handle a case of probable theft and fraud until the Compliance and Security Department could get some of their own people there from New York. Then I went to San Diego for ten days to help a friend get a grip on a situation that he wasn't quite tough enough to handle on his own and then I spent three days in Omaha doing a semi-audit function for an office that, to the disbelief of the New York home office was running fairly well. Rumor had it that I was going to Kansas City the next morning and that worried me because I knew Kansas City was looking for a permanent manager and I did not wanted to find myself assigned there. Things brightened a bit on Wednesday when I got a call from my mentor, Tony Sarceti, who said that he could delay my trip to Kansas City till Tuesday or perhaps Wednesday on the condition that I be in New York on Monday to discuss a proposition. It seemed a Godsend. I was eager for anything familiar and for anything that promised a break from my mad flight. I handled my own travel arrangement for a change.

Linda was living in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania then, two hours out of New York by bus. She and I had been lovers four years before when we had been in college together and still when I thought of the word lover I applied it to her in a way that I couldn't apply it to her successors. The intensity of our affair was witnessed by the fact that in the intervening years we had remained in contact and become something on the order of old friends.

I managed to call her that night. I thought I could get to her place by flying through Philadelphia but she said that that was too far away but that she would be happy to meet me at the smaller airport at Allentown and would let me spend the weekend with her in the dormitory apartment she had in the small state college where she was working as a counselor while she studying for a master's degree in psychology.

I had become as expert at transcontinental travel as I had once been at riding the subway in Chicago and the arrangements where soon made. On Saturday, I left Omaha at five in the morning. I felt sweaty and weak from a long night of drinking with the local managers who were congratulating themselves excessively on their own success. I had an hour and a half to change planes in Chicago, which gave me time for a large, desperately needed, breakfast at a restaurant in the terminal. I had to change planes again in Cleveland, which surprisingly was an airport I'd never been through before. The flight from Cleveland to Allentown was United and a 737 which is a nice plane but one which the pilot always seems to land after a distressingly steep dissent. The passengers all seemed to strain forward towards the windows trying to find the airfield nestled in the Pennsylvania hills, clearly concerned that the pilot might somehow miss it in his haste to find the ground. Playing the role of experienced traveler, I sat back reading the plastic backed airline copy of Business Week I had been given and hid my own anxiety till the plane was at last set down neatly on the small patch of concrete at the edge of an old industrial town surrounded by pretty hills.

The airport was a new. A neat concrete building that reminded me of a new college library and very soon after the flight had landed the small waiting room was nearly empty. I wondered exactly what I could do in Allentown if Linda never showed up. About 2:30 she showed up looking manic and tired.

"I just got up," she said. "I'm sorry, but it was a terrible night."

I gave her a long kiss and then wrapped my arm around her waist and held her. She felt good against me. She seemed familiar. She still seemed to be the same dark, slender woman who had shared my bed not so long before.

She stepped back and studied me. "You know," she said. "I think that this is the first time I ever saw you in a suit."

"Wild, isn't it?" I said. "It makes me think that I am a grown-up."

"When I heard that you took a job with Winston Stone. I figured that you were just hanging around collecting a check while you were trying to paint your masterpiece."

"That was the original plan," I said. "But when I saw what was going on I got interested in it."

"When you wrote that you were promoted and were going to be traveling all over the place, I wondered if I had ever really known you."

"So what's your judgment now?" I asked.

"I'll let you know when I decide," she said.

I gathered up my bag, put my arm lightly around her waist and we walked out of the terminal. Her car was waiting at the curb.

Linda had been a year behind me in school and our affair had taken place in my senior year. I had wanted to stay in Danbury, the small town where we had gone to college but I couldn't find a job there and since she was spending the first semester of her senior year in a study program with a social services agency in Philadelphia I had gone back to my hometown in Iowa and taken a job working in a warehouse that recycled paper, biding my time till we could be together again. It had been a bad idea to leave her alone because she had gotten involved with a social worker in Philadelphia and then after that relationship had ended and she had returned to Danbury, and we had managed a shaky but intense reconciliation. Then in her last semester in Danbury, she had fallen in love with Skyler, a more attractive man than I in several ways I suppose and most importantly a man who was still in Danbury when she needed him. After she graduated she had moved with Skyler to eastern Pennsylvania and taken a course to prepare her for a job as a paralegal and I had moved to Chicago to share an apartment with my friend John Norrel. I had a vague plan of pursuing a career as a painter. I was a naive stranger in Chicago and I took the first job that was offered to me. It was as a messenger in one of the local offices of Winston Stone. Linda had grown up in the western suburbs of Chicago and towards the end of my first autumn in Chicago she returned there to look for a job, but by then I had begun an affair with Melissa who had been her best friend in college. Skyler, perhaps realizing the importance of being in the same place as Linda followed her back to Chicago and after a very awkward time she quarreled with her parents and returned to Pennsylvania with Skyler. She was very angry with Melissa and I but we stayed in touch. She took a job with the local chapter of NOW and worked as a counselor for rape victims in Reading. The work was grim but it suited her and she had decided that counseling was a calling for her and she had enrolled at a master's program in psychology at the state college in Halcyon. When she wrote to me that she was leaving Skyler I thought perhaps, now we can be reconciled again. I had been involved with several women in the interim but had experienced nothing that resembled the intense, young love that I had felt with her then.

In the meantime I had abandoned my painting, my relationship with John Norrel had soured and gradually I had begun to make a career with Winston Stone. I had worked hard and gradually gone from being a clerk to a supervisor to a traveling troubleshooter assigned to the Operations Planning Group run out of New York. Occasionally I would daydream about painting again but it seemed childish compared to my work for Winston Stone. I thought that here I could accomplish a great deal more there then I ever could have as a painter. As I flew into Allentown I didn't have a clue how Linda and I could get back together but I was hoping that something would occur to me.

Linda's car was a ten-year-old Cougar that seemed to rumble ominously as she headed up the ramp onto the highway. "I just finished fixing the transmission," she said. "You can't imagine the satisfaction that you can get from accomplishing something like that."

In fact, I couldn't imagine even considering fixing a transmission.

"Julia is sorry that she's going to miss you," Linda said.

"Julia?"

"My lover."

"Oh, right."

"She had to go to New York to see her parents this weekend."

In the letter in which she had told me that she was leaving Skyler, she had mentioned that she decided that she was gay and later she had spoken of doing one thing or another with different women but somehow I hadn't quite made the connection to an actual affair.

When we had been together she had teased me about being gay whenever she wanted to make me feel jealous. Suggesting another male lover would have been too sharp a jab. She used to say that she wanted to have an affair with her best friend Melissa but that they had never found the time. She certainly had given me plenty of warning.

"When I was working as a rape counselor I was really forced to look at the horrible things that men were doing to woman. Stuff that had nothing to do with all the romances.

"Skyler never beat me, of course, but all the little control games he would play became intolerable. It was hard to make love to him without thinking of all those poor hurt women. The more I thought about it, the more senseless it seemed to be involved with a man. It's been a neat feeling for me to come out. You feel like you are really part of something."

add)

"It's really getting to be a movement," Linda said. "Do you know Carrissa Bennett is gay too?" The woman was a network newscaster.

"No, I didn't," I said. "I'm not surprised though. I no longer have any expectations."

"And you know who else is?"

"No," I said, wondering who she would name next. Bella Abzug? Rosalyn Carter?

"Liz."

"Liz? Are you sure?"

I saw her three months ago. She left Chris last fall and she was living on a cooperative farm in Tennessee and working for an ERA group."

"I slept with her once," I said absently. I wondered if Linda had too.

"What?"

This was a major break in our personal etiquette. From the time we had first slept together Linda had always been fairly open about discussing her affairs while I had discussed my own only in the vaguest terms on the theory that a gentlemen never speaks of such things and that my own experiences were less interesting.

"Nothing," I said. "Well, what's Chris doing these days?"

"Oh, the little shaman is hardly inconvenienced. He's moved in with some coed from IU."

"Too bad," I said honestly. "I've always respected Chris. Admired him."

"Well, I'd think you would admire him more now that he's get himself a new chickee."

No, I thought. I had admired him more when he had Liz.

There was a silence then. We had driven out into the open country. I traveled everywhere and I never left the cities. It was nice to see the open fields around us. I decided that it was time to take a chance.

"Have you seen Melissa lately?" I asked. Linda was silent then for a long time.

"When I heard that you were coming to visit I brought up the question with my support group."

"And?"

"They agreed that I should just answer the question. No. I haven't seen her. But I don't know if that's because of you. She seemed to have a lot of trouble with me being with a woman. I think she's very conflicted about herself. She doesn't know what she wants."

Aren't we all? Don't we all? I thought. It seemed that Linda was the only one who was really dealing with it.

"You know I learned a lot about myself lately," she said. "It's been a good year."

Linda's apartment was fashioned from three dorm rooms. It sat on the ground floor of the dormitory next to the rear exit, the idea being that in her role as residence hall director she would be in a position to control anything illegal that might involve the back door of the dorm. The rooms were actually slightly below ground so that the high set windows were at knee level to the people passing by. The first room was the largest and served as a combination living room and dining room. On the interior wall there was a tiny kitchen with a stove, sink and a half-sized refrigerator and three small cabinets. Linda ate most of her meals in the dining hall with the students. It saved her money and gave her a chance to get to know them better. There was a private bathroom with a shower and then down the hall two bedrooms, the smaller of which held a narrow bed and a desk and bookshelves made of bare boards and cinder blacks. The larger bedroom held a queen-sized bed and a dressing table. Except for a few small prints that Linda had taped up, the beige walls were bare. The furnishings were either standard school issue or the sort of things you could pick up in thrift shops. There were two exceptions. One was the headboard of the queen-sized bed, which was a huge carved maple thing, and the other was a huge sofa in the living room. It was covered with a lush sort of burgundy velvet and the dark wood of the frame, arms and legs were a baroque mess of acorns, oak leaves, and ivy. The feet were lion's heads biting down on orbs.

"Don't you just love it," Linda said when she saw me stare at the sofa.

"It's fantastic," I said.

"Some day I want to have a whole huge house full of that kind of thing. I bought it for $50 at a yard sale. When I first got here it was so easy to find bargains. But now all the people come out from Jersey and New York and the prices have all gone through the roof. Old houses that used to sell for $50,000 are now going for $200,000. You used to be able to buy lovely old quilts for $20 and now they are $400. It's terrible. They're going to all the wrong people."

You can't hide from money, I thought. Although maybe it was a good idea.

The small bedroom apparently served as office and library. I had noticed that there were no books in the living room and there were only a few here, scattered on bare metal shelves. The ones I didn't remember from our time together seemed to be mostly serious tracts on psychology and when I pulled one down and browsed through it the scholarly language seemed so dense that I couldn't make any sense of it and I soon returned it to its place on the shelf. The collection of records that sat on the closet floor also seemed to have grown only a little since we were together. There were some that were familiar from my own collection. Joni Mitchell and Al Green albums that I had copies of. Sometimes when I was flipping through my records trying to find something I would see one of these records and wonder where it had come from, whether it was really mine before I would remember that I had brought it to share some enthusiasm of Linda's, that it was a remembrance of something we had shared. The memories were pleasant but somehow without Linda to share them the records did not seem to be truly mine.

The lack of books and records seemed odd. Perhaps a graduate instructor didn't make enough money to buy unnecessary stuff I wondered though if perhaps her new interests where not housed somewhere else, stored with Skyler or with Julia in some other room where she truly lived. Then I realized that I had acquired very little myself in the years since I had left school and almost nothing in the months that I had been on the road. Lately my chief criterion in choosing a book to buy was the fact that I would be willing to throw it away when I was done with it. I was traveling so fast and so light that I couldn't afford to carry anything unnecessary.

The walls of Linda's apartment were the solid institutional walls of a dormitory, constructed to survive generations of student tenants and they were resistant to personalization. Linda had taped up a few posters announcing political rallies and pop concerts but the truly personal things were tacked to the side of a large dresser in her bedroom. There was a picture of her, looking lovely and wind-blown on a weekend trip to a sandy beach at the Jersey shore and one of Skyler, looking mysterious in dark glasses, standing beside a black Toyota in front of an gray stone faced townhouse. There was one of Linda sitting in a rustic farm house, beside a handsome older woman, who I took to be Julia and one which was familiar - a picture my friend Travis had taken during our college days in which a number of our good friends stood together outside the Student Union Building in Danbury, arms linked, kicking in unison like a chorus line. Linda and I stood together, Norrel and a half dozen others all smiling broadly. Melissa lay in front of us. We all seemed very happy. It had been a warm early spring day. I was glad to see that she had saved something of our time together along with the other pictures but I was a selfish man, I would have preferred to have this wall of memories to myself. When I had gone to visit her in Philadelphia the year after I had graduated I had learned of her new lover when I had seen a postcard she'd tacked to the wall. "We had a good time in Jamaica," it said. "We can't wait till you and Ben come visit us again." You and Ben, the two names linked so casually that they made one thing. That casual joining of the names caused me great pain.

"A penny for your thoughts," Linda said. I had forgotten she was still standing behind me.

"I was just trying to get to know you again," I said.

"Do you remember that day by the Union. It was beautiful," she said.

"I do," I said.

"Do you mind if we stay in tonight," she said. "I'm exhausted. Last night was terribly late and I really don't have a lot of money. I'll fix a soufflé."

"That would suit me fine," I said.

add)

After dinner, I sat down on the big couch with Linda sitting opposite me. She rolled a joint and after lighting it she passed it to me.

"I don't smoke these days," I said. "I'm afraid I might discover who I really am if I did." I meant it as a joke but I suppose it was true.

"That's what I am counting on," Linda said.

I took the joint and drew on it and then took another toke. The sensation was both nearly forgotten and familiar. Dope is the enemy of repressed feelings, booze is their friend. I did discover who I was. I was a very tired man. More tired than I ever remembered being before.

Gradually, her voice began to grow vague, to lose its shape and I felt drowsy and the next thing I knew I was awakening on the elegant old sofa. with a quilt thrown over me. Linda was sitting in the chair across from me, holding a large mug of coffee.

"It's eleven," she said. "I thought you were going to sleep around the clock. You made it more than halfway."

We went to lunch at the main dining room, which was at the bottom of a long hill from the quad. There was an odd bit of business that had to be done to get an outsider like myself in but Linda handled that and she led us through a cafeteria line where I ended up with a plate full of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and apple sauce. It was something I liked but not something I had a chance to buy very often when I was on the road. I followed Linda back to a large round table that was full of students. I gradually realized that they were business students and since I actually worked in business I was going to be treated as a sort of celebrity, a distinguished guest lecturer.

"Do you think that management by objective really has a place in business now?"

"Yes, I do definitely. But it's a little tricky to apply. In practice everyone is more concerned about raising their targets than in really cutting all the waste the way they should be."

"But surely," the young man protested. "If it's the policy, people will apply it."

"Most people resist it," I said. "Or rather most people try to finesse it. It’s really a utopian system. Like communism."

"Then why do they teach it?" he asked.

"It's part of the vocabulary," I said. "You have to know the vocabulary to play the game. But if you want to understand the application read John Van Neuman on game theory." That was sort of a personal shot. In my career I was constantly being outflanked by MBAs and whenever I could I liked to throw out references to the arts and sciences. If my late hippie training in the arts at Bettner had not really prepared me for the world of Winston Stone it had given me a wealth of unusual references. Actually the reference to Van Neuman struck me as being pretty appropriate although, as with most of my other good ideas I couldn't see how I could apply it to my real world.

"Do you get involved with strategic planning?" a pretty young woman asked. "I think that's what I would like best."

"No," I said. "Actually what I do most is fire people."

"Fire people?" the woman said. "Why?"

"Because that's what they tell me to do," I said.

"What do you think we should study?"

Good question. Public speaking? Cost accounting?

"Study Soviet politics," I said. "That's the best training you can get." I might have added study cynicism but I couldn't figure out how to tell them to do that.

Even after my long sleep I was still tired and when after lunch, Linda and I stopped to sit for a while on the wide stairs at the front of her dormitory, I stretched out on a long concrete slab that sat next to the steps. The sun was out and the slab was luxuriously warm and I felt myself drifting again towards a comfortable sleep. Linda sat by my feet, gently rocking her legs and watching the students walk past on the grassy quad in front of us. She was dressed in faded blue jeans and a plaid shirt, her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked completely like the woman I had loved at Bettner. I blinked to see if it was some sort of hallucination but she still looked the same. I wonder how it was that I had turned into a man with a suit and thirty-dollar haircuts. The campus was full of trees and when I closed my eyes again I heard the wind rustling the leaves and smelled a scent of the real pines.

"Hey ya, Linda," a cheerful male singsong voice called out.

"Hey ya, Charlie," Linda said. I opened my eyes to try to locate our visitor and found myself staring straight into the sun, which gleamed above the top of the tall trees across the quad. I turned onto my side and finally located the man who was a slightly overweight student with unruly haircut and a baggy Hawaiian shirt. If I met him in a Winston Stone office I would have immediately told him to get a haircut but I certainly wasn't at Winston Stone now.

"Hi," he said to me. "Do you know what the greatest song in the world is?"

"No," I said.

"Wildwood Nights," he said. "by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes." Then he and Linda sang the song for me. I was amazed. I thought, why is he telling me this? What is his purpose? I wondered if this boy was a rival for Linda's love but then I remembered Julia. Not likely. So what was his purpose? What was his aim? As Linda and he finished, I realized that his aim was to let me know what he thought the greatest song in the world was. A very odd aim, I thought. What was the point? He sat down next to Linda who introduced us. She called me her old friend. That seemed accurate. Particularly the old.

"Charlie works summers at a carny show down at Wildwood. It's a resort out on the Jersey shore. Very tacky."

"Sublimely tacky," Charlie added cheerfully.

"So what do you hear from Becky?" Linda asked.

"I got a long letter yesterday. It made me crazy. She just won't say yes. It drives me crazy. I told her I loved her."

"That was good," Linda said. "Did you tell her anything else."

"Nah," Charlie said and he broke into another chorus of Wildwood Nights.

"You've got to give her time," Linda said. "A woman needs a little time to make up her mind."

"I guess," Charlie said. "Say, I'm getting buried in my psych class. Can you help me with it?"

"I'm pretty well booked for now," Linda said. "See me tomorrow night." After I would have left. Even that stung a bit, the thought that her life would go on after I had reentered my world of airports and hotel rooms.

"Rad," Charlie said. "Ciao." and wandered off, leaving a badly sung version of Wildwood Nights to Doppler off until it was overtaken by the sound of the wind in the trees and some happy laughter from a dormitory across the quad. I was silent for a while before I said. "Your life is different from mine."

"Yes," Linda said. "I imagine that it is. Charlie's a sweet guy. He's my chief counselor."

What did he counsel? I wondered. Besides Wildwood Nights.

In the afternoon, she showed me the local sights. The first was a huge flea market that was set up in a large field near the edge of town. In Iowa where I grew up it would be called the fair grounds and perhaps it was here too. There was a big crowd and the ground was moist with a recent rain. Linda was dressed for the place, with rubber-soled Bean boots along with her blue jeans and a red flannel shirt. I was wearing a blue button down dress shirt and the khaki pants that I wore when I wanted to look folksy and friendly to the Winston Stone crowd and my Weegums, which were beginning to show some distress from the mud. I thought I must look like an overdressed fool, like some upper class husband venturing out to clean his gutters wearing topsiders and a knit Ralph Lauren shirt. Yuppie work clothes. There was nothing to be done about it, of course, but I still felt foolish and as I followed Linda along her slow examination of the heavily laden tables I found my attention drawn away from the items that were for sale to the crowds of people who were moving through the tents. I split the men I saw into two categories the ones who were dressed comfortably and the ones who like myself were overdressed and seemed to be dutifully trailing their wives. City men playing at being country people.

Under the long canvas tents there was a huge expanse of folding tables piled high with every sort of thing - antique weather vanes, brass fittings for doors, old copies of Life magazine, baseball cards and quilts and stenciled tee shirts. The wide muddy field was an enormous cornucopia of things and I imagined that there were things that were bargains here by the gross, but I had a hard time finding a way to relate to any of them. I was a modern American nomad and my treasures had to be small enough to be carried on my person.

Linda stopped at a table to buy some porcelain salt and peppershakers shaped like plump cats. "Julia will love these," Linda said. "She has a thing for cats."

What an odd natural thing - to have a "thing" for cats, I mused. I had no space in my life for a "thing" for anything. Like that nomad on the desert, I had been baked down to the essence of my function, to the "type" that Winston Stone needed me to be.

Linda stopped in front of a booth that was displaying beer cans. There must have been three hundred different kinds. Four of the rarest ones were locked in a glass case and marked with prices ranging from $50 to $100.

"I suppose you heard about the visit Travis paid us," she said.

"I didn't." Travis was one of my closest friends from college but since I had been traveling I had hardly spoken to him.

"He was working as a baby photographer and his travels brought him to Reading. I was still with Skyler but it was towards the end. He just showed up on our door one night and since we were going to this party out in the country we brought him along. He got drunk and made a terribly ugly scene. The gist of it was that I had treated you like shit and I was a horrible woman. Skyler wanted to attack Travis and it was all I could do to save him."

"Don't be too sure about that," I said. "Travis isn't very big but he's strong and real quick."

"I meant save Skyler," Linda said. "Travis has a warrior soul. I think he's a warlock."

"I didn't put him up to it," I said. "I didn't know anything about it."

"I figured that you didn't," Linda stared blankly at the beer cans for a while before she said, "He's a true friend of yours but he has a bad way of showing it. How is he?"

"Last, I heard he was back in Missouri, living on his grandfather's farm. He's a social worker, now."

Linda laughed. "You are kidding, I hope."

"No, I'm serious. When the baby photographer thing got to be too much for him, he retired to his grandfather's farm and went to apply for food stamps. Instead of the stamps they gave him a job. He says he's going to get his master's degree."

"In social work?"

"I think it's called Public Administration."

Linda walked up to the next booth. "Travis always scared me."

"Me, too," I said.

"I was afraid of you too. It was all so intense."

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry that it was so intense?"

"No sorry that you were afraid."

"You're still intense. I can almost feel you trembling."

I thought I was about fifty percent calmer than I had been on Friday. I must be scaring the hell out of the locals I visited for Winston Stone.

"You know," she said, "you look manic and exhausted at the same time. I don't think I've ever seen you this crazed."

"A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in this cocktail lounge in the shopping mall next to my hotel room. It was Saturday afternoon and I had no place to go, so I was kind of spacing out, just going numb and I looked up and they had the local news on the television with the sound off and there was this big weather map with an arrow pointing at Dallas on the map. It was like the maps in the shopping centers. You are here. Oh, yes, I thought. Dallas. I really didn't know where I was."

"You know, I wonder if it is planned or not? Is it some kind of method?"

"Method?" I asked.

"Kind of like boot camp. Or an internship where the doctor is on call for forty-eight hours or something. Meant to break down the previous personality to create something new.

"Have you seen enough?"

"Yes."

Linda led the way out of the fairground towards the parking lot, lost in thought as she headed back towards her beat up Mercury. It occurred to me that I should have rented a car at the airport. I always did when I came into a new town on a business assignment. Harvey had been very firm on that point. Always rent a nice car. It was ridiculous, of course, one car was as good as another to me but the world revolved around these small points of control and status. Harvey wanted to be sure that I remembered that. So much in America depended on who drove the car. I wanted Linda to love and want me without any thought of the power points involved in the relationship but if I also wanted her to go to bed with me than I should have paid more attention to the nuances of power. Was it the same in a gay relationship I wondered? Had I momentarily dazzled her with my artistic pretensions then? It was impossible for me to carry the thought more then a few steps. I was too tired. I didn't want to seduce her again. I wanted her to love me still, to love me forever.

We reached the old car and she unlocked the door for me. She had to try the ignition three or four times before she got the motor to turn over and then we sat for five minutes or so before it warmed up enough that she was confident enough to drive. I leaned back against the seat thinking it would be nice if I could take a long nap. It occurred to me that there was something odd about the idea of wanting to drive if you didn't know where you wanted to go.

"I am going to take you out to Hawk Mountain," she said. "It's one of the prettiest places in the state and one of the most relaxing."

"Lead on," I said.

Maybe what Harvey had been trying to teach me was that it was important to dictate the terms, to say where we were going. If things were that simple between Linda and I would have tried to lead her long before now and I knew immediately that she wouldn't have followed. Let's be friends, I thought, but make love to me.

The ascent to Hawk Mountain was made by slow degrees. The road made a gentle rise from the floor of the valley itself, gaining gradually much of the altitude before it turned steep for a short time as it neared the entrance to the park, traversing the side of the mountain up to a pair of parking lots set deep into the thick woods. From there we followed a path that rose at a steady but comfortable angle for a distance of about three quarters of a mile, before, after giving us just a glimpse of the view through a gap in the trees, the path turned suddenly very steep and proceeded up along a thick scattering of heavy white rocks which served well as natural steps and occasional hand grips.

As the trail became steeper my leather soled city shoes began to slip on the loose dirt. Linda moved along the trail easily, her boots finding a foothold even where the hikers had scraped the trail down to bare mud. I watched her as she moved ahead of me. Her long, black hair was folded into a ponytail and her narrow hips looked lovely in her jeans. There was no way we would seem a natural couple to any of our fellow hikers and I found that sad. I was miles and miles from anything that would be a natural environment for me but what I wanted was to be a part of a natural couple with her. Linda and Larry. Linda and I. It was clear enough what that had meant in the microcosm of our life together at Bettner but what had I expected it to mean in the world at large, the world after Bettner? I think I had had only had one image, one lovely dream of she and I sitting together on a Sunday morning sharing coffee and toast and the morning papers and that hadn't been enough to carry us past the changes that struck when the protection of college had ended. I had just hoped that it would all work out somehow and that we would stay together but it hadn't happened. And now, that we were briefly together again, I wanted some magic to make us a couple again but that was too much to ask.

We climbed for perhaps a quarter of a mile more through the thinning pine forest until we found ourselves out of breath and suddenly in the open, in the midst of a wide outcropping of white stone that sat like a parapet at the very tip of Hawk Mountain. The peak set near the middle of the long ridge that ran to the horizon to the north and south, creating a long trough of a valley, with the low softer string of hills forming the opposing ridge. The floor of the valley lay hundreds of feet below, with the farms and houses seeming like tiny miniatures that gives height much of it charm. There was a patch work carpet of variously colored fields, striped and veined with dusty roads and weaving streams edged by occasional clusters of trees. If you looked straight across the valley from where we stood you could see the notch in the opposing hills that held the road we had just come across at a distance of perhaps twelve miles. Off to the north and south you could look for a distance of many miles to the point where the ground blended into the light mist.

On a pile of rock to our left six or seven people, well outfitted with hiking boots, cameras, and binoculars were scanning the air beneath us and eagerly consulting guidebooks. Occasionally someone would point enthusiastically into the wide space below and the attention of all would focus in the direction he was pointing. They were studying the many hawks circling casually in the air beneath them.

I loved the view. This place was far from the flatlands of Iowa where I grew up or the lush Indiana countryside where Linda and I had gone to college, but it did recall the adolescent ecstasy that I felt when my family began to take our summer vacations in the mountains of Colorado. Absurdly I remembered that it was there that I first read Faulkner. But what did this view have to do with Faulkner? And really what did it have to do with me? It was such a brief respite. I wasn't going to make my home on this peak in a state park in Pennsylvania. On Monday I would be at the Winston Stone headquarters in Manhattan and I wasn't really sure where I would be on Tuesday, but I could be sure that I would be very far from here. Still, why ruin the moment. This half-hour spent overlooking these pretty valleys was my vacation, my much-needed chance to clean out my very cluttered mind before I returned to the frustrations of my life on the road.

"I love it up here," I said to Linda.

"I'm glad," she said. "It's one of my favorite places. I come up here a lot to think but it's kind of frustrating. I look out over all this country and the farms and the roads and what's happening to it makes me mad. Why can't everything I see from here be like the mountain? Why do I see all those straight roads and all those farms? I can imagine New York and Philadelphia crawling out here, filling up the valleys with condos and golf courses like some kind of creeping slime. I try to imagine what it was like and then I wonder if I want it to be the way it was before the white man came or before the Indians came and then I realize that it is all crazy, that I should just be grateful that I can know it before New York gets here. I am not one of the locals. I am not one of the Amish, I am certainly not one of the Indians. I'm just a tourist here, an intruder, but I hope I haven't done too much damage."

We were both silent for a while just watching. There were fluffy clouds that where drifting gracefully from right to left, from central Pennsylvania on to New Jersey.

"When I was working as a rape councilor," Linda said, "there was this wonderful old woman who worked with us. She was about fifty and she had four kids. Four daughters. It was unusual that she was there. Most of the volunteers were like me. NOW. Liberals. Feminists. Lesbians. She was wonderful though, her family has been here since 1820 and she loves the place and it appalled her, sickened her, that bad things were happening in her home. It took her a while to figure out what was going on, what the actual program was, but once she got it, she was absolutely the best. I loved to work with her, because when you really there, when you were with the victim doing your job, that real, shocking terrified victim, all the rest of us were the victim's angry loving sisters, but she was the mom. She would just throw her arms around the poor girl and cry. She was the best."

I stared out over the lovely valley and tried to think. What could I say? There wasn't a lot in my experience at Winston Stone that related to what she was talking about. I wanted to throw my arms around Linda. Not kiss her but hug her. Hold her but she was standing too far from me, five feet away and slightly down hill and she was looking resolutely across the valley. No chance for eye contact. It's all right, I thought. It's enough that I am here with her.

"It makes me so angry," Linda said. "It's all so terrible. I come up here and it helps."

"Does Julia come up here?"

"No, she would rather stay angry."

"You can't stay angry all the time," I said.

"No?" she said. "I think it's the only way I can be sane."

There was a sudden surge of interest among the hawk watchers that caught our attention. They were very interested and people were pointing both straight below us and off to our left. I caught sight of the quarry first, a medium sized bird gliding and turning playfully in the air currents near the mountainside below. It stalled for a bit in the air as if enjoying the pleasure of the air as a swimmer might savor a current of warmer water and then, looking below, it went into a slow, slow turning spiral heading diagonally away from the mountain side, angling slowly towards a thick grove of trees along side a creek bed. Far above, yet still down the steep face from us, a dark hawk had risen. It stilled itself and then suddenly folded itself into bullet and began its swift strike. Our hawk watchers were growing more excited. The dive was apparently both unusually swift and long because it seemed a matter of several long seconds before their vectors crossed with jarring violence and a sudden explosion of feathers. The prey fell straight as a rock and the hawk pulled off and steadied itself from the shock before it followed the dying, dropping bird catching it firmly in its talons when it was still far above the valley floor.

add Eagle)

The view of the valley was breathtaking. It was inspiring to be looking down on the world from such a height but something was wrong and before too long I realized what it was. This was the realm of the hawk and I associated with the pigeon, with the dove and not the hawk.

"I'm starting to realize that I have this power over people," Linda said, "and I am trying to be careful with it. For some reason people seem to be attracted to me."

No shit, I thought. Tell me about it.

"I've been doing a lot of personal therapy over the last few years and one of the things I've discovered is that I owe an apology to some people. You're one of them. I know I must have hurt you and I'm sorry."

"What were you thinking about then?" I asked. I was surprised then at the angry rise in my tone now that the question was finally being asked.

"I don't know that I thought anything. I guess I was flattered that two men might want me. And then it got so complicated. I have to say that you weren't much help in getting things straightened out. You were pretty rigid about things."

It was my turn to consider. This was a conversation that I had waited a long time for and it might have to be nurtured if the chance wasn't going to be lost.

I sang a bit of an old Jefferson Airplane Song, "Why can't we go on as three?"

The song was called Triad and when we lived together she had refused to let me play it. It had strong connotations. Before living with me she had been involved with two men for a while and I had vowed I would not find myself in a similar situation.

"I'm sorry," she said. The tone was oddly cold. I thought I heard in it the echo of her therapy groups, as if she were trying on an emotion to see if it was suitable. I had waited a long time to hear her say that she was sorry, but hearing it didn't solve my problem. I still felt empty.

I wanted something what I wanted was to believe that what I had felt for her then had been something special, something that could pass for true love.

My mind returned to a conversation that I had had a month before. I met Jimmy in Salt Lake City. I was being sent there to replace him so he could go to San Diego where some new problem was breaking out. I met him at the office about noon and he showed me the problem and then we spent the afternoon working on it. I liked Jimmy. He was about a year ahead of me in his progress through the firm but when I had first shown up in New York, a naive trainee, he had showed me the ropes and taken me out to dinner a few times and told me what he knew about Winston Stone I owed him and I liked him. He was soft looking guy, slightly overweight and his suits didn't quite fit right. He had a crew cut and an open oval face. Before I got into the brokerage business I had always assumed that it was the private domain of privileged patricians but one of the things I liked about Winston Stone was it's democracy. It was a place where normal people like Jimmy and myself carried on the business.

He and I had dinner at steak house that evening and then we walked back to the Ramada where we were both staying. We both were carrying a fifth of scotch in our luggage so we set down at the tiny table in his room and began to gossip.

"I keep hearing a lot about you as I travel around," he said. "You've got kind of a legendary status."

"Me?" I said. "Why?"

"That comment you made to Harvey Knox. You really skewered that bastard."

A year ago when I had been in New York for my first training course, Harvey, who supervised the training program had called all the trainees to a seven o'clock meeting at his office. I had a nasty hangover that morning and Harvey droned on for about forty minutes beginning with a long list of banal clichés and then moved on to self-promotion. At one point he said, "and despite all the other things I have to do, I am also affirmative action coordinator for the firm." "Well that can't take too long," I muttered. Winston Stone was better integrated than a lot of the firms in our business but it still was being sued for not promoting women. Harvey had frozen but I didn't think he had understood me. Someone had certainly heard me and if Jimmy knew about it so had a lot of other people.

"I'm not sure that's a good thing to be known for." I said.

"Well, it made you one nasty enemy but it might have made you a lot of friends. Everybody hates Harvey except for Allen Larsen and Allen only likes him because by comparison Allen seems like a human being. Tony Sarceti hates Harvey."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"It's obvious. Tony starts shaking whenever they are in the same room."

"But why?"

"They both want to run Metro sales. They can't both have the job."

I did hate Harvey and I couldn't hide it. I thought that I had tried to keep it a secret but obviously I had failed. The man had no redeeming characteristics. With Sarceti at least, I shared a love of classical music. Although what that had to do with anything I couldn't say.

"When was the last time that you were back in New York?" Jimmy asked.

"Not since the Pass Wansworth orientation meeting before this whole thing started. I've been on the road ever since. What's that? Three months? My instructions from Harvey Knox show up along with the interoffice mail in whatever place I'm suppose to be in a sealed gray envelope marked "strictly personal". It's a lot like the Mission Impossible routine."

"It is ugly in New York now," Jimmy continued. "No one meets anyone else's glance. No one talks to anyone else. No one who had any choice wants to be associated with the merger at all. Something like 97% of the Pass Wansworth salesmen have left. So everyone else is getting fired. All the salaried people are getting booted. Very grim. Even among the dog soldiers" (by which he meant people on the level of he and I) "no one even mentioned it."

"That's crazy," I said. "This is the biggest thing in the company right now. If it's not working everybody ought to be figuring out why?"

"You can think that in Salt Lake City if you want but don't let them catch you thinking it in the home office.

"My folks are Serbs," he continued. "First generation out of the old country and into the steel mills. Sometimes people come see us from the old country and they were always amazed if somebody really speaks their mind, criticizes the government or something. They figured that whoever spoke out would end up dead. When you think about New York, think about living in the east. Nobody wants to say anything bad about Tito."

For about the thousandth time in the last month I was hearing something about Winston Stone that contradicted what I wanted to hear. The Pass Wansworth people were more than happy to tell you about the failings of the big company and if you happened to be the guy who flew in to tell them that they were fired they would tell you about it at length and in a loud voice.

"You been anywhere where this deal is working?" Jimmy asked me.

"No? You?"

"No, nowhere. So why are we doing it?"

"We're the best people available," I said. "If anybody can make it work, we can."

Jimmy poured a little more of his scotch into my Ramada water glass.

"The general word on you is that you are all right but that you are Sarceti's boy."

"I suppose that's right," I said. "Although like you I don't seem to be able to escape from Harvey Knox."

"So Sarceti is a good guy?"

I hadn't ever thought of it like that. Sarceti was at best a kindred spirit, someone who I trusted to advance my interests while I advanced his.

I had formed my bond with Tony Sarceti by accident at a party when we both had had enough drinks to be a little drunk. There was a risk in a situation like that of course but I thought that I had found a sensitive spot in Tony's well protected self, his love of music which matched very carefully my own. We had talked about jazz and Bob Dylan and opera. He talked with an interest that suggested it was important to him and something that he rarely got a chance to talk about. I set the connection the next few times I talked to him by dealing with business first and only gradually working back to the shared interest of music. It suggested that I was safe, discreet, an ally, that business was actually my first concern. The tie seemed important to both of us and the last time I had seen him he worked his way rapidly through a post luncheon crowd of executives to share a few minutes with me talking about the latest jazz he had heard. It was reassuring to believe that there was someone within this organization who shared some of my tastes. I wanted to believe that. I needed to believe it. For the first time I considered the idea that I was being manipulated. It hurt to discover I could still be so naive.

"Yeah, I guess."

"You know Arnie Masters?"

I shook my head.

"He's a sweet guy. Bright as Einstein. He has been working the Pass Wansworth offices in the Northeast. Great guy but he's black and he's married to a white girl. Maybe that's why I like him. Where I grew up Serbs weren't exactly mainstream so I figure I can relate to blacks. Anyway the Northeast is Sarceti's region so he figures he ought to get to know the man that Harvey has put in his back yard. So Sarceti calls Arnie into New York for an interview but just so there is no mistake about who is in charge he arranges to have his shoes shined while he is talking to Arnie."

"Sweet," I said.

"Arnie actually thought it was a very elegant insult. He gave Sarceti points for subtlety. Said it saved Sarceti from actually having to call him a nigger."

I didn't care to hear that at all. If it was true, and I didn't doubt that it was, it took away my last chance I had of believing in Sarceti. It revealed to me that I had a huge need to believe that someone was a good guy.

"So, Jimmy," I asked, "why are we doing this?"

"Because I've got a wife and a kid and a house and no one else is willing to pay me enough money to let me keep all three unless I want to stoke a steel oven. And because I figure I might make enough and learn enough here that someday somebody will want to pay me more. Which is a fine story for me. Why are you doing it?"

Which brought me straight to the heart of my rationalizations. "I think of Winston Stone as a positive force. It is popularizing the business, giving people like you and me a chance to succeed in the world the upper class used to preserve for itself. It is egalitarian. Anyone can succeed here. I can improve it and if I do that it will be that much better. I can use the company to magnify the effect of my actions."

Jimmy reached across the table to pour the last of his bottle of scotch into my glass before he took my still nearly full bottle and filled his water glass half full.

"Yeah," he said bitterly, "a lot of people get into this business to serve mankind. You want some more ice."

When I first started traveling for Winston Stone I figured that I was in for a treat, a chance to discover the best food in each town, to find out what the local artists were doing across the country, to pick the brains of people who lived in every corner of the country but the facts were very different. The locals rightly had no desire to get to know you and if they took you out to dinner it was either to the country club or to whatever fancy restaurant the locals imagined compared best to the French restaurants in New York. Just as the airports and the hotel rooms began to blend together into one smooth image, so did the food, so that after a while I began to imagine that some corporate kitchen was following me around the country. As far as the local culture was concerned, well, that was something you had to work your way into and the thirty-six hours or so I usually had in a town left me permanently an outsider. As to getting to know the people, well, the executioner from New York wasn't a man you wanted to open up to. If I hadn't soon realized that the locals were delighted if you told them you had some personal business that kept them from having to entertain you and allowed them to go home to their families and their televisions then I might not have been able to sample the barbecue in Memphis, or the seafood in Seattle, of the Tex-Mex in San Antonio.

Like all the other aspects of my life on the road, my efforts with women had started as seeming exotic and exciting and had soon passed on to a sort of numbing repetition. The art of seduction centers on the idea of seeming greater than you really are, more handsome, more charming, richer. It is a game that the business traveler is ideally suited for. A stranger in the town with no friends or family to contradict him or pull him back to earth is perfectly suited for the game. He has an expense account and a pleasant impersonal hotel room waiting a few floors above the fancy bar where the game is being played. He comes with his image ready-made. "I'm with Winston Stone," you say. "Oh, I've seen your ads on television," she says.

For a while, driven by my ego and exhilaration at being on the road I had done pretty well. I had accumulated a list that was a parody of the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni. "One in Provo, one in Ogden and in Seattle three, and in Seattle three." But it was an empty game. It seemed that the penis that was briefly warmly held by the strange woman's vagina belonged to the fantasy man I had invented in the bar below. The woman briefly loved the idea of the young executive but what did that have to do with me? After a time I changed the procedure when I met a strange woman. I would try to make myself known to them, try to talk of my childhood or my eccentricities as if to find a way of stating, this is me, this is the real Larry. It was ridiculous, of course. It turned me into a very tiresome companion. This motel, airport, restaurant world was too wide and rapid to find a place for individuals. It demanded types. Perhaps any world beyond the family demands types and perhaps even the family demands types. I was soon to learn that the world of Winston Stone had no interest in the unique Larry beyond its success in creating out of me a certain type that it needed to do its business. My success in bedding these strange women had declined markedly in my last month on the road.

The job of the traveling salesman went hand in hand with the job of the seducer because what was the salesman trying to do but make the customer love him for the moment. I flattered myself that I was a sort of technician superior to the humble, often humbled salesman but it wasn't true. What I was doing in all these strange towns if I wasn't trying to seduce all these reluctant Pass Wansworth people into loving Winston Stone. If that was really what I was doing, I was terrible at it though. The Pass Wansworth people were fleeing in mass. The good thing was I wasn't lying to them. The bad thing was that they were all leaving.

The change in my pick-up routine corresponded to a peculiar tic I developed in the matter of tipping. I ate in restaurants three times a day, seven days a week and although my job demanded that I be good with numbers I lost my ability to calculate a fifteen or twenty percent tip. I would leave thirty or forty percent routinely and I was unaware of it till the humorless, underpaid accountants who audited my expense account accused me of padding my account. Then I realized that I had been doing it unconsciously, hoping to make some of the strangers I met during the day think kindly of me, it not actually love me.

So by the time my path recrossed Linda's in Halcyon, I was not so much horny although I suppose I was horny, as desperate to be known as someone like myself and not as that corporate type, the smooth man from Winston Stone that they were paying me to be.

We stood for a long time staring off across the valley. Finally, as the first signs of darkness began to appear in the East, I reluctantly followed Linda off the mountain.

On our way into the restaurant in Reading, Linda drove over the back roads of the slowly darkening countryside, past old farm houses and old farms and forests and then gradually up into the hills so that she was suddenly able to pull the car over into a road side lookout that gave us a clear view of Reading as a twinkling sprawling carpet out across the valley beneath us. She had planned the thing so carefully that as the car pulled into the turn off, the tape deck was playing Bob Seger's version of Hollywood Nights. The impression was that some how we had been transported into the Hollywood Hills.

"Well?" she said.

"Gorgeous," I said. "It reminds me of Danbury, of when we used to climb the fire escapes to watch the sunsets?"

"What was that? Two stories tall?"

"Maximum," I said "but still it seems we need to get above ground to get a long view. Still I wonder if we wouldn't all be a little happier, a little closer to the ground."

"I practically live underground," Linda said.

"I don't live anywhere," I said.

We stepped out of the car and walked over to the edge of the lookout. The town below was spectacular. It looked like a sea of lights. I remembered a clear Christmas Eve flight from Chicago to my parent's house in Iowa when all the little towns on the flat prairie showed like little spots of light as clean and as regularly placed as dots on a familiar road map.

I put my arm lightly on Linda's waist and she leaned against me a bit but after a few minutes, she said. "We have to go, we have an eight-thirty reservation."

Reading, Pennsylvania was a surprise. It was funky authentic old sort of town with street after street of the row houses that I had thought probably didn't exist anywhere outside of New York and Philadelphia. Linda parked the car on a very dark street and I followed her down dark brick paved streets to a dark, unpromising door in a brick row house. Before we could reach for the knob the door was opened for us and we were shown into a bright, warm, beautifully scented room. The scents were of basil and oregano and garlic and the music was lovely and soft. The man who opened the door was an oddly pear shaped man with a soft face and a bald spot. He threw his arms around Linda and kissed her on the cheek. "Linda, what a delight. Where's Julia?"

"She's back in New York visiting her parents," Linda said.

"Oh, not again," the man said. "She does that whenever the least thing goes wrong. Such a child. She wants us to believe that her parents would still welcome her back."

The man stepped back and noticed me.

Linda said, "I want you to meet Larry, one of my oldest friends."

The man looked at me skeptically. "He's a bit butch," the man said, "but he's welcome. Let me show you to your table."

The menu was aggressively French for a town the size of Reading but the food when it came was wonderful. Maybe not quite right by New York standards but enlivened by a love of food and a desire to please.

Andrew, who was the man who had met us at the door, served us a bottle of Burgundy. It was a very good wine. Not a great wine, like the one I had had a month before in San Francisco when the head of the West Coast Division had taken all the business travelers to dinner and spent a huge amount of tax deductible Winston Stone dollars to convince us all that we were very special people. I had admired the man's grace, knowing all along that it was an act. The restaurant was on the fortieth floor of a hotel with a stunning view of the city. I had wondered if some day I would be playing host to the young mercenaries. I had admired the wine very much, it was the sort of wine that you drank very slowly and struggled to find the right metaphor to describe. This wine was good but not that good but that was all right because I was going to be paying for this one myself. I realized that I would rather be here in this hidden cafe in Reading than on the fortieth floor of that deluxe hotel in San Francisco. Why was that I wondered?

Another waiter brought us two bowls of French onion soup. He was only nineteen or so. He was very thin with hair so blond that it almost seemed white falling over one side of his face and he wore a brass stud earring in his ear lobe. He had a look of self-absorption as if he was thinking carefully about each move he made. He reminded me of a child in a school pageant playing a courtier to the king but he looked like he was truly happy to be serving us our soup.

I broke the thick crust of the soup with my spoon and tasted it gingerly. Linda was watching me carefully.

"Is it good?" she asked.

'It's very good," I said.

"I'm glad," she said. "I would have hated it if you hated this place."

"How could I have hated it?" I said.

"Julia introduced me to this place," she said. "I first came out with Meg who I met in the rape counseling program. We loved each other but it was all terribly political. ERA rallies. Vegetarian bakeries. It was what I needed then but it was a little grim. It's not too romantic to have all your dates at political rallies and it's not too romantic to have to be correct all the time."

"Was I romantic?"

"Romantic? No, not really. But you were passionate. Passionate about me and not passionate about some cause. That was nice.

"When I met Julia it was different. She a lot older and she's been out so long that I think it predates the movement. She brought me here and introduced me to these people. It was incredible. An eye opener. I mean I never had anything to do with gay males before. I brought Meg here and she hated it. She criticized the political consciousness and she criticized the seasonings. It was our last night together and she caused me a lot of pain later in the movement. But it was all right because Julia showed me a little joy again."

I finished the soup and helped myself to one of the rolls from the basket. It was delicious. My mother's father was a baker and good bread is one of my favorite things.

"So, Julia's the one for you?" I asked cheerfully.

"I don't know," Linda said. "I'm still searching, I think. She's so much older and she wants so much to be in control. I still can't deal with that. She wants to dominate me because I'm so young and I want to do my own things. I'm not sure I want to be that settled."

"Did I try to dominate you?" I asked.

"You were funny," she said. "You would never try me to make me do things. You were never that aggressive but you would say, 'well, don't bother with me but I'll kill myself if you sleep with someone else.' It wasn't exactly comforting. So, yes, you did."

"Point taken," I said. "Sorry."

The blond haired boy swept away the soup dishes and returned with two salads of mushroom and tomatoes topped with anchovies and dill.

The man from the door sat down at one of the empty chairs at our table. "Is it okay so far?" he asked.

"Excellent so far," I said.

"The waiter is kind of a project of mine. You have heard of student teachers, I am sort of a student therapist. Julia introduced him to me. If he can just accept that he's gay then he can be Michelangelo. His family is terrible. His father wants him to be welder."

"You know what is particularly odd about being on the road all of the time,' I said. "After a while you want the waiters to love you."

"There's a name for that," Linda said. "Kind of compensation for affection deprivation. The unloved child creates a playmate who loves him."

"Thanks a lot," I said.

"You brought it up," she said.

The young waiter saved us by bringing the entrees. Veal for me: trout for Linda.

"It's interesting what we gays do in this hostile environment. We create our own warm places, our own surrogate families. In here it's always Christmas. You forget that when you go out into the street someone might spit on you because you're different. It's good to know there's a place where you can be yourself."

I thought of that expensive dinner in San Francisco. That was what the district manager was trying to create for us, the image that we were all part of a privileged family, The Merry Brotherhood of Winston Stone. It sounded very false.

?this

"When I saw Melissa in New York," I said. "Melissa said that her staff in the restaurant she ran was like a family, that the place was like a family."

"She's so repressed," Linda said acidly. Not, oh how's she doing, the way you would expect when someone mentioned your best friend. I had grown clumsily aggravated an old wound. I should have known better. And, of course, they were no longer friends.

"Do you still see her?" Linda asked.

"Not really," I said. "Once in a while when I'm passing through New York."

"You're passing through New York on Monday," Linda pointed out.

"I heard she was back in Chicago," I said. "I don't expect to see her."

After we had finished the entrees Andrew sat at our table again.

"I hope you enjoyed your meal and I hope you won't judge us too harshly. We're not the big time by any means. By god, I hope you aren't a restaurant critic."

I assured him that I wasn't.

"It's not so easy to be gay in this town and it's not so easy to serve French food. But we try."

"You do it beautifully," I said.

The man smiled and gave me a hug. Despite my best intentions I flinched away from his touch but the man just laughed at that and gave Linda a hug that was honestly returned.

"If you get tired of what you're doing," the man said to me. "I bet I could make you into a great waiter."

When we walked out of the restaurant onto the narrow street, I took Linda's hand.

"You're still pretty wound up," she said.

"A little."

"I'll take you to my other favorite place," she said and when we got back into the Cougar she drove slowly up into the hills above the town. It was very dark and the night was full of the sounds of birds and crickets. At the crest of a hill we came to a roadhouse. It was a long one-story building made of rough-hewn logs. There was a big neon sign out front that said "Ernie's," and a large gravel parking lot cut into the side of the hill that was half full of cars. Linda parked and when we stepped out the night air was sweet with the smell of pine trees.

The wine from dinner and the beer and my fatigue were beginning to weigh on me but with my stool and my back firmly planted against the wall I was able to lean back and watch the room full of people. There was a particular girl who caught my eye. She was obviously a student, no more that nineteen or twenty and she was spectacularly pretty, a glowing, healthy looking blond with a great figure. I remembered how a few years before I had stared at Linda at a party working up my courage and letting my desire distill before I finally got up the courage to pounce.

"What's your taste in woman like, lover?" I asked. "What makes you really . . . (What was the female equivalent of hard? Wet?) . . . excited?"

"It's not really like that. Not sexual."

"How could it not be?" I asked.

"I mean it's not so physical. It's the whole person that matters. Is she a good person? Are we good for each other?"

Very commendable, I thought. Still, it seemed odd that two people could come together, to merge their lives without the binding power of physical attraction. But perhaps two women did not have to span the same gaps that must be bridged by a man and a woman. The lovely blond girl had caught the eye of a tall curly haired man of her own age and they had begun to flirt intently. I wondered what the future held for them. There was plenty of sexual attraction.

Did a gay couple benefit from finding the same third party attractive? The intimacy that could come from the old joke in which a couple makes love and one says to the other, I'll tell you who I was thinking of if you tell me who you were thinking of. If they found the fantasy in the same person. Or was Linda thinking that I was looking for some bi-sexual three-some to bring us together? I wasn't. I wanted her and her alone and in my exhausted way I was struggling to come up with any sort of intimacy.

"You are exhausted." Linda said. "We should go."

"Yes, I am," I said. It was very unlike me to admit that I was tired. It was not something that one did at Winston Stone.

I was indeed exhausted, I could hardly keep my eyes open and Linda was off on some new discussion of the provincialness of Halcyon. She must have realized I was slipping away because she stopped. "I'm sorry, you're exhausted. Let me show you your room."

When I got into the second bedroom with its narrow cot, I took off my pants and shirt and stood in my underwear and socks. I wondered what I had assumed in coming here. I knew what I wanted. Linda was still standing in the doorway, watching me and smiling. I stepped toward her and put my hands lightly on her shoulders. I wanted to seduce her but I was too tired and too clumsy. "Linda," I said, "let me make love to you."

"I can't, Larry," she said. "Because of... There's someone else. I can't."

We reached a peculiar compromise. Two people who once could hardly be in the same room without making love, slept together in the same bed without sex. I was so exhausted I was soon asleep but it was a very light sleep, and often during the night I half woke, aware of her foot touching mine or just her warmth and smell. She pulled an extra quilt over herself and I slept beneath the sheet. We were still these polar opposites but we no longer came together. Except fleetingly at the edge. Our feet touched and we did not move away. It was nice. It was nearly enough.

Later, I would often remember my night at Linda's side. It seemed to have something of Sherlock Holmes observation of the dog that had not barked. It was the thing that had not happened which was the most revealing. It made me realize that the things that I was chasing after were not the things that I wanted. A woman to sleep with and not just to make love to. A quiet, sunny place where you could stay for a while. If the circumstances of the meeting were ridiculous - a brief weekend with a lesbian ex-lover in a temporary dormitory room, a thousand miles or so from my home if I could even be said to have a home - then the sweetness of being known, of being cared about stood out all that much more clearly against the sterile hardness that was demanded by my career.

We had to get up a little before five in the morning for me to make the bus connections for my ten o'clock meeting in lower Manhattan. The short night seemed to have crippled us both. We hardly even spoke. One of the most basic problems of our time together was that Linda is a night person and I am a day person. I naturally rise around seven, work hard in the morning, begin to coast a little bit in the afternoon and by eleven o'clock at night I am ready to fall asleep. Linda, on the other hand wakes very slowly as if recovering from a coma, begins to function well only in the early evening and as I was about to fall asleep, she reaches her best levels of energy. It was a problem that we never really worked out.

I slept for two hours on the bus ride into New York and wrinkled the back and shoulder of the stiff white shirt, although I had fortunately remembered to fold the suit coat carefully in the overhead rack. I woke in time to watch the last vestiges of the sun rise over the low flatlands of eastern New Jersey, a place so filled with the debris of an industrial society, the dumps and derricks, the cranes and bridges, that it was hard to remember that it was once a place of great beauty. The shape of the twin towers of the World Trade Center appeared slowly through the mist, gradually coming into focus.

At the Port Authority bus terminal I joined the thick eastwardly moving crowd of commuters and when I reached Seventh Avenue I caught a cab. The subway would have gotten me there quicker and more cheaply at this time of day but the cab ride was necessary. It was an important part of my mental preparation for my meeting with Sarceti..

Sarceti was rising quickly and he was being sure that he reaped all the rewards he was entitled to along the way. His new office was on the 42nd floor. This was very close to the floors that housed senior management. It was also one of the floors where the firm had taken great care to hide the functional glass and steel walls of the building with expensive hardwood paneling and fine carpets. It was important that the officers of the firm not be forced to feel inferior to the partners in the older, more staid, and smaller firms who operated out of the older, posher buildings across Broadway to the east.

Sarceti had managed to find himself an effective and efficient middle aged secretary to guard his door. Her manner and her desk showed a thoroughly professional style. This was important because the firm always tried to save money on secretaries. The pay was low and the turnover was quite high. Most of the secretaries were young girls from Queens or the nearer suburbs of Jersey. A competent secretary was a sign of either the charismatic ability to attract the alliance of people of ability to your person or the bureaucratic skill to get around the wage restrictions and find a way to pay her well. With Sarceti, I expected it was the latter.

If I thought that I knew Tony well I was in for a surprise as soon as I entered his office. He had grown a beard. My first thought was to run a quick checklist of who else among the higher ups of the firm had done such a radical thing. Only one name came to mind, Albert Paceti who was head of the technical analysis section of the research department. But the research guys were our equivalent of the advertising business's creative people. They were allowed a little more eccentricity than the rest of the world.

The beard had apparently become his principal conversation point because the first thing he said to me was, "Well, do you like it?"

"It's gorgeous, Tony. But just a bit radical don't you think?"

He laughed and headed back towards his large desk, turning our meeting gently but efficiently back towards business.

"Allen saw it for the first time the other day as I was entering the elevator. 'What is that growing on your chin?' he said. Fortunately the doors closed just as I said, 'A beard, sir.'"

I heard someone say once that the properly constituted corporation always had a vice-president in charge of spreading fear. Allen Larsen was ours. He was one of the most powerful men in the firm and by far the most hated. He was an ex-Marine Captain who enjoyed intimidating people and was not at all hesitant to exercise his considerable power on a whim, to end the career of someone who had casually displeased him for some reason. He had been brought into the home office from Cleveland eight years before to deal with the real need of removing some deadwood from the upper management structure of the firm and stayed on long enough to make many enemies by removing some wood that was both green and highly productive. Sarceti's beard was in fact very important. It was a firm act of self-assertion and it meant that he had either decided that Winston Stone was no longer so important or that at last he felt he was on firm enough ground so that he would take some chances. It was going to be very interesting to find out which was true.

The view out the window beyond his desk looked over the Hudson River towards the docks and warehouses of New Jersey. The leaden sky cast a dreary tint over the landscape but even on a clear day, I couldn't imagine that it was an inspiring view. I imagined that the true rulers of our firm had their offices on the southwest corner of the building where the view would include a view of the Statue of Liberty and the Harbor. Still a view from the forty-second floor unobstructed by any neighboring skyscrapers wasn't too bad. Sarceti was doing pretty well but you didn't have to look too much beyond this view to see why he would want to do much better. This office was like a nice house in a neighborhood full of mansions.

"I called the Livingston yesterday afternoon" Tony said. "I thought we could get some dinner and a little jump on our discussion."

The Livingston was a non-decrepit, medium sized hotel on 40th just off Park Avenue. They did about 80 percent of their business with Winston Stone people who were in town on business. It was were I would have been if I had come into the city on Sunday afternoon.

"I came in this morning," I said.

"From . . . Chicago?" he asked. I hadn't been in Chicago in months but it was nominally my home so it wasn't really a bad guess.

"No, from Halcyon. Pennsylvania," I added, in case the Northeast was littered with places named Halcyon.

He looked genuinely puzzled.

"I worked in a weekend visit to an old lover," I said. I was so tired I was losing my corporate touch. Lover was the wrong word to use. Old girl friend might have worked. Old friend would have been better. It was more neutral.

"Really? Good for you," he said. "I imagine accounting will have a field day with your expense reports."

"I'm relying on the golf theory. As long as you are going more or less in the right direction, not hooking or slicing then they usually pay."

"Really? So was it a successful weekend?"

'Well, I didn't get what I was looking for but I suppose it was a good weekend."

Tony looked puzzled. The conversation wasn't serving the purpose he had hoped

for.

"It seems to me that a man in your position, traveling as you do, ought to be approaching the romantic side of his life with the same protocol that you would use approaching a sales call, always have another two or three leads lined up in case the first one doesn't pan out."

Very sensitive, Tony, I thought. But then I realized he had managed to reign in our conversation to the point where we were ready to talk business again. It was my turn to make a move.

"Well, Tony," I asked, "do you have your real estate license yet?"

"No," he said. "No, but I have been giving some serious thought to how I can get myself into that action. Some way to benefit."

The focus of the firm's strategy of late had been to move into many new financially related areas. The most promising of which was real estate. It was really a classic textbook move and like the best moves it was very simple at its heart. The firm had been milking the resources and capital of its main business, the cash cow in the common slang, to move into industries that allowed better chances for growth. The main target now was domestic real estate. Your normal real estate man was presumed by us to be a nice guy, out on his own, probably a country club man, it seemed the good ones were often ex-athletes blessed with a non-professional good humor. The profession seemed to lack real discipline though and the current operators promised to prove to be only so much fresh meat as competition compared with the savvy Wall Streeters we had been fighting. If everything was properly handled from our end the plan should work like Mussolini's troops moving through Ethiopia. The only problem for most of us in the company with this plan was that this change seemed to make better careers in the developing areas of the company than in the existing ones.

A bunch of very expensive consultants hired by the top management of Winston Stone had decided that the area of growth for brokerage firms lay in turning them into what was called financial supermarkets which meant that we were going to provide every sort of financial service to all sorts of people. The first year of the resulting five year plan involved real estate and so that was the area that held the attention of everyone who wanted to prosper at Winston Stone.

That was the party line then, the firm's policy and its collective hope. Time would reveal it to be an idea so completely and catastrophically wrong that it could only have been produced by large committees of overpaid syncopants, but at the time we all thought of it as brilliant and it was the environment in which we were all scurrying to make the best possible career for ourselves. I wasn't the only person there who refused to say that the emperor had no clothes.

Tony continued, "I suppose you know Walter Jordan wants you assigned as the operations manager in Kansas City. I had hoped to find something for you here in the Metro."

Metro meant New York with its dense web of offices all close to the nerves of the home office. It was the broad important fiefdom that went with Tony's current job.

I decided to play the good and faithful employee role here. "Well it does seem like quite a challenge. This Pass Wansworth thing was a chance to prove a lot of things in a hurry, I think."

"Oh, I'm sure it was that and more," Tony said sarcastically. "I feel very fortunate myself that I got out of the Operations Planning Department in time to avoid the fallout. We had problems in Metro of course, but at least we weren't dead center the way those people were. They really took a beating."

"It was a mess," I said.

He looked at me carefully, wondering perhaps if all this toadying had somehow reduced my critical capacities.

"It was the worst merger in the history of the world," he said.

"Twenty million isn't a lot to spend to eliminate a major competitor," I said.

Tony thought for a while and laughed. A practiced, calculated laugh. "Well, that is certainly a fresh way of looking at it, I suppose," he said.

Just then, the door to Tony's office opened and his secretary stepped into the room.

"Meyers on line one."

Tony's eyes widened like a child who has just spotted the cotton candy stand.

"I'll take it," he said and punched a button on his phone. "Bill, what a great pleasure," he said. "What can I do for you?"

I was reminded of a diorama I had seen in the Brookfield Zoo, in which wolves lowered their tails to show submission.

"Of course I haven't forgotten," Tony said into the phone. "I'm working on it at this very moment. We'll be there. We'll be there in strength. It's under control. Of course, I have ideas. I have good ideas. I have good people. People who will handle it. It's practically done, Bill. Don't worry. Good. Good. Of course I'll be there I wouldn't miss it. Good-by. I'll see you then and give Rachel my love."

"You know," Tony said after a few minutes of silence when he at last remembered I was across the desk from him, "I couldn't make the switch to the new division. I am too clearly marked as a comer here and my base is in the brokerage division. But Duke Fernice does need new people. He's told me so. His section is growing like a fire. The real estate people we're getting with the firms that we buy may know their businesses individually but they are resistant to our way of doing things. Never heard the phrase, 'cost effective'. They think management by objectives has to do with whether you play your second shot with an iron or a wood. Duke and his people are having fits trying to get their people in line with the profit projections they have to hit. The new people just don't push hard enough. It's all so social, so undisciplined, that he's desperate to pry some people out of the brokerage division to implement the systems."

"We're so understaffed now that you couldn't pull somebody out of her with a crowbar," I said. It seemed to me that a main lesson of Pass Wansworth debacle had been that even a firm like Winston Stone had clear limits to the resources you could bring to bear on a problem and the situation would be pretty unpleasant when you went beyond those limits.

"That's just the way it seems," he said. "The people are there."

"Well, why are you bringing this up to me?" I asked. "I don't know a damn thing about real estate. I've never even bought a house."

"There's plenty of people who sell," he said. "We need someone who can go out and put the systems in place. You're a natural. You know the EDP, which is a bonus. You're seasoned. (Make that read exhausted, I thought.) Knox, Jankins, and Thompson all have commented on your work and I could introduce you gently to some more people even though you wouldn't be working for me. The way you closed some of those office was greatly admired."

"It sounds like the damn Pass Wansworth thing all over to me," I said.

Tony missed my point. Perhaps he chose to. "That's it exactly," he said. "That's precisely the reason that I can get you into this job. Because of the work you've done during the merger.

That was peculiar, I thought. The merger had ended many more careers then it had furthered. I knew that for sure.

"So what precisely is this job?" I asked.

"Staff assistant to Thomas Andrews, who is responsible for operations implementation for Diversified Services. It's a natural for you. Andrews reports directly to Duke Fernice but he doesn't have the stomach for knocking the heads or for removing the people that are going to have to be removed if this thing is going to work out. This part of the business is central to the whole five-year plan so a lot of the real higher-ups will be watching. You do the dirty stuff Andrews can't get done and you'll be noticed. Andrews is Duke's fair-haired boy but he's in over his head now and Meyers can't stand him so there's lots of points to be made there. The payoff could come fast in this job."

"When were you thinking about this happening?" I asked.

"Soon. Tomorrow. Next week. As soon as we can spring you from this Pass Wansworth thing."

"What makes you think that I'm the guy to handle this? I think you've painted a pretty ruthless picture of this."

"I wondered a little bit about that until I saw you at the cocktail party before the merger teams went out. I overheard you telling off Harvey Knox at the bar. Very subtle, of course, nothing that could be quoted but you made a point of standing up to him. I figure that marks you as having balls enough to handle this. If you're not afraid of Harvey you can handle this."

"Or it marks me as a damn fool," I said. I was straining to remember what it was that I had said. I had probably had too much to drink. If Tony remembered it after nearly nine months, it must have been fairly tough. If Tony wasn't just stroking me with this now then it had been a fairly foolish move. The reason, no doubt, that I had told Harvey off that way was that I found him to be such a vengeful guy. An unfortunate juxtaposition there.

Precisely at ten thirty, Tony looked at his watch. "Well," he said, "I think that pretty well covers what I have to say and I'm afraid there's another meeting I need to make. I'm sure you've got a lot of other people you want to see while you're here."

"Of course," I said. Tony stepped out from behind the desk and as he shook my hand he also began to lead me towards the door.

"When is your flight out?" he asked.

"Late. 7:30." You told me to keep the whole day open, I wanted to say.

"Good. Good. Look, of course, I had to tell Harvey I was bringing you in here. He's got a full calendar for today but he's hosting drinks at Blackwood's bar on Hanover at 4:00. Be there, okay?"

"Sure," I said. "Sounds great to me."

The natural thing to do would be to spend the day wandering through the giant building, chatting with the people I knew, find someone with time on their hands and take them to lunch, but I decided that Winston Stone could live without me that day and after arranging with Tony's secretary to store my bag in her closet I rode the elevators down to the lobby and then with the joy of a child skipping school for the first time I walked out of the building. I followed the maze of narrow old streets down to Battery Park where I stood for a long time watching the Statue of Liberty and the boat traffic in the harbor. I walked back through the financial district, up Wall Street and through the tacky bazaar of Pearl Street, which seemed like sort of an urban concentration of the sprawl of junk Linda and I had seen in the flea markets at Reading. I bought a gyro sandwich at a tiny storefront stand and then walked out to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a friend of mine who came to visit me in Chicago from rural Indiana once and later he confessed to me that he was would never come back. 'Even when you are outside there you are inside,' he said and I had something of the same feeling when I was in New York, but when you stood at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the traffic on the river, savoring the beauty of the bridge itself you were definitely, gloriously outside. I must have stayed there an hour, perfectly content to be where I was, but I couldn't escape my schedule and so I walked back reluctantly back into Manhattan and took the subway up to the Village. It's one of the quirks of my nomadic existence that wherever I went I carried a half dozen tokens for the subway systems in New York and Chicago. I wanted to revisit the places I had enjoyed a year before when I had come to town and seen Melissa. Her apartment building looked the same. There were signs of gentrification all through the neighborhood but they hadn't yet reached her old building. The little restaurant on Seventh Avenue that she had managed was now totally changed. It had become a Moroccan place with a chalk sign out front announcing specials of coucous and falafel. It didn't seem as profitable as it had in the days when Melissa had managed it but of course it was hard to tell for sure in the middle of the afternoon.

The day was nearly spent now and like a man reluctantly called back from a brief vacation, I caught the subway back to the financial district and Harvey Knox's reception.

Tony had the good sense to avoid both the reception and my return and so he was gone when I went back up to the 42nd floor to collect my bag.

His secretary had a message for me. "He said to tell you that he expects to hear from you no later than Thursday."

"Tell him," I said, "message received."

The bar was hidden away in the basement of an older building a couple of blocks to the south just off Trinity. Like the Livingston Hotel, they did a high percentage of their business with Winston Stone and after mentioning Harvey's name I was directed to the back of the bar where there were thirty or so people standing together.

Harvey took the heavy glass of clear liquor from the bar and took a long sip before he moved closer to me. He didn't seem concerned about drinking in front of me. If anything he seemed to want to intimidate me. He was about 6'4" and if he moved close enough to me he could look down at me as he spoke.

"So how is going out there?" he asked. "Down in the trenches?"

"It's tough," I said.

"Good," Harvey said. "That ought to help me with my winnowing out procedure. I can find out in a hurry which of my new kids have what it takes to stick. It'll save me a lot of time. Usually takes about a year to get rid of the deadwood."

I looked up at him trying to decide if he was drunk or mad, but then I realized madness was definitely related to the environment. In this environment he was definitely sane.

"It's tough," I said, "to like yourself when you are giving people bad news all of the time."

"Good," Harvey said, "in six months you'll hate yourself." He made it sound like something I ought to be looking forward to.

"You figure out yet where you want to be when this merger thing is over?" he asked.

"I'm working on it," I said.

"You ought to consider applying to be one of my internal auditors. It's a great job. Let's you see the whole system. Make yourself a lot of friends. Be a great move for you in the long run."

"I think I'm going to be pretty tired of traveling when I'm done with this gig," I said.

"No. No, Larry," Harvey said. "Your answer is, Yes, Harvey, I would love to."

"Yes, Harvey, I would love to," I said.

"Good. Good," Harvey said and then with his agenda complete, he looked around the room till he found his next target, had the bartender refill his glass with white liquor and left without another word.

I got another scotch. I remembered I had to be careful. I had a plane to catch. You could go from New York to Chicago anytime of the day or night but New York to Kansas City was a little trickier. I noticed Arnie Masters sitting by himself at the bar with a large coke in front of him. After my talk with Jimmy in Utah I had made a point to find a picture of him. Apparently, he knew who I was. I sat down next to him. He was a light skinned black man with a crisp gray suit and his hair cut short. He looked a lot like the rest of us.

"Were you called in from the trenches too?" I asked.

"Nah, last week I've been working on closing the Pass Wansworth office on Park Avenue. It's about the only one left in the northeast and Harvey's been tightening the leash so that I don't get away from him. He seems to be worrying that he's going to be stripped bare when the merger is over."

"Fair bet," I said.

"I hope so," Arnie said.

"I ran into Jimmy in Salt Lake City last week."

"Sweet guy."

"That's what he said about you."

Arnie looked at me thoughtfully. "You want to blow this joint," he said. "I've spent enough time here lately that I'm starting to find some good joints here. No soul food, unless you like."

"I'd love to," I said, "but my assignment, should I choose to accept it, involves a seven o'clock flight to Kansas City."

"Lucky you," Arnie said. "I heard that that is one of the offices they've decided to keep open come hell or high water. Great deal. You get to compete with the Winston Stone office that is in place, which if I remember right is run by a real cracker."

The scotch was making me tired and the thought of the run out to La Guardia nearly paralyzed me. One of the most valuable pieces of information we travelers share was the best way to get to various airports and the time it took to get there. Jimmy had told me that the airport in Kansas City sat out on the prairie half way to Omaha.

"What do you think about this deal?" I asked.

"I hate it," he said. "I am out of here as soon as I can find a job that lets me live at home. These white boys are crazy. I figured that this was the company that would give the odd ball a chance but that was before I got out into the field."

That was typical of the last few months. You would run into somebody who looked promising and then you would find out that they were on their way out.

I looked at my watch. 5:15. Time for me to travel. "Got to go," I said. "Give my regards to your wife." A look of hate flashed across his handsome face but then he remembered that the only connection I had to him was that I knew Jimmy and he smiled and offered his hand. "Good luck, friend," he said. "Good luck with Kansas City. Call me if I can help. I think you're going to need it."

I collected my bag from the bartender and walked out onto Rector Street and then over to Broadway, where on my third attempt I found a cab willing to take me out to La Guardia.

Later, once my plane finally rose though the low clouds the flight offered a spectacular view. The combination of the plane's speed and the rapid rise up to its cruising altitude meant that for a time we saw a sunset in reverse. The thin line of deep red of the sun that was about to disappear seemed to retreat back into the sky and I saw bands of red grow into orange and pink and then we could discern the wisps of high clouds sprinkled among the color and then for a time the bright colors gave way to the rich blues of twilight. Somewhere over eastern Pennsylvania the plane reached the apogee of its path and the speed of the sun took control again and the sun reversed itself and began to set again. It was like watching the normal slow sunsets of which I had grown so fond in the years before in Danbury with a special twist in that it had been repeated.

I had not imagined such a thing could even be seen. I thought of Hawk Mountain and wondered if this were something the big hawks might see, riding a thermal up at just the right moment to reverse the sunset, and then gliding easily back to earth. That's what I would do if I were a hawk, I thought, but I wasn't a hawk, of course, and if I was I would probably never be able to free my mind from the thought of my prey. A hawk that kept dreaming of the sunset would probably starve.

. Later, in the clear night, Kansas City was silent. It seemed flat and smug, somnolent and complacent and on the empty bus on the long ride back through the countryside from the airport to my hotel I felt estranged from this place which should have been my home.

A week later when the local manager offered me the job of operations manager at the small renamed Pass Wansworth office, I accepted. It turned out to be a bad decision in many ways. In no small part that was because I had managed to alienate both Tony Sarceti and Harvey Knox but I was tired and I had decided that it was time to live a little closer to the ground.

It could have done worse though. Seven months later when I was struggling to escape the frustration of my tiny Kansas City office, Winston Stone closed its real estate division with disastrous results for the careers of the people who had signed on.

A month or so later Linda called to say that she had fallen truly in love with a new man and would be leaving Pennsylvania for Los Angeles.