Maryellen didn’t have to be in town until the following weekend, while Devlin had to be on duty at 8 A.M. on Tuesday. Using the excuse of wanting to stay out of the worst of the traffic, Devlin was able to hang around until Monday midnight, when Maryellen walked out to the car with him. He opened the passenger-side door, but she didn’t get in, staring at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“I feel funny right now. I had a good time. I just feel kind of flat about us tonight.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know how many times you’ve pulled this crap?”

She winced. “I don’t want to have an argument with you.”

He slammed the car door and moved around to the driver’s side. “I’m getting out of here before you put yourself in orbit. Don’t call me again until you decide to act like a human being.”

He left her weeping. The next night he was in bed with one of his regulars, who was beginning to wonder what had happened to him.

Maryellen called the night after that, contrite and pleading, breathless to see him again.

He was beginning to see that it figured. Joe and Jack didn’t take Maryellen seriously, that was clear. She was years younger than them, a girl, too often unreasonable. Devlin’s interest in her fascinated them. He was beginning to see that they imagined him to be some kind of original, self-invented man, at heart a rebel, things they had never had the nerve to be. So they studied him. What was it he knew? He certainly thought he knew something about women. He really did seem to have the handle to Maryellen, didn’t he? Devlin thought it was funny, and in the moods he was in, he felt impelled to be ever more outrageous. One night when he was with the Brennan brothers in Toots Shor’s, three girls he knew from a show that had closed the previous spring came up to say hello. The girls were having a sort of reunion. After dinner they were going to walk over to the Music Hall and pretend they were tourists.

They were on pills. It was clear at once that Joe and the little blonde in the middle wouldn’t mind a change of plans, and that Jack and the big redhead were envious enough of the other two to wonder if they could find consolation in each other. Although Devlin had laid all three girls, the little brunette was a particular friend, very hip, up to conspiracy. He invited the girls to join them for dinner, and murmured to the little brunette that the Brennans weren’t supposed to know how well he knew her. She said right, and on the way to the table reached back and squeezed his dick.