I started a shower to wash the smoke out of my hair. But before I shut the bathroom door, I called out to Tim: “So how was your boys’ night out?”

Tim shrugged and mumbled something.

“What did you all talk about?” I asked.

He looked at me as if to say, You don’t want to know.

I smiled back at him and said, “Oh, right—TMI.”

TIM

TIM

I DIDN’T WANT TO GO. KATE MADE ME. SHE WAS GOING OUT WITH THE GIRLS AND HAD a sitter, so I reluctantly met up with the Weasel and his men—Dick Beebe, Dan Valentine, Tom Manker—who were having their monthly meal together at Peter Luger in Williamsburg. I sat on the end with another man who was (thankfully) also a newcomer. Initially, the talk was small, although my ears did prick up when Dan the Bear made passing mention of a risky investment that had gone sour. It had been a hard day for Dan. He’d lost a bundle. I asked him if Claudia knew.

“Yes,” he said glumly. “But she’s not as upset as I am.”

Easter was two weeks away, and if Dan’s investments didn’t rebound, Claudia was going to strap one on and have her way with him. I didn’t let Dan know that I knew. But clearly, he was dreading the day.

All in all, I found the evening interesting, from an anthropological point of view. A night out with a bunch of steak-eating men, sans wives and kids. What might these meat eaters discuss? Their good fortune. Tom Manker, who worked for Brown, Harris and Stevens, bragged that while the nationwide housing bubble had recently burst, the Heights seemed immune to falling prices. For fun, I referenced past speculation-driven debacles: Tulipomania, the Panic of 1837, the junk-bond high jinks of the 1980s, and, for good measure, I tossed a sub-prime smoke bomb into the conversation. “No,” Tom said. “This is not that. House prices in the Heights are only going up, up, up!” Dick Beebe snorted in agreement. The Weasel kept saying, “Yawn. Yawn.” Meaning, I suppose, he wanted to talk about something else. When our slabs of steak arrived, the Weasel got his chance: “So, who’s hot?”

I managed an “Excuse me?”

“Who would we like to bang?”

Before I could change the subject, someone offered up that all of our wives were hotties. “Especially Tim’s wife,” someone said. Agreed. Fortunately, for the purposes of the discussion, all of our wives were off-limits. But other wives, nannies, and babysitters were up for grabs.

The beer flowed. I soon concluded the steaks all must have come from the same angry cow, because the men got ornery. They kept punching one another in the shoulder to emphasize a point. It was like a junior high locker room. At any moment, one of the guys might have started snapping the rest of us with a cloth napkin.