Standing in the bathroom after a shower that was not quite right, he wiped steam from the lower part of the mirror in order to see his dick. There it is. Then it disappeared as the steam reinvaded. Just checking it out. The body wasn’t too bad considering a neglect of weight. He was five eleven and three quarters and weighed about two hundred. Years before, the Air Force had refused to round off the fraction to the nearest whole number and he had been forced to lose ten pounds. He had gone from the steam tables of college dormitories to the steam tables of the Air Force, wanting to be a pilot but narrowly flunking the physical—a slight stigma in the right eye.

While dressing he closed his eyes to recapture the power of his dream of the future, the green unwinding of the morning drive, with the lake a heartless aquamarine beckoning with a signed promise of new life. He stumbled backward on the bed. Not that he was a dope, a schlepp as they say. He didn’t care about that sort of thing, and often went quite contrary to fashion in dress and behavior. In college his econ major had been liberally strewn with courses in philosophy and literature and psychology. He had been thought quite the wise one among his cronies and was given to quipping “Tell it to Anne Frank” to those who whined about life’s difficulties.

As an instance, several nights before, he and Diana had watched Tom Snyder after an energetic bout of making love; an attractive woman, Nancy Friday, had told Tom that eighty-five percent of all women surveyed said they defined masculinity in terms of whether or not a man was a good provider. Diana had been uncommonly tender, taking his hand.

“Don’t be upset.”

“I’m not”

“You’ll find something. Just don’t get depressed. They must have all been brainless cunts.”

“That’s okay, darling. Not to be corny but I’ve always tried to do it my way.”

“That’s terribly corny. You should stop listening to the radio.”

“I’m interested in the news. In the world beyond our petty interests.”

“Oh God. You could always paint portraits again.”

“Nope. Shut up.”

They had wrangled themselves into a grand screw on the floor, the dog growling in the middle distance.

Chapter 3

Warlock was pissed. His first wife, Marilyn, used to say “Define your anger.” She was given to the more otiose forms of psychologizing. During a particularly bad period of their marriage she had insisted that they had never really “learned how to touch,” no matter that their mutual sexual athleticism had far surpassed that imagined by the best directors of pornographic films. She would advance on him, hips ajar, as if she were Clint Eastwood and her tiny clitoris a .44 Magnum.