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two or three undulating steps before him, moving her pretty little feet with the high, smooth insteps and the bright red toenails. She lowered her eyesas if the display were private, internal. She even knelt on the floor between his legs and spread them, as he sat on a straight-backed chair, and she licked his scrotum, including the space between his anus and balls, and then she held his erection in both her small hands and started licking up the veiny, rigid column.
    She looked up at him as she licked, and then she said, “I don’t know about this giant, Jack Holmes. You’re going to stretch me out of shape before I find and marry my normal-sized little Jewish husband, when and if I ever find him.”
    Jack could feel himself flushing with resentment and was aware of a snake of vexation coiling through his entrails.
    “I know, I know,” he said, thinking, I didn’t start this. “I know it’s a problem.”
    “A heavenly problem,” Rebekkah sighed, and she straddled his lap and introduced his cock into her vagina and slowly sat on it. He could see it inching in, and he thought this was the best feeling in the world, this muscular glove grabbing every last microsurface of his greedy dick.
    When it was all over, the daylight outside was dimming and Rebekkah continued to sit on his lap, squeezing his ribs with her knees. Jack wondered if she’d want him to marry her—a thought so crazy he didn’t dare voice it, though that was what was circuiting through his mind. He’d been told that women always wanted to get married. When they heard Alice in the next room, Rebekkah led him by the hand to his own little room with the narrow bed, deftly gathering up their clothes from the floor in a single gesture.
    They fell asleep, and when Jack woke up it was the next morning, and Rebekkah had written in lipstick on his mirror over the dresser, “What a guy!” and Jack, feeling priggish and ungrateful, wondered how he’d ever get it off. The phone rangin the kitchen in the empty apartment. Naked, Jack rushed to answer it. It was Gephardt’s secretary asking in Briarcliff accents if he could wind up his affairs and start working the following Monday.
    “Yes, I can. Uh—what time does the workday start?”
    The secretary, Donna, laughed for a second as if the word “workday” shocked her or sounded a bit brutal. “Oh, ten or ten thirty, more or less. And by the way, Betty and Helen, the dear ladies, they want you to stop by sometime this week—sometime in the morning, I’d recommend—and fill out some more of their eternal forms.”
    Jack didn’t have the vulgarity to ask how much he’d be paid. He was surprised to hear the dear ladies, who’d seemed to hold his fate in their hands, suddenly laughed off as the alcoholic fussbudgets they were.

3.
On Jack’s first day at the Northern Review he was overcaffeinated, overdressed, and under-instructed. He was given a desk in a cubicle next to a woman in her late forties, who’d been with the magazine all of her working life; until recently she and the whole operation had been in Boston. He thought she was probably a secret drinker since, as he quickly learned, she was irritable in the mornings and made a meal of opening her mail and reading open-submission ideas or even unsolicited articles sent in by unknown writers. She’d read a few lines, mumble, “Oh brother,” and then slap the offensive submission into her overflowing out-box.
    “Pardon?” Jack asked with a smile, wondering if “pardon” sounded provincial.
    “I said you never find a good story idea in the slush pile. I don’t know why that should be so. In twenty years of crawling through this sludge, you’d think one gem, oh Lord, just one gem. Is that too much to ask?”
    Harriet wore baggy beige linen trousers and had teeth browned by tobacco, coffee, and red wine. She might’ve been attractive once, and she still had a hard-boiled elegance about her. She’d cornered the market at the Northern