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wondered if his dreaded sleep-breath (which the army could use as the ultimate weapon) was wafting in her direction. "It makes me feel even older than I am."
        "I'm sorry."
        "It's all right."
        "But do you?"
        "Sleep with women?"
        "Yes."
        "As in sharing a bed with rather than making love?"
        "Yes, on occasion when I've been heartbroken or especially lonely, women have been nice enough to do that for me, and on occasion I've been nice enough to do that for women in similar circumstances."
        "I need to be held."
        "All right."
        "Very tightly."
        "All right."
        "I need to be a little girl again."
        "All right."
        "But I really don't want to be touched. Not sexually."
        "All right."
        "Really?"
        "Really."
        "It's a lot to ask."
        He leaned over and kissed her, nuclear breath or not, on the forehead. Chastely. The way he did his daughter when she was but a year and sleeping with her fuzzy pink bear.
        
***
        
        Her body was more wondrously curved than he'd even imagined and at first there in the dark, her lying against him, the water and the moonlight inviting immemorial urges, it had been difficult indeed but then she'd begun to cry, so softly he'd been moved far more than he would have thought possible, and then he had a frank and a sharp discussion with his penis about decorum and appropriateness and giving-Cindy-my-word, and finally then, next to her sweet scent and sweeter warmth, he fell asleep.
        

11
        
10:37 A.M.
        
        Tobin had once read a rather long and surprisingly fascinating book on medieval theater and how, when the theater wagons pulled into the small towns surrounding London or Rome or Prague, the townspeople would come forth with gifts of flowers and food.
        What audiences these days had to offer was not much different, really. But their gifts were the special attention they lavished on people who were essentially nobodies, has-been's or would-be's (Tobin always put himself in the latter category), and instead of flowers their mouths bloomed with laughter over the trite jokes of mid-level celebrity. Game show or melodrama, they searched for some respite from the grind of work or dull relationships or any number of fears.
        And that was why there were so many of them this morning, the ocean sky cloudless blue, the ocean calm and unending green, on the brilliant white deck, where the episodes of "Celebrity Circle" were taped.
        Jere Farris, the producer, tense under the best conditions, looked even tenser and more exhausted this morning as he tore himself this way and tore himself that way to address all sorts of problems-from lighting to sound checks to makeup to cue cards to the routine the warm-up comedian was going to use.
        Tobin was in his seat behind the big horseshoe-shaped panel. He had a nameplate in front of him, a guide for all the millions of folks at home who might not have a clue as to who he was. He wore a Hawaiian shirt-even though they weren't anywhere near Hawaii. As Farris said, "It's tropical, that's all that matters to Mr. and Mrs. Midwest, it's tropical."
        Everybody on the panel wore Hawaiian shirts and leis, and had gigantic fruit drinks in front of them, and redwood-sized plastic palm trees behind them so that the picture that went home was of this fantastic floating paradise, complete with insert shots of truly incredible babes lolling about the swimming pool and snapshotlike inserts of the various celebrities doing "tropical" stuff: Tobin playing deck tennis, looking short next to the gorgeous Susan Richards; macho ex-TV cop Kevin Anderson pumping iron as two women with a lot of suntan goop on, so they'd look darker, standing to his right supposedly playing the ukuleles they hugged to their great bikinied bosoms; and Cassie McDowell leading a group of "young-at-heart