THIS IS a love story and I apologize; it was inadver-tent. But I want it clearly understood from the start that I don't expect it to turn out well. I'm not going to give you an "although I am wry and world-weary, me and Sam have found the answer together which only we share and you can't come in except to press your nose against this book." It's bad luck for one thing. I know this lady who just made a fortune writing about her uplifting redemption, practi-cally, from Falling In Love, and while she was on tour promoting the paperback the light of her heart ran into the night and disappeared off the face of the earth. Besides its being bad luck to even whisper that you're happy, it's also not nice basically. I mean, Scott and Zelda really weren't very nice bragging up and down Fifth Avenue about how perfect everything was. But the real truth has nothing to do with bad luck or niceness; the real truth is that I've never known any man-woman thing to pan out (it may pan out to them, of course, but couples in middle age who don't speak to each other are not my idea of a good movie.

I have a lot of friends who are positive life isn't worth living without True Love Forever. They're always on the prowl and sulk against the gods when they go to a party and don't fall in love. Women, especially, engage themselves in ghastly self-inflicted tortures for which they've been primed since childhood. After all, historically it's always been dreadful for women, and the logic given them was "It's going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it." I talked to my friend Graham the other day and told him that perhaps it'd be better to forgo men altogether and take up with women, only I had a horrible suspicion that I'd wind up in the same heartbreak hotel as I did with men. "No you won't," he reasoned. "You be the man and that way you get to be the shit." I had a sudden transplant of sense as I imagined myself "the man" and just how creepy I bet I could be: dodging emotional entanglements and lying and otherwise having a lovely time. Forgetting to phone.