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      “Precisely. I had enough of it at home. My mother could have won prizes if they held contests in nagging.”

      “So now I’m like your mother?” Allison said teasingly.

      “Yes, and I don’t like it. Cut it out.”

      “What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to go for it.”

      “I don’t want you to be a mother to me,” I protested.

      “Nonsense. You’re gay and therefore you’re seeking mother substitutes with whom to re-enact the primal situation. I read that somewhere once.”

      “You read books?!!! Thank God that I found out before it was too late. I’ve heard about people like you. Your kind is trying to undermine the very foundations of this country. I heard that once at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Fellow who had the local tar and feather concession was talking. Very interesting talk, very timely. I learned all about you all city folks that night. You people with book larnin’ is a menace to decent folks.”

      Allison crossed over to in front of the television set. “May I take this occasion to announce that one member of the Literate Society to Stamp Out Mom and Apple Pie is in her cups? In fact, you might say I’m inebriated. No, I like four sheets to the wind better. All my sheets unfurled and spread out to catch the vagrant winds.” She spread her arms out wide to illustrate. The gesture knocked her off balance and she swayed back against the TV set. It knocked the rabbit ears antenna down and it fell around her, one limb on each side of her shoulders. Allison pondered this for a moment and then looked up with a profound expression. “That’s me…symmetry always.”

      I roared. When I recovered myself, I said, “I have just discovered that I’m in love with the kookiest woman in New York.”

      “You just find that out?”

      “No, I’ve known it right along but that last bit finished me. Allison my love, you win the prize for irresistible insanity. You’re marvelous, my love, simply marvelous.”

      “You really mean that?”

      “As James Joyce would put it, ‘Yes.’ ”

      That cracked her up. She fell all over me with love. Ever been kissed by someone who can’t stop laughing? Their lips keep sort of trembling. It tickles.

      I mixed us another drink. Halfway through that one I began to get “Sloane’s Reaction” (that’s the name I gave it. If Bright could have a disease named for him, why couldn’t I have a response to liquor in my name?). “Sloane’s Reaction” consisted of most of the effect of the alcohol being concentrated in one particular area. Some people get weak in the knees from booze. Up about a foot and a half was bull’s-eye for anything I drank.

      If we were going to come to any solution that night I’d have to push the conversation right then, before my mind goofed off with my body.

      “Allison.”

      “Yes, baby?”

      “Ugh. Don’t use that word now. Since you brought up that mother substitute routine I’ve gotten self-conscious about it.”

      “You never objected when I used it before.”

      “I know. But now it’s too blatant. I crave subtlety in my regressive acting outs.”

      “Who’s been reading books now?” She lifted one eyebrow mockingly. Allison did this as she winked, by closing both eyes and then opening one. Perfectly adorable. “Anyway, tell me how I can subtly shanghai you aboard the plane to California next week?”

      “Allison! Please, baby…I mean, darling…try to be serious for a moment. We could reach a conclusion about this in a few minutes. Then, I promise you, I won’t bother you with any more of my troubles for the rest of the night.”

      Allison composed her face into that absurd caricature of attentiveness that drunks wear. It was ludicrous. She looked as if she were trying to convince an arresting officer of her sobriety.

      “Don’t you have any thoughts on the subject?” I asked.

      “Sure,” she said, looking very grave. “To me it’s all very simple. I don’t know why you insist on making a prime spot production out of it.”

      She stopped speaking. I could see the alcoholic fuzziness creeping back into her eyes. I fought it fast.

      “So it’s simple. So tell me about it,” I said.

      “Very simple. Lovely girl, Sloane Britain, wonderful girl…but she’s got some strange idea about herself.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Like she thinks she’s some kind of real down cynic. A mentally retarded orangutan would see through that pose five minutes after meeting her. But she’s lived with herself for over twenty years and she still believes most of the nonsense she tells herself. Very sad.”

      I was beginning to feel highly uncomfortable. The truth doesn’t always hurt. More often it is just embarrassing as all hell.

      “So, being the adorable idiot that she is, she thinks that she can work in an office where honesty and sincerity are dirty words,” Allison continued. “She thinks that she ought to believe that all human beings are out to exploit each other. So what difference does it make if Happy Broadman happens to have carried exploitation to the point of being an art? Cynic Sloane wants to think that working for him might be a good idea. She might learn the fine points of being self-seeking from her boss.”

      Allison stopped and stared at me fixedly. Then she stretched out on the couch with her head in my lap.

      She was still staring at me with eyes that held a potpourri expression of amusement, compassion, mischievousness, and advanced inebriation.

      I was no temperance advertisement myself. Otherwise, I don’t think I could have taken her observations. That she was saying those things at that time didn’t bother me too much. What got me was realizing that she had most likely held the same opinions for a long time. All the while that I had been trying to come on as a juvenile delinquent version of a composite of Messrs. Shaw, Wilde and Voltaire, with a dash of Dorothy Parker thrown in, Allison had been seeing through it.

      “My beloved Miss Britain,” she went on, “I have news for you. You’re no cynic. Sure, you see that life and people are ludicrous. It’s the foundation of your humor. You laugh at the absurdity of everything and everybody, including yourself. Nothing wrong with that, human beings a re ridiculous and some people, I among them, suspect that life is nothing but a cosmic joke.”

      She raised one finger, like a platform lecturer about to make a point. Instead, she continued the gesture upward and grasped a strand of my hair with it. She continued to play with the lock of my hair throughout the remainder of her discourse.

      “In fact, at the risk of having you throw an apoplectic fit, I will go so far as to say that I think you’re almost naïvely idealistic. Emotionally, I mean. Intellectually you know that the great majority of people will be doing more good when they’re fertilizing the flowers than they ever did in their lifetimes.

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