I surveyed the bar with that dolefully sardonic expression I effect. Nothing but losers left at this hour. Two men sat arguing with hooch-blurred intensity: young, hard-charging sure-to-succeed types wearing the uniform that made mid-Seventies Texas businessmen look like ticket agents for minor airlines, white belts and white shoes, double-knit polyester slacks, and jackets in centennial primaries. Spaced out along the bar were three single males staring into their glasses, trying to figure out why they had failed to make out, not realizing that they were Darwinian rejects from the mating process-the kind who drive Volvos. At the end of the bar was a boozy, buxomy gal with big hair and an eyelash that had come unstuck at the corner. She was still waiting for the guy who had excused himself to go to the men's room half an hour ago. And two stools up from me was a woman in her mid-thirties, 'dressed for success' in a feminine version of a man's business suit. She had come in an hour ago when the action was peaking, and now she seemed a little embarrassed to have missed the tide of lust and ended up beached and alone.

A sad lot, I evaluated. The culls, the losers, the shucks. And yet, there was I-me—sitting in their midst. Ironic. Ironic!

An hour earlier, the bar had been full of action, with its clientele of mercantile types of both sexes, all playing it for more interesting than Nature had designed them to be, all hunting for crotch in this pasteboard jungle of music, laughter, hooch, and single-entendrejokes that elicited loud guffaws, not because the motswere bons,but because the laugher wanted to show that he had got the joke and was-if only to that modest extent-with it.

I had hooked an easy fish early in the evening, but I let her off the line-off my dizzyingly clever line, that is-out of fatigue and boredom and age. Age looms large with me. Lots of men have trouble with the arrival of male menopause, but with me it's worse; I just cannot accept the idea of being forty; and that's awkward when you're almost fifty.

I downed my scotch-and-milk, pushed myself off the stool, and signaled Sam One for my tab.

"That'll be thirteen-fifty, Mr Lee."

"You took care of yourself, Sam?"

"I always do, sir."

"Wonderful. I have it on excellent authority-one Virgil, an Italian tour guide who works the rings of Dis-that the most attractive feature of hell is that the serviceis compris."

Sam One guessed from my tone that this was supposed to be clever, so he made a weary effort towards a laugh but produced only a slight nasal sigh.

Slight though it was, this sigh had an astonishing effect: the lights went out, and Rick's was plunged into darkness.

A crash of thunder seemed to split the tarmac of the parking lot, then the lights flickered and came back on. All the drinkers were startled and frightened, so they laughed.

I went to the window and looked out. A storm had broken over the city; hailstones the size of moth balls clattered onto the parking lot and bounced up to a height of three feet. The tinny rattle of the hail obliterated the sound of As Time Goes By,now playing for its second and last time.

The only warning of an oncoming storm had been an odd greenish light at sunset, a kind of bathospheric afterglow. I had noticed it as I dropped into Rick's at six-thirty on my way home from the university.

By the time the other customers joined me at the window, the diagonal streaks of rebounding hail had stopped and rain was drilling down, rapidly melting the hailstones almost before they stopped bouncing and rolling.

"O, mutability!" I muttered.

"Oh, shit!" muttered the woman at my side, the 'dressed for success' thirtyish one I had noticed up the bar.

"No, just rain, I think," I said.

One of the customers called back to Sam One, telling him that no Christian barman would send customers out in shit like this.

"You see?" the woman said to me. "I told you."

As everyone drifted back towards the bar, Sam Three was quick to explain that he couldn't sell any more drinks without risking his license.

Fine, someone said. Don't sell us another round. Giveus another round.

And because most of us were regulars, Sam One shrugged and nodded to Sam Three, who, with cheerless fatalism, began to make everyone another of the same.

"I hope you realize," I said, taking the barstool next to hers, "that the fact that these yahoos agree with you about the rain being shit does not constitute proof. The vox populi is almost always the voice of ignorance, which is why democracy is the least efficient thing since early experimental substitutions of waxed paper for toilet paper in an effort to reduce time wasted in the john. In the case of that particular guy, it was his inability to distinguish shit from Shinola that ruined his career as a television meteorologist."

"He wouldn't make much of a shoe-shine boy, either."

"True. Except in West Texas, where a wedge of dung under the heel of the boot is a symbol of status."

"To say nothing of rural chic."

"You're fun to banter with, lady. You have a well-developed sense of the ridiculous and a firm grasp on the whimsical. And what is more, you're quick on the uptake. I like the cut of your gibe, sailor."

"Thanks, mister. What's that you're drinking?"

"Scotch-and-milk."

She made a dubious face. "Is it good?"

"I've never thought of it as a moral issue."

"You seem to have a low opinion of our fellow drinkers, stranded here in this Casablancan hailstorm."

"Oh, they're all right in their way. Just a pack of moonstruck kids who sit all night on barstools in the hope of striking up a relationship that occupies that satisfying middle ground between romance and getting a quick lay."

"Yeah, I know the type. Pitiful."

"Yes, pitiful."

And the conversation lay there for a while, as she pushed ice around in her drink. Mentioning getting laid by its name often has a stunning effect on the social flow.

"What's your name?" she asked, without looking at me.

"Marvin Lee. And yours?"

"Martha Zinberg."

"You don't look like a Martha."

"Fifteen years ago, I didn't look like a Martha, maybe. But I'm afraid I'm growing into it. But you, you reallydon't look like a Marvin."

"Thank you. It's unfair that Marvin Lee should be so patently wimpy a name, while Lee Marvin sounds all sinew and balls."

"Poetry's a funny thing."

"True. I remember giggling all the way through Paradise Lost."

She smiled. "Do you come here often?"

"And what zodiac sign was I born under?"

"Hey, give me a break. I'm new at this sort of business."

"Ah, the cry of the Sabine women. All right, yes. I come here often."

"To pick up women?"

"Certainly not! Or, to be more precise... why else? And how about you, Martha? Did you come here to get picked up?"

"I thought so an hour ago. Now I'm not sure. It's my first time."

"Your first time at Rick's?"

"First time anywhere."

"Married?"

"Divorced."

"Recently?"

"Very."

"Children?"

"None. You?"

"Which?"

"Any of the above."

"Married, yes. And I have produced an F-1... she who just yesterday was a little girl, all sugar and spice and unanswerable questions, but who will soon be entering Yale as what the acceptance letter called a 'freshperson'."

"How do you earn your money, Marvin?"

"I don't actually earnmy money. I'm a university professor. 'History of Western Thought.' Creating faculty positions is our culture's way of providing for brilliant people who are emotionally underdeveloped."

"That has the sound of a rehearsed line."

"Just what it was. What about you, Martha? How do you earn your money?"