"There's a girl at work," Rosa said at breakfast one morning, setting in front of Sammy a plate of eggs scrambled with Portuguese sausage. She was a frequent guest at breakfast, too, if "guest" was the proper term to apply to someone who shopped for the meal, prepared it, served it to you, and cleaned up when you were through. Their across-the-hall neighbors were visibly outraged by this waywardness, and the doorman's eyes would twinkle crudely as he held the door for her in the mornings. "Barbara Drazin. She's a dish. And she's looking. You should let me introduce you."

"College girl?"

"City."

"No thanks."

When Sammy looked up from the platter of pastry, which Rosa had as usual arranged with such photogenic artfulness that he was loath to disturb the cheese danish he had his eye on, he caught her giving Joe a look. It was a look he had seen them exchange before, whenever the subject of Sammy's love life came up, as when Rosa was around it tended rather too often to do.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing."

She spread her napkin in her lap, pointedly somehow, and Joe went on tinkering with some kind of spring-loaded card-passing contraption that was part of his act; he had another of his magic gigs tomorrow night, a bar mitzvah at the Pierre. Sammy snatched the cheese danish, collapsing Rosa 's giveaway-cookbook pyramid.

"It's just," she continued, never requiring an actual rejoinder to sustain a conversation, "you always have an excuse."

"It's not an excuse," Sammy said. "It's a disqualification."

"And why are college girls disqualified? I forget."

"Because they make me feel dumb."

"But you aren't dumb. You are extremely well read, fairly well spoken, and you make your living by the pen or, in your case, the typewriter."

"I know this. It's not a rational feeling. And I can't stand stupid women. It's just, I guess I feel bad that I don't have a college education myself. And I'm embarrassed when they start asking me about what I do, and I have to tell them I write comic books, and then it's either 'Gee, aren't they awfully, well, trashy,' or else it's that patronizing 'Comic books! I adore comic books!'-which is even worse."

"Barbara Drazin would never make you feel bad about what you do," Rosa said. "Besides, I told her you also wrote three novels."

"Oh my God," Sammy said.

"I'm sorry."

"Please, Rosa, how many times do I gotta ask you not to tell anybody that anymore, okay?"

"I'm so sorry. It's just that I-"

"For God's sake, those were pulps, I got paid by the yard. Why do you think they invented the pseudonym?"

"All right," said Rosa, "all right. I just think you ought to meet her."

"Thanks, but no thanks. I got too much work to do anyway."

"He's writing a novel," Joe said, peeling a Chiquita. He seemed to take a good deal of pleasure in the exchanges between his girlfriend and his best friend. His only contribution to the decor of the apartment had been the stack of wooden crates in which he kept his burgeoning collection of comic books. "In his spare time," he added, through a big white mouthful of banana. "A real one."

"Yeah, well," Sammy said, feeling himself blush. "At the rate I'm going, we'll all be sitting around in the old-age home reading it."

"I'll read it," Rosa said. "Sammy, I'd love to. I'm sure it's very good."

"It isn't. But thank you. You mean it?"

"Of course."

"Maybe," he said, for the first but by no means the final time in their long association, "when I get chapter one into shape."

When Sammy arrived at the Empire offices on that textbook April morning-tufted sky, daffodils swinging like a big band on every patchof green, love in the air, et cetera-he took the oft-revised first (and sole) chapter of American Disillusionment out of his bottom desk drawer, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and tried to work, but the conversation with Rosa had left him uneasy. Why didn't he want to, at least, say, have a drink with a dish from City College? How did he even know that he didn't like dating college girls? It was like saying he didn't care for golf. He had a fairly good idea that it was not the game for him, but the fact was the closest he had ever been to a golf course was the peeling plaster windmills of the old Tom Thumb course at Coney island. Why, for that matter, wasn't he jealous of Joe? Rosa was a great-looking girl, soft and powdery-smelling. While it was true that he found her remarkably easy to talk to, tease with, confide in, and let down his guard around, easier than he had ever found any other girl, he felt only the faintest itch for her. At times this absence of prurient feeling, so marked and plain to both of them that Rosa had no compunction about lounging around the apartment with her underpants covered only by the flapping tails of one of Joe's shirts, troubled Sammy, and he would try, lying in his bed at night, to imagine kissing her, stroking her thick dark curls, lifting those shirttails to reveal the pale belly beneath. But such chimeras invariably faded in the light of day. The real question was, why wasn't he more jealous of Rosa !

He was just happy to see his friend happy, he typed. It was an autobiographical novel, after all. There was a hole in the man's life that no one person ever would have been able to fill.

The phone rang. It was his mother.

"I have the night off," she said. "Why don't you bring him and we'll make Shabbes. He can bring that girlfriend of his, too."

"She's kind of picky about food," Sammy said. "What are you burning?"

"All right, so don't come."

"I'll be there."

"I don't want you."

"I'll be there. Ma?"

"What?"

"Ma?"

"What?"

"Ma?"

"What?"

"I love you."

"Big joker." She hung up.

He put American Disillusionment back in the drawer and started to work on the script for Kid Vixen, the crime-fighting female boxer feature, with art by Marty Gold, that he had put in as a backup for All Doll, along with the Glovsky brothers' Venus McFury, about a hard-boiled girl detective who was the reincarnation of one of the classical Erinyes, and Frank Pantaleone's Greta Gatling, a cowgirl strip. The first issue of All Doll Comics had sold out its entire run of half a million copies; #6 was in production now, and orders were extremely strong. Sammy had half of an idea for the latest Vixen story, involving a catfight between the Kid and a champion Nazi girl boxer whom he was thinking of calling Battling Brunhilde, but he could not seem to get his mind into it this morning. The funny thing was that, as hard as he had fought with Sheldon Anapol for them to be able to keep plugging away at the Nazis, fighting the funny-book war was getting tougher all the time; though futility was not an emotion Sammy was accustomed to experiencing, he had begun to be plagued by the same sense of inefficacy, of endless make-believe, that had troubled Joe from the first. Only there was nothing Sammy saw to do about it; he wasn't about to start picking fights at ball games.

He kept at the script, starting over three times, drinking Bromo-Seltzer through a straw to keep down the pang of dread that had begun to gnaw at his belly. Much as Sammy did love his mother, and craved her approval, five minutes of conversation with her was all it took to induce a matricidal rage in his breast. The large sums of money he gave over to her, though she was gratifyingly astonished by them and always managed, in her curt way, to thank him, proved nothing to her about anything. To get paid vast sums for wasting one's life, in her view, only added to the cosmic tallying of wastefulness. Most maddening of all to Sammy was the way that, in the face of the sudden influx of money, Ethel steadfastly refused to change any element of her life, except to shop for better cuts of meat, buy a new set of carving knives, and spend a relatively lavish amount on new underwear for Bubbie and herself.