As she rides by

hurt yourself?”
    “No! Worse!” She was turning this way and that in front of the floor-length mirror.
    “Worse than hurting yourself?”
    “Yes!” she said. “Don’t look, I’m starting to sag!” She also started to snuffle.
    “Sag!” I exclaimed. “Where? I can’t see any sag, can you, King?”
    “Right there!” she said, pointing to her curvaceous buns. “And here and here!” At which she pointed to two other delectable items. “Oh, Vic,” she moaned.
    “Oh, baby,” I said. “Come here.” I wrapped a bath towel around her and then wrapped my arms around the both of them. I stroked her wet hair while she sniffled into my shoulder. “Those aren’t sags, honey, now come on. You’re talking to a sag expert here. I had sags when you still had zits.”
    “Well, what would you call them, then,” she said, “being the big expert on the subject?”
    I thought fast. “ Newton ,” I said. “I’d blame it all on him, he’s the one who invented gravity, after all. That’s all you got, babe, a little gravity breaking out here and there.”
    “Oh shut up,” she said. “Get out of here, both of you.”
    “Yes, dear,” I said. “Come on, King. Brekkies.”
    “And don’t come back!” she shouted, slamming the door behind us. “All right,” I called back with admirable dignity. “I won’t. I will never enter my own bathroom again. Not even to hang up your wet towels you never hang up yourself.”
    She emerged, attired and made-up, some short while later. No, she did not want any breakfast, thank you, give it to the dog. So I did. No, she did not want a cup of fresh-brewed Colombian coffee. She wanted to be taken to school, please, if it wasn’t too far out of my way.
    “Certainly,” I said. I drove her to school, in a deafening silence. “Thank you,” she said, getting out of the car.
    “You’re welcome,” I said. She hurried up the school steps and vanished inside. King looked at me inquiringly. “Want to hear a great sag joke I just thought up?” I asked him. “No, eh? Don’t blame you. Come up front for a change, my friend, suddenly I’m feeling mighty low.”
    I patted the seat beside me; he hopped over from the back into it, and I drove us the few blocks to my office. I parked out front for a minute, thinking, while King investigated our little parking lot. Why does everyone assume, I thought, that it is harder for a woman to grow old than a man? And why does everyone assume that it is harder for a beautiful woman than a plain one? It’s insulting; it’s not fair. I dare anyone to prove that I’m not suffering as much with the passing of the years as Raquel Welch, Lauren Bacall, and Brigitte Bardot all put together. And I dare anyone to prove that the most hopeless of the world’s most pathetically hopeless wallflowers don’t suffer equally as much as those re-knowned celluloid beauties. The proof is simplicity itself: 100% = 100%; with me so far? Therefore, 100% of X = 100% of X. Therefore, 100% of suffering = 100% of suffering. Therefore, 100% of (my) suffering = 100% of (your) suffering, like it or not. The point being that, far from belittling Evonne’s anguish, I understood it only too well; Father Time and I had already sparred many a bloody round together in the prelims and the main event was creeping up, creeping up. Oh dear. Hi ho. Off to work we go. Sometimes I think that whoever invented work wasn’t such a fool after all.
    The first thing I did after opening up and generally setting up shop was to look up Mrs. T. E. Flint’s number in the phone book. Amazingly, agin all the odds, it was there. I was going to call her then, but put it off for a while as it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet, and I didn’t know what her early morning habits might be. Instead, I made a list, which turned out to be a fairly lengthy one, of all what I considered to be anomalies in the pile of printouts from Sneezy, and all the questions arising from them one might want answers for. If it turned out that one came up with even the slightest reason to ask them, of which there was no evidence at all so far. Desperation, however, acquaints a man with strange bedfellows (John T. Milton), as does the frayed remnants of a Puritanical conscience that says give value for money, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.
    I finally phoned Mrs. T. E. (Deborah) Flint shortly before ten. She answered by reciting her phone number.
    “Would that be Mrs. Flint?”
    “It would. And who