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stopped, thought, nodded. “We have a tendency to believe good things will last forever. It is in our nature. The Beatles, for example. Oh, they’ll be around forever. The Sopranos —that show will always be on the air. Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Springsteen concerts. Good things are rare. They are to be cherished because they always leave us too soon.”
    Win rose, started for the door. Before he left the room, he looked back.
    “Doing this stuff with you,” Win said, “is one of those good things.”

4
    I t did not take much to track down Lex Ryder.
    Esperanza Diaz, Myron’s business partner at MB Reps, called him at eleven P.M. and said, “Lex just used his credit card at Three Downing.”
    Myron was staying, as he often did, at Win’s co-op in the legendary Dakota building, overlooking Central Park West on the corner of Seventy-second Street. Win had a spare bedroom or three. The Dakota dates back to 1884 and it looks it. The fortresslike structure was beautiful and dark and somehow wonderfully depressing. It’s a hodgepodge of gables, balconies, finials, pediments, balustrades, half domes, cast iron, archways, ornate railing, stepped dormers—a bizarre blend that was somehow seamless, hauntingly perfect rather than overwhelming.
    “What’s that?” Myron asked.
    “You don’t know Three Downing?” Esperanza asked.
    “Should I?”
    “It’s probably the hippest bar in the city right now. Diddy, supermodels, the fashionista, that crowd. It’s in Chelsea.”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s a little disappointing,” Esperanza said.
    “What?”
    “That a playah of your magnitude doesn’t know all the trendy spots.”
    “When Diddy and I go clubbing, we take the white Hummer stretch and use underground entrances. The names blur.”
    “Or being engaged is cramping your style,” Esperanza said. “So do you want to head over there and pick him up?”
    “I’m in my pajamas.”
    “Yep, a playah. Do the pajamas have feetsies?”
    Myron checked his watch again. He could be downtown before midnight. “I’m on my way.”
    “Is Win there?” Esperanza asked.
    “No, he’s still out.”
    “So you’re going down alone?”
    “You’re worried about a tasty morsel like me in a nightclub on my own?”
    “I’m worried you won’t get in. I’ll meet you there. Half hour. Seventeenth Street entrance. Dress to impress.”
    Esperanza hung up. This surprised Myron. Since becoming a mother, Esperanza, former all-night, bisexual party girl, never went out late anymore. She had always taken her job seriously—she now owned 49 percent of MB Reps and with Myron’s strange travels of late had really carried the load. But after a decade-plus of leading a night lifestyle so hedonistic it would have made Caligula envious, Esperanza had stopped cold, gotten married to the uber-straight Tom, and had a son named Hector. She went from Lindsay Lohan to Carol Brady in four-point-five seconds.
    Myron looked in his closet and wondered what to wear to a trendy nightspot. Esperanza had said dress to impress, so he went with his tried and true—jeans-blue-blazer-expensive-loafer look—Mr. Casual Chic—mostly because that was all he owned that fit the bill. There was really little in his closet between jeansblazer and all-out suit, unless you wanted to look like the sales guy at an electronics store.
    He grabbed a cab on Central Park West. The cliché of Manhattan taxi drivers is that they are all foreign and barely speak English. The cliché may be true, but it had been at least five years since Myron had actually spoken to one. Despite recent laws, every single cabdriver in New York City wore a mobile-phone Bluetooth in his ear, twenty-four/seven, quietly talking in his native tongue to whoever was on the other end. Manners aside, Myron always wondered whom they had in their lives that wanted to talk to them all day. In this sense, one could argue that these were very lucky men.
    Myron figured that he’d see a long line, a