Roger had found the Red Sox playing Kansas City on Channel 38

and was sitting on the sofa in his skivvies with a room-service sandwich and a glass of milk, watching the warmups.

'Of all your habits,' Vic said, 'most of which range from the actively offensive to the mildly disgusting, I think that eating in your underpants is probably the worst.'

'Listen to this guy,' Roger said mildly to the empty room at large.

'He's thirty-two years old and he still calls underwear shorts underpants.'

'What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing ... if you're still one of the Owl Tent at summer camp.'

'I'm going to cut your throat tonight, Rog,' Vic said, smiling happily. 'You'll wake up strangling in your own blood. You'll be sorry, but it will be ... too late!' He picked up half of Roger's hot pastrami sandwich and wounded it grieviously.

'That's pretty fucking unsanitary,' Roger said, brushing crumbs from his bare, hairy chest. 'Donna wasn't home, huh?'

'Uh-uh. She and Tad probably went down to the Tastee Freeze to catch a couple of burgers or something. I wish to God I was there instead of Boston.'

'Oh, just think,' Roger said, grinning maliciously, 'we'll be in the Apple tomorrow night. Having cocktails under the clock at the Biltmore . . .`

'Fuck the Biltmore and fuck the clock,' Vic said. 'Anyone who spends a week away from Maine on business in Boston and New York - and during the summertime - has got to he crazy.'

'Yeah, I'll buy that,' Roger said. On the TV screen, Bob Stanley popped a good curve over the outside comer to start the game. 'It is rawtha shitteh.'

'That's a pretty good sandwich, Roger,' Vic said, smiling winningly at his partner.

Roger grabbed up the plate and held it to his chest. 'Call down for your own, you damn mooch.'

'What's the number?'

'Six-eight-one, I think. It's on the dial there.'

'Don't you want some beer with that?' Vic asked, going to the phone again.

Roger shook his head. 'I had too much at lunch. My head's bad, my stomach's bad, and by tomorrow morning I'll probably have the Hershey-squirts. I'm rapidly discovering the truth, goodbuddy. I'm no kid any more.'

Vic called down for a hot pastrami on rye and two bottles of Tuborg. When he hung up and looked back at Roger, Roger was sitting with his eyes fixed on the TV. His sandwich plate was balanced on his considerable belly and he was crying. At first Vic thought he hadn't seen right; it was some sort of optical illusion.

But no, those were tears. The color TV reflected off them in prisms of light.

For a moment Vic stood there, unable to decide if he should go over to Roger or go over the other side of the room and pick up the newspaper, pretending he hadn't seen. Then Roger looked over at him, his face working and utterly naked, as defenseless and as vulnerable as Tad's face when he fell off the swing and scraped his knees or took a tumble on the sidewalk.

'What am I going to do, Vic?' he asked hoarsely.

'Rog, what are you talk -

'You know what I'm talking about,' he said. The crowd at Fenway cheered as Boston turned a double play to end the top of the first.

'Take it easy, Roger. You

'This is going to fall through and we both know it,' Roger said. 'It smells as bad as a carton of eggs that's been sitting all week in the sun. This is some nice little game we're playing. We've got Rob Martin on our side. We've got that refugee from the Home for Old Actors on our side. Undoubtedly we'll have Summers Marketing & Research on our side, since they bill us. How wonderful. We've got everybody on our side but the people who matter.'

'Nothing's decided, Rog. Not yet.'

'Althea doesn't really understand how much is at stake,' Roger said.

'My fault; okay, so I'm a chicken, duck-duck. But she loves it in Bridgton, Vic. She loves it there. And the girls, they've got their school friends ... and the lake in the summer ... they don't know what the fuck's coming down at all.'

'Yeah, it's scary. I'm not trying to talk you out of that, Rog.'

'Does Donna know how bad it is?'

'I think she just thought it was an awfully good joke on us at first But she's getting the drift of it now.'

'But she never took to Maine the way the rest of us did.'

'Not at first, maybe. I think she'd raise her hands in horror at the idea of taking Tad back to New York now.'

'What am I going to do?' Roger asked again. 'I'm no kid any more.

You're thirty-two, but Vic, I'm going to be forty-one next month.

What am I supposed to do? Start Liking my resume around? Is J.

Walter Thompson going to welcome me in with open arms? "Hi, Rog-baby, I've been holding your old spot for you. You start at thirty-five-five." Is that what he's going to say?'

Vic only shook his head, but a part of him was a little irritated with Roger.

'I used to be just mad. Well, I'm still mad, but now I'm more scared than anything else. I lie in bed at night and try to imagine how it's going to be - after. What it's going to be. I can't imagine it. You look at me and you say to yourself, "Roger's dramatizing." You -'

'I never thought any such thing,' Vic said, hoping he didn't sound guilty.

'I won't say you're lying,' Roger said, 'but I've been working with you long enough to have a pretty good idea of how you think.

Better than you might know. Anyway I wouldn't blame you for the thought -but there's a big difference between thirty-two and forty-one, Vic. They kick a lot of the guts out of you in between thirty-two and forty-one.'

'Look, I still think we've got a fighting chance with this proposal -'

'What I'd Iike to do is bring about two dozen boxes of Red Razberry Zingers along with us to Cleveland,' Roger said, 'and then get them to bend over after they tie the can to our tails. I'd have a place for all that cereal, you know it?'

Vic clapped Roger on the shoulder. 'Yeah, I get you.'

'What are you going to do if they pull the account?' Roger asked.

Vic had thought about that. He had been around it from every possible angle. It would have been fair to say that he had gotten to the problem quite a while before Roger had been able to make himself approach it.

'If they pull out, I'm going to work harder than I ever have in my life,' Vic said. 'Thirty hours a day, if I have to. If I have to rope in sixty small New England accounts to make up for what Sharp billed, then I'll do it.'