Living Room by Sol Stein

scale of a hundred, what does medicine know now that won’t likely be contradicted by future research? I guess that’s an impossible question.”
    Mary studied the two men. With Shirley present, they had been a group. Now she was excluded.
    “It’s a guess,” said Jack. “Ten percent.”
    “What are the weakest links?”
    “Psychology, meaning the psychosomatic origins. Viruses. In surgery, immunology.”
    It went on for half an hour. Mary thought of Shirley home in bed alone. Her name was never mentioned.
    When Al left, Mary checked the baby, undressed, prepared for bed, came out into the living room to find Jack yawning.
    “Come to bed.”
    Mary was dozing when she felt the weight on the mattress shift.
    “Do you think anything happened tonight?” she asked.
    “I thought you were asleep.”
    “I think we ought to give up matchmaking.”
    *
    On the drive up to Westchester, Al thought a moment about Shirley. Face and figure good, quality of mind as yet unknown. He flipped on the car radio to get the late news, and rolled the window down to help keep him awake. He didn’t understand people who slept in the same bed with other people every night of their adult lives. Making love was one thing, sleep another. Coupling they called it. Till death do us part. Why are people so sanctimonious about their bodies? Wasn’t he? Would Jack ever find out what had happened between him and Mary? They say someday everybody finds everything out. He turned the radio louder in the hope that it would drown but his thoughts.
    In Westport, Arthur Crouch had retreated to his study after a late dinner, clipped the end of a cigar, made himself comfortable in his Barcalounger. Grateful to be away from the living room, where Jane would interrupt every few minutes, he settled himself in his retreat and slowly read Shirley’s Ford proposal.
    When he finished, he had one more puff on the cigar, now just a stub, and snuffed it in the ashtray. He wondered how the others would react to Shirley’s idea. He felt a moment’s fibrillation. Nothing ventured, something gained: peace. Maybe he should never have hired Shirley. He closed his eyes and found himself remembering the day that Harold Armon died.
    When Armon, Caiden, and Crouch had thrown their careers together, Max Caiden had a reputation as the great account-catcher. Arthur was the administrator, charged with building a viable organization. And Harry Armon had been the idea man. But in less than five years, one bright spring day, they had all gone their separate ways to lunch, and Harry never returned. Within a block of the office, late for a client meeting at the Four Seasons, he had suddenly sat down next to a trash can on Forty-seventh Street and told a woman passing by he thought he was having a heart attack. He died before the ambulance arrived. Harry would have been forty-three the following Sunday.
    Arthur didn’t realize how much he had liked Harry as a person as well as a partner until after he was gone. Nor had Arthur realized how big a bastard Max Caiden was. Before Harry Armon’s estate could be wrapped up, Max, thinking the agency’s creative capacities had gone down the hole with Harry in the cemetery, took his person and nine of the agency’s most lucrative accounts elsewhere.
    Arthur remembered the panic of those days, interviewing a stream of potential partners heavy on the creative side and sensing that every last son of a bitch would snatch Armon, Caiden, Crouch away from him first chance he got.
    In an untrustworthy world, he finally settled for Marvin Goodkin as creative director because Marvin, though mischievous and as untrustworthy as the others, had the instincts of an employee rather than an entrepreneur and wanted a high salary and not a piece of the action. Marvin’s flash and aggressiveness helped the agency hold the remaining accounts, most importantly Ford, without which Arthur would have been compelled to fold his tent.
    Marvin’s way was to build an