Three Balconies by Bruce Jay Friedman

he had lost faith in the profession.
    Dugan hoped for a let-up in the parade of grim developments, but none came. Soon after, he was notified by fax that Smiley, the owner of his favorite saloon, had died in the back room of the popular watering place. In this case, the news came as no surprise. Not only was Smiley a heavy drinker, there was also a drug habit that was supposed to be a secret but that everyone in the world knew about. In Dugan’s dwindling circle, the concern was not so much for poor Smiley – but whether the saloon could function without him. And before Dugan knew what hit him, he lost his accountant, who was barely fifty – although he did smoke a great many cigars. Dugan had given some thought to firing Esposito – who never really understood the peculiarities of artists – but fortunately the accountant died before Dugan could let him go.
    He looked on with dismay as friend after friend bit the dust. And if that wasn’t bad enough, even his enemies started to go under. Chief among them was Toileau who had accused him in print of shoddy research on his massive Bismarck biography – an attack so vicious and unfair it took Dugan a decade to regain his confidence. He had hated Toileau – how could he not? – but the man was, after all, a contemporary – and it was only small consolation that the nit-picking critic was safely in his grave.
    Despite the circling ring of doom, Dugan saw no other course than to press on. After all, wasn’t his favorite hero Marshall Joseph Joffre, whose answer to every battlefield situation, no matter how dire, was “J’attaque.”
    Dugan lived in the country where he had carefully surrounded himself with youth – a wife who was twenty years his junior, an adopted son of twelve, and young dogs. In truth, his wife
took fourteen kinds of pills to make sure her disposition was cheery. But his son excelled in ice hockey and could lift Dugan off the ground. Dugan was not particularly hypochondriacal, although an occasional twinge in his chest got him nervous. But to be on the safe side, he wolfed down fresh vegetables and made sure not to eat anything he enjoyed too much. His one exception was the large pair of greasy egg rolls he treated himself to on his occasional forays into Manhattan. The hell with it, he told himself, as he took a seat at the bar of Ho’s . I’ve got to have something.
    At the moment, he was working on a DeGaulle biography (the youthful DeGaulle, of course). It troubled him that Lieberman hadn’t trained a skilled underling to take over as Dugan’s editor. But he forged ahead all the same. His routine was to lose himself in the book for two weeks, then come up for air with a drive to the city and lunch with a friend. But even his surviving friends weren’t setting the world on fire. His choice of lunch companions included Burke, a poet who had been fitted up with a pig’s bladder, Karen Armstrong, a brilliant copywriter whose leg had been chopped off to stem a circulatory ailment, and Ellis, the healthiest of them all, a jade collector who wore a pacemaker and had a penile implant. Another candidate was Grebs, his former attorney, who had been in and out of mental institutions. In this case, he could imagine the repartee: “They’ve suggested volts, Dugan. How shall I instruct them?”
    His friends were all fine, upstanding individuals, each one a credit to his or her profession – but Dugan lacked the courage to meet them for lunch. Considering the circumstances, how could he be expected to concentrate on food. So on his trips to the city, he ate alone, checked a few bookstores and drove home in cowardice.
    An argument could be made that the condition of his friends had nothing to do with Dugan – there were healthy people all over the place. A case in point was his brother Kevin, the picture of wood-cutting vigor in far-off Maine. But Dugan didn’t buy the