In the locker room, George takes off his clothes, gets into his sweat socks,

jockstrap and shorts. Shall he put on a tee shirt? He looks at himself in the

long mirror. Not too bad. The bulges of flesh over the belt of the shorts are

not so noticeable today. The legs are quite good. The chest muscles, when

properly flexed, don't sag. And, as long as he doesn't have his spectacles on,

he can't see the little wrinkles inside the elbows, above the kneecaps and

around the hollow of the sucked-in belly. The neck is loose and scraggy

under all circumstances, in all lights, and would look gruesome even if he

were half-blind. He has abandoned the neck altogether, like an untenable

military position.

Yet he looks — and doesn't he know id — better than nearly all of his agemates

at this gym. Not because they're in such bad shape — they are healthy

enough specimens. What's wrong with them is their fatalistic acceptance of

middle age, their ignoble resignation to grandfatherhood, impending

retirement and golf. George is different from them because, in some sense

which can't quite be defined but which is immediately apparent when you

see him naked, he hasn't given up. He is still a contender, and they aren't.

Maybe it's nothing more mysterious than vanity which gives him this air of a

withered boy? Yes, despite his wrinkles, his slipped flesh, his graying hair,

his grim-lipped, strutting spryness, you catch occasional glimpses of a

ghostly someone else, soft-faced, boyish, pretty. The combination is bizarre,

it is older than middle age itself, but it is there.

Looking grimly into the mirror, with distaste and humor, George says

to himself, You old ass, who are you trying to seduce? And he puts on his

tee shirt.

In the gym there are only three people. It's still too early for the office

workers. A big heavy man named Buck — all that remains at fifty of a football

player — -is talking to a curly-haired young man named Rick, who aspires to

television. Buck is nearly nude; his rolling belly bulges indecently over a

kind of bikini, pushing it clear down to the bush line. He seems quite will.-

out shame. Whereas Rick, who has a very well-made muscular body, wears

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a gray wool sweatshirt and pan covering all of it from the neck to the wrists

and ankles. "Hi, George," they both say, nodding casually at him and this,

George feels, is the most genuinely friend.. greeting he has received all day.

Buck knows all about the history of sport; he is an encyclopedia of

batting averages, handicaps, records and scores. He is in the midst of telling

how someone took someone else in the seventh round. He mimes the

knockout: "Pow! Pow! And, boy, he'd had it!" Rice listens, seated astride a

bench. There is always an atmosphere of leisureliness in this place. A boy

like Rice will take three or four hours to work out, and spend most of the

time just yakking about show biz, about sport cars, about football and

boxing — very seldom oddly enough, about sex. Perhaps this is partly out of

consideration for the morals of the various young kids and early teen-agers

who are usuallyaround. When Rick talks to grownups, he is apt to be smartalecky

or actor-sincere; but with the kids he is as unaffected as a village