"Oh. God." It was a two M&M moment. As the love scene progressed, Belle was taken out of her eating rhythm. When she recovered, helped by a car commercial, she said: "And you think that getting him to talk dirty will bring him out of his shell?"

"Either that or make him think twice about talking trash."

Pfeffer's pristine work experience quickly degenerated into hell. Like most young middle managers toiling for a public corporation, he had developed fantasies to obscure the realities of his servitude. He was Pfeffer, bright and ambitious young corporate warrior, grinding it out to get the value of the stock up so that he could cash his options at a steep profit, thereby affording the luxury sedan that would spend 95% of its time parked in one garage or another, so that he might purchase a Buckhead condo to which he could take the attractive young working girls whom he dated only in the same fantasies that kept him at his desk. He was part of the team, The Management Team, that nebulous coagulation of employees whose members changed from week to week depending upon the priorities of the two or three truly powerful individuals who ran and profited from the company. Pfeffer could garnish his pride with the knowledge that no one put in more hours than he, that no one pulled at his oar harder than he did; and surely Langston understood this, appreciated Pfeffer's value to The Team and would take care of him in the end.

This misty reality comforted Pfeffer through his days of struggle, kept the phone glued to his ear as he strove valiantly to maintain the staff amid the loosely organized chaos that was Exetron, Inc. But now his blissful illusion was being disturbed by the aggressive accounting tomato, Anna Barth, a young woman who was perhaps more radish than tomato and who very slyly had called the bluff he had put into play to make Exetron seem like an exciting place to work where anything could happen. Even he, Pfeffer, grand master of Long Island bullshit, had not considered this development, this return of serve laced with English, this brilliant play, really, if he stopped to consider it, which he did not. This was precisely why he did not get involved with women, such creatures as were pleasant to look at but treacherous, conniving, likely to do or say the very thing one wished them not to do or say.

He began to live in fear of his telephone, that friend, that electronic instrument which he had learned to yield like a rapier. He had always looked forward to its ring, even amid the tumult, had always seen it as an opportunity. Someone was on the other end of that line, someone whom he could sway with the rapid staccato of disinformation that flowed effortlessly from his brain. Be it a recruit eager to find a reason to accept a new opportunity or an Exetron employee trying to scam some legitimate benefit from him, Pfeffer was ever ready to pounce and turn the moment to his advantage.

Now, however, any ring might be her, might be Anna, calling to discuss lingerie, erectile functions, the quality of erotic kisses or some other topic that Pfeffer was painfully inadequate to discuss. She had his cell phone number; she had his work extension; she had easily acquired his home number, and she used all of these to pursue him into the teeth of his own lie. He couldn't admit the truth to her. He scarcely admitted it to himself, the reality that he, Pfeffer, gilded corporate warrior, possessor of twenty thousand stock options, Team Member, who had Langston's ear, who had dined at his house, who had experienced the privilege of picking up his wife from the airport, was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin, had not had a date in five years, preferred to socialize with the airbrushed, silent women of the Victoria's Secret catalog.

It was fine with him, damnit! He was living his life. Okay, maybe he was socially inadequate. Maybe his whole carefully orchestrated public persona was a sham, was a construct of Long Island bravado, but it was working for him. He had the appearance of the good life, and wasn't that what was truly important? He didn't need some numerophile nymphomaniac disturbing the balance he had worked so long to create.

He came to expect her call in the evening, in those hours after seven which had once been his alone. The phone rings. He answers it. Tentatively, almost interrogatively, he says: "Stu Pfeffer."

"I'm wearing your favorite color panties," says the voice aerated with breath.

"I've never told you what my favorite color is."

"You have two favorite colors, Stu," she tells him. "One for panties, another for everything else."

"What is my favorite color for....for..."

"Say it, Stu."

"For..."

"Say it. Panties. Panties. Panties."

"I can't."

"Panties, Stu. It's easy to say. It's liberating to say."

"P-p-.."

"Oh yes, you can say it."

"I can say it.".

"Panties. Say it!"

Diminutively. "Panties."

"Yes!"

Louder, more confidently. "Panties." He laughs. "Panties."

"Yes, Stu!

"Panties! Panties! Panties!"

"Oh, Yes! Yes! YES!"

Such breakthroughs were extremely hard fought. She pursued his libido relentlessly, not knowing exactly why, or not admitting it to herself. She relayed her triumphs to Belle over low fat ice cream, M&Ms and eight o'clock melodrama. Sometimes, if her roommate was home, she allowed her to listen in to her stalking calls, but she always felt bad about it later, as if she were allowing Belle to become the voyeur in a museum display to a bygone relic.

A month passed. Stu refused to admit that he had never been a sex talker, clung to his excuse that he felt it was inappropriate for him to unleash his torrid carnal vocabulary on a coworker. That lie became the ball they volleyed back and forth across the phone lines, clear to both of them for what it was. Imagine the irony of the situation, the Human Resources Director, protector and enforcer of the company sexual harassment policy, ruthlessly pursued and harassed by a subordinate and unable to file a complaint. Who would believe him? Worse, who would not ridicule him? Team Members were supposed to be virile, to conquer and pillage, not to be explained the intimacies of fellatio by a recent college graduate.

She waited until she sensed panic in his voice, the desperation that signaled his capitulation to a relationship beyond his control. By then the fun of the hunt had dissipated for her, and she felt it was time to make peace. She arrived at his office after eight one night with a bottle of wine, dressed like a Friday night high school girl in short skirt and tube top, for the dead ozone heat of summer had arrived. Pfeffer was at his desk, phone to his ear, note pad in front of him. The aroma of Chinese food greeted her, and she looked to the waste bin to discover the stained boxes of his dinner.

His expression did not change when he saw her. He was in character, the fast talking Pfeffer, bullshitting another prospective hire. She calmly opened the wine and poured two glasses. His only acknowledgment of her presence was to put his thumb and forefinger around the glass stem. When the call ended, he scribbled a few notes, then looked at her. A nervous smile appeared on his face.

"Phone not working?" he said.

"It's working fine," she said. "I just can't seem to get what I want out of it."

"I know a few good 900 numbers."

"I'm through with the 1-900 game," she replied. "So unsatisfying."

He nodded. "Oh. So you're quitting?"

She laughed. "You're so consistent." She raised her glass. "To Long Island, the motherland."

This brought a more genuine smile. "To Nassau County."

She hoped a drink might take his edge off. "To Exetron, Inc. May it rest in peace."

"Why do you say that?"

"Just drink," she laughed. "That's the important thing."

He accepted her logic and drank deeply from his glass. She refreshed it. He regarded the wine, which was dark red and viscous. "Another half day."

This was one of his standard expressions, and she took it as a release of nerves. "Stu," she said. "What are you doing here?"

He glanced at her. "Working."

"Even Langston leaves by seven," she said. "He's probably just finishing a two hundred dollar meal by now or he's sitting in his million dollar home smoking a twenty dollar cigar. And here you are, a forty-five thousand dollar a year man, putting in all these hours because he's too rich and lazy to organize his business properly."

"You've got to do what you've got to do to get ahead."

She swirled her glass around, gazing into the wine and thinking. This was a precursor to her flashing her eyes at him, all scripted in the moment. "Why can't you admit to me that you were never a phone sex operator?"

He smiled. "Part of the code."

"Part of what code?"

"The code of the island."

"I see. That section reads, 'it's better to look stupid than to admit you lied.'"

He laughed but found no words to say. Anna refilled the glasses. She proposed another sophomoric toast, this one to "yankees" because she wanted him to drink. He wanted to know whether she meant the New York Yankees or north easterners in general.

"Whichever one gets you to down that glass of wine," she said and giggled, drinking boldly. He followed her lead. When the glasses hit the table, both empty, she felt the rush in her head and presumed that he felt it to.

"Take me home," she said.

"Didn't you drive?"

"I mean, take me to your home. All this sex talk has gotten me kind of horny. You probably don't feel it because you haven't been talking any sex, but we'll see what we can do about that when we get there."

His mouth opened in a defensive laugh, which presaged a protest. Anna stopped him before he could utter it by rolling her tube top off her breasts. "Hey Long Island. This is Fantasy Island calling. Time for your vacation."

She managed, after some prevarication on Stu's part, to bully her way into his car. He drove as if he were just learning, eyes glued to the road, hands at ten and two o'clock. This type of rigidity she did not view as a good sign.

"If you have anything else to confess," she said, "maybe now is the time."

"Like what?"

"Like you haven't been with that many girls, if any."

"What? In New York. All the time..."

"Yeah yeah. Come on, Stu. If you're as enthusiastic in bed as you are on the phone... I just want the truth."

This is when Stu Pfeffer, twenty-eight-year-old virgin, played the religion card. Anna was touched. For once, something came out of his mouth that didn't sound like complete bullshit. He'd taken that business about there being one right somebody for each person a little too seriously, especially for a guy, but it was refreshing to actually meet a man with a genuine romantic notion about the sanctity of sexual relations. Not that Anna wasn't planning to obliterate this long-nurtured ideal, but it endeared him to her nonetheless.

Approaching his condominium, her breasts again exposed, she pried one of his hands from the wheel and took it for a tour. Now it was time for her to interpret the spirituality of human relations. Anna's concept of the divine was far more naturalistic and open to sexual expression. Once in Stu's apartment her evangelical fervor seemed to win an instant convert. No one would have accused Stu Pfeffer, with his drooping chin and his corporate paunch, of having a full tank of testosterone; but apparently, parsimonious husbandry of the hormone could lead to a rather bright blast off, if one that didn't quite wait for the countdown to begin.

Anna did not allow him to ponder his lack of adherence to mission control. It had been months since she had practiced the liturgy she described to him in the car. Thus, her religious ardor assuaged any embarrassment on his part. She led him into one of those timeless nights of speechless communication that are so few that one remembers them always. If he had to abandon his quixotic quest for the perfect girl, he might realize one day that this was the best way to do it.

They did not sleep until nearly five in the morning. The new day was a Friday, a work day, but Stu awoke at eleven without any panic, without ambition, without being able to recall exactly why he was spending so much time at the office. She had broken him. This was the best compliment and a pleasant victory, that not only did he not slink out early in the morning but that he seemed to have lost all focus.

"Do you see it in a different light today?" she asked him over lunch in an old rural house someone had converted into a restaurant. "What's the point of it? The company is dying. Maybe Langston can pull a few more rabbits out of his hat, but the management is horrible. That's why we're all working so hard."

"I need a check up from the neck up," he said. "I've been killing myself. I should have met you earlier, about ten years earlier."

She smiled. "Judging from last night, you could have been very successful in the 900 phone sex game."

"Oh, no. I'm not a talker. That's why all the women love me. Because I keep my mouth shut."

"We'll see," she said. "Now that you have something to talk about."

How far could she push him out of his groove? She decided the thing to do was to keep moving. Before afternoon rush hour she had convinced him to hop the ultra cheap AirTran to Tampa. They arrived into a dazzling sunset with hastily packed bags and no idea where they were spending the night. In a rental car they headed toward the beach, supped in a seaside restaurant festooned with fishing nets and rotted crab traps. Here was Stu Pfeffer, in Bermuda shorts and a golf shirt, drinking mai tais one after another. Anna could hardly suppress her laughter. Who was this unmasked man?

Money seemed no object. They paid the walk-in rate at the surfside Ramada. Anna flung open the curtains and the sliding glass door. The seabreeze wafted in. She peeled off her clothes and stood enjoying the salt air washing over her skin.

"A real life, night two," she suggested.

Drunk and liberated, Stu was in no mood to argue. He rather imagined that last night qualified him as a bonafide stallion of the bedroom, and he was out to prove he was a natural on the hypoallergenic bedding of Ramadaland. There was no way, juiced on rum and stuffed with fried shrimp, that they were going as far past midnight as they had the previous evening. Instead, they passed out in each other's arms like a couple of movie lovers.

Late the next morning they lay together on the beach, two soft albinos protected from the sun by their SPF 35 sun screen. Their sunglasses were relics from the past. Stu clung to his Wayfarers, imagining himself to be Tom Cruise. Anna wore her 70s retro gigantolenses. "Too cool," she had told Belle when she discovered them at the flea market. She may have been the only person to think so. But who cared? These two knew they weren't going to set any fashion trends. They knew they were far from measuring up to the tall, slender, well-muscled standard set by Madison Avenue. Even the sand was better tanned than they. But they appeared unfazed by it, comfortable, relishing their flash romance.

"I'm never going back," Stu declared.

"Oh? Just going to stay here until you run out of money?"

"I don't know. Get a job, wash dishes, eat oysters, lay on the beach."

"Involvement with a woman is supposed to make a man more ambitious. With you it seems to be having the opposite effect."

"You've just opened my eyes to it," he said dramatically. "No, I've been wrong this whole time. Five years busting my hump for a company that's never turned a profit. I guess the professors are right. A company does have to make money. I should have paid more attention in school."

"You mean you should have attended school. Imagine a business executive with a high school diploma."

"Hey the high schools in Nassau County are like colleges. That's why I've done so well."

They made love and slept in the afternoon. The beach made Anna dream of Puerto Rico, where she'd traveled with a man during spring break a couple of years ago. It was another hasty romance, except that it was inspired and controlled by him. The similarity tied the two events together in her subconscious. The dream was pleasant but tinged with the anxiety of what came after, which was not. She awoke glad to be with Stu rather than with the other. She didn't believe he had the capacity for meanness that the other had displayed in the end.

She showered. Stu arrived asking sheepishly if he could shower with her. "Only if you agree to wash my back," she said. They were off to find another restaurant as good as Buddy's Crab Trap of last night. The desk clerk recommended one that turned out to be indistinguishable from Buddy's. Another fried seafood orgy, minus the mai tais, ensued. Regarding him from across the table, Anna could tell he was wearing out. He was showing all the signs of having overdosed on sex, sun and alcohol. Still, she decided to drive him the extra mile.

The waiter gave her directions to a sandy discotheque where summer beach dwellers, primarily locals it seemed, cruised the floor in silk shirts and chinos, party dresses and stiletto heels. Against this crowd Stu and Anna looked like neophyte F.B.I. agents in problematic disguises. Stu's protests against dancing increased in frequency as they neared the dance floor, which was an undulating, fleshy organism of skin, cologne, cigarette haze and bass-beaten rhythm. Anna pointed out that in that throng moves were secondary. Going with the flow was a survival tactic. The thing to do was put a good buzz on, dive in and feel it. She suggested tequila shooters, which she touted as a safe drink for the hungover.

Three shots later, she shoved him into the hip-hop-driven melee. Thus Stu Pfeffer, conservative devotee of the corporate ideal and late of the vintage virginity, found his groove among the practitioners of fast, careless living. The tequila had the desired effect. Soon he was raising his arms in the air, spinning around, shouting out made up lyrics, bumping into people who then looked at him strangely. "What? Didn't you see Footloose?" he said to a few.

It was like stomping on the accelerator when the fuel light comes on. Their vehicle went fast into the night. They didn't know when the gas would run out, only that it would, knowledge that made the rush more intense. They danced until so many others gave up that Stu could see how foolish his moves looked in the mirror that lined the back of the dance floor. By then it was past one. Too drunk to drive, they stumbled down the street and between two condos to the beach. They could see the Ramada about a mile away and began walking toward it. Laughing, kissing, shoving each other, they made slow progress through a hot, succulent night. The hotel did not seem to get any closer. Finally, they lay down together in the darkness and fell asleep.

At noon they hopped the AirTran back to Atlanta with other partiers catching the Saturday night layover price break. Stu looked he'd just been released from Latin American prison: bloodshot eyes, one shoelace untied, sand in hair sculpted into odd topographical features. Anna hid behind her gigantolenses, her hair pulled back She stayed completely still, which was difficult to do with a tequila banger headache.

"Going to work tomorrow?" she asked.

"Hell no," he said. "Never going back there."

She knew it wasn't true. In the morning he would shower, put on a tie (he and Langston were the only ones to still wear them) and be at his desk at seven. She hadn't really expected to change him, only to put a footprint in his conscience.

"I think maybe I'll drag in about ten," she said. "Put my resignation on Smolinski's desk. Now that you've been laid my mission at Exetron is through."

"Oh, thanks. Now I'll have to find another accountant. They're the hardest. They always read the damn annual report and run like hell."

"Everyone should read the annual report before signing on at Langston's Happy Farm." She turned her head so that it was laying against the back of the seat, her eyes staring at him from behind the gigantolenses. "Besides, maybe I'm fantasizing that you'll actually call me, and I don't want to work at the same company with the guy I'm seeing."

"Oh, I'll call you," he said. "Beginning at ten o'clock tomorrow morning and every half hour until you agree to stay at your desk."

Maybe she would stay. If he didn't ignore her, if he sent her funny e-mails and stopped by her desk once in a while to see her, she would stay at least until the ill-fated ship Exetron finally sank. She might come up to his office once in a while in the evening, bring him his Chinese food, eat with him and enjoy that great view of the illuminated skyline. If it worked out that way, maybe the real living wouldn't turn out to be so bad.