"LIKE DARYL VAN HORNE"

We met at the home of Sarah, a filmmaker who used to be a model, "until I got sick of the bullshit and gained twenty pounds." She wore a dark pinstripe suit. "When you look over the list of guys you've dated, Peri is the one guy that doesn't make any sense," she said. "You think, What was that about?"

But before we could even get to the juicy bits, we made a disturbing discovery. Although none of the women had heard from Peri for months, that morning he had called four of them.

"I don't think he knows anything, I think it was just coincidence," said Magda. Magda has been friends with Peri for years—in fact, most of her girlfriends are former dates of Peri's, whom she met through him.

"He knows everything about us," one woman said. "He's like Daryl Van Home in The Witches of Eastwick."

"Van Horney is more like it," said another. We opened the wine.

"The thing with Peri is this," said Sarah. "The reason he's so charming is. when vou first meet him. he is articulate, he

is funny—and, he's available at all times, because he doesn't work. What's more fun than a guy who says, 'Meet me for lunch, then you go back to work, then he says 'Meet me for cocktails at six? When was the last time you went out with a guy who actually wanted to see you three times a day?"

"'Cocktails' is such a loaded word," said Magda. "It's like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant."

Jackie, a magazine editor, said, "When I met him, we started seeing each other instantly—five nights a week. He won't leave you alone."

"He's smart, because the thing that he does is, he loves the phone," said Sarah. "Which to a woman, you think, He must really be into me, because he calls you ten times a day. And then you start to disregard the fact that he's like a funny-looking little thing."

"Then you start to look at his suspenders, and you think, My God," said Maeve, a poet who is half Irish.

"Then you begin to realize he's not funny," said Sarah. "He has a good stack of jokes, but once you've heard them a million times, they get really annoying. It's like a loop. He's looping himself."

"He told me that I was the only girl he ever went out with who got his jokes," said Maeve, "and I didn't think they were funny."

"And then you see his apartment. Those twenty-five doormen—what's that about?"

"You wonder why he doesn't just throw out all his furniture and go to the Door Store instead."

"Once he showed me these napkin holders he had gotten. They were in the shape of handcuffs. Like this was how he was going to seduce a girl, with napkin holders."