MR. NEW YORKER AND HIS THREE-SPEED

This was not my first encounter with a Manhattan literary-romantic subspecies I've come to call the Bicycle Boys. A while back, I was at a dinner with one of the most famous Bicycle Boys, whom we'll just call Mr. New Yorker. Mr. New Yorker,

an editor at that publication, looks like he's thirty-five (even though he's quite a bit older), with floppy brown hair and a devastating smile. When he goes out, he usually has his pick of single women, and not just because these women want to get something published in the New Yorker. He's smooth and a little sloppy. He sits down next to you and talks to you about politics and asks your opinion. He

makes you feel smart. And then, before you know it, he's gone. "Hey, where's Mr. New Yorker?" everyone was asking at eleven o'clock. "He made a phone call," one woman said, "and then he took off on his bike. He was going to meet someone."

The image of Mr. New Yorker, stealing through the night in his tweedy jacket, pumping like mad on his three-speed bike (with fenders to keep his pants from getting dirty), haunted me. I pictured him pulling up to an Upper East Side walkup—or maybe a loft building in SoHo — leaning against the buzzer, and then, panting shghtly, wheeling his bike up the stairs. A door would open, and he and his inamorata would be giggling as they tried to figure out where to put the bike. Then they'd fall into a sweaty embrace, no doubt ending up on some futon on the floor.

The Bicycle Boy actually has a long literary-social tradition in New York. The patron saints of Bicycle Boys are white-haired writer George Plimpton, whose bike used to hang upside down above his employees' heads at the Paris Review offices, and white— haired Newsday columnist Murray Kempton. They've been riding for years and are the inspiration for the next generation of Bicycle Boys, like the aforementioned Mr. New Yorker and scores of young book, magazine, and newspaper editors and writers who insist on traversing Manhattan's physical and romantic landscape as solitary pedalers. Bicycle Boys are a particular breed of New York bachelor: Smart, funny, romantic, lean, quite attractive, they are the stuff that grownup coed dreams are made of. There's something incredibly, er, charming about a tweedy guy on a bike—especially if he's wearing goofy glasses.

Women tend to feel a mixture of passion and motherly affection. But there's a dark side: Most Bicycle Boys are not married and probably never will be, at least not until they give up their bikes.