We’re considering a trial separation, my wife and I. After all this is the “Single in New York” expo at the Madison Square Garden Rotunda. Who can tell, maybe they have an airport metal detector that’ll—clang!— notice our wedding rings. Then—like some cocaine mule caught at JFK—I might get strip-searched for traces of sacrament. But no burn, Fern: this caucus is just another industry trade show, the Great Ohio Breakfast Nook Builders Convention, say. I knew that your video dating service and single cruise/hike/mixer had become a big American buck-bringer. And rap groups for the unmarried must help support every third Methodist or Episcopal church in New York. But, great Mothering Sunday, what’re E. F. Hutton and Metropolitan Life and Chemical Bank here for? And a Subaru booth— do they sell only one-seaters? Futon furniture. A house-plant outfit. Belmont Park, Stop-Smoking Clinic, and the New York Post. They seem less pertinent than no-pest strips on Saturn.
But the single, in prostitute jargon, is a champagne trick. If not affluent, he/she has low overhead and high expectations. There are four million, an unmerging nation, in the metropolitan area alone. They predict that 35,000 singles will drop tens and hundreds here over this weekend. In 1890 these were the people you chaperoned a taffy pull or hymn sing for. They have time and don’t quite know how to amuse themselves yet. They can travel, change employment, apartment, commitment. (At MSG real-estate and travel and job agencies are very single-minded.) In a feral pack, these are the young—male young at least—who would be driven out. They jeopardize order: entice mated females, threaten the prevailing older-male rule. But, in New York, we sell them term insurance and a futon hassock.
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