Got a call from GK4, former fiance.

"I got your valentine in the mail today," he said.

"Oh, good. That was fast."

"Nice choice."

"Well, I just bought a bunch of them, and then I decided who got what, at random."

"Really. So you would have sent, say, Liz or Eloise or Maeve a card with a picture of a Victorian cupid standing next to a flaming heart, with the words 'all's well that ends well'?"

There was a silence.

GK4 informed me that he'd been invited to a Valentine's Day party to which each guest had been asked to contribute a piece of original erotic fiction, to be read anonymously.

"I think I'll write one about driving my cab." he said.

"Don't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because all you do is talk about driving your cab, and you'll have told, like, twenty people about it, and then they'll read this 'anonymous' piece of erotic fiction about a cab driver, and it'll obviously be you."

He called back twenty minutes later.

"I know what I'm going to do." he said. "I'm writing an erotic piece about Joan Didion picking me up in a bar. She'll be really sexually aggressive and make me come home with her. I think it'll go over really well."