I got some smiles and laughs from that but here is something that better captures my thoughts about men and women. Yeah, I know, I'm a romantic. It's a book review.

"About Alice," by Calvin Trillin; Random ($14.95)

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The prose of Calvin Trillin, witty and light as gossamer, has been
harnessed to a sorrow profound enough for Dostoyevsky.

The great American satirist writes of his epic love and epic loss in
"About Alice" but in the same wry style familiar to readers of The New
Yorker and The Nation, where for 40 years he has contributed essays, often
humorous, and poetry, often hilarious, about politics, murder, urban
living, family life and adventurous eating. But this book is about Alice
Stewart Trillin. His Alice. The other half of a much admired literary
couple. And about her death and the hole left in Calvin Trillin's heart.

"About Alice" remembers how she faced serious illness with considerable
courage and humor and a writer's insight. And it's about the void in
Trillin's life after her death in 2001. No matter how much humor leavens
these 78 pages, the effect is as heartbreaking as an overwrought Russian
tragedy.

The Trillins met in 1963 at a party for a rapidly failing satirical
magazine "that proved more durable as a marriage brokerage than a
magazine." The Trillins became one of those famous New York couples. She
was the writer, editor, educator, TV producer. He was the sophisticated
writer everyone loved. "About Alice," though, tells us that Trillin's
essays and novels and poems were all written for an audience of one. The
dedication of his first book was "For Alice." The dedication of his most
recent novel: "I wrote this for Alice. Actually I wrote everything for
Alice."

He was trying to impress his girl. The rest of us, the fans of his work,
were only interlopers, peeking at the private correspondence of two
lovers.

Trillin writes that he was utterly dependent on Alice's brutally honest
criticism and editing. A friend warned that his marriage would be
healthier if he would forgo Alice's tough advice. He agreed but responded,
"If I thought that there was any chance I could get along without it, I
would."

His miniature masterpiece, a slightly longer version of a New Yorker essay
published in March, recalls Alice's childhood, her literary skills, her
political philosophy, her child rearing and her notable physical beauty,
which he said accounted for her knack at getting out of speeding tickets
with just a warning.

She was outspoken. (Alice once asked New York Gov. George Pataki "Why in
the world are you a Republican?") Trillin writes, "If we'd had the
misfortune to live in a milieu that called on me to work my way up in a
corporation and on Alice to be the supportive and diplomatic and perfectly
behaved corporate wife, I sometimes told her, I would never have emerged
from middle management."

When other parents they knew espoused complicated theories on modern child
rearing, Alice kept it simple: "Your children are either the center of
your life or they're not, and the rest is just commentary."

"About Alice" chronicles her struggle with lung cancer from 1976, followed
by another scare in 1990 and finally her fatal heart failure, which
doctors attributed to damage caused by the radiation treatment that staved
off cancer. "You could say she died of the treatment rather than the
disease." Trillin writes that she survived those 25 years after lung
cancer out of sheer determination to see her two daughters through to
their marriages. Those same years also gave Trillin readers this exquisite
little book about a long enduring love affair. And they gave us tears.

After Alice's death, a young woman wrote Trillin to say she would
sometimes regard her boyfriend and wonder, "But will he love me like
Calvin loves Alice?" After the publication of "About Alice," that has
become a test few men could hope to pass.