He used his hand and my cheek to open my face toward his. "And Sue," he said, "meanness is not the issue. The issue is ridiculousness. The bastard feeds on ridiculousness like some enormous Howdy-Doodyesque parasite. The whole show feeds on it; it swells and grows when things get absurd. Letterman starts to look gorged, dark, shiny. Ask Mary Moore about that. Ask Charmian or Dick. You've heard them. Dick could tell you stories that'd curl your toes."

I had a compact in my purse. My skin was sore and hot from on-air make-up for two straight days. "He's likable, though", I said. "Letterman. When we watched, it looked to me as though he likes to make himself look ridiculous as much as he does the guests. So he's not a hypocrite."

We were in a small grid lock. A disheveled person was trying to clean the limousine's windshield with his sleeve. Rudy tapped on the glass panel until the driver activated the intercom. He said we wished to be driven directly to Rockefeller Center, where Late Night taped, instead of first going to our hotel. The driver neither nodded nor turned.

"That's what makes him so dangerous," my husband said, lifting his glasses to massage the bridge of his The whole thing feeds on everybody's ridiculousness."

The vagrant fell away as the young driver leaned on his horn. We were driven west and slightly uptown; from this distance, I could see the building where Letterman taped and where Dick had an office on an upper floor.

"It will be on how your ridiculousness is seen that whether you stand or fall depends," Rudy said, leaning into my compact's view to square the knot of his tie.

Less and less of Rockefeller's skyscrapers were visible as we approached. I asked for half a Xanax. I am a woman who dislikes confusion; it upsets me. I wanted, after all, to be both sharp and relaxed.

"Appear," my husband corrected, "both sharp and relaxed."

"You will be made to look ridiculous," Dick said. He and my husband sat on a couch in an office so high in the building my ears felt as they'd felt at take-off. I faced Dick from a mutely expensive of canvas stretched over steel. "That's not in your control," Dick said, raising his glass to his little mouth. "How you respond, though, is."

"If he wants to make me look silly, I guess he's welcome to try," I said. "I guess."

Rudy swirled the contents of his own glass. "That's just the attitude I've tried to get her to cultivate," he told Dick. His ice made a sound as he crossed his legs and looked at Dick's white cat. He smiled grimly. "She thinks he's really going to be like what she sees."

The two of them smiled, shaking their heads.

"Well, he isn't really like that, of course," Dick told me. Dick, who is NBC's vice-president in charge of broadcast resources, has maybe the smallest mouth I have ever seen on a human face, though my husband and I have known him for years, and Charmian, and they've been dear friends. His mouth is utterly lipless and its corners are sharp; the mouth seems less a mouth than a gash in his head. "Because no one's like that," he said. "That's what he sees as his great insight. That's why everything on the show is just there to be ridiculed." He smiled. "But that's our edge, that we know that, Susan. If you know in advance that you're going to be made to look ridiculous, then you're one step ahead of the game, because then you can make yourself look ridiculous, instead of letting him do it to you."

I cocked an eyebrow, "I'm supposed to go out of my way to look ridiculous?"

My husband lit a cigarette as his old superior stood. "It has to appear that way, yes." Rudy's brand is that foreign sort that lets everyone around know that something is on fire. "It's got to be clear it's your choice," he exhaled. The couch he sat on was in a slant of sunlight. The light, this high, seemed bright and cold; his smoke hung in it like ink in water.

Dick is known for his tendency to fidget. He will stand and sit and stand. "That's good advice, Rudolph. There are definite dos and don'ts. Don't look like you're trying to be witty or clever. That works with Carson. It doesn't work with Letterman."

"Carson would play along with you," my husband said. "Carson's still 'sincere.'"

"Sincerity is out," Dick said. "The joke is now on people who're sincere."

"Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they're sincere."

I asked whether it might be all right if I had just a third of a Xanax.