Alfred Hayes is one of the secret masters of mid-twentieth-century American fiction, a journalist and scriptwriter and poet who possessed an immaculate ear for prose and wrote two perfect short novels about passion and its payback.<br> <br> <i>In Love</i> is a New York story of anonymous people looking for recognition and consolation in the arms of strangers who only grow stranger. A man tells his story to a woman in a bar, a story about another woman: early married and divorced, with a child living with her parents. They go out, they grow close, but he has his work and his own life and concerns and keeps a distance from her even as he goes on seeing her, that is, until the day when, out dancing, she meets a gawky businessman, himself wounded in love, who offers her a thousand dollars to go home with him. And now the narrator discovers that he is as much in love with her as she is with him, perhaps more, though it will take him a while to realize just how utterly lost he is.