George Clooney is Single Again

Sarah Larson joined us. She is twenty-nine (or, as he later put it, “Her grandmother has posters of me”), and she first met Clooney three years ago, in Las Vegas, where she was working as a hostess at Gerber’s Whiskey Bar, but she has been a public part of his life only since last September, when she broke some toes, and Clooney a rib, in a motorcycle accident in New Jersey. “You can’t outrun paparazzi on crutches,” she later said. She still has a home in Vegas, but now spends a large part of her time with Clooney.

He kissed her and asked, “You O.K.? Are you bored out of your mind?”

“No, just doing e-mail.”

She was genial and soft-spoken and seemed a little shy. He was bouncy. He scooped out some of the salad that Larson had made while he was out (“Oh, Miss Sarah!”) and dressed his with something sprayable called Balsamic Breeze, this process accompanied by joshing between them about calorie intake. “She’s trying to keep me from getting fat and old,” he said, although it sounded more as if she were teasing him for his own watchfulness. He made a joke about the pepper grinder doubling “as a marital aid.”

On the living-room couch, Larson stroked Clooney’s leg in a firm, one-way motion, as if brushing clean a billiard table, and then tried to flatten an unruly tuft of his hair.