“She’s not a hippie, especially; unless everybody that age is. And I’m the one shacking up.”

“How is she at it?”

“She’s balling me ragged,” Rabbit tells him. He is beginning to get Stavros’s measure. At first, meeting him on the street so suddenly, he felt toward him like a friend, met through Janice’s body. Then first coming into the Phoenix he felt him as a sick man, a man holding himself together against odds. Now he sees him as a competitor, one of those brainy cute close-set little playmakers. O.K. So Rabbit is competing again. What he has to do is hang loose and let Stavros make the move.

Stavros hunches his square shoulders infinitesimally, has some soda, and asks, “What do you see yourself doing with this hippie?”

“She has a name. Jill.”

“What’s Jill’s big picture, do you know?”

“No. She has a dead father and a mother she doesn’t like, I guess she’ll go back to Connecticut when her luck runs thin.”

“Aren’t you being, so to speak, her luck?”

“I’m part of her picture right now, yeah.”

“And she of yours. You know, your living with this girl gives Janice an open-and-shut divorce case.”

“You don’t scare me, somehow.”

“Do I understand that you’ve assured Janice that all she has to do is come back and the girl will go?”

Rabbit begins to feel it, where Stavros is pressing for the opening. The tickle above his nose is beginning up again. “No,” he says, praying not to sneeze, “you don’t understand that.” He sneezes. Six faces at the bar look around; the little Schlitz spinner seems to hesitate. They are giving away refrigerators and ski weekends in Chile on the TV.

“You don’t want Janice back now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You would like a divorce so you can keep living the good life? Or marry the girl, maybe, even? Jill. She’ll break your balls, Sport.”

“You think too fast. I’m just living day by day, trying to forget my sorrow. I’ve been left, don’t forget. Some slick-talking kinky-haired peacenik-type Japanese-car salesman lured her away, I forget the son-of-a-bitch’s name.”

“That isn’t exactly the way it was. She came pounding on my door.”

“You let her in.”

Stavros looks surprised. “What else? She had put herself out on a limb. Where could she go? My taking her in made the least trouble for everybody.”

“And now it’s trouble?”

Stavros fiddles his fingertips as if cards are in them; if he loses this trick, can he take the rest? “Her staying on with me gives her expectations we can’t fulfill. Marriage isn’t my thing, sorry. With anybody.”

“Don’t try to be polite. So now you’ve tried her in all positions and want to ship her back. Poor old Jan. So dumb.”

“I don’t find her dumb. I find her—unsure of herself. She wants what every normal chick wants. To be Helen of Troy. There’ve been hours when I gave her some of that. I can’t keep giving it to her. It doesn’t hold up.” He becomes angry; his square brow darkens. “What do you want? You’re sitting there twitching your whiskers, so how about it? If I kick her out, will you pick her up?”