“Kick her out and see. She can always go live with her parents.”

“Her mother drives her crazy.”

“That’s what mothers are for.” Rabbit pictures his own. His bladder gets a touch of that guilty sweetness it had when as a child he was running to school late, beside the slime-rimmed gutter water that ran down from the ice plant. He tries to explain. “Listen, Stavros. You’re the one in the wrong. You’re the one screwing another man’s wife. If you want to pull out, pull out. Don’t try to commit me to one of your fucking coalition governments.”

“Back to that,” Stavros says.

“Right. You intervened, not me.”

“I didn’t intervene, I performed a rescue.”

“That’s what all you hawks say.” He is eager to argue about Vietnam, but Stavros keeps to the less passionate subject.

“She was desperate, fella. Christ, hadn’t you taken her to bed in ten years?”

“I resent that.”

“Go ahead. Resent it.”

“She was no worse off than a million wives.” A billion cunts, how many wives? Five hundred million? “We had relations. They didn’t seem so bad to me.”

“All I’m saying is, I didn’t cook this up, it was delivered to me hot. I didn’t have to talk her into anything, she was pushing all the way. I was the first chance she had. If I’d been a one-legged milkman, I would have done.”

“You’re too modest.”

Stavros shakes his head. “She’s some tiger.”

“Stop it, you’re giving me a hard-on.”

Stavros studies him squarely. “You’re a funny guy.”

“Tell me what it is you don’t like about her now.”

His merely interested tone relaxes Stavros’s shoulders an inch. The man measures off a little cage in front of his lapels. “It’s just too—confining. It’s weight I don’t need. I got to keep light, on an even keel. I got to avoid stress. Between you and me, I’m not going to live forever.”

“You just told me you might.”

“The odds are not.”

“You know, you’re just like me, the way I used to be. Everybody now is like the way I used to be.”

“She’s had her kicks for the summer, let her come back. Tell the hippie to move on, that’s what a kid like that wants to hear anyway.”

Rabbit sips the dregs of his second Daiquiri. It is delicious, to let this silence lengthen, widen: he will not promise to take Janice back. The game is on ice. He says at last, because continued silence would have been unbearably rude, “Just don’t know. Sorry to be so vague.”

Stavros takes it up quickly. “She on anything?”

“Who?”

“This nympho of yours.”

“On something?”

“You know. Pills. Acid. She can’t be on horse or you wouldn’t have any furniture left.”

“Jill? No, she’s kicked that stuff.”

“Don’t you believe it. They never do. These flower babies, dope is their milk.”

“She’s fanatic against. She’s been there and back. Not that this is any of your business.” Rabbit doesn’t like the way the game has started to slide; there is a hole he is trying to plug and can’t.