“I got it at Kroll’s. They’re outlandishly behind the coasts, but their staid things are half as expensive.”

“You see friend Chas?”

Mim puts down her purse and removes her white gloves and signals for the ball. He used to spot her ten points at Twenty-one when he was in high school. As a girl she had speed and a knock-kneed moxie at athletics, and might have done more with it if he hadn’t harvested all the glory already. “Friend Janice too,” she says, and shoots. It misses but not by much.

He bounces it back. “More arch,” he tells her. “Where’d you see Jan?”

“She followed us to the restaurant.”

“You fight?”

“Not really. We all had Martinis and retsina and got pretty well smashed. She can be quite funny about herself now, which is a new thing.” Her grease-laden eyes squint at the basket. “She says she wants to rent an apartment away from Charlie so she can have Nelson.” This shot, the ball hits the crotch and every loose bolt shudders looser.

“I’ll fight her all the way on that.”

“Don’t get uptight. It won’t come to that.”

“Oh it won’t. Aren’t you a fucking little know-it-all?”

“I try. One more shot.” Her breasts jog her black lapels as she shoves the dirty ball into the air. A soft drizzle has started. The ball swishes the net, if the net had been there.

“How could you give Stavros his bang if Janice was there?”

“We sent her back to her father.”

He had meant the question to be rude, not for it to be answered. “Poor Janice,” he says. “How does she like being out-tarted?”

“I said, don’t get uptight. I’m flying back tomorrow. Charlie knows it and so does she.”

“Mim. You can’t, so soon. What about them?” He gestures at the house. From the back, it has a tenement tallness, a rickety hangdog wood-and-tar-shingle backside mismatched to its solid street face. “You’ll break their hearts.”

“They know. My life isn’t here, it’s there.”

“You have nothing there but a bunch of horny hoods and a good chance of getting V.D.”

“Oh, we’re clean. Didn’t I tell you? We’re all obsessed with cleanliness.”

“Yeah. Mim. Tell me something else. Don’t you ever get tired of fucking? I mean”—to show the question is sincere, not rude—“I’d think you would.”

She understands and is sisterly honest. “Actually, no. I don’t. As a girl I would have thought you would but now being a woman I see you really don’t. It’s what we do. It’s what people do. It’s a connection. Of course, there are times, but even then, there’s something nice. People want to be nice, haven’t you noticed? They don’t like being shits, that much; but you have to find some way out of it for them. You have to help them.”

Her eyes in their lassos of paint seem, outdoors, younger than they have a right to be. “Well, good,” he says weakly; he wants to take her hand, to be helped. As her brother, once, he had been afraid she would fall in the quarry if he let go and he had let go and she had fallen and now says it’s all right, all things must fall. She laughs and goes on, “Of course I was never squeamish like you. Remember how you hated food that was mixed up, when the pea-juice touched the meat or something? And that time I told you all food had to be mushed like vomit before you could swallow it, you hardly ate for a week.”