“Harry,” Janice says, “you’re making Nelson miserable.”

“My opinion is, you have to fight a war now and then to show you’re willing, and it doesn’t much matter where it is. The trouble isn’t this war, it’s this country. We wouldn’t fight in Korea now. Christ, we wouldn’t fight Hitler now. This country is so zonked out on its own acid, sunk so deep in its own fat and babble and laziness, it would take H-bombs on every city from Detroit to Atlanta to wake us up and even then, we’d probably think we’d just been kissed.”

“Harry,” Janice asks, “do you want Nelson to die in Vietnam? Go ahead, tell him you do.”

Harry turns to their child and says, “Kid, I don’t want you to die anyplace. Your mother’s the girl that’s good at death.”

Even he knows how cruel this is; he is grateful to her for not collapsing, for blazing up instead. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Tell him why he has no brothers or sisters, Harry. Tell him who refused to have another child.”

“This is getting too rich,” Stavros says.

“I’m glad you’re seeing it,” Janice tells him, her eyes sunk deep; Nelson gets that from her.

Mercifully, the food arrives. Nelson balks, discovering the meatballs drenched in gravy. He looks at Rabbit’s tidily skewered lamb and says, “That’s what I wanted.”

“Let’s swap then. Shut up and eat,” Rabbit says. He looks across to see that Janice and Stavros are having the same thing, a kind of white pie. They are sitting, to his printer’s sense, too close, leaving awkward space on either side. To poke them into adjustment he says, “I think it’s a swell country.”

Janice takes it up, Stavros chewing in silence. “Harry, you’ve never been to any other country.”

He addresses himself to Stavros. “Never had the desire to. I see these other countries on TV, they’re all running like hell to be like us, and burning our Embassies because they can’t make it fast enough. What other countries do you get to?”

Stavros interrupts his eating grudgingly to utter, “Jamaica.”

“Wow,” Rabbit says. “A real explorer. Three hours by jet to the lobby of some Hilton.”

“They hate us down there.”

“You mean they hate you. They never see me, I never go. Why do they hate us?”

“Same reason as everywhere. Exploitation. We steal their bauxite.”

“Let ’em trade it to the Russkis for potatoes then. Potatoes and missile sites.”

“We have missile sites in Turkey,” Stavros says, his heart no longer in this.

Janice tries to help. “We’ve dropped two atom bombs, the Russians haven’t dropped any.”

“They didn’t have any then or they would have. Here the Japanese were all set to commit hari-kari and we saved them from it; now look at ’em, happy as clams and twice as sassy, screwing us right and left. We fight their wars for them while you peaceniks sell their tinny cars.”

Stavros pats his mouth with a napkin folded squarely and regains his appetite for discussion. “Her point is, we wouldn’t be in this Vietnam mess if it was a white country. We wouldn’t have gone in. We thought we just had to shout Boo and flash a few jazzy anti-personnel weapons. We thought it was one more Cherokee uprising. The trouble is, the Cherokees outnumber us now.”