"They've got to be fucking," Stavros insisted, setting his hands on the table in that defining, faintly menacing way he has: palms facing, thumbs up.

"You'd think so," Rabbit agreed. "But these kids now are spooky. These letters in long white envelopes keep arriving from Colorado and they spend a lot of time answering. The postmark's Colorado but the return address printed on is some dean's office at Kent. Maybe he's flunked out."

Charlie scarcely listened. "Maybe I should give her a buzz, if Nelson's not ringing her bell."

"Come on, Charlie. I didn't say he's not, I just don't get that vibe around the house. I don't think they do it in the back of the Mustang, the seats are vinyl and these kids today are too spoiled." He sipped his Margarita and wiped the salt from his lips. The bartender here was left over from the Barcelona days, they must have a cellarful of tequila. "To tell you the truth I can't imagine Nelson screwing anybody, he's such a sourpussed little punk."

"Got his grandfather's frame. Fred was sexy, don't kid yourself. Couldn't keep his hands off the clerical help, that's why so many of them left. Where'd you say she's from?"

"California. Her father sounds like a bum, he lives in Oregon after being a lawyer. Her parents split a time ago."

"So she's a long way from home. Probably needs a friend, along more mature lines."

"Well I'm right there across the hall from her."

"You're family, champ. That doesn't count. Also you don't appreciate this chick and no doubt she twigs to that. Women do."

"Charlie, you're old enough to be her father."

"Aah. These Mediterranean types, they like to see a little gray hair on the chest. The old mastoras."

"What about your lousy ticker?"

Charlie smiled and put his spoon into the cold spinach soup that Melanie had brought. "Good a way to go as any."

"Charlie, you're crazy," Rabbit said admiringly, admiring yet once again in their long relationship what he fancies as the other man's superior grip upon the basic elements of life, elements that Harry can never settle in his mind.

"Being crazy's what keeps us alive," Charlie said, and sipped, closing his eyes behind his tinted glasses to taste the soup better. "Too much nutmeg. Maybe Janice'd like to have me over, it's been a while. So I can feel things out."

"Listen, I can't have you over so you can seduce my son's girlfriend."

"You said she wasn't a girlfriend."

"I said they didn't act like it, but then what do I know?"

"You have a pretty good nose. I trust you, champ." He changed the subject slightly. "How come Nelson keeps showing up at the lot?"

"I don't know, with Melanie off at work he doesn't have much to do, hanging around the house with Bessie, going over to the club with Janice swimming till his eyes get pink from the chlorine. He shopped around town a little for a job but no luck. I don't think he tried too hard."

"Maybe we could fit him in at the lot."

"I don't want that. Things are cozy enough around here for him already."

"He going back to college?"

"I don't know. I'm scared to ask."

Stavros put down his soup spoon carefully. "Scared to ask," he repeated. "And you're paying the bills. If my father had ever said to anybody he was scared of anything to do with me, I think the roof would have come off the house."

"Maybe scared isn't the word."

"Scared is the word you used." He looked up squinting in what seemed to be pain through his thick glasses to perceive Melanie more clearly as, in a flurry of purple colonial flounces, she set before Harry a Crépe con Zucchini and before Charlie a Crépe aux Champignons et Oignons. The scent of their vegetable steam remained like a cloud of perfume she had released from the frills of her costume before flying away. "Nice," Charlie said, not of the food. "Very nice." Rabbit still couldn't see it. He thought of her body without the frills and got nothing in the way of feeling except a certain fear, as if seeing a weapon unsheathed, or gazing upon an inflexible machine with which his soft body should not become involved.

But he feels obliged one night to say to Janice, "We haven't had Charlie over for a while."

She looks at him curiously. "You want to? Don't you see enough of him at the lot?"

"Yeah but you don't see him there."

"Charlie and I had our time, of seeing each other."

"Look, the guy lives with his mother who's getting to be more and more of a drag, he's never married, he's always talking about his nieces and nephews but I don't think they give him shit actually -"

"All right, you don't have to sell it. I like seeing Charlie. I must say I think it's creepy that you encourage it."

"Why shouldn't I? Because of that old business? I don't hold a grudge. It made you a better person."

"Thanks," Janice says dryly. Guiltily he tries to count up how many nights since he's given her an orgasm. These July nights, you get thirsty for one more beer as the Phillies struggle and then in bed feel a terrific weariness, a bliss of inactivity that leads you to understand how men can die willingly, gladly, into an eternal release from the hell of having to perform. When Janice hasn't been fucked for a while, her gestures speed up, and the thought of Charlie's coming intensifies this agitation. "What night?" she asks.

"Whenever. What's Melanie's schedule this week?"

"What does that have to do with it?"

"He might as well meet her properly. I took him over to the crépe place for lunch and though she tried to be pleasant she was rushed and it didn't really work out."

"What would `work out' mean, if it did?"

"Don't give me a hard time, it's too fucking humid. I've been thinking of asking Ma to go halves with us on a new air-conditioner, I read where a make called Friedrich is best. I mean `work out' just as ordinary human interchange. He kept asking me embarrassing questions about Nelson."

"Like what? What's so embarrassing about Nelson?"

"Like whether or not he was going to go back to college and why he kept showing up at the lot."

"Why shouldn't he show up at the lot? It was his grandfather's. And Nelson's always loved cars."

"Loves to bounce 'em around, at least. The Mustang has a whole new set of rattles, have you noticed?"

"I hadn't noticed," Janice says primly, pouring herself more Campari. In an attempt to cut down her alcohol intake, to slow down creeping middle-itis, she has appointed Campari-and-soda her summer drink; but keeps forgetting to put in the soda. She adds, "He's used to those flat Ohio roads."

Out at Kent Nelson had bought some graduating senior's old Thunderbird and then when he decided to go to Colorado sold it for half what he paid. Remembering this adds to Rabbit's suffocating sensation of being put upon. He tells her, "They have the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit out there too. The poor country is trying to save gas before the Arabs turn our dollars into zinc pennies and that baby boy of yours does fifty-five in second gear."

Janice knows he is trying to get her goat now, and turns her back with that electric swiftness, as of speeded-up film, and heads toward the dining-room phone. "I'll ask him for next week," she says. "If that'll make you less bitchy."

Charlie always brings flowers, in a stapled green cone of paper, that he hands to Ma Springer. After all those years of kissing Springer's ass he knows his way around the widow. Bessie takes them without much of a smile; her maiden name was Koerner and she never wholly approved of Fred's taking on a Greek, and then her foreboding came true when Charlie had an affair with Janice with such disastrous consequences, around the time of the moon landing. Well, nobody is going to the moon much these days.

The flowers, unwrapped, are roses the color of a palomino horse. Janice puts them in a vase, cooing. She has dolled up in a perky daisy-patterned sundress for the occasion, that shows off her brown shoulders, and wears her long hair up in the heat, to remind them all of her slender neck and to display the gold necklace of tiny overlapping fish scales that Harry gave her for their twentieth wedding anniversary three years ago. Paid nine hundred dollars for it then, and it must be worth fifteen hundred now, gold going crazy the way it is. She leans forward to give Charlie a kiss, on the mouth and not the cheek, thus effortlessly reminding those who watch of how these two bodies have travelled within one another. "Charlie, you look too thin," Janice says. "Don't you know how to feed yourself?"