He lifted an arm and pointed out to his wife; then he slumped down in his seat. “Aaach!” he said, and drank off half a glass of champagne. “I’ll tell you, I go as far as New London, Connecticut. That’s as far as I’ll go, and when I come home at night I stop first for a couple drinks. Martinis. Two I have, sometimes three. That seems fair, don’t it? But to her a little sip or a bathtubful, it smells the same. She says it’s bad for the kid if I come home smelling. The kid’s a baby, for God’s sake, she thinks that’s the way I’m supposed to smell. A  forty-eight-year-old man with a three-year-old kid! She’ll give me thrombosis that kid. My wife, she wants me to come home  early and play with the kid before she goes to bed. Come home, she says, and I’ll make you a drink. Hah! I spend all day sniffing gas, leaning under hoods with grimy poilishehs in New London, trying to force a lousy bulb into a socket – I’ll screw it in myself, I tell them – and she thinks I want to come home and drink a martini from a jelly  glass! How long are you going to stay in bars, she says. Till a Jewish girl is Miss Rheingold!

“Look,” he went on after another drink, “I love my kid like Ben loves his Brenda. It’s not that I don’t want to play with her. But if I play with my kid and then at night get into bed with my wife, she can’t expect fancy things from me. It’s one or the other. I’m no movie star.”