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tosses a proud look to his father and Ira returns a look of tough love and Avis is watching all this feeling like the odd woman out and sits there sighing deep inside and sucks the juice out of one of those funky little feet with the knees on the side of her lobster.
    “Sonuvabitch loser,” Ira murmurs. “Doesn’t have a clue about what it takes to be number one, to be on top of the world.”
    All Avis can think of is that final scene in White Heat where Jimmy Cagney, playing Cody Jarrett, shouts from atop the gas tank, as he is being gunned down, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world! ”
    The time has now come for Ira Spade’s nightly What Is Right with Us and Wrong with Them Session.
    “Did I ever tell you that quote of Tom Seaver’s?”
    Yeah, about a gazillion times, the look on Avis’s face says.
    No, Dad, tell it again, the look on Jack’s face implores.
    “Well, sir,” Ira says, answering his own rhetorical question, “the great Mets pitcher once said, ‘There are only two places in the league—first place and no place.’ Do you know what that means, son?”
    Avis sighs deep inside herself.
    Jack says, “Yeah, if you can’t win, go home !”
    “Bingo!” Ira says, and the two males at the table high-five and fist-bump.
    Then they play their favorite game of taking turns naming winners.
    “Jack Nicklaus!” Ira begins.
    “Tiger Woods!” Jack adds.
    “Pete Sampras!”
    “Roger Federer!”
    “Old Yankees!”
    “Old Celtics!”
    “Wayne Gretzky!”
    “Muhammad Ali!”
    “Vince Lombardi!”
    “That’s my boy!” Ira says, before taking a gulp of his $4,000 Château Pétrus.
    “And now,” he continues, wiping the scarlet residuum from his black mustache with his Pierre Cardin sleeve, “it’s time to play—”
    “Fill in the blanks!” Jack interrupts gleefully.
    Avis Spade sighs backward, deep inside her soul.
    “Okay now, ready?” Ira asks.
    Jack is.
    “Let’s start out with Americans, who love to win!”
    “Yay!”
    “Okay. Leo Durocher once said, ‘Show me a good loser in professional sports and I’ll—’”
    “‘Show you an idiot!’” Jack shouts.
    “Good. Okay, let’s see. George Brett once said, ‘If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like—’”
    “‘Kissing your grandmother, with her teeth out!’”
    The soul of Avis is mortified and, unnoticed, turns a deep crimson.
    “Two-for-two!” Ira says proudly. “I can’t stump this boy, Avis. Let’s see. Deacon Jones once said, ‘When I hit someone, I want to put them in the—’”
    “‘Cemetery, not the hospital!’”
    Avis would slide under the table and be with the dog, if she could.
    “Okay, one more American. Johnny Pesky once said, ‘When you win, you eat better, you sleep better, and your beer tastes better. And your wife looks like—’”
    “‘Gina Lollobrigida!’” the two Spade males shout with machismo and in unison. More high-fives and fist-bumps.
    Avis slides halfway down her chair and closes her dewy eyes.
    “And now,” Ira says, making that trumpety sound by expelling air out of the left corner of his mouth, “it’s time for… the European losers !”
    “’Ray!” Jack shouts.
    “Okay, ready? Boris Becker said, ‘I lost a tennis match. It was not a war—’”
    “‘Nobody died!’” Jack shouts.
    “Right again! Let’s see…French golfer Thomas Levet once said, ‘It was pretty good to—’”
    “‘Come in second!’”
    “Correctamundo! All right. German luger Georg Hackl once said, ‘I go in there thinking, well, if I lose, it’s not—’”
    “‘The end of the world!’”
    The end of the world. A hunk of lobster, attached to Avis Spade’s little fork, hangs suspended two inches from her mouth, and she is sitting there ostensibly calmly but inside there is a fire burning, a fire of indignation and humiliation that has been smoldering all these years, and she is reliving in her mind a whole string of Ira’s rants, about Bush 43’s stay the course and