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For once your mother and I agree about
     something. She’ll milk you for all you’re worth and then some.”
    Johnny ignored the barb. Dolores was a spendthrift, but apart from the fact she was also sensational in bed, she hadher own inheritance and was, if anything, more generous with him than he was ever able to be with her.
    Following the usual pattern of dinner, an infrequent occasion because of his father’s heavy travel schedule, Johnny knew the
     real reason for the meeting would not come up until they had ordered and the first course was well under way.
    Perhaps his father knew, perhaps he didn’t. In any case Johnny reckoned he wouldn’t care a damn that the reason he always
     made a date to meet somebody after these command performances was because, no matter how good the food, he was too jittery
     to eat, then found he was ravenous as soon as they parted company.
    Now he sat on the edge of the banquette, toying with his fork, watching his father throw down twelve malpaque oysters. He
     loved oysters, too, particularly in the late fall, as now; but as usual his appetite had disappeared.
    “Great pieces from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.” He said what he knew his father expected him to say, but all the same he meant
     every word. His father had a magical way with words, whether at home or abroad clarifying the most complicated situations
     in a way that from a lifetime of listening to and reading endless letters of admiration, Johnny knew, made readers feel they
     had unraveled the problems of the world for themselves. It had always been hard being Quentin Peet’s son and it wasn’t getting
     any easier.
    Peet grunted. “Mr. Hussein thinks he’s going to get away with it, but he isn’t…”
    “I thought that we told him…” Johnny stumbled, trying to remember the American diplomat’s name. As he often did to cover
     up his forgetfulness, he rephrased his sentence, “I thought our woman in Baghdad assured Hussein in the summer that we weren’t
     going to interfere, that Washington has no treaty obligation to defend Kuwait?”
    “Damn fool woman. I told State, Gillespie should never have been appointed there; wrote it, too.” Peet leaned back and looked
     long and hard at his son. “Mark my words, the Security Council is sooner or later going to pass a resolution toauthorize all members of the U.N.—and I do mean all members—to use force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, if they haven’t
     withdrawn by such and such a date. This is something they haven’t done since Korea in the fifties.”
    There was a sense of pent-up excitement, mixed with impatience, about Quentin Peet. Johnny wasn’t surprised. The old man liked
     nothing better than a fight, a confrontation, a war, another opportunity to be at the forefront of something most people would
     give their all to escape from, including Johnny himself. He swallowed a sigh. “You mean there could be a war?”
    Peet didn’t answer.
    “What’s going to happen, Dad?”
    “That’s what I should be asking you, son.”
    Here it came. Johnny pushed his oysters away.
    “When the hell are you going to get off your ass? At your age, d’you know what I was doing? What I’d already done?”
    “I know… I know…”
    “Don’t you ‘I know’ me!” Peet’s brows met thunderously together as he puckered his forehead in rage. Once Johnny would have
     ducked for cover. Now he didn’t need to, but he still slumped back against the banquette, head down, waiting for the onslaught
     to continue.
    “Suez, Saigon, the Soviet Union—I’d already covered all of them at your age, not for my health and not for the travel section
     of
The New York Times
either.”
    Johnny winced. Since his father had arranged an internship for him at the
Times,
it was a constant cause of friction that one of the few bylines he’d achieved had appeared in the travel section. He’d written
     a piece about Puerto Rico after going there with Dolores to visit some of her