The girl had been downright affectionate during the second Palio, which they had watched without Jastrow, and at one point in the evening—when they were well into a third bottle of Soave at dinner after the race—she had remarked that it was too bad he wasn’t a few years older, and a Jew. “My mother would take to you, Briny,” she had said. “My troubles would be over. You have good manners. You must have lovely parents. Leslie Slote is nothing but an ambitious, self-centered dog. I’m not even sure he loves me. He and I just fell in a hole.”
