She was standing over him and her very position inflicted a pressure of decision upon him, and he got up and walked to the bed and sat down. She came over and sat beside him, waiting for him to speak. He looked at her, then at his hands.

‘I guess the truth is that I wish the whole thing would blow over.’

‘They turned over your garbage can. Somebody’s got you marked for a Jew.’

He saw it now. What he wanted was to go back to the old days when his hate had no consequences. It used to be a comfortable thing and there were no rifles and fat men involved in it then.

‘I’m not the type to go around beating up people,’ he said, although she knew it.

‘You don’t see Fred going around beating up people. He’s got a spot in the outfit. That’s what you’ve got to do. Get yourself a spot. You’re an executive type, Lully.’

His body seemed to pause. You’re an executive type, Lully. He looked up into her anxious eyes.

He knew there was a hurt expression on his face. But he was beyond hurt, wandering toward a memory that seemed suggested by this moment. He was sitting like this, and she …

Her office. The day he had found her again. The way her face, her whole meaning had changed.

He studied her now, not knowing what he was trying to realize. She was talking. He could not focus on her words. This was the same woman he had so despised in the glass cubicle. How amazing it was, how strange. He kept watching the living flesh of her face, her moving lips, and played upon her features with the hands of his mind, changing them back to what they seemed to have been in the glass cubicle. She was still talking … talking … her face changing. There she was in the cubicle … the heavy purse … the pin …. the furpiece … overdressed, overpainted, Jewish. Now he changed her back, began hearing her words. Here she was, Gertrude, his wife, gentile, as easily understandable as his own mother.

‘ … the best thing,’ she was saying. ‘So you go to that meeting, Lully.’

A strange flush was on his face. He kept looking at her and beyond her. And he found his arm moving around her back and his hand clasping her waist. His head moved closer to hers …

She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Now, before the war’s over,’ she was saying. ‘When the depression comes everybody’ll be getting in and then it won’t do you one bit of good. They’re liable to figure you’re a scared Jew trying to cuddle in for protection. That’s why I say …’

Talking, she let herself be pressed back on the bed. Her hands kept a pressure against his shoulders and as she talked he leaned harder against them until they gave way and he broke in to her lips. Kissing her a great sadness surged over him, and even while she laughed as though it were all silly she was trying to free her lips and hold him away from her to see him, for she knew something was wrong. But he pressed and held her so she could hardly breathe. And then she stopped struggling and he rested his head close to hers on the bed. If she talked again he would kiss her again. No more, in God’s name, no more talk! Why did everyone know what to do except him? Fred, she, even Finkelstein … only him. It was not the danger; he had always known that only hoodlums would do the dirty work. Why was he acting so proper suddenly? He had always known it. Every morning on the subway, every night coming home. Why suddenly was it such a horror to him? What was Finkelstein to him? What right had the man here in the first place? Why was he acting as though the man …?