“Hello, baby,” he said. She huddled against him, feeling the metal buttons of his work shirt pressing against her. His presence made the room shrink; he smelled of soap and machine oil.

“Is there anything to eat?” he asked, unbuttoning the shirt, pushing her away.

“I didn’t go out. I was afraid you’d come.”

“Later…”

Without his clothes, he seemed less massive. There was a thick lurid scar on his right thigh. Jake’s thin bones had pressed against her under cover of darkness like the bones of an invalid child; she’d imagined his flesh to be faintly blue. Walter’s chest and back were the color of light amber. As he lay down next to her, she wondered what he would feel upon discovering that that crucial, yet ridiculous, obstruction was gone. He might accuse her of having held out on him. She began to invent a story to herself, then gave it up and put her arms around him. He muttered into her neck that she would have to do something about a contraceptive.

His hands, his mouth, at last his sexual organ, invaded her; she could not control the stiffening of her limbs; she fled him even as she lay there so passively.

He was subdued as he had never been when he’d tried to make love to her before. She thought, as the sweat of his exertion covered her belly and thighs, that it would be possible to love him even for this, though that female response he’d had so much experience of, with which he’d taunted her so mercilessly, might be forever beyond her, she might learn to love the helpless animal hidden behind clothes and speech—if it was this humble and sightless and mute. But it wasn’t mute! That wordless cry against her breast had tossed into life every human being, the old witch in the corridor, the mad German, the multitudes. As she felt him slide out and away from her, she wondered at the silence of the helpless animal in herself. Had she been born without it?

“You’ve been thinking,” he whispered, “all the time.” She looked at his reddened eyes. “Annie…sometimes you’re a little homely.”

She gasped with pain and turned away. He said nothing more. It grew late. She went down to the boulevard and walked until she found an open grocery store. When she returned, he was in his Levi’s, shirtless, clean, handsome. He emptied the grocery bag. “Oh, Annie. Christ!”

She had bought little hot dogs in pastry.

“This isn’t food!”

“I got what they had…”

“You should have gotten stuff like canned macaroni—” She burst into tears. She danced around the room, sobbing. She threw herself across the bed; she rolled to the floor. Wrapped in her grief, she heard remote sounds, footsteps, a strange little whistle.