She coughed. Her sobs stopped and she looked through her tangled hair at Walter. He was buttoning on his work shirt with intent concentration. Their glances met. He smiled.

She got up and went to the toilet where she blew her nose on the rough gray toilet paper. When she came out, Walter was making the bed.

“We’ll eat now,” he said.

Chapter 9

Annie emerged from the basement at the end of each day to the bright lights of the store, then out to the streetcar, which, rattling and shaking, bore her home to the apartment house. Walter was often waiting for her. Sometimes he was out and did not return until she was asleep. Although the job demanded little physical effort from her, the intense boredom, the isolation, exhausted her.

She met some of his friends, most of them from the Federal Theater days. Their living arrangements measured the degree of success they’d attained in movieland. One couple shared a huge shadowy house with a director and his wife out in the valley. What valley, Annie didn’t know. The actor husband came to pick them up in a Chrysler touring car that had seen better days. It smelled pleasantly of leather and mint. Mitchel Lowe, the actor, said his wife had been growing mint and selling it to little markets around town. He drove the old car with great verve; he was happy, he’d just gotten his first substantial part in a movie. He teased Walter about his “shipping out.” “Next, you’ll be in a factory, Walt. A worker! A worker!”

Lowe was the oddest-looking man Annie had ever seen. He had a jester’s face, a huge bony nose, eyebrows like small hedges that rose and fell as he talked. His eyes seemed amused by everything he said, as if they were the audience of his mobile face.

Walter was smiling, somewhat angrily, she thought. “Anyone who changes his name for the movies is hardly in a position to sneer at the revolutionary efforts of a man who’s trying to rid himself of middle-class attitudes. For God’s sake! Mitchel Lowe! The ultimate Gentile nothing name!”

Lowe grabbed Walter’s knee and squeezed it. “Envy!” he shouted. “Wished it was you, don’t you, Walt!”

They began to talk about movies, Walter saying that most of the new ones were ruined by Jewish sentimentality. Annie shrank back against the seat. But Lowe seemed indifferent, even amused. “You anti-Semite…” he said without rancor.

They rode up a driveway to a house similar in size and architectural hysteria to the ones Annie had seen in Arizona Canyon. Inside the vast living room, a middle-aged woman knitted by the light of a small lamp. A small, elegantly dressed man leaned on a grand piano while another paced up and down, fingering his chin thoughtfully. The room seemed to have very few lamps for its size.