Wildener barked with laughter. “The industry! Oh, Israel, you’ve sold out and not even been bought yet! No, she’s not in the industry. She’s with Walter.” He looked across the room at Walter. “He wasn’t a good actor, you know. Too much self-drama. He got into hideously knotted relationships with people in authority. Israel, do you remember the time he lost his voice because he hated the director so much? He’s a pretty fellow. Oh, this country …it takes boobs and stirs them all up with poetic fancies. Then they’re worth nothing, nothing!” Wildener seemed really angry for a moment. Israel drifted back to the piano. He was standing over the keyboard, his fingers resting lightly on them. “He wants someone to ask him to play,” whispered Wildener. “But no one will.”

“What do you teach?” she asked him.

“For the moment, I’m supposed to be teaching German. They’ll probably ban it from the universities pretty soon. I have no qualifications for anything else. Actually, I teach more than that. Those students—they can’t learn German anyhow, so we talk about the Depression and French literature and even the movies—anything to keep them from going to sleep.”

“But weren’t you an actor?”

“No, no. Never. I wrote a play and it was produced and then I met these types here. Then Lowe—who used to be Murray Gold —wrote and told me to come out. He’s a kind fellow. For an actor, extraordinarily kind. He knew I was without a cent and he mailed me a money order with the fare. For all his narcissism, he thinks well of other professions. Especially writing. I find that endearing in an actor. Once here, I got a teaching position. Now I’m hoping nothing happens, no war, no earthquakes, let the stupid sunlight bathe me…It is the first time in many years I have had money coming in regularly, a place to put my books, my records, a basin in which to wash my socks, and socks to wash. My dearest friend back east has lost his senses as a result of having had no steady work for a dozen years. He’s now writing continuity for comic books and has had the horrible idea of writing Hamlet in modern-day slang. Poor Fishbein! But, of course, there will be a war. And an earthquake too, probably.”

Israel Kuyper had begun to play softly. Annie lifted aside the drapes. She saw the glimmer of a swimming pool near a grove of trees. The branches of the trees were swaying. There must be a wind blowing. She had a momentary sense of being in her own dream.

“You know that joke,” Wildener was saying, “about a Communist get-together. ‘You bring the gin, I’ll bring the Negro.’”

“I heard that same joke in New York,” Annie said in surprise. Wildener laughed heartily. But Natasha had heard him.