“I think you’re crazy,” it read. “I give you my permission to marry as no one can be dissuaded from craziness. Love.” It was signed “Papa.”

“Papa!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never called him that in my life. ‘Tony,’ that’s how he always signed his letters.”

“He’s smarter than you are, baby. ‘Tony’ can’t give you permission to get married.”

The details of this endeavor had been so cumbersome, obscurely threatening and clearly irrevocable—the call to Bea, the wording of the telegram to her father, the nervous wait in a narrow shop where an aged hollow-eyed jeweler had fumbled among a tray of wedding bands while Walter watched her try on rings with amused condescension, as if it were all some lunatic scheme of her own, the earlier visit to a doctor whom she’d found not far from the apartment house, alone in his office, patientless and morose, who fitted her roughly with a hard-rimmed rubber contraceptive. And now Walter was telling her that the final act was to take place tomorrow in Los Angeles, he’d made all the arrangements. Each stone was fitting into place across the cave entrance. They were to marry each other. Why did she feel that it was she who was being walled in?

“During my fifteen-minute lunch break?” she asked with conscious irony.

He stared at her patiently.

“If I tell them I’m sick, they’ll fire me.”

“That would be a good thing,” Walter said quietly. “It’s the worst job I ever heard of. Only you could have found it.”

“It is a job. And I can’t do anything anyhow.”

“There are other jobs where you don’t have to know anything, but they pay better.”

The morning began with a disagreeable conversation with the store manager. It was clear he didn’t believe her. She had an impulse to tell him she was in an advanced state of leprosy. But instead, she apologized immoderately, oppressing both the manager and herself. She said she would be in the following day no matter what. Then, when she returned from the drugstore where she’d made the call, she saw Johnnie Bliss heading into the apartment house. Oh, she should have kept him away, written him a note, said she was leaving town for good! Walter would detest him. He would hold her responsible for his very existence!

It didn’t turn out as she had anticipated. Walter was excessively hospitable to Johnnie, pressing him to smoke up the cigarettes, offering him a drink—“At this time in the morning?” Johnnie purred demurely—and when Johnnie left shortly after, clasping his hand warmly. Annie walked down the hall with him. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Of course I’m all right!” Without warning he grabbed her hand and pinched her wrist hard. “You’d better worry about yourself,” he said spitefully. She gasped with pain. “Why did you—”