At breakfast that morning she had nearly shouted that she’d never spend a cent on clothes while there was still a single volume to add to her Marxist-Leninist library. And how bitterly she had gone on to denounce those girls who learned their politics in the beds of certain functionaries whose names she preferred not to mention at the moment, although, she managed to imply with a prig’s menace, she’d have something to say on the subject in due time. That she might be deficient in more than books seemed not to occur to her. But what an odd answer she’d given him when he’d suddenly asked her if she didn’t intend to marry someday.

“I want someone who isn’t even alive,” she had said in a submissive, confessional voice. Max had been astonished, thinking she’d had a love affair after all. Perhaps someone in the Lincoln Brigade who had left his bones in Spain, or, less romantic, someone else’s husband smashed up in a car wreck in Oakland. But a moment later, he’d known his speculations were foolish, and looking at her now as she drove the car without deference to what she was doing (gloved hands lifeless on the wheel, back stiff against the seat, foot riding on the brake pedal), he knew she’d meant exactly what she’d said. She wanted someone who wasn’t alive and never would be.

“The Japanese planes,” she was saying. “They flew over the city last night. Aren’t you from L.A.?”

“I live just outside it,” the girl said, “toward Hollywood.”

“They were so far up, I’ve never seen planes in the sky that far up. It’ll serve them right, selling scrap iron to a militarist regime, after Nanking, as if they didn’t know—”

“They? Them?” he asked, only to provoke her.

“American capitalists,” she said in a low furious voice.

He turned to look at the girl, and she smiled at once as though she had heard nothing surprising. Her teeth were small, even, neglected. The smile was a painful habit, he thought, like a tic—or a kind of camouflage.

“Annie, what’s your last name?” he asked once more.

“Gianfala,” she answered.

“The newspapers said that next time they’d bomb L.A.,” Fern said. “What a joke!”

“You’re Italian?” Max asked, looking at the fair skin and hair.

“One of my grandfathers,” she said.

“Are you hungry?”

But he was pressing her. He could see it in the way she pushed back against the car seat, and he felt an answering nervousness. He wished suddenly Fern had had her way, and they had not stopped. He folded his hands on his lap. Paper rustled. She was opening the lunch sack. Why was she so furtive?