Sigrid, who had been to Laguna a few times before, gave directions but was silent most of the time. They stopped once for gas, and later she asked Annie to pull over near a stretch of woods so she could answer a “call of nature.” There was no special restraint between them. They didn’t ever have much to say to each other. After work in the Greek’s with Sigrid, Annie knew that her bursts of conversation always had to do with some immediate or imminent event. The nearest thing that could pass for speculation was that occasional guileful look of the Swedish girl’s—as for that, it seemed more mimetic than an indication of thought. But, Annie thought, she was “goodhearted,” which was the most one could expect as a rule. One could put up with a lot if people were goodhearted, even their cruelties.

Max Shore, whose visit had only taken place a few days earlier, was more complicated to think about. Shore’s presence during that terrible day and evening had been of greater magnitude than mere goodheartedness. Alone, Annie told herself, she might have cut her own throat in order to escape the vermin’s emergence. Even as Max had knocked on her door, she had been in a condition of such utter panic, at the furthermost reaches of paralyzed terror, that she had hesitated to open the door for fear that she would fling herself into the street and try, impossibly, to outrun the hours still to be endured.

So he had sat there with her, watchful, tense, his attention, the whole attention of a man she didn’t know, given over to her as though he’d handed her himself to use as she might want. They had gone through it together. He had covered her; she had taken the stale sandwich from his hands. Yet she had been unable to take up his offer of help, then anyhow. Her sense of obligation to Sigrid, about whom she cared little, weighed more heavily than the promise of Max Shore’s taking a place in her life. Not that she believed there were any jobs for her except drudgery. As for the lady friend he’d mentioned, what did she care about her except to see who it was Max had as a friend.

She had told him her stories out of dread lest her mind be consumed by the worm. But she’d not told him all her stories.

There were the movies. She spent days at the movies; she went to work from the picture houses; she bore on her forearms the imprints of the movie-chair arms because she pressed down so in dread that a man would come and sit beside her and put his hand on her thigh—or worse, as had once happened when, instead of a hand, a man laid across her skirt, like a bound roll of pennies, his naked penis.