It was movie music that hypnotized her—those swollen pulsating chords, the pudding texture of beaten pianos and whipped violins as the lovers kissed, as the mist covered the mansion, as the ship’s prow rose and sank upon orderly oceans, as calendar pages fell through apple blossoms and snowflakes to tell of the passing of time, as cowboys took their guns from holsters, as Bogart drove straight toward her down a narrow city street, as girls danced in dreams for themselves. Dimitri Tiomkin! It was a name that made her reel even as she carried four shrimp cocktails along her arm to a table full of sallow-faced caddies munching crackers at a corner table.

That movie music, when she left the theater, lifted her from the sidewalk, obscured the light, whether of afternoon or night or morning. She knew it was awful stuff; she wept, not for the humble Viennese girl who, deserted by the successful composer, threw herself into the Danube, but because of that music, a smothering syrup that drowned her brains, yet released in her a flood of melancholy that through some alchemy became a kind of exaltation.

Gunther Wildener, the white-haired man she’d met at the actor’s house where Walter had taken her, managed to track her down. He had the weighty jocularity Annie had come to recognize in middle-aged men who wanted to put their hands on the bodies of young girls. He had advised her what to do with her life from the same chair in which Max Shore had sat; he suggested she make a little extra money posing for pictures. She was driven to someone’s estate. She sat naked on a diving board, the rough warp of its rope surface cutting into her buttocks, while several men who did not speak to her took photographs. She moved this way and that according to Wildener’s directions. Someone said, “Do something about the nipples.”

She dressed. Wildener took her to a restaurant on Sunset Strip. An actor she recognized was sitting in a corner drinking by himself. After a number of drinks, he threw up, without apparent strain, into his handsome gray fedora. Then gave it to a waiter and staggered out. Brocade hung in threatening folds from the corners of the room. She felt she was in a tent that was about to collapse.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Wildener assured her. “You have a marvelous body. So we make little color pictures and gentlemen from all over the country can enjoy and admire you. Have the stroganoff.” He ran his thick strong hand down her arm. “You need some clothes to set you off,” he said. She asked him about his students. He was not distracted for long. They both understood. After he’d gotten up heavily from the bed in his apartment, he headed toward the bathroom and said, “Poor thing,” in such a tone she thought he was about to burst into tears. She thought he’d meant himself.