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.

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.