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.

She discovered, or, rather, recognized at last, that men wanted to do this thing to her that they wanted to do to anyone. Her body, the object, was of no value to her. Yet somewhere, like a hidden depravity, she felt love for it, pitied it like the lost animals she sometimes saw slinking into the doorways of closed shops late at night.

The movie music was almost always with her. A man’s glance, the million-dollar chords began; he spoke, a violin played a cheap and tender tune; they walked down the night streets of Hollywood, cellos stained the night sky plum; they looked at each other in his or her room, a low muffled roll of drums. Then the male body covered her and the whole orchestra fell into its own pit with a tinny crash of instruments. Yes. Then the whole goddamned bunch picked up their lunch boxes and instruments and put on their old coats and went home.