Wrenched from these silent extravaganzas, she considered the worn furnishings of the room in which she and Walter lived, the kitchen of the restaurant where the Greek flung about his great mass, hollering orders in accents made unintelligible by his impatience, the smell of food frying in grease used over and over again, the apprehension which pursued her even into sleep as 1:00 A.M. drew near, at which time Walter, change jangling in his pockets, would unlock the door, undress in the dark, and crawl between the sheets next to her. These sheets were mere rags, even though Walter took them to the laundryman on Saturdays, bringing back last week’s load, the frayed scraps clean and neatly folded.

One Friday night, he brought home a group of people from the plant. They went out bowling. Somewhere along the way, they picked up one of the men’s wives, a tall, shelf-breasted woman with red hair and a thick wet red mouth. Early in the morning, they returned to the Vogels’ room and began to drink bourbon. Annie sat on the floor, her back against the wall. The redheaded woman, Augusta, lay on the bed. Why in God’s name was she eternally laughing? Her legs were sprawled out, her mouth open, her hands flattened on the blanket, palms up and opened. Half-finished sentences, shouts of laughter, exclamatory cries whirled around above Annie’s head like dishes tossed from shelves. Other workers at the plant, foremen and inspectors, were execrated, ridiculed, damned forever. Laughter strained, won, and overcame words, coughs and gargles and snorts.

Augusta’s husband, Junior, a thin small man with stubby pale hands, drank steadily from the bottle. He observed his wife on the bed, his black eyes squinting. There were too many girls in the plant, he told Annie, squatting in front of her. “Women!” he cried, then toppled back at once on his skinny haunches. “Ooops! I may have broke a little wind, yer honor!”

She edged away. Junior plucked at his belt buckle. “They ought not to be so many women there,” he said. “Makes trouble.” At that moment, Annie saw Walter lean over and plant his mouth in the center of Augusta’s fleshy fig lips.

“You were shocked,” he said, after they had all left. “I didn’t know that about you.” Still drunk, he giggled inanely. “Oh, Annie, so pure…”

Several months later, Junior appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom on a rape charge. Annie and Walter went to the trial, where Walter was to be a character witness.

“How can you witness something that isn’t there?” she had asked him.

“You’d like him whipped down the street.”

She recoiled physically from him. She wouldn’t want that done to anyone, she cried. But he’d managed, as he always did, to push her back into self-accusation. She would like to have asked him why he never saw his old friends, Paul Lavan, or those other people she’d met out at the big house in the valley. What about the party people he’d wanted her to know? In some sense, he was further away from her now than when he’d shipped out—working overtime almost every night, drinking heavily on weekends, or lurching from bowling alley to honky-tonk bar with Junior and his pack of loutish friends.