“What do you mean, recruit! The party doesn’t send people out with membership applications!”

“The woman was supposed to be investigating jail conditions, but I thought the whole point was to get members…”

He looked disgusted.

“I don’t like Lavan.”

“You don’t have to like him.”

“I did read some books.”

He grunted, but didn’t ask her what she’d read.

They got to George’s and Herbie’s sheep ranch around two in the morning. She watched Walter drop the duffel bag among the weeds. As they left, he pressed his finger against the car horn until she grabbed his arm, begging him to stop.

Later, they rested by the side of the road and he told her he’d gotten a job at Lockheed-Vega on the assembly line, and hoping to make some kind of peace between them, she described the rivetsorting work she’d done and how she’d been responsible for shutting the place down.

“How did you shut it down?”

“I went to the CIO.”

“The CIO? Whatever did you have in mind!”

“Oh, God!” she cried.

“Annie, you’re so tangled, what’s to become of you?”

She gave up. He could twist and turn all he liked; he could rebuke and tease and change his tune every two minutes. She’d play dead. Let him heave her around like a sack of grain.

By the time they’d moved into a room on Cheremoya Avenue, the time they’d spent in Yosemite was only a dream, as insubstantial as those fancies which effortlessly, as though emanating from a source outside herself, took possession of so many of her waking hours.

She went back to a job at the Greek’s, and Walter went on the night shift at Lockheed.

Waiting on tables in the restaurant, she dreamed of concert appearances, of taffeta evening gowns. To customers’ demands for shrimp cocktails, she gave a noble, grave inclination of her head, deafened by cries of “Encore! Encore!” She wrote her autograph on her order pad beneath “steak MED/R”; she arrived late at a party in her honor wearing an Irish revolutionary raincoat and a Garbo hat, and all heads turned toward her; in the stunned silence, she lit a Turkish cigarette; lovers circled her at an exact distance of three feet. She measured out the three feet. Even in her daydreams, the men who interested her were those who turned away, their impassive faces hidden by the curve of their hat brims.