Melvin brought around a beautiful blonde girl to Cletus’s loft. Her name was Miranda Katz, and she was the adopted child of a wealthy Chicago clothing manufacturer. She drove a taxi for a living and had a mania for clothes. Her latest purchase from Bullock’s Wilshire was a red wool coat with an enormous fox collar which had cost five hundred dollars. They were garnisheeing her salary because, of course, she couldn’t pay for the damn thing all at once! Her other passion was the ballet, which she attended at any opportunity, escorted by several rich homosexuals she knew. They liked to be seen with her, she remarked without emphasis. It was possible to stare unrestrainedly at Miranda; she neither preened nor fidgeted, accepting impassively examination of her features as though she were a garment being tested for the fineness of its seams. Cletus reported that the only way to distress the girl was to mention her family’s wealth. She refused to take a cent from them—he didn’t know why. Yet she continually indulged in such extravagances as the red coat. “There’s a net of money around her wild preserve,” Cletus remarked, “and she knows it’s always there. She can’t help knowing it.” Annie gazed longingly at the golden hair. Miranda had never had a permanent wave; she cut her hair herself, bringing it around her neck and lopping it off with heavy shears. Without making the slightest claim on individuality, she was unlike anyone else. “She’s not even like herself,” said Cletus.

Often, the four of them played poker late into the night, and even though Annie had to get up so early for work and drooped with fatigue, she could hardly bear to leave. Each evening she spent with them ended in uncertainty; she felt a pang of grief as she stood at Cletus’s door, her hand raised briefly in farewell, that the four of them might never meet again. It was more than Melvin’s magically evoked horses and Miranda’s yellow mane, more than the charm of Cletus’s knowing ways, that made her tarry at the door.

How had the three of them met? Perhaps in the same way she had come to know certain people in the party, the ones Schmitter called “unstable.” Like attracted to like. Her few party friends joked about Calvin, about the local functionaries with their Stalin mustaches, about a slogan someone reported was actually used by the New York party branch: PEASANTS OF BROOKLYN, ARISE!, and a pamphlet entitled: “What Means This Strike in Steel?”

Oh, they laughed! But yet the party was creeping over Annie, making her judgments about Stalin mustaches irrelevant, her laughter the laughter of contingency. No one had to tell her that there was a growing order in her life.