Then, several weeks after the Ives family had departed for New England, Max failed to appear one noon hour at the bench, and Annie felt a tick of dread. She spent the afternoon in desultory conversation with Hannah Groops, although now and then they had to go and stand at their machines. Things had been stiffening in the shop, and the foremen who passed through had begun to make a show of efficient impatience. “Goddamn lend-lease,” Hannah said. “We’re gonna be working soon, and here I got used to taking my ease.”

That afternoon, she told the Catalan she could not spend the evening with him. His mouth turned down. He scraped the sidewalk with his foot. Then he looked up quickly. “Is that man? The man you eat with?”

“No, no…I have some things I must do. No. Not that man. He’s my friend.”

He shook his head. “Friend?” he said with a slight touch of disbelief. As she drove away, she saw him in the rearview mirror, standing there, his hands in his pockets.

Her room seemed exceptionally silent. There was a sallow yellow light in the sky that evening which persisted in the dark like a flush of illness. Not a leaf moved. She tried to read. She turned on her radio. A sweet tenor voice sang “I’ll Remember April.” Annie tried to remember April. She flung herself out the door and walked down to Hollywood Boulevard. She walked for miles. Confronted with this special and painful emptiness, she felt uneasy, embarrassed at the thought of phoning Cletus or Theda. Melvin was out of reach of a message and in any case was either with his Italian lady friend or at his naval unit. Miranda Katz was driving her taxi. Perhaps she would call Paul Lavan to ask him about Ethel Schaeffer. She really did want to know how Ethel was. She hadn’t been to see her for a week. She drifted into a news store and bought a copy of Photoplay, a grimace of self-dislike on her face.

Reluctantly, she made for home. The night was so airless, she felt half suffocated. A throb of pain came and went in the lower regions of her stomach. It was sharp, a physical manifestation of the panic she’d felt at Max’s absence from the bench.

She went into a phone booth and looked up Ben Greenhouse’s number. He was right there, his name in print; he lived on Beechwood Avenue. She remembered that May Landower also lived there. May! Was there nothing behind her but broken-off conversations? She recognized, then dismissed the combination of mischief and loneliness that had led her to even consider calling Greenhouse, and went directly home. There, she wrote a long letter to Uncle Greg. When she read it over before sealing it into its envelope, it seemed to her that the letter was about someone entirely other than herself. The pain in her belly persisted.