“Thirteen fifty.”

“And the room rent?”

“It’s eight dollars.”

“How the hell did you manage to pick a woman like that to drive out here with? All right, all right…”

His hair looked damp. She did not tell him about the German and his dog. She looked at him as he played with the shot glass, his eyes half shut, and she imagined with what disgust he would look at the room she’d rented. “I’ll tell you about my trip,” Walter said, placing the shot glass in front of him.

It was hard for her to listen. She was thinking of that room, its ash-colored walls, the screech of the rusty springs when she pulled the bed down from the wall, the two grease-encrusted burners of the stove, the dusty, decayed smell of the apartment house.

“Did you hear me, Annie?”

“What?”

“I can’t sign off till Seattle. It’ll be another week or so. I’ve only got a few hours before I have to get back to the ship.”

She concealed her relief—at least he wouldn’t be able to see the room for a few more days. Then she wondered how she would get back to Hollywood. Somehow, she hadn’t thought of that. She had imagined returning with Walter.

“Did you notice a bathroom?” she asked timidly.

“In the back, past the bar,” he said, grinning suddenly. “Where did you get that suit?” She rose quickly without answering him.

The toilet was dirty. The suit bunched up around her waist. She knocked her head against the naked light bulb. The toilet itself was in an unresolved condition; it neither flushed nor ceased to pour down into the bowl a trickle of water. Walter’s grin accompanied her discomforts; she was painfully shy about bathroom functions. What a heaven of unconstraint other people must inhabit! People were always getting up, or leaving rooms, to go to the bathroom; she herself had a weakness for imagining the exalted and great roosting on toilet bowls. What an idiot she was!

On the way back to the table, an old man lurched away from the bar and grasped her arm. He was drunk and smelled of catsup. Croaking like a rusty mechanical bird, he said, “What a life!” She caught a glimpse of Walter watching her. She put her hand over the hand that grasped her arm. “I know,” she said. “The hell you do,” he muttered.

As they walked away from the café, they argued about the old man. “You sentimentalize everything,” he said. “He was a used-up old bum. He only wanted to cadge a drink from you.” But he hadn’t, she insisted. He only wanted to talk to somebody; he wanted to say what a life to someone living, who would respond to him. What else was there?

“Socialism!” Walter said angrily. “A society where old men don’t wind up begging for drinks.”