“Stalingrad,” said Mike, touching her hand. She withdrew it. “Was I vulgar?” he asked, offended yet apologetic. She had been listening that November in 1943 to the radio, and a labor reporter from a San Francisco newspaper had wept over the air waves as he described the battle then taking place in Stalingrad. A few months later, they had both heard the same reporter read letters from the Russian soldiers who’d been imprisoned by the siege in November.

Mike Eagle, out on his night calls, had knocked at her door. “Wanted to know how you’re feeling,” he’d said, standing there with his black medical case in one hand. She’d been struck by the absence of a pronoun. He hadn’t said I. He had stood there like two decisions colliding—his presence affirming his wish to see her, the unidentifiable person, I, he, they, who? not present.

Myron Eagle was thirty-five. He had a daughter named Brett and a son, Tracy. They were fancy names, Annie had remarked. “For a Jew?” he’d asked. “For anybody.”

She rarely inquired about his wife. He found her lack of curiosity unnatural. “She’s limited,” he’d offered once. “Who isn’t?” Annie had replied. “It’s beastly,” he’d protested, “to answer anyone that way.”

She’d laughed at the word, beastly. After that, he used it often. Annie might have confessed to him that she did not feel she was vying for his attention; she was on the side. She had, in fact, once touched upon her sense of her transitoriness ever so indirectly. She’d seen how uneasy her words had made him; he’d accused her of false humility, of not even taking his marriage seriously! And she hadn’t defended herself. Underlying whatever she might have said would have been her consciousness that she didn’t love Myron. She suspected he nurtured an inner vision of himself, torn between two women, and that for all his vaunted rationality, he yearned to be struck down by passion. A lunatic romantic was on the loose somewhere in Myron, waiting for the curtain to rise at last. Crediting him with this secret dream, she felt tenderly toward him, as though he were innocent.