The letters thrilled her as much as they repelled her. To be told what one was! Such unforgiving criticism argued honesty, exactitude. He knew her! Yet she destroyed all the letters—she did not like to touch them as she dropped the scraps into the garbage pail. She imagined them to be damp, as though a faint sweat covered them; the letters were about her, but in them was the presence of other women, grown-up women, and she snatched her fingers from the paper as though she might reach right through them to glistening female flesh.

“Let me,” he muttered, and pressed her down into the sand and rolled over onto her. She twisted her head away for she remembered he did not like to kiss her mouth. Beneath his chest, pressed against hers, his hands struggled up to clutch her breasts. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “This way, it’s all right.”

She heaved him off of her and sat up. One of her braids slowly lifted itself from the anchor of hairpins and drooped down the side of her face.

“I don’t like virgins,” he said coldly. They stared down at the beach. The swimmer had gone.

He was silent most of the way back to town. He’d put on his watchman’s cap and pulled it down over his hair. When he did speak, it was in a milder voice than she’d had any reason to expect. Had he known how she was going to behave all along?

Did she have any money at all? he asked. No? Not even bus fare? She lied. He pressed some bills into her hand. Back at the docks, he put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her toward him, kissing her cheek. Just before she turned away from him, she caught sight of his eyes fixed on her. They were his best feature, his eyes, large, brown, limpid. What a mystery he was! She felt dizzy with a rush of excitement; she could have him—even if she didn’t want him; a Communist, a sailor, a womanknower, he held the world’s secrets. Perhaps she’d find out something after all—she would allow him to do that simple thing to her, and in entering her body, perhaps he would free her from some other, more significant ignorance.

At the bus station, she looked at the bills he had thrust at her —thirty dollars. Food, rent, safety for a little while. In her imagination, she embraced him with pure gratitude.

Chapter 4

The first time Annie saw Walter Vogel, he was drunk. A high-school teacher from Summit, New Jersey, had taken her to a party at a Greenwich Village walk-up on Perry Street. It was early December; frost-glazed muck glittered in gutters; a strong wind blew through the nearly empty streets, tumbling lids from garbage cans, rolling them along like hoops.