In a smoke-filled room on the second floor, a Negro guitarist sat on a high stool, a black ship in a gray fog. He played a song, “The Midnight Special.” When Annie asked him to play it again, he glared at her from red-veined eyes. “You like that song?” he asked. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Hunh!” he grunted. “You don’t know nothin’ about that song. But I’ll play it for you ‘cause it’s me that’s lovely.” He wasn’t smiling. He leaned over the guitar and seemed to thrust it into his belly. He flung the words at her, his eyes never leaving her face. The guitar moved under his hands like the piston of a locomotive, thrusting now toward her. A man leaned against her, laughing. She thought it was the high-school teacher, amused at her discomfort—the guitarist seemed to be trying to play her to her knees—but it was a handsome youngish man in a thick black sweater. “He jus’ loves you,” he’d crooned. She saw the guitarist’s eyes flicker—“when the midnight special come to town,” he suddenly roared.

The stranger found a corner behind a couch. “I’m Walter Vogel,” he said, pulling her down to the floor beside him. The guitar music had grown softer; around and above them, the party cranked on in its noisy way. She couldn’t see the high-school teacher; she didn’t really care if he was still in the room. She drank a sickening sweet wine from Walter’s paper cup; he placed the cup between them on the floor; he held both her hands in his; their knees touched. His rapt attention to her, drunken or not, made her giddy. She knew she was talking too much. But how he laughed! “Who are you, who are you…?” he asked softly. No answer would have been worthy of the mystery, the significance of such a question…who was she, indeed? But she tried. The party vanished from her consciousness. He’d pitched a tent for her in the desert—she threw aside her veils. She had never known she could be so charming; she’d never seen how comic her life had been, was…her mad-for-marrying father who had only recently left her alone in a West Seventy-third Street flat with a case of beer and twenty-seven dollars, left her, to marry again, of course, and her former stepmother, Bea, the one who’d taught her solitaire to amuse herself with, and—suddenly, the veils looked like rags. Walter Vogel, winey mouth and glassy eyes, was laughing at her with disbelief, or could it be disgust? In anguished self-recognition, she stood straight up, back into the party. He rose unsteadily and clasped her at once in his arms. She struggled; he held on.