“It’s very good,” she said at last. It wasn’t the worst lie she’d ever told. He nodded grimly.

She told him that a muralist at the League had invited her to drop by that afternoon for some drinks and food. The muralist, who was from Louisiana, had often shared his lunch with her. She’d modeled for him. She was sure Walter would like him. Walter agreed to go, still looking rather grim. She handed him his manuscript. He rolled it up and stuck it in his pocket.

On the way downstairs, she said, “You know, I really am going to California.”

“I know,” he said. “You can’t help yourself.”

“The day after tomorrow,” she said, ignoring his comment. He suddenly gripped her in a ferocious and painful embrace. One of her feet dangled over the next step. She was afraid one of the tenants would come out into the hall, or, worse, Samuel. Walter muttered something and kissed her neck. “Don’t!” she pleaded. He pressed more strongly against her as though forcing a jammed door. He would never kiss her lips—he said that was movie horsing around. She’d asked him if people didn’t kiss in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He’d told her not to be so goddamned arrogant.

“Walter!” she cried. He let go of her abruptly and raced down the steps ahead of her. There was a light snowfall. The few cars parked along the curb looked like deserted hovels. Annie and Walter walked quickly, silently, toward Columbus Circle near which Leonard Poole lived in a small flat with his wife and two children.

The door was open. A stifling odor of old radiator pipes did not quite overpower the delicious smells of corn bread and fried chicken which Annie tracked down to a card-table buffet set up near a Christmas tree already withered in the tenement heat. Nearby was another little table on which reposed a large mixing bowl, a ladle hanging from its rim.

Walter seemed almost instantly drunk, one of his arms around a young painter Annie knew slightly, the other circling the plump shoulders of Leonard Poole’s fat sleek Georgia wife, an abstracted smile on her baby’s Tartar face. Annie ate steadily. She had been in many rooms filled with people. Outside of the food—which no one seemed about to take away from her—only the two small Poole children caught her interest. The girl was around ten, plump, her face benign, dressed in a long white cotton nightgown, a gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck. The boy was about five. And as Annie, holding a chicken wing in one hand, a piece of corn bread in the other, observed them, the boy put his small hands on his sister’s thighs and rested his head on her lap. His fingernails looked like little red candies—he must have gotten into his mother’s nail polish. The girl looked down dreamily at his nestling head, then up at the adults circling around them, talking and shouting. She smiled faintly as her glance came to rest on the scrawny tree with its dusty chains of popcorn.