“Jersey!” cried Elmira. “Do you remember those marvelous theater sets Kenneth did when we were all in Washington, you know, sort of Breughel-like? Walter, listen! Now he’s living in the woods and won’t see anybody! Just painting trees.”

Jersey said, in a low voice to Annie, “She didn’t leave Kenneth for me. She just left him. I think she married me because I was the only one of their friends who didn’t worship him.”

“Jersey! Tell Walter what Kenneth wrote you last month…that note. Tell him. Listen to this, Walter!”

“I hated him,” Jersey whispered, putting the figurine in Annie’s lap and standing up. “He wrote, ‘Don’t let that Queen Bee breed off you. You know what happens to drones.’”

Elmira shrieked some incomprehensible word, then rested her head on Walter’s shoulder. “Can you imagine?” she asked. “Our old Kenneth? So reactionary!”

Annie’s father was a bit like that, always talking about women, how they destroyed men’s energies, demon brides, bent on begetting, materialists pretending to be romantics. What was the meaning of that word reactionary? Jersey might tell her. She turned to ask him but he was dragging an old mattress into a small room she hadn’t noticed earlier. Elmira nodded and smiled when Walter said the baby inside was sleepy too.

“Who won the book?” asked Jersey, holding an armful of blankets. “You’re staying, aren’t you, Walter?”

“Oh, I didn’t pay any attention,” said Elmira. She was sitting on the double bed, taking off her shoes. “Now, you can’t work any more tonight, Jersey,” she said petulantly. “The light will keep us all awake.”

The mattress Annie and Walter were to use had been pushed beneath a little window. Walter walked around the room naked, his expression malicious. Annie undressed down to her pants and brassière, looking uneasily at the open doorway to the main room. The lights went out.

They struggled for a few minutes, she and Walter; flesh struck flesh. Walter’s hand gripped her between her legs. “Oh, stop!” she whispered. “They’ll hear us!” “What do you think they think we’re doing?” he whispered back angrily. But he fell asleep at last, his back against hers.

She heard sleepers’ breathing from the next room. Walter snored delicately. Annie lay inert, feeble with exhaustion. Watcher’s fatigue, she told herself. If only she wouldn’t watch people so much! The least change of their expressions, the slightest shift of their bodies, threads on their clothes, holes in their shoes, stains on their fingers, their dangerous and unpredictable glances, nose pickers, tooth suckers, cheek scratchers, aroused in her a macabre and anguished response! But to what? To what!

Suddenly she heard the sound of singing. Raising herself carefully on one elbow so as not to awaken Walter, she looked down. Four people stood beneath a street lamp singing “Silent Night” to the darkened windows of MacDougal Street.

They had coffee with the Lighters in the morning. Walter was sullen, and Elmira, apparently piqued by his lack of response, began to question him belligerently about when he was going to work again. “I’m shipping out,” he answered her snappishly.