She would have to find another room—she couldn’t endure this place! Her job started in two days. Except for the League modeling, she’d never worked; she couldn’t imagine how it would be. She almost wished it were possible to slip unseen back into May Landower’s little house on Beechwood Avenue in Hollywood. She and May—the whole arrangement had come to a grotesque ending, Annie running through the living room with her suitcase as May banged out hideous dissonant chords on the piano and Johnnie Bliss danced like a moth-eaten bear on the street outside. That night, with no place to go, he’d let her sleep in the back of his old Model T; she nested among scraps of fabric Johnnie had stolen from the property department at the studio where he was, he said, “a seamstress.” There had been other things beside fabric—rope, tools, cases of sewing needles, spools of thread, and the canned food he carried around in case he got locked out of his own room.

“You’re better off,” he’d told Annie that night. “The old bitch is off her rocker. I should know. I’ve known her for several hundred years.” He’d first met May in the brilliant gone days when he himself had been a leading lover of the silent screen. May’s husband had been an actor too. “He preferred me to that cow!” Johnnie told Annie, up in the Hollywood Hills where they’d parked for the night. “Oh, she was a cow even then. You can spot them when they’re ten. Princess Cows. That’s how they raise them in the U.S.A.”

“Am I a cow?” she asked drowsily from the back seat.

“You!” he cried, and twisted his ill-fitting toupee to make her laugh. He’d been locked out of his own room that night because one of his young men had cut a wrist and run bleeding through the landlady’s parlor, dripping blood over her Turkey carpet, Johnnie weeping and wringing his hands, stumbling after him. But the landlady would get over it, he told Annie, she always did. That’s why he’d stopped by to see May, nothing else to do, and he could always get a drink out of her. Annie might not have nerved herself up to leave May’s place if he hadn’t been there.