“Yes. And for women too.” They looked at each other seriously. Suddenly, he flushed. “Let’s go now and see what Ivan’s up to.” In the end, he’d paid for both their suppers, saying it didn’t matter, he’d manage the fare east, and anybody who was working for eleven bucks a week shouldn’t be made to pay their own way …think what Max Shore would say if he, Jake, exploited the working classes. “The pro-le-tar-iat!” he intoned.

They walked back to Sycamore Street. It was almost as if they were walking home together from school, she thought, recalling her brief sojourn in the Nyack high-school sophomore class where she had successfully conjugated Latin verbs and flunked math.

At Ivan’s, they were at once plunged into the particularities of mad existences. Only a few minutes after Ivan had waved them to a wooden bench, his roommate, the Sheriff, arrived, carrying a large burlap sack which he emptied on the floor in front of them. Out of it fell alarm clocks, trusses, capsules, lipsticks, blue bottles of Milk of Magnesia, cigars, a hot-water bottle, an enema bag, bars of candy, bottles of castor oil, tins of Ex-Lax, and a Mickey Mouse doll.

“Get the Beast down,” commanded Ivan. “This will interest him.”

The Sheriff flung off his cowboy hat. “It’s sickening!” he cried in an outraged tenor voice.

“You see!” Ivan exclaimed. “He has no respect for his work. How the hell did you get out of the place with that sack, Sheriff? You’re branching out, I see. God! You’ll be showing up with the contents of the whole Owl drugstore next week, then the entire chain of them, then Los Angeles, then California itself, goddamnit! Now everybody shut up! I’m going to play Number 39 in E Flat. You like Mozart, girl? What’s your name?”

Annie nodded silently, watching Ivan’s tic. It was a kind of folding of the upper cheek against the bottom lid of his eye and it seemed to be having a separate conversation with her. “Annie,” she said almost inaudibly.

The Sheriff opened a can of beets with a pocket knife and began to spear them, chewing them morosely, one by one.

“I said,” Ivan cried irritably, “to go and get the Beast. He’ll want to pick over the night’s haul, and I enjoy that. You shock him silly.”

“Nothing shocks him,” replied the Sheriff, his mouth bleeding with beet juice. “That’s just another of your fairy tales.”

Ivan shrugged. He picked up the record carefully, wiping it with a shirttail. “‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King,’ ” he chanted ponderously. “Annie, you’re just a sweet young girl. You can’t imagine what a sordid hole this place is. The landlady is an old sot, gin bottles under her bed, with all the English airs she puts on to make me feel low-class.”