They walked on. “You must have felt I’d left out something,” he said finally. “I did. I stole a car and spent six months in jail. I don’t know why I did it. I was just eighteen. There it was, parked in front of the movie house. Sometimes I worked there at night, changing the posters, you know, behind the display glass, and ushering. The key was in the car. I drove it out of town past the Burma-Shave signs, and when I got to the last one, a state trooper was waiting for me. I knew him, we all did, the kids always do in a small town like that. They went easy on me. I could have got a lot more time. My father cried. I won’t be in the army, even if there’s a war, because of the record, a criminal record.” He was silent for a while. “It wasn’t criminal though. It was an impulse. I didn’t want the car. It was just there! And I felt like breaking out…”

He gripped her arm. “You were so smart to know I’d been hiding that.” She said nothing. She didn’t know how to explain that what she’d wanted from him was not his secret. Could no one ever tell her what it was like to be himself?

She held his hand on the way back to the room on Sycamore Street. He didn’t turn on the light. For a while, they smoked and watched Ivan’s window.

The Beast, wearing a dark suit, was drinking from a jug of wine, and Ivan was fiddling with his phonograph. A murmur of sound crossed the few yards separating the two windows. It was a quiet night in the freak house. Jake held her arms and hands when they weren’t smoking. It seemed uncanny to sit there and watch that room.

Finally, Jake stood up and led her to his bed. He placed the afghan carefully in a chair, then undressed himself. She took off the hateful suit and removed her underwear. She was frightened because there could be no backing out. From that moment when he’d emerged so uncertainly from the shoe-store entrance, she had marked herself for this.

It hurt her in a way she had not expected; it was such personal secret pain. And she was dazed at the suddenness with which it happened and then was over. Jake was brief and light and nearly silent—she listened to his heavy breathing thinking of Walter’s mad howls that had always filled her with embarrassment even though things had never gone this far between them.