He continued hectoring her even as he took his accustomed place on the bed. She hated the sour smell he gave off when he shifted from side to side. But she suffered from her own ingratitude. She sensed that she hadn’t wanted Johnnie to see her with Jake; she didn’t want to be painted with Johnnie’s brush—sexual intercourse. For God’s sake, how could she explain to him that she didn’t see what all the noise was about? That what she loved was lying there with Jake, talking softly in the dark, their legs tangled, their faces close together, their hands clasped. It was such a comfort! What did Johnnie’s awful stories about thin little men with enormous sex organs have to do with that?

The next evening, she met Carson Brody. He had an ugly hard-looking skull and narrow gray eyes. In his presence, Jake grew excited and expansive. Carson, at first, was silent, watchful. She felt the iron quality of his suspicion. He refused to speak to her directly, but his words seemed meant for her, sentences that uncoiled like snakes, about bitches and bastards, about stunt men who drove motorcycles off cliffs and bashed in their brains, about a certain bar where they kept a record of those men who’d survived three assignments without breaking a limb. But mostly he spoke of the bitches who “snowed” men, who took them for a ride, who wanted to “get laid,” who betrayed men as naturally as they breathed. Jake was a baby, he said once, a rube who didn’t know his ass from his elbow, but he, Carson, was there to see to his interests; Carson would never let him down. Jake glowed. Carson said he couldn’t see how a nice American Arizona boy like Jake could get mixed up with a goddamned Communist like Max Shore.

“He’s all right, Carson,” Jake said. “You just take it easy there.”

But Carson grew more venomous, like a spider that poisons itself; his outbursts grew louder; he flung out observations, warnings, threats like bottles, and they shattered haphazardly against the surface of a world he judged to be without hope of redemption. Now, it was Hollywood.