She drank it, then she told him about Carson Brody whose hatred had pursued her to this room and hour.

“There are thousands of boys like that—rough boys out to make a million, plotting how to do everybody in.” Johnnie’s voice was slurred only slightly; as he spoke he picked up the grapefruit rinds and dropped them back in the paper bag.

“It’s something about the way we’re all brought up—the way we grow up.” He sighed and dropped the bag on a table and sank heavily into the chair. “Everybody wants to make a million. He’ll marry some poor Mary, and get six children off her. He’ll drink too much and consort with whores. My mother said we all go to God, and every Sunday for twelve years she shoved me into the family pew. Christ! The only joke she ever made in her life—that I heard—was when my daddy died of heart trouble in Chicago —he had a little meat-packing plant and after he left Mama, he married a woman half his age—well, my mother said, after she’d read the telegram, ‘He got away scot-free!’ My uncles were deacons in the church. The church was everything in our lives. But all the time I was holding the little Jesus-cards in my hand in Sunday school, I was thinking—get out! You got a cigarette?”

She handed him one. He lit it, saying, “Wait! Wait!” as he puffed. And she waited, seeing all those fathers running away.

“I had a French boy once,” he was saying. “Claude. He came here to make it in pictures. But he was too beautiful. It made you sick, just to look at him. Well, he said to me, ‘You’re all so boring wiz your unhappy-happy…Your pricks grow but your leetle minds stay in muzzer’s lap…’” Johnnie laughed and coughed. “You too, Annie? Thinking about your millions?”

“No, no…”

“What then? What are you after?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whatever it is, this is the place for it.” He took off his jacket and untied his shoes. “I drank too much,” he said, belching heavily. He lay down on his side of the bed. “Our last night, Queenie. I hate to think what’s going to happen here in this bed tomorrow!” He made his Pola Negri love face and buried his head in the blanket.

In the morning, he was cold, distant, sarcastic. Perversely, she wanted to go with him when he left.

Walter arrived in the late afternoon, and Annie, nervous and pale—she’d not gone out for anything, eating a couple of oranges and a box of crackers—looked at him with a frozen face as he dropped his sea bag on the floor, the thump she’d been anticipating all week.