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“I called him yesterday. Then I made my appointment for the haircut. This haircut you don’t like. Does that surprise you? Did you think you’d have to kick me out? All right.” She cleared her throat. “Maybe I’ll become a prostitute. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry. You think I’m a…

Eitel learned. Everything was all right until they tried to make love again. Then, Elena was far away, and it was no better for him. He hated her. It was impossible not to remember how she had given herself to the others, and whatever expression might cross her face became deformed to him and infec…

“All right, Charley,” Elena said, sitting up in bed, her face filling with hard wisdom and hatred of him, until she was beautiful to his eyes, and more than a little frightening. “Now, you listen to me,” she said. “You were the one who arranged everything tonight, and yet you call me a pig. If it h…

I had found the orphanage again and I was home; I might just as well never have left home. After work, after my meal in the expensive drugstore, I would go back to my furnished room and I would bathe—what luxuries have the poor—and lie naked and powdered on my bed, covered with heat rash, reading t…

I could have had other jobs. I could have been a male car-hop as Munshin had warned, or a parking-lot attendant, or I could have gotten work of some sort in one hotel or another, but I chose to wash dishes as though my eight-hour stint in the steam and the grease and the heat, with my fingers burne…