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closed door. The floor buzzes with the noise of the party downstairs, but the click of the doorknob turning in Dolores’s palm echoes through the corridor. Tristan stands behind her, trying to get a whiff of her hair, but it is saturated with the smoke of the gambling room, and he can only imagine the sweet haze he’s sure encircled her before the guests arrived.
    Tristan does not have to imagine for long, because as they enter the room, he is met with a blast of just the kind of womanly scent he’s been trying to conjure. A little tray table full of cosmetics sits in one corner of the room with a plastic-framed vanity mirror atop it, tilted against the wall. It is so low that Dolores must have to kneel to see herself. The rest of the room, too, is almost miniature. The mattress is narrower even than his bunk bed; it lies on the floor below a down-sloping plane of ceiling, against a window covered with pink paper blinds. The bureau is stuffed with clothes, the open drawers jutting out almost halfway to the opposite wall.
    It may be a glorified linen closet, but it is hers alone. He folds his hands behind his back and turns in a slow, appreciative circle, as if in a museum.
    â€œMy sister Lillian got married last year. Before that, I shared a room with my little sister Ida, down the hall.”
    â€œHow many kids in your family?” Tristan notices some pictures taped up by the bedside, clipped from newspapers and magazines. They are all of colored women. The only one he can identify is Josephine Baker, smiling coyly from beneath her feather plumes.
    â€œSix. Seven, but my brother Michael died when he was a baby. You can sit down if you want.” Dolores is perched on the edge of the bed, her legs jutting out in front of her and her hands in her lap. She pats the place beside her and Tristan tosses his notebook to the ground and folds himself into it.
    â€œThanks.” He crosses his legs, rests his hands on his thighs. It is the only option the space offers.
    â€œYou know,” Dolores says, “I’m older than I look. I’ll be eighteen November first. I’ll bet you thought I was younger.”
    Some neighborhood putz, quite possibly Sammy Fischer, once told Tristan that women always want to be mistaken for younger than they are. He wonders if that applies now; it seems doubtful. And anyway, you could fill Yankee Stadium with what Fischer doesn’t know.
    â€œI hadn’t really given it much thought.”
    She turns and grabs his hand. “My cousin Freda in Chicago is twenty-one. She has her own apartment and everything, and she said as soon as I finish school, I can come out and room with her. She’s got a job as a cigarette girl in a supper club, and she’s going to get me one, too, and introduce me to all the stars she knows.”
    â€œThat’s great,” says Tristan with all the gusto he can put forth. The simple touch of her hand is wreaking havoc on his bodily self-control, and the last thing Tristan wants is for Dolores to notice what’s going on beneath his strategically placed forearm. “What stars does your cousin know?” he asks, determined to keep Dolores’s mind on the glitzy midwestern future until his dick realizes, as he does, that this girl is merely being friendly.
    â€œWell, Freda told me that every weekend—” she is saying when the doorknob turns. Her voice cuts out abruptly, like a radio when the power fails, and her hand snaps back into her lap. Both of them stare at the rotating lump of brass for a moment, and then, as the door swings open and slams against the wall, Tristan and Dolores leap to their feet and stand as far apart as possible.
    Standing at the threshold, with an unlit cigar wedged between two thick fingers and a woozy shimmer playing in his eyes, is one of the gamblers, a stout man with a pumpkin of a head. Perspiration beads where his hairline would begin, if he had one.
    â€œEarl!”