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Piner said with bitter intensity, “and you got this tainted luncheon meat.”
    “It was a long drive just to drop in like this,” Linda said, forgetting her original story. “And I really have toget going.” She stood and walked to the doorway. “Say so long to Mr. Piner for me, please. I’d hate to disturb him; he looks so peaceful.”
    Mrs. Piner walked behind her, soundlessly. “They gave you a corner in the closet to hang your clothes,” she said. “Next to the folding bridge chairs and the ironing board.”
    Linda walked rapidly to the front door. As she did, it opened and a man carrying two shopping bags hurried past her and up the stairs. Did he live in one of their old rooms? Mrs. Piner didn’t seem to see him. She took Linda’s arm with the grasp of an arresting officer, and her voice fell into an ominous whisper. “And do you think those young couples ever waited six weeks, postpartum? You could hear them going at it all night, through the walls.”
    Linda fled.

7 “We’re gonna miss your smiling face around here, kiddo,” Simonetti said, looking everywhere but at her face. Linda had come to the studio for her last paycheck and he held it in one hand and slapped it against the other while he talked to her, but he didn’t hand it over. She had a memory flash of her father doing something like that with a piece of candy; withholding, teasing. Did she ever get it?
    “I’m going to miss you, too,” Linda said with sweet insincerity. She had hated Simonetti from her first day at the Bayonne Fred Astaire’s. He was the one who hired her, on the recommendation of a mutual friend in the midtown New York City branch where she’d worked before. She lost that job when the building went residential and the studio folded.
    Simonetti had looked her over then, too, with the same kind of cruel scrutiny that made her feel graceless and conscious of all her physical flaws. “You’re too tall,” he said, and she slouched and shrank. He wanted to know if she could do something with her hair, go blonde maybe. They already had Iola, who was brunette. When she hesitated he took her on unchanged, indicating that they were desperate.
    Linda wasn’t beautiful. She had good skin and a cleft chin, but her nose was too short and a little broad, and she had an overbite. A favorite two-stepping client often pointed out that her eyes were her best feature and that her smile was nice. Ah, whose smile wasn’t nice?
    Once, when she’d turned down the advances of a drunk who’d wandered in during a get-acquainted open house, he told her that girls like her were a dime a dozen. “You have a cute ass; I’ll give you that,” he said. “Butyou’re nothing special. What’s your name?” he demanded, even though it was right there on the name badge pinned to her sweater. “Donna? Rhonda?” He was perilously close. “They’re all called Donna or Rhonda,” he said. “They all look like you.”
    When he became noisy and abusive and shouted that he didn’t have to crawl for pussy, Simonetti, convinced that he was not a likely prospect for even the one-month trial offer, threw him out.
    Iola, who was frugging with a sailor from the Naval Station, waved to Linda and rolled her eyes in sympathy. Later she said, “Creeps. Jesus. How do they all find us? We must be in the Yellow Pages under Victims.”
    He was drunk, of course, and he
was
a creep, but Linda couldn’t help feeling diminished by his account of her. It confirmed what she had always suspected, that she was ordinary in a frightening, anonymous way. Even the word “victim” that Iola had used ironically was accurate. Whenever Linda read an article in the newspaper about the unidentified body of a young woman found in the woods somewhere, or dragged from a river, she felt a disturbing affinity.
    The check had disappeared and Simonetti had his arm around her. “Your regulars will be heartsick,” he said. She wondered which pocket held the check. But she