Lee Ann

Lee Ann is Remi Boncoeur’s partner in the Mill City shack where Sal Paradise stays, a sharp-tongued, financially strained woman whose resentment exposes the gap between Remi’s extravagant hopes and their precarious daily life. She is not merely a foil in their quarrels: her work commute, thwarted ambitions, and eventual refusal to keep performing a stable household help define the limits of Remi’s plans and Sal’s place within them.

Identity and Circumstances

When Sal arrives in Mill City, Lee Ann and Remi are living week to week. Remi works as a special guard in barracks across the canyon while waiting for a ship; Lee Ann reproaches him nearly every day. They save pennies through the week, then spend fifty dollars in three hours on Saturday night. In the shack, Remi wears shorts and an Army cap, while Lee Ann goes about with her hair in pincurls. They yell at each other, but when Saturday comes they dress up, smile, and go out together as if they were successful Hollywood characters. The contrast makes their routine at once comic and strained: the performance of glamour is a brief escape from the life they return to.

Lee Ann’s circumstances sharpen the strain. She comes from a small Oregon town and wants to marry a rich man. Remi once spent a hundred dollars on her during a conspicuous weekend, and she thought she had found an heir; instead, she is stuck in the shack, with little to do and no easy way out. She has a job in San Francisco and rides the Greyhound from a crossroads to get there. The commute is a daily reminder that the promised future of comfort and status has not arrived, and the book says she never forgives Remi for it.

Life in the Shack with Sal

Remi sets out the terms of Sal’s stay: he will sleep with Lee Ann in the bed across the room, while Sal takes the cot by the window and is not to touch her. Remi presents the boundary with a boastful maxim about the old maestro not learning a new tune. Lee Ann, meanwhile, looks at both men with hatred. The household therefore receives Sal not as a neutral guest but as another person inside an already tense arrangement, with Remi acting as both host and self-appointed guardian of its rules.

Remi’s ambitions extend beyond the shack. He wants Sal to write an original story for a Hollywood studio and imagines flying down in a stratosphere liner with a harp under his arm, making them all rich. In the plan, Lee Ann will accompany him and meet his friend’s father, a famous director said to be close to W. C. Fields. Sal spends a week writing a gloomy story about New York; Remi can barely read it and later carries it to Hollywood, while Lee Ann is too bored and resentful to read it at all. When Sal says the work will not do and that he needs a job instead of depending on them even for cigarettes, Remi is disappointed. Lee Ann’s indifference and anger stand against Remi’s elaborate future-making: his schemes may include her, but the evidence shows no corresponding investment from her in the scheme.

Money, Jealousy, and the Household’s Breakdown

The household’s economic insecurity becomes concrete after Remi and Sal lose their money at the racetrack. Their last two food dollars go on a bet, which also fails, and they hitchhike back to San Francisco. That night rain beats on the roof; there is not a cent left in the house, and Remi has put aside his fine suit for his shorts, Army cap, and T-shirt. He stares sadly at the floor while a gun lies on the table. The scene compresses the distance between the couple’s Saturday-night display and their ordinary circumstances: the money is gone, the weather closes in, and the gun gives the cramped room a dangerous edge.

Lee Ann accuses Remi of being a son of a bitch and suspects that he is hiding money from her; she also suspects Sal. Remi, already keeping a small black book of people who owe him money and marking their names with red-ink curses, has begun hanging Sal’s itemized grocery slips on the bathroom wall to demonstrate what he considers Sal’s inadequate share. The slips turn a private dispute over fairness into a visible household ledger. Sal says he has been sending money to his aunt and buying only four or five dollars’ worth of groceries a week before adding a few more dollars. Lee Ann’s threat to leave meets Remi’s mockery of her proposed alternative, a racetrack cashier named Jimmy. Neither money nor affection is discussed plainly for long; the argument circles through accusations, accounting, and derision.

The dispute escalates when Lee Ann says that she lived in the place first and tells Remi to pack and get out. As he begins packing, Sal imagines being left alone in the rainy shack with her. Remi pushes Lee Ann; she lunges for the gun, and Remi hands it to Sal and tells him to hide it. It contains a clip of eight shells. Lee Ann screams, puts on her raincoat, and goes into the mud to find a police officer. She returns soaked after finding that their old acquaintance Alcatraz is not home. Sal hides in a corner with his head between his knees, shaken by the prospect of being stranded in the confrontation far from home. In the middle of the fight, Lee Ann also announces that she will no longer cook Remi’s brains and eggs or lamb curry. Her domestic labor, like the roof over the room and the money in the house, has become part of what the quarrel threatens to withdraw.

Remi’s Appeal and Lee Ann’s Place in the Narrative

After Lee Ann’s threat to leave and the struggle over the gun, Remi speaks quietly rather than answering her with another insult. He says he did not expect roses and moonshine when he took up with her, and recalls what he believes he has tried to do for both Lee Ann and Sal: fly to Hollywood, find Sal a job, buy Lee Ann beautiful dresses, and introduce her to San Francisco’s finest people. He tells them that he feels they have both let him down, and that he had hoped their association might produce something fine and lasting. The speech reveals the gulf between Remi’s account of his generosity and the shared life the scene has shown: his purchases and introductions are not enough to overcome the couple’s cramped circumstances or Lee Ann’s resentment.

Remi asks for one final favor. His stepfather, a distinguished doctor who has practiced in Vienna, Paris, and London, is due in San Francisco the following Saturday. Remi wants Lee Ann to come with him and act as though the situation is as he has described it to the doctor; he will borrow a hundred dollars so his stepfather can enjoy the visit and leave without worrying about him. The request makes Lee Ann’s role in the household’s public image explicit: she is being asked to appear as Remi’s girl in a story that conceals their hardship. The evidence establishes the appeal, but not whether Lee Ann agrees to it.

Later, on a bus bound for Los Angeles, Sal meets Terry and hears that her husband beat her, that she left him in Sabinal, and that she is going to stay with her sister. Terry has left her young son with her family, who pick grapes and live in a shack among the vineyards. Sal and Terry begin talking, hold hands without reaching a formal agreement, and become lovers. In the book’s sequence of relationships, Lee Ann’s story is not given an equivalent romantic resolution; instead, her tense partnership with Remi helps set the earlier domestic pattern against Sal’s sudden, more tender attachment to Terry. Their contrast is grounded in circumstance as much as feeling: Lee Ann is tied to Remi by shared poverty and a failed promise of prosperity, while Terry’s account brings Sal into contact with abandonment, family labor, and the vulnerable hope of a new beginning.