“That’s a very bad joke, Gunther,” she said severely. “I do not like chauvinism. It is very serious. It is an attack on the Communist party, on Negroes, and it is nasty bourgeois sneering of the lowest order!”

Gunther bowed. “You lack humor, Nat,” he said. “But I suppose no revolutionary can afford it.”

Lowe and Lottie called everyone into a large kitchen where they all sat around a marble table and were served coffee and black bread and cheese. “I’m sorry there isn’t more bread,” Lottie apologized. “But Murray forgot…”

Kuyper commented that he hadn’t thought Hollywood was civilized enough to have such amenities as black bread, and Gunther remarked, “The trouble with Jews is they are so hopelessly parochial.”

“That makes two anti-Semites among us,” Lowe said. “We are a little microcosm, aren’t we, Annie?” He smiled at her with his whole face. Kuyper told a long story about the machinations of some Trotskyist screenwriter who was keeping Communist writers from getting assignments. “What abominations they are!” he said.

“What is a narcissism?” she asked Walter when they’d gotten back to their room.

He looked at her gravely, then sat her down on the bed.

“Narcissus was a boy,” he whispered. “And he wouldn’t love anyone. So the gods punished him by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. But whenever he reached out to embrace his image, it disappeared, and so he began to die of this awful love.”

She looked at him, then impulsively flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. “And a Trotskyite?”

“Same thing,” he murmured.

“Come on.”

“That’s too long to tell. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Lottie didn’t like me. But she likes you.”

“The only person she cares about is Murray. Anyhow,” he added brutally, “she wouldn’t be interested in someone like you.”

Stung, Annie got up. “You were phony with her,” she said. “All that significant silent hugging. And she’s phony too, that grim beauty and talking about bread…everyone there was putting on an act.”

“Everyone everywhere puts on an act.”

“I don’t!” she cried. “I’m natural.”

“That’s your act,” he said, grinning and pulling off his shirt.

“It isn’t an act.”

“Yes, it is, the biggest act of all.” He grabbed her and hugged her. “My Annie is the biggest phony of them all!”

Over his shoulder she caught sight of Walter’s square black seaman’s wallet on the bed, its link chain hidden in a fold of sheet. She’d looked through it that morning while he’d been closeted in the toilet, and found a faded brown picture of a young girl in a bathing suit leaning against a tree trunk, a vapid smile on her face. Another penny of Walter’s?