He remembered, then, how Theda always asked the names of pet animals in houses, how once, at a meeting in someone’s apartment, she had enraged Calvin by interrupting in a loud voice his dissertation on Menshevism to ask the age of the mongrel sitting beneath the table, then figuring out its life possibilities as though Calvin had simply been snatched away by magic. It was Theda’s habit to calculate such possibilities. The death of a child whose passing she had noted in a newspaper or whom she had heard about seemed to stun her. “Seven years old,” she would say again and again, disbelief and shock in her voice.

“I’d forgotten,” he said.

“I haven’t seen you in a while, Max, but I’m glad you’re here. I’ll get you coffee. Or do you want a drink?”

He shook his head.

She went across the room to the stove and brought back a coffeepot. Interrupting his vision of the window, her long arm interposed itself. It was slender, brown, faintly freckled. The coffee poured, she sat down and placed her elbows on the newspapers.

“Have you come to offer counsel, Comrade?” she asked with light irony.

“Are you writing a book?”

She scowled. “Oh, hell. Who said so? I’ve started a diary, a kind of backward diary. You know, I have all these paintings of Simon’s.” She waved toward the wall. “I don’t know what I had in mind. A memorial, I guess.”

“Calvin is concerned about your column.”

“Don’t speak to me in that unreal voice, Max.”

He bowed his head. Her narrow fingers tapped the paper. She drank, put the cup back. He looked up at her.

“Calvin is a dirty little rat,” she said pensively. “A knothead, a fool, a tiny monster of voracious vanity, a louse, a loon, a false man.”

He began to laugh. Then he was struck by a sudden languor, as though he’d been given a drug. He realized how tense he’d been as he walked up the hill to Theda’s apartment. From the floor below, he heard the familiar opening bars of Showboat. He looked at the floor.

“They start the day with it,” she said. “It’s not the only record they have, but it’s the only one they play. I wonder what happened to them with that music? You’d think it was their marriage they were listening to, or a Kern version of it. They’ve got a life-sized picture of Helen Morgan on the wall. Funny.”

“Are you all right, Theda?”

“I’m all right”

“How’s the reading?”

“Warner’s keeps me busy,” she said, looking at the books on the floor. “I’m getting damned good, you know. I can read a seven-hundred-page Chilean novel on transparent paper in three hours.”