He remembered Simon. His paintings, three lines, beach, sea, sky, always the same, empty as though he’d seen and been hypnotized by a stopped world. Max looked at the ones Theda had hung on the wall. Always the beach, sea, sky, swept clean of all that was animate. He’d met him only once, at the party that had been given him before he left for France, as a “tourist,” from where he intended to make his way to Spain. Simon had been silent, stiff with drunkenness in this very room, slumped into the canvas wing chair while Theda, her sallow cheeks flushed, attended him, managing to keep the space around him empty as though she’d known he could not bear the press of people. He hadn’t been a party member, just an Ohio country boy who’d traveled to Cleveland once a month to spend his time in the library there, poring through volumes of drawings. In the end, he hadn’t drawn anything.

“When I took him to the ocean that first time, it was as if his heart fell out of his body,” said Theda. “He gasped. I remember that.”

He’d been a womanizer in a glazed, implacable way, even while he was living with Theda. Max remembered at the party the way Simon would focus his vision on a girl, looking at her with a grim sexual desperation.

There was a faded photograph of him in a gold frame on a bureau. He seemed smaller than Max remembered but the delicate blank face was the same, the arrowy nose, and Irish secrecy about the eyes, the thick curly hair. They had surely been an odd couple, Theda and Concannon. She was watching him reflectively.

“What are you thinking?”

“About—attachments.”

She snorted faintly.

“Why don’t you tell them you’re not going to do the column,” he said with unexpected resentment. Silly damn long drink of water, picking over a dead man’s life…

She smiled and took his hand and held it until he began to feel embarrassed, wanting to pull his hand away. She dropped it.

The room felt too warm.

“Max, I’m on my way out.”

“Wait—”

“No. you don’t want to hear it, even though you know it. I don’t have enough sense to have reasons. I know there are good reasons, but I don’t even want them. I was never good at this, this view of life. I laughed at things I shouldn’t have. There are people who would as soon die as leave the party, I know that. It’s the content of their lives. Not mine. I don’t feel pain about it. I don’t want people to be angry at me. But that doesn’t weigh as much as what I want to do. I can tell what I’m going to do.”

“What are you going to do?”