“Better. Socialism can make it better. Things are awry.” He thought for a moment. Class conflict, the English orphans virtual slaves in factories, the mad utopianism of the nineteenth century, inevitable revolution—he’d read so much, Liebknecht and Alcott and Brisbane and Saint-Simon and Fourier and Kautsky, Engels and Marx, and—

“How can you do that? With the good will of the capitalists?”

“No.”

“Force?”

“The force of the working class.”

“And then?”

“‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’”

“Who said that?”

“Louis Blanc.”

“And when one has no abilities?”

“When true Communism comes, one will receive what he needs, with or without abilities.”

“People are too wicked.”

“Because of the system.”

“It can’t be that Communism is the first system that will work. No. Even I know that. Even I know…”

“You must read history.”

“Walter says bourgeois history is all distortion.”

“Listen. You must learn something of the world outside you.”

“You stayed with me today. You were so good to do that.”

He stood silently by the door, feeling the wrench of leaving her.

She walked over to him.

“I’ll want to know what happens to you,” he said. “Will you write me from Laguna Beach?”

“To your house?”

“Yes, yes. Of course to my house.” He found a piece of paper in his wallet, a laundry ticket—he’d never get his shirts back—and wrote down the address and put it in her hand as he visualized himself in mortal combat with the Chinese laundryman.

Suddenly she seized his hand, the pencil still gripped in his fingers, and brought it to her mouth and pressed her lips on it. “Thank you.” she said.

He arrived home to find the door ajar and heard voices, one loud, two murmuring. He sighed bitterly.

It was Levi Lewis and his wife, Cleo. Max walked into his living room. Eva was standing in the middle of the room looking rather lumpish, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her eyes fixed on Levi, whose arm clutched Cleo’s plump shoulders. As usual, Cleo looked dazed. She was Levi’s chief exhibit, perhaps the only one in his life. His Negro bride. His bona fides couldn’t be questioned.

He asserted himself feverishly on every occasion, talking, talking, talking, as though Cleo’s presence—and look how he was gripping her as though she might disappear—gave him limitless license to explore the caverns of his mind. Wretched man! Poor Cleo with her young round soft face, the tendrils of hair that curled around her ears, the neat brown hands pressed against one another on her lap, her whole body pulled into Levi’s embrace, his talisman, his object.

He managed to refer to his heroic act in every conversation, at meetings, at caucuses, just as Fern dragged in her family. And some were impressed. Yes, Calvin Schmitter was impressed. Why, Levi had actually married one of them!