“I don’t really know,” Theda said glumly. “They’ve never paid much attention to me. I’ve been lectured to a number of times, but I have this terrible faculty of depressing them, I mean a kind of personal depression, the way you’d feel about someone you don’t much care for who’s dying of an obscure disease. I suppose if I were important…well, I’ve used them as much as they’ve used me. You know, the serious ones, the ones who really believe, they even walk differently from other people…They know what’s right, all of history fits in their fists. Even in my shrillest days—that once upon a time when I thought there was a side I could take and hold forever—even then, I experienced the most terrible irritability—I think it was construed by some as conviction—and I realized that in me the idea that no truth could come from the capitalist press, its literature, its movies, its theaters, took the form of raging paranoia. I was tormented by suspicion of simply everything. When Simon went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, I listened to the kind of grim praise that was showered on him those last days before he left, political praise. But I knew why Simon was going. Simple Simon. He thought Franco was bad; he was troubled in his work; he was bored. Oh, Simon! He never had a political thought in his life. When I think of him, I become insane.”

The rugs had been straightened, the chairs returned to their places, the glasses and dishes washed. Theda had opened the window and a eucalyptus-perfumed night breeze blew across their heated faces. She got up to pour them both more wine. They sat silently for a bit, smoking, looking out through the leaves to where the lamps illuminated the empty street.

“How did you get in?”

“My brother,” Theda said. “He’s what’s known as a party theoretician. He is not without learning, the shit! Implacable monster that he is! He went through college like a general, slaughtering his professors, putting Trotskyites to the sword, burning villages…I mean, of course, with his mouth. He has the most terrible mouth in the history of mankind. He’s in the East now, issuing directives. He came here once. Simon was sitting just where you’re sitting. He began to tell Simon about the true function of art. Simon listened. Then he went into my little kitchen and came back with a five-pound sack of flour. He cut open the top with my nail scissors. My brother, Carl, continued to address the furniture, the walls, the paintings. Simon dumped the whole sack of flour on his head. Then Simon said, ‘I’ll be back after you’ve swept up.’”