Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I'd had with an old friend , the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she'd slept with everybody-and she practically had. "How did we do it?" I asked her. "How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?"

"You have it wrong," she said. "We weren't blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them."

"Oh, right," I said. "I remember now."