The Man at the Door

There were two of them in the basement already, unfinished, the pages hidden in a cabinet behind the cans of paint and stain. This one was her third attempt.

Last fall she’d been on a binge, filling two notebooks on weekdays during the baby’s morning nap while her husband and two older children were scattered at their own desks miles away. But now that it was winter, a familiar torpor had set in. For weeks she’d written nothing, though she couldn’t break the horrid compulsion to sit there and wait.

This morning, however, without warning, a sentence rose, a strange unexpected chain of words meeting the surface in one long gorgeous arc.

As she hurried to get it down, she could feel the pressure of new words, two separate sentences vying for a place next to the first, and then more ideas splitting off from each of those and where there had been, for so long now, arid vacuity there was fertile green ground and any path she chose would be the right one. Words flooded her and her hand ached to keep up with them and above it all her mind was singing here it is here it is and she was smiling. The baby bleated through the monitor.

She’d only managed to get three sentences on the page.

He was not the good kind of baby who cried out and then, sensing that no one was going to come running, rolled over and fell back asleep. The crying would swiftly build to a crescendo of outrage and reproach that would wipe out all hope of another sentence. She stomped up the stairs to his doorway.

“What baby takes a six-and-a-half-minute nap?”

He pulled himself up, pressed his teeth into the coated crib railing, and began to sway fetchingly, grinning all the while at the cleavage within the V

of her bathrobe.

“Don’t you get it? I need you to sleep.”

He whimpered at the ugly sounds she was making.

Her only choice was to nurse him back to sleep while she worked. She hoisted him out, squeezing him hard at his armpits. He studied her face uneasily.

She carried him to her spot at the kitchen table, latched him on, and reread the three sentences. How quickly they had flattened, lost their music.

For those few words she had been rough with her son? Her eyes passed over the page again. Awful. She felt like driving the pencil through her skin.

The baby sucked, his eyes shut for the long pulls and open for swallowing, unseeing the whole time. The strong tugs at her breast returned her to a more familiar self. She pressed her lips to the fuzz at his hair-line and nibbled. These animal moments of motherhood obliterated everything else briefly.

Eventually he drifted off, her nipple hanging from his lips like a cigar.

She read her words several more times trying not to condemn them, straining to catch the faintest echo of what she thought she’d heard before.

Just as she lifted her pencil, the doorbell rang. She glanced in its direction through the walls and shook her head. It rang again. The threat of losing any more of this precious time forced another sentence out of her. Then the doorbell was held down so long the chimes played notes she didn’t recognize.

“I’m not coming,” she said quietly.

Sharp knocks began on the thin side window, growing louder and louder until she was certain a hand would shatter through before she could reach the door. She swung it open wide.

“That’s enough!” she said in a harsh whisper. She wasn’t about to wake the baby up for this man on her porch, a man who did not hesitate to knock on glass as if it were solid steel. His knuckles, she saw, were red as he dropped them into his pocket.

“What are you selling?” Usually she would have cared—about her tone, her bathrobe, the great bulb of breast and the dark brown areola still tenuously attached to the baby’s mouth—but her anger consumed all weaker concerns.

He held out a thin paperback.

“No thanks,” she said, more civilly now, understanding the knocking was part of a religious fervor, a feeling, perhaps accurate, that this house or half

of a house (their childless neighbors were rarely home, never shared the brunt of the peddling that went on during the day) needed conversion.

“I’ve come from Smything and Sons,” the man said.

“Who?”

“The publishing house.” He shook the book at her. “They’ve given me this and I’ve come to talk to you about it.”

She shifted the baby upward, hoping to cover up a little more. “Why?”

She read the largest words on the cover. It was the working title of her novel, the one in the notebooks on her kitchen table. She pinched the book between her thumb and fingers but could not loosen it from the man’s grasp. “Give me that.” Then she let go. The sound of her own voice scared her. It was her voice as a small child. She even felt the slight resistance of the words in her mouth, as if language were still somewhat new. “Please,”

she added.

“That’s what I’ve come to do. Will you have me in?”

She looked at his face for the first time. He was a familiar stranger, someone you know you haven’t met but could have, perhaps should have.

There was a little Bing Crosby in the heart-shaped mouth, a little Walt Whitman (when he was younger and kept his beard trimmed). There was even a bit of Gerald Ford somewhere, maybe only because she’d recently read an article about his hidden integrity and decency. It was clear that the only way she was going to discover how there could be another novel with that name, despite the searches she’d done to make sure there wasn’t, was to let the man in.

So often, when she made a dubious decision like this, she followed it up extravagantly, as if flaunting it to her better judgment. She led him into their small living room and said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

“I’ll take a gin martini if you’ve got it.” He gave his trousers a quick tug before bending to sit in the middle of the couch. A diaper peeked out from beneath his left thigh though he didn’t notice it. He balanced the book on his gray flannel knees. She smiled, waiting for him to acknowledge his joke. A cocktail at nine thirty in the morning.

He smiled back. “On the rocks.”

“I’ve got coffee, seltzer, OJ, tap water.”

“Hmm?”

“What can I get you, really?” Her anger was back. The baby was asleep and her writing time was dwindling. Why had she let him in?

“Here, let me help you with the martini.” He nestled the paperback in the seat of the bouncy chair on the coffee table.

She followed him into the kitchen. “I’m sorry but that’s not a possibility.

We don’t have any—”

He opened the pantry door and there, instead of the teetery plywood shelves her husband had nailed in, instead of the thin boxes of rice and couscous, instead of the baby’s mixed grain cereal and jars of sweet potatoes, instead of the pasta and beans and cans of soup and the precious bottle of sun-dried tomatoes from Liguria she had splurged on but never wanted to use, was a long, glass-covered counter stocked with two chrome shakers, a strainer, a jar of onions, a jar of pimiento olives, a box of toothpicks, five glass swizzle sticks, and the ice bucket with the silver pine cone sticking up on top. She didn’t have to look any farther to know that below, behind the white cabinet doors, were bottles of vodka, gin, bourbon, and vermouth or that above, upside down on paper towel lining, were her father’s Class of ’62 highballs, the muscular bull fading with all the trips through the dishwasher of her youth.

“I’m glad you’ve got Beefeater,” the man said over his shoulder. “No need to get any fancier than that.”

She watched the sureness of his hands, the love that went into the preparation. She had forgotten, long forgotten, the ritual of it all. She had carefully married a man who, like her, did not drink a drop.

He made his martini. She’d never noticed, as a child, the tenderness between a drinker and his drink. He didn’t grab the bottle by the neck as she remembered, but lifted it with two gentle hands, one at the base and one at the belly. His hands moved delicately from ice to glass, bottle to glass, each gesture a signal of love. As a result, the liquor seemed to shine with a thousand glints and glimmers of gratitude as he carried it, close to his breast, back to his spot on the diaper on the couch. She sat down in the chair opposite him. She didn’t realize until she released the weight onto the armrest what a strain the baby had been on her arms and neck. With her free hand, she reached for the book, saying, only when she had firmly secured it,

“May I have a look now?”

“Of course. It’s your book.”

“It’s not mine,” she laughed. “Mine’s not finished. Someone else beat me to the punch.” But there was her name below the title, in a sort of swirly script she didn’t like. The words ADVANCED READER’S COPY ran diagonally

across the upper left corner. Was it the first of April? She was conscious of how long it took her sloggy mind to find the month. January. Even if it were April Fools’, this was not in the realm of the sense of humor of anyone she knew. And no one knew about this novel.

She opened the book. On the left-hand side, opposite the title page, which again declared this to be hers, was the copyright date. She gasped.

“What is it?” the man asked between two loving, shut-eyed sips. “Two more years?”

He took in the gestalt of her life—the robe, the boob, the primary-colored plastic items on the floor, the cardboard books with corners chewed off, the bouquet of half-deflated balloons hovering in the corner—and shrugged.

She turned the page. It was dedicated to her mother. Of all people. “The jig’s up now, mister.” It was an odd choice of words for her, and she was reminded of walking with her mother through a parking lot, though she couldn’t say why.

“I suppose you had a reconciliation.”

“No chance of that. She’s dead.”

“But not beyond the reach of forgiveness.”

She slammed the book shut, though its flimsy galley covers did not give her the effect she wanted. “Who sent you? What is this about?” She wondered if he was, after all, a religious fanatic, one of those Mormons wanting to do a little hocus-pocus on all of her ancestors.

“As I said, if you have the time, I’d like to discuss your work.”

“Why should I discuss my work with you? You’ve never read it. No one’s ever read it.”

“No one?” he asked, doctorly, humoring her delusion.

“No. I keep it locked up.” She’d read a part of her first novel to her husband soon after they’d met, when she could have read him cereal boxes and he’d have thought she was a genius. After all his praise, she hadn’t been able to write another word of it. She was careful not to read him any of the second one, but he’d stolen glances and eventually a turn of phrase had leaked out of him, something about nests of snow in the trees. He tried to placate her with compliments, threatened to publish both books himself if she wouldn’t try, but she hid them in the basement, bought a box with a key, and never told him she’d begun a third.

“It would have been a waste of time for me to come here without having read your work.”

“This is not my work!” Oh, why had she shouted? The baby jerked awake, shot her a pissed-off glare, and began to scream. The morning—or what was left of it—was officially ruined.

“Listen,” she said above the noise, flipping madly to the first chapter. She read the first line aloud. She had approached this sentence with such resistance to ownership that the resistance momentarily outlasted the fact of her own words on the page. Then her defiance collapsed. Her baby was shrieking, and her book, half-written, locked in a box for several years, was bound in a galley in her hand.

She felt the baby’s tears rolling down her stomach inside her bathrobe.

She stood up and jogged him on her hip until the crying mellowed to a low, nearly satisfied hum. The man continued to sit patiently, primly, on her couch.

“Okay,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I have a few suggestions, minor ones, really.” He held up his drained glass. “Might I bother you for another before we begin?”

She thought about having him make it himself again, then decided she’d water it down a bit, just as she’d done to her parents’ drinks before they caught on. The baby, having spied something interesting as she carried him across the room, lunged for the floor, twisting his torso out of her grip.

From the kitchen she could see he’d crawled over to the sofa, pulled himself up by the piping of a cushion, and was sidestepping toward the man and the red ballpoint he’d taken from his breast pocket.

Her hands among the martini ingredients were not sure or loving. They were not even, as she half expected, the hands she’d once laid upon this bar, innocent and investigative. Her two fingers no longer fit easily in the onion jar, and the shaker, smaller too, seemed far more menacing. She felt as an atheist might, returning to the altar of her childhood. These were the tools, the chalice, cruet, and pyx, the ugly, important objects that had once worked a kind of black magic years ago.

She felt a heaviness in her limbs and spun around to tell him to go. She didn’t care how the bar got here or the book with her name and her words.

All she wanted was to get back to the page on her desk. But what was the point if somehow it was already finished? She had such trouble with endings. She had to get that book. She forced herself through the steps of the martini, adding a few splashes from the tap before shaking, and returned.

The man remained exactly as she had left him, though his hair (had he removed a hat?) had changed. It now seemed his most striking feature (where was Bing? where was poor, decent Gerald Ford?), a thick white covering shorn into a square with closely cropped sides and a slightly longer, iron-straight top. She was so struck by the alteration or her own lack of observation that she forgot, until after she handed him his drink, about the baby.

He was gone.

“Did you notice where Matty went?”

“Hmm?” He looked up from his notes, notes in red ink in the margins of her book.

“My little boy. He was right there.”

He stared blankly back at her, as if she’d ceased speaking his language.

“Where did he go?” she said, faking calm, concealing suspicion for the moment. Was this how simple it was—a Faustian bargain—the book for the baby? The door to the stairway was shut, and he hadn’t crawled into the kitchen—or had he? She raced back in, bent her head to peer beneath the table and through the pantry door. She returned to accuse. What the hell did you do with my child? She opened her mouth, then she saw him, on the fourth shelf of the bookcase, face out, feet dangling between Hardy and Hazzard. She lunged for Matty and got him safely in her arms. Nothing in the course of this morning was as strange and impossible as the fact that her baby, her wriggling, restless, rarely sleeping, nonstopping baby, had been sitting still on a shelf for over a minute while she searched for him. In that minute, the man had downed his martini. Again she opened her mouth to scold him—you put him on the bookshelf, he could have fallen, he could have struck his head on the edge of that table!—but upon hearing her intake of breath, he glanced up, smiled the absent smile of a man absorbed, and patted the cushion beside him. “Come let’s talk this over,” he said.

His voice was gentle, promising great wisdom and perhaps a little necessary admonishment, with love. She went to him with sudden obedience. When he shifted his weight toward her, his clothes released the smells of the span of her life: sour apple candy, wet mimeograph ink, used paperback books, semen, baby wipes. The odor nauseated her. He held the book out but tipped away from her so she couldn’t see his writing. He cleared his throat and read the first sentence. Then he looked at her with pity and struck a line though the entire first paragraph. “Now enters the

father. Now it gets interesting. He is the action. She is the reaction. The action is infinitely more interesting.” When she didn’t immediately agree with him, he said, “Would you have preferred David Copperfield to have been told by Agnes?”

“Would you have preferred Moby Dick to have been told by the whale?”

His mouth fought with his impatience. “That falls into a different category of conflict. When it is man versus nature, then man is the action against a force. The force is not interesting in itself.”

She searched frantically for a better example. “The Great Gatsby.”

“Oh, Scott. He barely knew how to tie his shoes in the morning let alone write a novel. Max wrote that. He wrote all those books. But let’s not quibble. This book is about the father. No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.” He proceeded to cross out several more pages, shaking his head. “You simply cannot name me a book, a great book, a lasting book, that was written by a woman about a woman.”

“Mrs. Dalloway.”

“Oh, now, she’s the lens, not the object. She herself is the least material character in the book. That book is about the aftermath of war. It is about the rigidity, aka Richard Dalloway, the fear, aka Peter Walsh, and the insanity, aka Septimus Smith, of course, of war.”

There was no arguing with this man. He could take one of her most treasured books, a book that she always felt captured her own fragile relationship with the past, a book with her favorite moment in it—Clarissa and Sally and their kiss by the stone urn—and claim that it was about war.

Still, there was Jane Austen, wasn’t there?

He held up his hand. “And don’t talk to me about those other English women. All those books are fairy tales written by hound-faced spinsters who never got asked to dance, let alone to marry.”

Her book. She needed to keep him focused on her book. “So you think it should be told strictly from the father’s point of view?”

“No, no. You’ve entirely misunderstood me. Keep the girl, just train her eye on the father and don’t let her slip into those little pity parties she has for all her feelings. Think”—he clenched his eyes and his jaw and his fists,

then released—“Huckleberry Finn,” he said. “And let’s most certainly not follow her into her adulthood.”

“Why not?”

“We know where she’s headed. We don’t have to read it. She marries, she has babies, and they fill her with love and rage. What’s new or startling about that?”

He had changed again, transitioned smoothly from military to effeminate, his legs now tightly crossed, his lips in a bemused pout. His attitude reminded her of her college boyfriend, who’d passed through with his new husband last summer and sat for several hours on this same couch, watching with those same lips as she scrambled to meet the needs and whims of her three children, witnessing over dinner a spat with her husband about a missing Hello Kitty straw. The visit had unveiled the mystery of this man’s devastating ambivalence years ago, but she could have done without his but-for-the-grace-of-God relief as he hugged her goodbye.

Matty, struggling to get off her lap, scraped an unclipped fingernail across her neck and she reacted loudly, more loudly than it hurt. She put him on the ground and pointed him toward his toys, then returned her attention to her visitor, though she no longer knew what she wanted from him.

“I’ll just fetch myself another.” The ice, still fresh and large, rang in time with his steps. It was only ten fifteen in the morning, but she was overcome with a late-afternoon feeling from childhood, sitting at the table with a spelling book (the poem she’d written in study hall tucked safely inside) while her mother arranged fish sticks on a cookie sheet and her father carried both their glasses back to the bar. It was a perilous time of day because of its promise. Her dad was singing a song about her mother’s hair, which had been all poufed up that day at the hairdresser. Is it cotton candy?

Is it marshmallow? If you try and taste it, you’re a brave fellow! Her mother was laughing. If only they fed her earlier, she could leave the room now, carry away the happy little ditty, keep it separate from other words of theirs that would lodge inside her. But her mother set the timer for seventeen minutes. Her father opened a can of dog food. Then he made a joke about her mother’s pocketbook, which was always in his way, always on top of the one thing he was looking for. Like a shitting pigeon, he said, yanking the newspaper out from under it. They kept their drinks close. Her mother slid a plate in front of her, then made her father get up from the red

chair by the fridge to sit with them. He slid the spelling book toward himself and flipped to the hardest section in the back.

Okay, Sylvia. Conundrum.

Her mother was reluctant to play; she was always the first to turn sour.

You haven’t even asked your daughter about her day.

C’mon, give it a shot.

All right, her mother said, taking in a deep, wary breath, C-U-N—

Wrong! There was far too much glee in his voice. He pointed toward the street. Back to Cranford Junior College for you! The windows blackened and it felt like the house was being buried alive. Her father brought two new drinks to the table. They were always so excited about a fresh drink, but all the alcohol seemed to do to either of her parents was uncover how little they liked life or anything in it. You haven’t even asked your daughter about her day. How often her mother said that, as if it were their last hope, a white ring tossed onto the waves. She tried to say the things they liked to hear: who got A’s, who got in trouble. But every night she failed. Such an uncompelling child, wholly unable, night after night, to keep her parents afloat. And then the poem slipped out of the spelling book and her mother snatched it up before she could. What’s this? Her parents’ eyes met. If they’d been wolves, they would have licked their chops.

She thought she’d disposed of these moments long ago. But now, in a house of her own, with children and a husband of her own, with dusk and dinnertime coinciding once again, they had begun to creep back in. And with them came a feeling, a presentiment, that she would eventually destroy this good life, for wasn’t her need to write like her parents’ need to drink? A form of escape, a way to detach? And, like the alcohol, it weakened and often angered her, left her yearning for the kind of rare and extraordinary ability she’d never have. What had her mother yearned for? She’d married at nineteen. Had one child. ( Any more would have put me in the nuthouse, she used to say to people who asked.) Died at fifty. (Alone in a rented room, her father having left her for someone who let him be the only drunk.) After her mother’s death she’d searched her drawers for clues but there was nothing but a dinner party planner and a few manila envelopes of photographs stuck together. No note, no apology (it didn’t take her long to realize this was what she was really looking for). What had her mother’s life consisted of? When she came home from school in the afternoons, her mother would either be on the phone or flipping through a magazine, and

even though she’d be doing nothing that she couldn’t continue doing now that the bus had come, a terrible wave of sadness seemed to pass through her, as if her daughter were the sun itself, setting on all her dreams. Her mother would often make herself a drink then, though she would rinse out the glass and put it back to dry on the paper towel on the shelf so that when her father came home she could pretend the one he made her was her first.

The book lay on the couch. Once again she took it in her hands. He’d crossed out nearly half the words. His red ink covered the margins of every page. He had an opinion about every choice. A grown woman would not own a toboggan! This is not the kind of man who would order a salami sandwich! She flipped again to the last chapter. It began with the four sentences she had written this morning, though he’d struck them through with triple lines, then a wavy one on top, and if she hadn’t been familiar with the words already she wouldn’t have been able to make them out.

She’d been right; it was crap. The entire chapter was obliterated like that, his annotation no longer limited to the sides but covering the crossed-out type, the hand furious and uncontrolled, ending with a huge YOU CAN’T

DO THIS!!!!! in the space left on the last page. Still, she’d had no idea she was so close to the end.

He returned. She could see the effects of the alcohol now, not in any carelessness of his movements but in their carefulness. He was in that state just before drunkenness, when the alcohol makes you more aware of your body and what it is touching. She felt that he drank for this moment: not for the dulling but rather for the heightening of his senses. There was something about the way he breathed through his nose, the way his fingertips touched the glass, the way his free hand settled in his lap as he sat back down beside her. Just watching him reminded her of the texture and temperature of things. She could feel the heat of his thigh. And yet his awareness of her had slipped a little. Her attraction to him came on fast and undeniably.

He turned to her sharply, as if she had spoken her desire aloud. He was young now, college age, with thick brown hair and those eyes, those haunted eyes that all the men who’d ever broken her heart had had. “You have more than one?” he asked.

“One what?” She could barely find a breath for the words. When was the last time her groin had throbbed so painfully?

He looked down at Matty, who had managed to put two pieces of a wooden track together for the bright-blue train to sit on. “Distraction.”

“I have a million distractions,” she said, hearing a long-gone flirtation in her laugh, knowing that if he touched her she would not resist. “But only three children.” Usually it gave her pleasure to speak of her children—their ages, their quirks—but now they were obscuring the conversation.

“Tolstoy had thirteen children. And most of them were born while he was writing War and Peace. I’m not sure he even knew any of their names.

That’s the way it has to be done. You’ve got to forget your children’s names.”

Matty was pushing the train back and forth on the short track, making a noise she knew was “All aboard!” but to anyone else sounded like “Pla!”

His long sleeves were pushed up nearly to his armpits, the way he liked them. His upper lip was tucked deep into the warm interior of the lower, which kept its slippery purchase with steady upward undulations. But when he glanced up to find her studying him, the lip was released for the sake of an enormous smile. He patted the spot on the rug beside him, mouthing mamamamama without diminishing the smile. He looked just like her husband then, beckoning her, eager for her. But she did not doubt Matty, did not suspect dissembling or duplicity. Why was it so much harder to believe in her husband’s love for her? She thought again of the time he had quoted her line about snow like nests in the trees. They had been walking around a lake, the three of them, their oldest, Lydia, not more than four months old and tucked in the BabyBjörn inside her parka. Halfway around, he had stopped and wrapped them tightly in his arms. My family, he’d said, his voice a little squeak. Then, a quarter of a mile later, he said that about the snow and the trees and she marched off and he kept insisting he hadn’t been mocking her. Now she could easily see he hadn’t been. Of course he hadn’t been. She knew now, too, that even at the time she had known he hadn’t been mocking her—but she’d needed to find something to create distance, to put a wedge between her and that small squeak of joy he’d revealed to her. Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.

She slipped off the couch down to Matty, who secured her with a meaty elbow on her thigh. The man was adding more notes to the margins. He was old again, her desire for him already a ludicrous memory. “The third book is traditionally the strongest of the early works.”

“This is my first.”

He shot her a stern, disappointed glare. “Novels in boxes are still novels.”

Then he softened. “Why haven’t you been able to finish them as well?”

“As well? As well as I finished this one?” He looked hurt by her disbelief in him, and she decided to try and answer him honestly. “I don’t know.”

Matty had crawled behind her and was hoisting himself up by her hair.

“That hurts Mommy,” she said. “Please stop.” And when he didn’t, she felt the anger stir, the deep pool of it, always there. “I used to feel ambitious, I think, in college. My professors were so decent and respectful, nothing like the adults I had known before. They made me feel like I could do anything.

Sometimes still, I get these burning electric jolts of, I don’t know, belief, I guess. I’ll write and I’ll believe. But then—” It was like those nights when she was a kid, it was just like that, her father making the jokes and her mother laughing and everything was like something to believe in and then the timer for the fish sticks goes off and we sit down and it’s all shifted completely. “Then it just stops.” There was a raw ache in her chest. “You have kids, and everything else becomes so . . . faint. And that old desire is like a cramp you wish would go away for good.”

“But those first two books. You’ve done nearly all the work. Why bury them?”

“They should be burned. They’re awful.”

“You have trouble finding the merit in your own work.”

“You do too, apparently.” She pointed to the last redsplattered page.

A look of revulsion came over him, as if he’d forgotten to whom he was talking. “Well that— That last chapter is awful. It’s disgusting. There’s no excuse for it.”

She felt a familiar weakening in her stomach muscles. She still buckled so easily under a sudden change of mood, an unexpected attack. Gone was the compassionate face, the sympathetic ear. “It is entirely unconvincing.

Why do you people even try to write scenes of violence? It’s not your genre; it’s not in your nature.” He threw the book down on the floor and stood over her. “It makes absolutely no sense.” He walked to the end of the room and back. “You breach every understanding, every promise to the reader when she commits that act. Maybe someone like Bowles or Mailer could have pulled it off, but not you, honey.” He shook his glass at her.

“Not you.”

He was one of those lightweight alcoholics, she realized. Three drinks and he was toast. Either of her parents could have six martinis and still drive her to a friend’s house.

“And without a weapon. It’s priceless,” he cackled. “A weapon is necessary to the triad. Don’t you even know that? The killer, the body, the weapon. They interact. They interchange. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for Christ’s sake. After a murder, the murderer is really the murdered, killed by his own lack of humanity. It’s his death that is significant. The weapon stands as the judge and jury, the object that casts him out of the dream back into reality. Without it, you simply don’t have murder.”

She never stood up to the drunks when she was young. Not to her father or her mother, not to any of their friends on Friday and Saturday nights, their heavy hands on her hair, their strange, unchecked thoughts spoken aloud. She still remembered Mrs. Crile finding her in the TV room, stroking her, putting a hand up the back of her shirt and clucking with pity, declaring that no one ever recovers from being an only child. Look at Richard Nixon, she’d snorted before turning away.

“I think you’re full of shit.” She didn’t even know what he was talking about, who could possibly die at the end of her book.

He glared at her. She was not surprised to see Nixon’s small eyes and bulging jowls. “It is wrong on every level: schematically, thematically. You are meant to feel at the end of a book that what has gone on is completely unimaginable and yet inevitable. Do we feel that? No. Not to mention that no woman could bury a grown man’s body in an hour. And in the backyard?

In January?” He thrust out his arm toward her windows, as if this were the house of her novel. “The whole thing is an atrocity.” Without asking, he headed to the kitchen for a refill.

“No,” she said.

The bite in her voice jerked him like a rope. “One more, then I’ll go.”

“No. No more. You need to leave now.”

“I’m not leaving until I get another drink,” he said from the pantry, his hands having reached safety, “and you come up with a better ending.”

“Get out of my house.” She grabbed at his arm but only caught his coat sleeve; glass and ice shattered across the countertop.

He locked his fingers through a bottle opener fixed to the wall and she couldn’t yank him out of the tiny room. With his free hand he began to make another drink. She reached behind him and shoved his arm. Another

highball shattered. He took down a third and she did the same thing. He paused then, staring at all the broken shards.

“I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What’s the point? You’ll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable. You’ve got your little scenes, your pretty images, but that desperate exhilaration of blowing past all the fixed boundaries of art, of life— that will forever elude you.” He took down another glass, waited for her to smash it, and when she didn’t he quickly made his drink.

His eyes wandered over her as he drank. Then he said, the liquid still glistening on his lips and tongue, “And why don’t you tighten up that robe.

I’m done looking at those things.”

Matty was fascinated by her work, the new movements of her arms, the strange tool and its wonderful noise as she thrust it again and again into the earth, and the spray of dirt and rocks that came up over her back onto the grass, sometimes landing on the thick rubber lip of his red sneaker. He sat and watched her with more interest even than he watched the backhoes on Spring Street, digging up an old septic system. She worked hard and fast and the sweat began to mix with the milk and the tears inside her robe. She was surprised, given the season, how soft the earth was, how relenting.

Soon she’d dug deep enough to step down into it. She felt its warmth curl around her ankles. Its smell was intoxicating. She’d paid so little attention to the earth in her life.

When she was done digging, she scooped Matty up and brought him into the house, fed him a small bowl of rice cereal mixed with applesauce (they were back in their regular spots on the wonderful wobbly shelves), and put him in his crib. He cried briefly, but by the time she came back downstairs and listened for him through the monitor, there was only the loud tide of his breath in sleep. She dragged the man from where he’d fallen across the pantry’s narrow threshold out the back door. His feet bounced carefree down the steps. He was light and fell into the hole gracefully, like a piece of cloth, so she didn’t have to get in there and rearrange him. There was no mound when she’d finished; every scoop of dirt had fit perfectly back in.

She replaced the sod she’d carefully cut out and went inside. According to the clock on the stove, her work had taken forty-nine minutes.

The book was sprawled on the floor where he had flung it. She brought it over to the couch, tossed off the diaper, and lay lengthwise, on her stomach.

She turned to the last chapter. The red cross-outs had faded, and it was, she could easily see now, a fine ending.