longer, and since I could now afford, with my portion of the proceeds from the sale, to buy another house, if a smaller one, I asked Molly to marry me. I told her that we could live anywhere she wanted. It seemed that during the weeks I’d been away, she too had gotten sick of New York, if not of the hypothetical lawyer or banker who had been my replacement. A junkie had tried, rather ineptly, to hold her up in the foyer of her building, in addition to which there were problems at the ad agency: a new boss who didn’t like her. Also, her mother had been in a car accident. She decided that she wanted to move to Milwaukee, where she came from, and since I had no great desire to live anywhere other than on Florizona Avenue, which was now impossible, I agreed. It was a heady feeling at last to be able to give her something, after so many years during which, every time we’d gone out for dinner, she’d had to pick up the bill. Not that a little house in Milwaukee was in any way going to compensate for the loss of this place—this fantastic place—or for the knowledge that I had failed my mother. And yet it was something: a life. So we moved.
And of course, when I went to Milwaukee, I brought the notebooks with me. And once there, in that funny little brick house of ours, I had no idea whatsoever what to do with them. There was no barbecue pit in that backyard. I considered various hiding places—a dormant dumb-waiter and a sort of hidden shelf, way up in the back of one of the closets—before I realized that at this point there was really no longer any need to look for a hiding place. Because of course no one who knew about the notebooks, who knew what they were, and might have recognized them, was anywhere near Milwaukee. And so, taking a page from “The Purloined Letter,” I started just leaving them out on my desk. Once Molly strolled in and asked me about them. “Oh, those are the notebooks I wrote poetry in when I was a kid,” I said. “I dug them out of the house in Wellspring before we sold it. I thought I’d read them over.” And she smiled, and said, “That’ nice,” and left the room as obliviously as she had entered it. She had a habit, my first wife, of wandering in and out of rooms for no particular reason that I found vexatious.
So now I was a husband and a homeowner, and I had to do something. Molly had found a job with an advertising firm most of the clients of which were big Milwaukee breweries. Our house had cost so little, comparatively speaking, that even after buying it I still had quite a bit of money left from the sale of the big house, my mother’ house. I told her that I was going to give myself a year to write a new novel, and that if that didn’t pan out, I’d give up writing and get a job, and since it seemed that now I could afford that year, she gave her assent. Now, every morning, I would sit down in front of the computer—I’d bought myself one of the new Macintoshes, which seemed so astonishing at the time, even though these days we would find them ridiculously slow—and gaze at the little simulacrum of a blank page that the screen offered up. Next to me, on top of my desk, sat the notebooks. It wasn’t my intention at this point to do anything with them. On the contrary, I only kept them out because I hoped they might bring me luck, inspire me to write the book that Georgiana Sleep (who had in the meantime changed jobs, moving to a bigger, more prestigious house) would actually buy.
And then for two weeks I just sat there. It wasn’t that I didn’t have an idea—I did—I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to depress the keys. My fingers either felt heavy as iron weights, or they felt gummy and rubbery, or they shook so badly I could barely control them. And every one of those days, that awful virtual blank page stared out at me. I hated it. On old computers, when you wrote, you typed pulsing green letters onto a black screen. Somehow that was easier, because it looked