each other. The food was bland by Owen’s standards, and probably Rachel’s, too, but she complimented it anyway, deploying positive reinforcement like any skilled parent or trainer. Ever since he’d begged off teaching freshman creative writing to all the would-be poetic geniuses at Lansdowne last year, Rachel had deemed it only fair that he take on a greater share of the household chores. It was a reallocation made with ironclad logic, but the iron aspect had stoked his eagerness about as much as a pair of manacles.
“How’s the novel?” she asked.
The novel was nothing. The novel was a non-starter. There were thirty-seven pages and twelve of them were nothing but dialogue.
“It’s okay,” said Owen.
“Just okay?” she said.
“Well, it’s coming along.”
“That’s wonderful.” Her whole face transformed with her enthusiasm, and Owen felt sickened at how incapable she was of discerning even his most obvious lies. “Are you going to be able to send Andy a draft soon?”
Andy was his agent, at least on paper. Owen was hesitant to contact him in case the only thing that was preventing him from being dropped was the fact that Andy had forgotten about him.
“No, not soon exactly.”
“Did you turn the corner on that problem you were having?”
“What problem was that?”
“Of David’s father?” David was Owen’s stand-in for Chanoch. “The fight they were going to have on the telephone as soon as he arrived in Chicago?”
“Right.” He’d forgotten he’d mentioned that much about it. The story had petered out as soon as his protagonist had reached Chicago and discovered his violin had been stolen. “I haven’t figured that part out yet,” he said.
The truth was that in the past few months he had not done much more than move things around. He had changed everything from first-person to third-person and back again. He had spent time looking at porn and online reviews of his earlier novels, and he had priced Caribbean vacations even though they did not really have the money to go anywhere. He had also looked up the fertility chances of a thirty-seven-year-old woman. The chances were, unfortunately, still quite good. But not for much longer.
“You will,” said Rachel. Her confidence in him was singular and terrible, a constant balm as well as a reproach. “Now, what do you say to some dessert?”
Owen had noticed the new container of peach sorbet in the freezer when he’d gone searching for ice cubes for an afternoon scotch.
He stood up. “I think I’d better get back to work.”
* * *
—
Sitting on the overstuffed armchair in the corner of his office, his back to the shuttered window, Owen angled the lamp to illuminate the gathering dust on the piles of books on his desk. He tore open an envelope that had arrived a week ago, which he already knew contained a royalty statement from his publisher, a statement that was several hundred dollars into the negative. It was demoralizing how many copies of his second novel, Blue Virginia, were still coming back from bookstores a full three years after its release. Surely there ought to be a cut-off for how long the stores were allowed to return them.
The new novel was stagnant. His protagonist, aimless. He could scarcely bring himself to describe the Rachel character, let alone muster the prose to steer David towards her. What he needed was a crisis that would throw everything into upheaval. Owen envied those writers who set novels during wartime, though he had never felt the urge to do so himself. The Second World War had been rendered so many times in fiction that it ran the danger of seeming more like a symbol than a tragic set of real human actions and consequences. A symbol of ignorance and hate, and an opportunity to showcase the human spirit in the face of adversity. It was terrible, really, the way one could start thinking about catastrophe.
And then he was thinking about catastrophe. The pressure it would force upon his characters. There was no reason it had to be a war. No reason it had to be in the past, even. His thoughts drifted to the real story of Chanoch and the unexpected pneumonia that had killed him so far from home.
Owen stood up and stretched his legs, cracking his knuckles behind his back. Then he sat down again, with an excitement he had not felt in months.
* * *
—
At four in the morning, he lay down on the couch in his office and napped for two and a half hours before