If pressed, and it was his booze so he was never pressed, Todd would have found it hard to produce any examples of doing. Janis cooked and cleaned and dealt with bills and maintenance. Todd had some intermittent income from—yes—teaching writing at the community college, but that had tailed off lately as Todd had a habit of giving outlandishly good grades to the girl students, while simultaneously putting down any talented young males (in this respect, and this respect only, Todd was an early proponent of positive discrimination).

Generally, however, Todd Milstead was not an active man. He had designed his life to be this way, as it gave him more time for writing. The only problem was that Todd very rarely did any writing. He would get up, shower, breakfast, and go into his study. He would organize all his writing materials and sometimes even tidy his collection of authorly items: the framed and signed photograph of John Steinbeck (Todd had bought it at auction and it was signed To Beverley but hey, it was authorly), the quill-and-ink brass paperweight that Janis had thought was cute and bought for him, the inspirational Bob Dylan quote he’d typed out himself and taped to the wall—these were all the tokens of his author-ness, what Todd (but only to himself, which was wise) sometimes liked to call “the handmaidens of brilliance.”

But once this was done, the straightening and the tidying, that was it. Nothing happened. Todd could sit there for hours, waiting for the Muse to strike. But if she was striking, it felt to Todd like she was doing so for few er hours and more pay. Todd waited and waited. He took down books and scoured them for inspiration. He quoted his favorite lines to himself. Sometimes phrases came into his head, and he would start writing them down and expanding them into paragraphs until he realized that he was just transcribing passages that he remembered (he remembered them perfectly, but that wasn’t really the point). And he’d pull the paper out of the machine and screw it up into a ball and throw the ball into the corner with the others, and then he’d pull out a copy of Playboy.

And that would be it until lunchtime, when he’d wander into the kitchen, look at whatever Janis had left him to heat up, and then phone for a pizza because he didn’t cook. Todd was a man who’d always rather someone else did it for him, and now he was waiting for Janis to come home and tell him how his marriage was going to end.

*  *  *

Janis came home toward the end of Todd’s second beer, which was just as well. If she’d come home during the third beer, conversation—rational conversation, anyway—would have been risky. Todd tended to get angry after beer in the afternoon.