“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 red-splattered 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.