Raymond liked her so much he kept her on even after his oeuvre had waned. A year after his announced retirement, a big publisher gave him a generous advance to write a memoir of his youth, The Lost Boy. But what was the use of memoirs? He felt that “nonfiction” was a genre cherished beyond what it deserved by NPR-addled Americans. Because was “nonfiction” even that? Didn’t the scrim of memory render fugitive every supposed truth? He’d much rather write up an inspired adaptation of his youth, where he roamed Manhattan in a vampire’s cape, than recount tawdry evenings waiting by a mossy glory hole. Who’d want facts? After a year’s deliberation, he returned the money—and on a tighter operating budget, he let Adele go.

These days, he couldn’t even reenter the marketplace if he wanted to. Bookstores crippled him. A few years ago they were bad enough, filled with tomes by authors who took macho pride in the plainness of their prose, writing about burnt coffee and trailer parks and midday highs. But now, now was worse. Historical thrillers set in olde Europe, doleful as doorstops and stuffed to the gills with encyclopedia vomit; slim compendia by “modern humorists” who chronicled painfully ordinary situations and parlayed their modest gifts into radio programs, TV appearances and campus tours; and the absolute pits—catty romans à clef about life in New York’s upper crust written by venal young things in stiletto heels.

He longed for the days of clichés he only partly despised—women’s stories where empty tumblers of Dubonnet and old 78s, played over and over, stood in for romantic agony, or war stories where likable heroes got wounded and actually died. He’d rather starve than compete with the hacks of today, thank you very much.

Holding the stories by the dead Korean, Raymond walked out to his backyard the following morning. He’d reheated the chive pancakes in his oven and the first of them now crunched warmly in his mouth. Not bad, not bad at all.

He pulled over a wrought-iron chair from the patio and put it under his oak tree. Facing him, across his privet hedge, was the Parks’ yard. Through a bare patch in the hedge, he glimpsed his bête noire, their abandoned blue sofa. Its cushions bore a thousand slashes, inflicted by some insomniac cat, and moldy foam rubber was pushing out of its wounds. An eyesore matched in noxiousness only by the mysterious blasts of slut-rock.

Raymond turned his chair so he wouldn’t have to see that thing. He reminded himself to talk Mrs. Park into getting rid of it in exchange for reading the stories.