And that, he told his wife Maybelle, skipping the details, had been the real start of his writer’s block.

Maybelle Spritz knew what it was to be blocked.

As a young woman of twenty-five, starting work in a large publishing house, she had been appointed Meershank’s editor. It was a fluke for someone so young to be assigned a major writer, but somebody or other in charge had had the wit to see that the Spritz warp matched the Meershank woof.

She loved him from the first day, falling upon his scrambled, pencil-whorled manuscripts, her hands flying over the stacked pages, smoothing them hot or cool, taking possession. Turning over the sheets she often laughed her big-girl laugh. Other times she circled and queried. It was said she had the Meershank canon by heart. But that was all she had.

Every year on her birthday he took her to lunch; Zuckerman’s on Bathurst, boiled noodles and brisket. At Christmastime he bought her items that reflected the privacy of his affection, jokey jewelry or sternly ironic travel books, one year a beautiful seashell, another time a blue teapot shaped like a flower and covered with images of itself.

And she was always included at the Meershank’s annual Boxing Day parties. There in the crowded scented noisy house, whose windows and banisters were trimmed with holly, Maybelle was embraced by Meershank’s adored wife Louise, that good and gentle, blameless and bloomingly pretty woman.

These parties made Maybelle go dreamy. Always she drove out to Jacksons Point with the idea of taking a single cup of punch and slice of holiday cake, then fleeing. But year after year she was seduced, before she knew it snuggled between the cushions of a broad tufted sofa and told she was irreplaceable, priceless, one of the family, a fiction she fleetingly-that is, for an hour or so-believed.

This went on for fifteen years. She adored Meershank, not so much ardently as hopelessly, and sometimes she forgot about it for days at a time. A kind of lankiness came over her as she got older. She grew taller, it seemed, along with her name and title: Maybelle Spritz, Senior Editor. Her own office. A member of the Board. Meershank came more and more to rely on her judgment, and his twenty-ninth book, Monkey Funk, was dedicated to “The Spritziest Girl in Town.” That made her bawl.

It never occurred to her, even in her dreams, that Meershank’s wife would grow ill, would die, and that Meershank would be “free.” (Maybelle Spritz is a clever woman with a blue pencil, a sorceress some say, but she lacks basic imagination.) Her life had taken a particular shape and could not be reinvented. It wasn’t so terrible. She had her friends, her holidays, her work, her birthday lunches, her Boxing Day tributes. She wasn’t crippled or crazy. She wasn’t dead.

She was only blocked.