Well, I suppose success flickered for me, for a moment, and went away just as quickly, and has yet to come back again. That’s the funny thing about dreams. You always eventually wake up from them. My first book was a success, not from a mainstream or commercial standpoint, but from a literary perspective. One critic even called me, “The next David Foster Wallace,” which I liked. The book has a nice cult following to this day, and I thought I’d duplicate that success, but books two and three have flopped by all standards, literary included. I’m surprised my agent has kept me on, and I’m sure if the book I’m working on isn’t a success, I’ll be getting the ax soon enough.

I’ve tasted a small sampling of triumph, but I haven’t exactly lived out my dreams. Sarah’s dream was to be a criminal defense attorney, one of the best. She’s not one of the best: she is the best—like I always knew she would be. I just never thought I’d resent her so much for it.

But like I said, it wasn’t always like this, and when I say this, I mean me running off to our second home any chance I get and her practically taking up residency at her office. After all, you don’t become the best criminal defense attorney by loving your husband.

One would think that living in solitude and wallowing in my own self-pity would make me one of the great writers, like a modern-day Thoreau or Hemingway. But to date I have all the alcohol usage of Hemingway, just none of the success to go along with it.

Sarah has her work, and I have mine, and there was a time when we had each other, but that time has passed.

We had met at a party, a complete stroke of luck as it was out of the norm for Sarah to attend one, she would go on to tell me later that night. She’d much rather have her face in a book than be surrounded by sticky, hormonal bodies in a basement of a college house—but there she was, standing in a corner, casually sipping cheap beer out of a Solo cup, looking more out of place than a nun in a brothel. She held a partial smile trying to mask her discomfort, but her body language gave her uneasiness away. She was leaning against a wall, one leg crossed over the other, the Solo cup hovering near her lips, glancing around the party, one arm crossed over her chest tucked underneath her other arm. She was trying to make herself as small as possible, blending into the background, going unnoticed. But to me, she was the only person in that room.