There was a knock on my door and I looked through the peephole before opening it. It was Jane, who lived across the hall and down one. She'd been there about a year and I'd met her when she asked for help moving some furniture around when she was setting up her place. She was impressed when I told her I was a newspaper reporter, not knowing anything about what it was like. We'd gone to the movies twice and dinner once and spent a day skiing at Keystone but these outings were spread over the year she'd been in the building and nothing ever seemed to come of it.

I think it was my hesitation, not hers. She was attractive in an outdoorsy sort of way and maybe that was it. I was outdoorsy myself-at least in my mind-and wanted something different from that.

"Hello, Jack. I saw your car in the garage last night so I knew you were back. How was the trip?"

"It was good. It was good to get away."

"Did you ski?"

"A little bit. I went out to Telluride."

"Sounds nice. You know, I was going to tell you but you already left, if you're ever going away again, I could take care of your plants or pick up the mail or whatever. Just ask."

"Oh, thanks. But I don't really have any plants. I end up traveling a lot overnight for the job, so I don't keep any." I turned from the door and looked back into the apartment as if to make sure. I guess I should have invited her in for coffee but I didn't.

"You on your way to work?" I asked instead. "Yeah."

"Me, too. I better get going. But, listen, once I get settled in, let's do something. A movie or something."

We both liked DeNiro movies. That was the one thing we had.

"Okay, call me."

"I will." After closing the door I chastised myself again for not inviting her in. In the dining room I shut the computer down and my eyes caught on the inch-thick stack of paper next to the printer. My unfinished novel. I had started it more than a year earlier but it wasn't going anywhere. It was supposed to be about a writer who becomes a quadriplegic in a motorcycle accident. With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing anding what he tells her before she even types it in. And rewrit what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches.

He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell.

The stack of pages sat there on the table daring me to try again. I don't know why I didn't shove it into a drawer with the other one I had started and never finished years earlier.