“Work-for-hire, consulting on individual projects, no pay. But you have to call me editor in chief. If over the long haul you trust me and want to build your publishing house with me, you have to call me editor in chief. The only way I can accept this is if you call me editor in chief. I’ll give you a few days to think it over. Now I have to do my shopping.” I held out my hand, he shook it, and not looking at him or taking back my espresso cup, I walked into the store.

Once inside, I glanced back through the glass doors: the publisher was still there, standing motionless, then he tentatively raised the espresso cup for me to see. I waved my index finger, letting him know he could return it some other time.

That fall, there were mornings when one of us would wake the other without so much as a movement or a word, like a fluorescent light clicking on, under the sheets. Facedown on the bed, arms numb up to my shoulders, unable to move, I woke my wife with my worried thoughts. It was Saturday.

Later, at a nearby plant nursery, I said: “They’ll be upset. I shouldn’t have lost that work. I should’ve kept it no matter what.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about it.” She was holding two chubby baby cactuses, each adorned with a lopsided flower, like toddlers playing dress-up. “Your job’s so strange that there’s really no point in going into so much detail like you always do.”

“But I don’t have a job.”

“Do you get what I just said?”

“That I don’t have to go into so much detail with my folks.”

“That’s right. Because tomorrow you’ll take on an editing job, a translation, some proofs, and you’ll be back at it. And in the meantime, write for the paper. Maybe you’ll go back to working for that moron on his terms and you’ll tell your parents you’re still an editor. How you work is your business and no one else’s! You’re an intellectual—you can always pretend you have more work than you do.”

The guy from the nursery came up to us, and Barbara and I joked about the discount he gave us last time: “Maybe this time, you won’t make us pay at all, since you’re such a nice fellow?”

At the checkout counter, we added a bag of fertilizer. The girl at the register handed me the bill, and Barbara took it from me and paid.