Or he had to do something. As long as those photos sat in an envelope with no one studying them, they didn’t mean much. Of course, taking them out and showing them to somebody, to anybody, was the quickest way he could think of to finish the story of his own life while it was still only a novella.

To keep from thinking about that, he took another stab at working on his diss. He even got into it, more than he had for a while. He was sitting at the Smith-Corona and making some sense of frequency patterns when Anna kissed him on the back of the neck.

Caught by surprise, he jumped. Then he tried to grab her. Laughing, she skipped away. “No fair,” he said. “You were the one who said, Wait till tomorrow.”

“You looked so cute, though,” she answered, laughing still. “Like everything was a million miles away. I thought I’d give you a wake-up call.”

This had happened before. If he pushed it, she might go on saying no. Or she might give in and show she resented giving in. She didn’t get that, once she pulled him out of writing, he had trouble getting back to where he’d been. The other possibility was that she got it but didn’t care. Jerry preferred not to think about that.

He looked down at the sheet in the typewriter again. For all he could remember about where he’d been going, it might as well have been written in Cherokee. Sometimes he could start it up by putting one word after another till the whole thing got rolling again; a critic he admired called that method “shitting rocks.” Sometimes even shitting rocks didn’t help. This was one of those nights.

“Fuck,” he said softly, and gave up. Maybe tomorrow would be a better day. He hoped like hell tomorrow would have a better morning, anyhow.

He headed for the bedroom. Before he got there, the King of Siam did a flop-and-roll at his feet. After a couple of months living there, he’d become an acceptable human being. He squatted down, rubbed the cat’s stomach, and scratched the sides of his mouth. The King of Siam condescended to purr to show that his loyal subject was doing something right.

“What kind of drugs are you feeding him? I can hear that in here,” Anna called. She was what she was, the same way the King of Siam was what he was. Jerry was, too, though at the moment what he felt like was a dog in a cats’ world.

Sunday morning, Jerry and Tim went to a park off El Segundo to play catch and hit fungoes, and goof around. Alex often joined them, but he was down with a cold.