And then she’d go off on a crying jag. She’d just get up and rush off into the bedroom and throw herself on the bed. So I didn’t want another one of those scenes coming up that Saturday morning. She didn’t have anything out right then; she’d sent some stuff off to Redbook, but they’d rejected all of it. I think she’d already gotten about fourteen rejection slips when she wrote “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” I was sitting there eating my breakfast when she came in. I had the story beside my plate. I’d been reading it over again, but it didn’t look any better than it had the night before. As far as I could tell, the kid was a nerd, and his mother was a turd, and the only thing the dog did, even on the last page, was lie around and whine and thump “its tail weakly against the hard unforgiving gray cobblestone pavement littered with cruel gray pigeon droppings.”

“Well,” she said. She was grinning again. “You’ve slept on it.” Yes I had.

“I didn’t know you knew so much about literature,” she said.

‘Ah, I’m a closet fan of Flaubert’s.”

“Who’s he?”

“Gustave. I like Melville, too. You ever read Moby Dick ?”

“No, but I saw it on the late movie. Gregory Peck and all them. Did that come from a book?”

“Yes, it did, dear. A very great book.”

“Well, I didn’t know it was a book. What’d you think about my story?”

I knew that if I said I liked it, she’d ball my brains out. She’d shut down the typewriter, lock all the doors and pull the curtains closed, strip naked down on the floor and tell me to climb on.

“It was something else,” I said. “Indescribable.” She started stripping out of her clothes. “Unbelievable.”

She stepped out of her panties. “I can’t believe you wrote it.”

She got back on the pillows of the couch and put one foot on the coffee table and said, “Come and get it, big boy.”

“You’re better than Jackie Collins,” I said, and went to her.

Okay, so it was a lousy thing to do. But it made her happy, for a while at least. Naturally she typed up a clean copy of “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati,” didn’t change a word, and sent it off. I think it set some kind of record for coming back. I came home from the reactor one evening and she was drunk in the living room. She had a bottle of vodka, a pint, and she was halfway through it. She had it mixed up in some grape Kool-Aid, and she was soused. Supper wasn’t fixed, and she started getting sick, and I wound up holding her head over the commode for her while she threw up.

All this happened before things got bad.