For the larger of the two rooms he’d found a deep, down-filled easy chair—another garage sale acquisition, this one for twenty-five dollars, with a reading lamp thrown in. He moved his desk under the middle window, placed his typewriter in the center, and laid in a supply of paper, carbons, typewriter ribbons, and white-out. Once everything was arranged, he sat there for four days, drinking coffee and staring at the view. During his preparations, he was brimming with ideas. Now that he was ready to go to work, his mind was blank.

He wrote the occasional paragraph, but he spent most of the time thinking about Walker. He couldn’t figure out why Walker was so successful with girls while he remained so out of it. Walker had had a string of girlfriends his senior year. Two of them Jon found attractive, but neither one would give him the time of day. It was always “Walker this, Walker that.” Their only purpose in talking to Jon was to ask how Walker felt about them. Having heard Walker trash both in private, Jon wondered if they’d lost their tiny minds. Walker treated girls badly. He ignored or snubbed or insulted them. He’d date them, screw them, and break up with them. Given the tears and upsets and phone calls and public scenes, they were totally smitten, absolutely gaga about him. Jon detached himself, mystified by the unspoken rules underlying love, flirtation, passion, and sex.

Just to feel like he was doing something, he went into his father’s study and pulled out a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He took it back to his desk and typed out the first two chapters. He liked the plain, choppy feel of the prose, but transcribing someone else’s work didn’t spark inspiration. While he liked the language, he wasn’t connected to the content. The words belonged to Hemingway and the images were his. For Jon, the subject matter carried no emotional energy. If he could write about anything, what would it be? He couldn’t think of a thing.

He had to laugh at himself. He hadn’t written a word and he was already suffering writer’s block. Just to shake himself loose, he closed up shop for the day and broke into a house four doors down. The owner was a Hollywood producer who spent the occasional weekend in Horton Ravine. Jon knew their habits because the couple had come to a number of dinner parties Mona had given and they talked nonstop about themselves. The guy had a son Jon’s age that Jon had no use for. Mona liked him, of course, because his manners were good and he wore a coat and tie and said sir and ma’am. It was therefore doubly amusing to discover the kid’s stash of dope and pornography. Farm animals? Come on.