Week 1
          “Pussy, pussy, pussy,” said the interviewer.
          I was marooned in a scuffed black leather couch with busted springs. Donny paused for dramatic affect and, presumably, to see if I blushed or fled.
          “Just so you understand that we’re not dealing with literature around here,” he continued in what had to be a mock English accent when my face remained impassive. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hair, dyed the color of eggplant.
          I nodded. “What exactly does the position entail?” I winced as I said position, already sensitive to the pitfalls of double-entendre.
          Aristocrat Publishing had purchased a mother lode of 70s-era pornographic letter digests – a few titles of some low budget publications aspiring to the seedy-yet-slick not-too-amateurishness of Penthouse Forum. My employer was going to revise, repackage, and resell them. My job was to update and upscale the scant existing details – substituting sleek leather sectionals for beanbag chairs and waterbeds, Bridget Shuster sandals for Birkenstocks – and to add a few piquant details of my own while maintaining the illusion that the letters were written by ordinary people sitting down at the kitchen table with paper and pen as the sweat evaporated from their last sexual escapades. “I can do that,” I said with the confident tone of a semi-recent graduate of a prestigious MFA program who didn’t quite have next month’s rent money covered and was within $50 of maxing out her credit cards; a graduate who felt in peril of being swept into an entry-level position in public relations or non-profit development, or forced to move home to Bellingham and sign on at the family nursery and landscaping business; a graduate who had, actually, maintained a stubborn ambivalence to sex, semi-recently complicated by the advances of her grad school mentor – a development which had been both welcome and unwelcome, treacherous and, very possibly, treachery.

          During the lunch hour, a young woman dressed in shorts and a see-through cotton tunic waters the purple petunias in her window boxes while the construction workers across the street eat their sandwiches and drink Cokes and smoke. Incidental, faux-accidental eye contact established, she goes inside to masturbate. (I fed the guys, figuring they’d need the meal to keep up their strength.) After quitting time, two or three of the men saunter over, perhaps dangling a couple of six-packs of Miller from their fingertips. She feigns surprise, invites them in, and puts on some Patsy Cline.
          Just like that, I’d be writing along, lickety-split, describing the beer drinking, hip swaying, and dirty dancing, until two of the men get into bed with the woman. She straddles one, while the other, somehow, enters her from behind, and there I’d seize up, trying to work out the Kama Sutrical feasibility. Or, consulting the list of synonyms Donny had provided, I’d dead end while trying to come up with yet another word for penis, the one word I was instructed not to use. Those words! Schlong, dong, heat-seeking missile. Sometimes I’d pause a bit longer and try to invent my own: swizzle stick, clothes pin.
          I set up my work station at the kitchen table: laptop, desk lamp, pile o’ porn, and Aristocrat’s guidelines. It seemed important to make a clear distinction between this work and whatever I might do at my actual desk, such as revising the stories from my thesis or pressing past page 25 of what Blount had assured me would turn into a novel. The porn gig was paid-by-the-piece employment. Time-fritterers or those too long in search of the precisely right word for ejaculation would end up making about a dollar an hour. But I figured my pace would pick up once I had successfully completed a dozen or so orgasmic encounters.
          A tree branch scraped the kitchen window. Three lone yellow leaves hung on, which I took as a symbol for persistence. My cat, Mr. Blinky, left a dirty sock on my pillow, a message I was unable to interpret. Other signs, I ignored completely. The cupboards were peeling paint, leaving curled white shreds on the countertops. As the winter rains began and humidity buckled paper and books, my closet and front door developed an excruciating wood-swollen squeak.

          Week 2
          My other job that didn’t pay the bills was as part-time receptionist at a Seattle brokerage house located in Belltown. Jolene Prody, assistant to the vice-president, supervised the employees such as me, Elspeth the hypochondriacal semi-permanent temp, and Billy the abnormally handsome and good-natured 45-year-old copy room boy.
          “Mr. Anders is expecting a very important fax,” she told me when I arrived for my 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. shift. I didn’t appreciate her superior tone, her back to me as she spoke. I pictured the fax in flames in the stainless steel wastebasket beneath the front desk.
          “Did you hear me Lindsay?”
          “I’ll give you a buzz as soon as it comes in.” This was my primary tactic of quasi-rebellion: I gave her what she wanted, with nauseating obsequiousness, but I make her ask for it at least twice.
          I kept it to myself that her boss exposed himself to me an average of twice a week on his way back from the men’s executive restroom. He would step behind the reception desk, a rather large semi-erect penis slung from the fly of his perfectly pressed black wool suit pants, and attempt to engage me in pleasantries. Thus far the phone had always rung before I could summon an appropriately cutting reply (i.e. “I’ll take that on rye with sauerkraut on the side, please”) and he absented himself before the second ring without further incident or ado.

          The best things about a mindless desk job are easily pilfered office supplies and time to work on your own stuff. While that had typically consisted of online activities such as consulting “Free Will Astrology” and reading The New York Times Book Review and playing Scrabble with my insomniac friend Betsy who was teaching English in Japan, my downtime was now devoted to You Know What.
          On Wednesday, as I was working on a passage about a trio of cousins (all very conventional, really, two boys, one girl, boys in control) smearing chocolate birthday cake frosting on each others’ naked bodies, Mr. Anders came by for peek-a-boo. Wag, wag, the plump pink flag. It occurred to me that Anders might work as a synonym for penis. Why should Johnson get all the glory? I ducked beneath my desk as if I’d dropped something, horrified that he might think I was smiling at his purpley-pink revelation rather than my own keen wit.
          The ability to rapidly switch screens is essential. Fortunately Ms. Prody wore an industrial strength application of Chanel, providing at least five feet of advance notice, so by the time she rounded the corner into the reception area I’d be merrily reformatting the office supply inventory sheet.
          “Can you stay until noon, Lindsay?”
          I swatted at a non-existent fly.
          Ms. Prody flinched, raised her voice slightly. “Are you able to stay – ”
          “Yes, Miz Prody.”
          “Have you seen Mr. Anders?”
          “I think I saw him heading for the executive restroom.”
          “Very well.”

          “Well that’s a twist on putting your grad school experience to use,” Andrea chortled.
          In school, Andrea had taken on the role of virago, whereas I’d stuck with chaste apprentice, enjoying the wariness my un-promiscuity created in both the men and the women in workshop. Did I think I was too good for them? Who did I think I was fooling? Most people, it seems, more readily accept bestiality or pedophilia as a sexual orientation. “Pish-posh,” Andrea replied in an email when I directed her to the AVEN website. “You just haven’t found the right guy.” A sexual throwback, that Andrea.
          What would she make of the case of Justin, my pre-grad school boyfriend? His libido had been dulled by anti-depressants for several years before we met. He confided this to me on our second date, in the spot in the conversation reserved for disclosure of outstanding warrants, ongoing lawsuits, and herpes. I lowered my eyes briefly to hide my freakish surge of hope. Those were the best eight relationship months of my life. We snuggled, nuzzled, noshed, and napped. Justin was nearly as broke as I was and we went to poetry readings and free concerts and gallery openings. He was an actor. He made pronouncements and elaborately layered vegetarian casseroles. Relieved of the cranky-making artifice of faking yearning and delight or the irritating angst of explaining and defending my own low libido, I was kind.
          However. “I can’t live like this,” he raved one night. We’d been slugging Jameson’s at a good clip, playing gin rummy, listening to Scott Japlin rags. He threw his cards on the floor. He yanked open his medicine chest. He dumped his meds into the toilet.
          I am so stupid, I thought, as he apologized for his outburst, as he tried to explain. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he said. “I don’t know who I am without my desire.” I might as well have believed that gravity was taking a holiday.
          Soon thereafter, we broke up. “I mean, you liked me like that,” he said. His shoulders were tense, as if he was barely restraining a shudder.
          In any case, my job with Aristocrat was about words on the page, arranged for a given effect (I told myself). This was concocting one cogent, verb-driven sentence after another, and I knew sentences, if not lust, multiple orgasms, and orgies. Hadn’t Blount declared my writing self brilliant? Were his copious accolades invalid because he’d pursued seduction of my fleshly self as well? And the fact that he’d ended up rejecting me – surely this too was irrelevant in the matter of my ability to craft a successful sequence of smutty sentences.

          Week 3
          In the unremarkable original, a faceless woman entertains a couple of door-to-door salesmen; two run-of-the-mill blowjobs on the couch later, they leave with twin grins pasted to their anonymous faces. After briefly considering making them Mormon missionaries, I refashioned them into a dwarf father-son extermination team who arrive at the woman’s apartment to spray for roaches. The men have handsome faces and red beards and specialize in cunnilingus. I affixed Jolene Prody’s face to the vixen and make her a wailer – she screams as her love-cave trembles with ecstasy. Her sleek up-do meets its downfall and is sticky with jizz.

          Cassandra Remell, CEO of Aristocrat Publishing called me in to review my first batch of work. I looked forward to meeting her, but as a survivor of three years of uneasy, envious, occasionally blood-drawing graduate workshops (made more problematic over time by Blount’s esteem), I was wary of critiques, even when it wouldn’t technically be of my own writing.
          Cassandra was in her mid-30’s, a 6-foot former professional volleyball player. Her office wall held a framed 8 x 10 glossy of herself on Lance Armstrong’s arm along with photos in which she accompanied lesser athlete celebrities. She told me she was proud to be a woman executive in an industry dominated by limp-dicked white men living in silk dressing robes and tacky mansions. “I’m about to produce my first film and I guarantee that all the actors will be treated with real respect.” I wondered how that respect might manifest itself. Handy spittoons for ridding oneself of mouthfuls of cum?
          She’d wielded her red pen with gusto, an editorial dominatrix. “You literary types,” Cassandra said. “Too fancy and then some.” She tapped a crimson fingernail to each set of red marks as she explained her edits. She had nixed the exterminators. “The sex and death combo is off-putting and the dwarves are just plain weird,” she said, raising a sharply plucked eyebrow. “I like the way you portray the woman, though. A sizeable percentage of our readership consists of women, so it’s good to depict female pleasure.”
          “What else?” I asked, hoping she didn’t notice the flush that was rising from my chest.
          “This isn’t erotica. Less foreplay, less setting, minimal characterization. Oh, and spanking is good. If you can add a little spanking – ”
          “Consider them spanked.”

          “Let me read something,” Andrea said.
          “No thanks.” Andrea had been ruthless in workshop. She took personally her classmates’ slack prose and wobbly plot structures and punished the hapless writers accordingly. Blount and Able, the other fiction-writing professor, kept reminding us to take each story on its own terms. What if those terms suck? Andrea would ask. No one ever answered this question to her satisfaction. She was regally beautiful and impartially ruthless or someone surely would have knocked her block off. “One editor is enough,” I said.
          “C’mon, Lindsay, I could use a laugh.” I didn’t doubt it: Andrea edited in-house benefits publications for Safeco.
          “You’re not missing anything, believe me.”
          Andrea had been prolific in school, flaunting the fact that she had to choose which stories to workshop, rather than exhausting herself the weekend before submission deadlines like most of us. In our final semester she wrote over 300 pages of a novel featuring a sexually liberated heroine and the working title Down My Spine. I’d asked her about it only once. “I’ve put that away,” she said curtly, laying to rest the subject of our “real writing.”
          “Does it pay? Is there room for advancement? I worry about you.”
          “I wish you wouldn’t.”
          “So what does next week look like for you? It’s about time for our semi-annual dinner.”
          Though we spoke at least twice a week on the phone, it was true that we rarely met face-to-face. Andrea maintained a rigorous dating schedule and I’d been on a frozen burrito budget since forever. Did I really want to exhaust my Visa with Andrea?
          “I’ve got Friday open,” I said, betting that she wouldn’t devote a prime date night to me.
          “Terrific. I’m writing it down on my calendar as we speak.”
         
          “Do you want to go out to eat?” Matthew asked.
          “I could fix you something,” Matthew offered.
          “Won’t you come to bed?” Matthew rubbed my shoulders in a preamble-ish way.
          Matthew, twenty-three, studying for the LSATs, training for his first marathon. Runner-skinny, with a nearly hairless chest, goofy baby-fine blond hair, and a high forehead – he was lovely. The same week I found the Aristocrat gig, he had sidled up to me in the reference section at the library. For a future-attorney he had sound reading credentials, and we ended up at my apartment to drink whiskey and argue about Cormac McCarthy.
          I get lonely. I long to make pots of Earl Grey instead of cups, to roast a whole chicken rather than grill another measly boneless, skinless chicken breast. And so I conveniently forget how it goes when I make the bargain of sex for companionship.
          Matthew’s roommates, holdovers from college, were rowdy and irregular and made his place less than conducive for a rigorous studying and training regimen. He had every reason to hang out at my place. Lacking the will to kick him out, I settled for being mean.
          When we met he was wearing loose corduroy pants and argyle socks and New Balance running shoes and everything about his appearance suggested sexual diffidence and low testosterone, but he was, in fact, well-endowed and driven. His appearance in my life was along the lines of a cosmic coincidence, as if he had simply walked out of the pages of one of the porn stories, smiling sheepishly and ready to fuck.
          “When you slouch like that you look stupid,” I told him.
          “I’ve got to work,” I said.
          “Could you please not leave your nasty little hairs around the bathroom sink?”
          He was incurious yet respectful of my freelance writing project. When I rebuffed him in favor of the struggle for porn-fluency, he retreated behind the bedroom door with his stack of LSAT review books. For hours all I could hear were the low murmur of TV voices and the occasional thump of Mr. Blinky jumping on and off the bed and nightstand as Matthew teased him with the hanging feather toy.

          As auto mechanic Todd seizes Toyota-driving Suzie’s fuzzy blonde bush, and half-clothed Brad, the Federal Express guy, thrusts into receiving clerk Leanne with hardly a hi-how-are-you, I felt like I was finally getting in the groove. Brad rosies Leanne’s buttocks as his truck idles. Todd snorts like a truffle-hunting pig in Suzie’s slick pubes. Eliminating the niceties was easy. In my experience, foreplay was overrated. I felt sorry for the guys I called the clinicians, the ones who hovered over my genitals – touching here and there, asking, How does this feel? How about this? Here? – as if they were dentists probing for cavities. (At least Matthew’s sex-making was brief and unstudied.)

          “Vivica starts her vacation next week. We need you to work full days,” Ms. Prody said. “Is that a problem?”
          Having misdialed, I began again, entering the phone number and security code and job code necessary to send the fax on its way to Oslo.
          “Keep in mind that the phones are much busier in the afternoon.”
          I was too relieved by this small financial blessing to be annoyed by Ms. Prody’s implication that I might not be up to the task. “Count me in,” I said.

          Week 4
          “I know what women want.” My seatmate on the bus leered at me. His hairline nearly met his bushy eyebrows and one of his front teeth was missing. “I know what you want.” He wiggled his tongue through the gap.
          I shuddered. Andrea would have had the perfect putdown or slapped him silly, but a muttered “fuck off” was the best I could do. I slid as far away from him as I could and hoped he got off before Pioneer Square, the stop closest to Aristocrat’s office.
          “These were better,” Cassandra said, although her redlines suggested not by much. “Though you have got to give up the exterminators.” I blushed, embarrassed that I’d tried to slip them in again. “There’s no room for irony in porn.” Furthermore, she nixed my infinitesimal nods to character development and was unimpressed by my attention to texture and scent.
          Surely she was wrong here. Wasn’t the particular smell of Matthew’s skin (or pheromones if you prefer the scientific explanation) – a mossy scent with a hint of basil – a big part of what drew me to nestle against his back in the middle of the night? Hadn’t the velvet smoothness of the fine black hairs on Blount’s surprisingly muscular forearms struck me as incredibly poignant?
          “You work in an office, don’t you?” Cassandra asked, handing me a fresh batch. “You showed some real flair with the FedEx thing. Let’s see what you can do with these.” I heard the challenge in her voice. I vowed to focus on the anatomical – what got inserted where and how hard.

          The afternoon phones were a breeze and Ms. Prody kept her distance. Mr. Anders and his pecker were no-shows. For a couple of days I was on a porn roll, working on more than one piece at a time. I imagined a single office building, much like the one in which I sat, with all of its elevators, storage rooms, blinds-down offices, and out-of-the-way cubicles seething with fornication. Cassandra-be-damned, I enjoyed the irony of bosses fucking their direct reports, screwing the truly-screwed atop strewn piles of annual reports and budget estimates. I made the randy janitor an aspiring screenwriter, a future Sundance winner, and had his female coworkers beg for his quicksilver tongue. A gymnastically inclined middle manager photocopied her pierced labia and folded three versions of the self-portrait into her paramour’s inbox. The photocopier repairman sniffed the glass, rubbed his erection against the temp’s tight-skirted ass.
          I knew that irony had a place in my life if nowhere else. Blount had spent a year wearing me down. He slipped tiny boxes of expensive chocolate truffles into my mailbox. He called me late at night as he drank Zinfandel in his Jacuzzi. “I’m reading you,” he’d say. “I love this part.” I could hear the water burbling. He assured me I was the real thing, his once-in-a-lifetime writing star. He told me that I filled the place in his heart that had been previously tenanted, sketchily, by his sometimes girlfriend, Nadia, a medieval music scholar who’d been abroad for 18 months on a Fulbright in Romania. I took to reading his books in the tub, too, so that when he called I could read his sentences back to him. I felt the cadence of his language beat in my blood, a second pulse. Who had ever paid me such attention?
          “Writers should always be with other writers,” Blount said, dismissing Able’s third wife, a pediatrician, as an anchor that would bring him down sooner or later. On workshop nights the two groups reunited at a local bar for debriefing and solace. Standing at the bar waiting for a fresh pitcher, I’d feel Blount’s breath on my neck and he’d tuck my hair behind my ear. “My special girl,” he said. He invited me over to his house for light suppers. Over wine we discussed literature and my bright future. We debated word choices and made sly remarks about my classmates. My previous romances seemed as insubstantial as my rough drafts.
          In March I succumbed. We kissed for hours. By April, consummation – to me, an afterthought. A springtime of breakfasts in bed and ardent declarations. In early May Blount left for a month-long residency at Ragdale and a version of our “affair” began to circulate. In June Nadia returned from Cluj. In July Blount vacillated: he loved being with me, he had a history with Nadia. He had lunch with me, he had dinner with Nadia. By the time the school year began I had been ousted, and opportunely shuffled into Able’s workshop. At department parties Nadia gloated, claiming that we would all be dear friends.
          I spent my final year in the program with a smile sutured to my face. Most of my classmates were amused by my comeuppance. I’d held myself in abeyance too long. They had not much use for me, though they let me buy them drinks. I was grateful when Andrea and I began sharing our morning hangovers at the diner. She told me about her exploits and encouraged me to get back in the saddle.
          It was a good thing I’d already completed most of my thesis stories or I’d never have finished my degree. My so-called gift took a holiday. On dark days I suspected Blount had pirated my best ideas, sucked them out of my ear while I slept. On my worst days I was sure he had simply lied to me about my work. For several months I moved words here and there and amused myself fiddling with punctuation marks. I drank a staggering amount of cheap beer. To round out the year I successfully defended my thesis and danced at Blount and Nadia’s wedding. Andrea made out with Blount’s son at the reception. There was no part of me that didn’t hurt.

          Andrea had outwitted me. I was sure that her choice of the J&M Café had more to do with man-watching than the cuisine, and by arranging to meet at 6:30 she had left herself plenty of time for a late date. I’d forgotten how disconcerting it was to sit across the table from Andrea’s ample cleavage. Looking away, I tried to imagine loggers and gold-seekers bellied up to the bar instead of perspirey clumps of ties-loosened lawyers and brokers. Andrea’s head swiveled like a security camera, taking in the crowd.
          I ordered the beet salad and a beer.
          Andrea clucked her tongue at me, ordered the pub steak. “So what’s your plan?”
          That’s all I needed – the question and the tongue-cluck – to understand that Andrea intended some kind of intervention. I parried, hoping I was wrong. “Dessert?”
          “Tell me this Lindsay, do you enjoy being poor?”
          “It has its moments.”
          “Oh really.” No one delivered sarcasm like Andrea. A few drops in the water supply and you could wipe out an entire city.
          “So what did you accomplish this week?” I asked. “Name one thing you’ve done at work this year that made your heart sing.”
          “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can keep this up indefinitely.”
          “Oh really. How much time would you give me?”
          Andrea raised an eyebrow. We both heard something in my tone. It occurred to me that Andrea and I probably weren’t friends.
          “I called you at home on Wednesday to leave a message.” She tapped her knife on her water glass. “A man answered.”
          “That’s Matthew.”
          “Boyfriend?”
          “Not exactly.”
          “Are you fucking him?”
          “Yes.”
          “Does he have a key?” she asked. “You know my rule,” she said. “No one gets a key unless they pay rent or put a ring on my finger.” She watched for my reaction. “That’s what I thought.”
          “He buys groceries.”
          “Give me a break,” Andrea said.
          “An arm or a leg?”
          Andrea’s lips curled in a sly smile. “Speaking of serious injuries....”
          At once, I knew I didn’t want to hear it. I knew before she spoke that it was Blount.
          “Your old professor friend was in a head-on collision a couple of months ago.” She studied my face. “Severe traumatic brain injury, is what they’re saying. Retrograde post-traumatic amnesia and aphasia,” she said. “Looks like Blount’s oeuvre is complete.”

          When I got home Matthew was lying on the bed wearing only a pair of red boxer shorts. Mr. Blinky was stretched out beside him.
          “You smell like beer,” he said.
          I pressed my palm to the hot plastic side of the TV. “You don’t have to stop watching whatever you were watching.”
          “Right. Because you don’t really care what I do.”
          I could hear Mr. Blinky purr as Matthew rubbed his tummy.
          “I was out with – someone I hung out with in grad school.” Andrea had picked up the dinner tab, taking the opportunity to inform me that she would be completely in the black by the end of the year – credit cards and car and student loans all paid off. I tried to imagine in the black as a damp cavern in South Dakota populated by twitchy, venomous snakes. My stomach muscles clenched. I couldn’t remember when my hardship deferral expired.
          Blount.
          “You know, Lindsay, this cat is the best thing about you.”
          “Maybe you should go home tonight,” I said. “I really don’t feel up to this.”
          “We don’t have to talk,” he said.
          Compromise followed. We fucked and then I sent him home. Sex in lieu of conversation – wasn’t that how it was done? I considered how dialogue was sparse in porn, too. There was whatever had to be said before clothes were shed, followed by moans, gibberish, and telegram-worthy exclamations. “Harder!” “There!” “Mercy!” You can be sure porn stars don’t get paid by the word.
          Melancholy ensued. I cleaned Mr. Blinky’s box and the bathroom sink. For at least half an hour I sincerely tried to be the kind of person who wasn’t consoled by talking to people who were no better off than me. Then I called Carol, a poet who was working part-time as a medical transcriptionist and teaching two sections of composition four nights a week at a community college in Portland and was married to a pessimistic, unemployed man named Art, who, after she’d helped put him through massage therapy school decided he didn’t like to touch people. I tried Leo’s cell phone next. Leo lived with his parents outside Rapid City. He used his father’s truck for a morning rural paper route and worked as a blogger for an automotive website. Most nights, he carted his laptop to the café at the local Borders and tried to write essays and book reviews. Hi, this is Lindsay, Little Miss Misery Seeking Company, call me if you’re home before midnight, love you miss you bye.
          These were my college friends, friends who’d gotten their MFAs elsewhere. They didn’t know Blount.

          Week 5
          My cloudburst of porn was a drizzle by Friday. The real people in my office grew glum each afternoon once the optimism of coffee and croissants and the midday pick-me-up of a shoe sale at Nordstrom faded. Only Billy remained cheerful, ebullient, really, over the arrival of the new Xerox 4590, which, Billy boasted, produced up to 90 copies a minute. Job applicants arrived for their appointments spattered with dread like birdshit. The admin assistants’ faces took on a Novocained stiffness. Elspeth, the temp, stopped by every few hours to whine about the poor air quality in the building. Even the resilient enameled tans of the partners took on a grey tint as they fingered their empty message cubbyholes. Sensual pleasure seemed as unlikely as polkas being broadcast over the intercom. My checkbook told an equally dour story. A stupid subtraction error and double-digit interest rates on my two maxed-out past-due credit cards meant the extra I was earning wasn’t extra at all.
          I spent Thursday night eking out the rest of the office batch. He pressed his thumb to her clit. I read sentences like this aloud, repeatedly, as if tasting soup for seasoning. But some key faculty in my brain had shut down. I couldn’t hear what was flat or trite. I couldn’t tell if it was the nature of the pressing or the clitoris itself that cried out for elaboration. Surely not the obscene, fleshy pad of the thumb?

          “Would you like to go to lunch?” Ms. Prody asked me, perhaps for the pleasure of seeing bewilderment float across my face.
          “I come here most days,” she told me as we entered the Virginia Inn.
          Like the J&M, it was historic, and an overly popular see-and-be-seen after-work spot, but at lunch only a few tables were taken and the room was aglow with natural light.
          “This is on me, by the way. Do you want a beer? I recommend the Shakespeare Stout.”
          The moment was an oasis: the waiter’s crisp, white apron, the gleaming marble tabletops, two freshly poured pints of nearly black beer crowned with creamy foam. We clicked our glasses together.
          “To what do I owe the pleasure?” I asked.
          “Drollness. How utterly unexpected,” Jolene Prody said, which I supposed was her due. We both ordered Salad Nicoise and neither of us vetoed the anchovies. I slathered butter on another piece of bread.
          “Do you know what the trouble with you is?” Ms. Prody asked. She plucked a bread heel from the basket. She spread her remaining half-pat of butter deliberately, as though coloring between the lines of the crust with a crayon. I took this to mean that she wouldn’t provide an answer unless I asked for it.
          “I don’t think I do.”
          The corners of her mouth barely betrayed amusement. “You think you’re special. Or you want to believe you’re special and you’re all wadded up with the suspicion that you may not be. You’re in danger of becoming a woman who goes to séances, or gets into genealogy, or plays blackjack on sunny afternoons at the Indian casinos.”
          I’d never considered doing any of these, of course, but I heard the truth in her words, like a pool ball hit squarely in a corner pocket.
          “Now you do me,” she said, stabbing four green beans onto her fork. “Tell me what you think the trouble with me is.”
          “I don’t think so,” I said.
          “C’mon, you know you want to.”
          “I’ll pass.” The waiter was eyeing our empty glasses. “Do you usually get another?”
          “About once a week, followed by a double-shot of espresso. Two’s the limit, though. Once I had three and had to lock myself into the conference room and take a nap on the floor.”
          I pictured her slipping off her medium-heeled taupe pumps and lowering herself onto her back on the nubby grey carpet. She’d lay stiffly with her arms at her sides, linen skirt smoothed, doing what she could to avoid telltale wrinkles. Her chest rose and fell and I could almost hear her slight snore as she slept off the Shakespeare Stout. Ms. Jolene Prody was making it hard not to like her.

          Regrettably, Andrea was the easiest person I could call to find out more about Blount.
          “C’mon. Don’t tell me you’re not over that,” she scoffed.
          “What does that mean?”
          “It was just one of those grad student-prof things. Like Winnie fucking Able and Lee sleeping with that visiting writer – the one with the limp.”
          Didn’t I have to believe she was wrong about me and Blount? “Will you please just tell me everything you know?” I asked. “Is he alright? Is he really not going to be able to write again?”
          “Like the world needs another novel about a middle class white guy’s existential angst.”
          I waited.
          She sighed. “I already told you most of what I know. He’s home, he’s able to take care of himself, but he’s not really Blount anymore. So far he hasn’t remembered anyone except Nadia and she’s flown the coop. The prognosis ain’t good. Apparently he’s in good spirits, though. I guess he doesn’t remember enough about his old life to miss it.”

          Week 6
          “Challenging,” Cassandra had said, presenting me the latest batch.
          The sentences were so ugly that they gave me a headache.
          With the office batch I’d been able, mostly, to amuse myself by imagining that the characters were acting out their class issues, easing their midweek office ennui, or trying to sleep their way to the top. This batch was populated by horny automatons taking their clothes off and assuming the positions. “Remember,” Cassandra said. “You’ve got to take this stuff on its own terms. Porn has its own paradigm.”
          Ha! I’d found the old terms challenging enough: I was ashamed and Blount wasn’t. I had been foolishly, naively romantic, but Blount had been wrong to start with me – or so it had taken me most of the last couple of years to nearly convince myself. And yet, staring at the grubby sentences on my computer screen I realized I’d been keeping a small part of myself prepared for Blount to make it right. But he would be writing no apologies or love notes, no confessions or novels. He was alone and damaged, unavailable in a way I could barely comprehend.

          I put on a stiff pot of coffee, flipped on the bank of fluorescent lights over the reception area, and filed the faxes that had come in overnight. In my first Scrabble game with Betsy in over a month I beat her soundly, scoring 65 lovely points with a strategically placed S-U-Q. On a mission to get some fax cover sheets copied, I discovered Jolene in a liplock with Billy. They embraced beside the sleek but mammoth Xerox 4590. Jolene’s bun was just a bit loosened, her periwinkle silk blouse just barely coming untucked. Billy whispered in her ear and she threw back her head and laughed. The hollow in her throat was a place to set a small speckled egg. The copier hummed and flashed and whirred, dispensing paper and the smell of hot toner. This was something like what I’d imagined for her, only better.
          An hour or so later Ms. Prody stopped by the reception desk. She was still flushed but had been reconstituted into her neat-as-a-pin self. “I see you’ve decided on astrology as a coping mechanism,” she said.
          It had finally happened – I’d neglected to switch screens. No one could miss the bright banner of primary colors announcing Rob Brezsny’s site.
          “I...I...Well, you know, it’s so messy carrying around rodent entrails.”
          “I suppose that’s true,” she said. “So what does Mr. Brezsny have to say for himself?”
          I read from the screen and waited for her smirk. “Collaborate with the goddess to enact a huge movement of lifeblood that brings sustenance from below to above.”
          “Well I certainly approve of huge movements of lifeblood, though I suspect you should wait until after lunch. I find the goddess is often particularly accessible after a Shakespeare Stout or two. Are you free?”

          Surely a writer has only so many words inside her, just as her heart will beat just so many beats before ceasing. When I formed the sentence, “He exploded in her honeypot,” those were five words I’d never get back. (I tried very hard not to hear Blount’s scolding voice here.) I wish I could say I quit for such noble reasons, but even though there’s something compelling in that line of thinking, mostly I just wasn’t very good at it and it made me feel faintly nauseous, and pathetic. From which it followed that Matthew would have to go, as well. It didn’t, he didn’t, suit.
          What would become of me? I wondered. My heart ached, and there was so much I didn’t understand. What if I constructed a little time capsule representing these past few months – tucking in a matchbook from the J&M, a coaster from The Virginia Inn, one of Matthew’s broken shoelaces, a box of paperclips filched from the office, a few pages from the Aristocrat handbook, the clipping of my “roommate wanted” ad from the Weekly – and cracked it open ten years in the future. Would I have learned enough by then to make sense of it? Would I still think I was special?
          What else did I have?