“One what?” She could barely find a breath for the words. When was the last time her groin had throbbed so painfully?
He looked down at Matty, who had managed to put two pieces of a wooden track together for the bright-blue train to sit on. “Distraction.”
“I have a million distractions,” she said, hearing a long-gone flirtation in her laugh, knowing that if he touched her she would not resist. “But only three children.” Usually it gave her pleasure to speak of her children—their ages, their quirks—but now they were obscuring the conversation.
“Tolstoy had thirteen children. And most of them were born while he was writing War and Peace. I’m not sure he even knew any of their names. That’s the way it has to be done. You’ve got to forget your children’s names.”
Matty was pushing the train back and forth on the short track, making a noise she knew was “All aboard!” but to anyone else sounded like “Pla!” His long sleeves were pushed up nearly to his armpits, the way he liked them. His upper lip was tucked deep into the warm interior of the lower, which kept its slippery purchase with steady upward undulations. But when he glanced up to find her studying him, the lip was released for the sake of an enormous smile. He patted the spot on the rug beside him, mouthing mamamamama without diminishing the smile. He looked just like her husband then, beckoning her, eager for her. But she did not doubt Matty, did not suspect dissembling or duplicity. Why was it so much harder to believe in her husband’s love for her? She thought again of the time he had quoted her line about snow like nests in the trees. They had been walking around a lake, the three of them, their oldest, Lydia, not more than four months old and tucked in the BabyBj?rn inside her parka. Halfway around, he had stopped and wrapped them tightly in his arms. My family, he’d said, his voice a little squeak. Then, a quarter of a mile later, he said that about the snow and the trees and she marched off and he kept insisting he hadn’t been mocking her. Now she could easily see he hadn’t been. Of course he hadn’t been. She knew now, too, that even at the time she had known he hadn’t been mocking her—but she’d needed to find something to create distance, to put a wedge between her and that small squeak of joy he’d revealed to her. Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.
She slipped off the couch down to Matty, who secured her with a meaty elbow on her thigh. The man was adding more notes to the margins. He was old again, her desire for him already a ludicrous memory. “The third book is traditionally the strongest of the early works.”
“This is my first.”
He shot her a stern, disappointed glare. “Novels in boxes are still novels.” Then he softened. “Why haven’t you been able to finish them as well?”
“As well? As well as I finished this one?” He looked hurt by her disbelief in him, and she decided to try and answer him honestly. “I don’t know.” Matty had crawled behind her and was hoisting himself up by her hair. “That hurts Mommy,” she said. “Please stop.” And when he didn’t, she felt the anger stir, the deep pool of it, always there. “I used to feel ambitious, I think, in college. My professors were so decent and respectful, nothing like the adults I had known before. They made me feel like I could do anything. Sometimes still, I get these burning electric jolts of, I don’t know, belief, I guess. I’ll write and I’ll believe. But then—” It was like those nights when she was a kid, it was just like that, her father making the jokes and her mother laughing and everything was like something to believe in and then the timer for the fish sticks goes off and we sit down and it’s all shifted completely. “Then it just stops.” There was a raw ache in her chest. “You have kids, and everything else becomes so . . . faint. And that old desire is like a cramp you wish would go away for good.”
“But those first two books. You’ve done nearly all the work. Why bury them?”
“They should be burned. They’re awful.”
“You have trouble finding the merit in your own work.”
“You do too, apparently.” She pointed to the last redsplattered page.
A look of revulsion came over him, as if he’d forgotten to whom he was talking. “Well that— That last chapter is awful. It’s disgusting. There’s no excuse for it.”
She felt a familiar weakening in her stomach muscles. She still buckled so easily under a sudden change of mood, an unexpected attack. Gone was the compassionate face, the sympathetic ear. “It is entirely unconvincing. Why do you people even try to write scenes of violence? It’s not your genre; it’s not in your nature.” He threw the book down on the floor and stood over her. “It makes absolutely no sense.” He walked to the end of the room and back. “You breach every understanding, every promise to the reader when she commits that act. Maybe someone like Bowles or Mailer could have pulled it off, but not you, honey.” He shook his glass at her. “Not you.”