It was a nightmare now, engulfing him, making him want to die. But it hadn't been that way at the start. It had started glowingly, a new way of life opening up, a bright prospect of fulfillment stretching out before him with nothing at all to mar it.
There was nothing depressing or unwelcome about the acclaim of the really important critics, the substantial literary recognition he'd only pretended to despise in moments of immature cynicism. And it was not tormenting even now to go back and dwell on all the financial rewards which were showered on brilliant young novelists who were both serious and widely popular writers—rewards which had been almost within his grasp.
Success had not been a prospect reserved for the future alone—a prospect veiled in uncertainty that might not materialize for months or years, or turn out, in the end, to have been completely illusionary. Success had swept so close that it had taken on an aspect of immediacy. He had felt its invisible pulse-beats all about him, had glimpsed the bright fluttering of its wings. And with it had come an undreamed of happiness, something he'd hardly dared to hope for.
A woman he could worship, and adore and build a shrine around. A woman at the center of his life—not just at the periphery. A woman who did not think him awkward and self-conscious and ridiculously helpless in a practical way. A woman who knew what artists, writers, musicians—all creative people—were really like. A woman who didn't want to mother him, because she knew he had no real need to be mothered, that he had great inner strength and needed only to be understood and accepted for the kind of person he was.
He could not avoid asking himself, even now, just how much finding out the truth about her had changed him. Was he still the same person, thinking the same thoughts, capable of acting toward others in the same way? Or was he a different person entirely, thirty years older than the twenty-five years which made him, in the eyes of the world, still little more than a boy by actual year-count.
He felt incredibly old and drained—a man of seventy couldn't have felt any older. But no man of seventy could have been torn as he was by emotions so deeply rooted in despair. Both explosive violence and its tormenting aftermath of black despair could only be experienced in their full intensity by the young. In old age such emotions could still be destructive to body and mind, but never in quite so terrible a way.
He had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to pick up the typewriter which had helped to betray him and hurl it with violence to the floor. But instead he stood rigid, unmoving, before the room's one small window, with its bleak, brick-wall outlook until time became fluid, backward-sweeping, and the present less real than a certain morning, almost three weeks before, when she had returned the manuscript he'd sent her with words of glowing praise, and a suggestion that he make a few minor changes which did not distress him at all.
"One of those big, brown envelopes, Ralph. Looks like another one of your stories came back. Ralph, you awake? Want me to open it and tell you—like you asked me to do the last time? You said it might bring you luck. It sure sounded silly to me. You can't change what's in a letter after it's been mailed, silly. But I'll open it if you want me to."
The knocking which had preceded the voice had been loud, insistent. It had continued for ten full seconds, but curiously enough, it was the voice itself which awakened him, even though he could not distinguish the words and their significance was completely lost on him.
He sighed and rolled over on his side, drawing the sheets up more tightly about his naked shoulders. Then, abruptly and almost instantly, he cursed under his breath and threw the sheets back, reviling himself for his lack of self-discipline in succumbing to drowsiness at ten in the morning.