"Pity. One of your saving graces has always been your sense of humor. Without that, you would often have been... well, frankly insufferable."

He stared at her. "You're certainly making it easier for me to give you the sack without remorse. What did you mean when you said that Gold carried me through the Great Drought?... If anything."

"Mr Gold would never tell you himself, but I think you should know. Do you recall how you managed to survive the lean years when you were unable to produce material you considered-and quite rightly-worthy of your name?"

"Of course I do. I lived on a trickle of residuals, foreign rights, reprints-that sort of thing. A trickle from which Gold wrung his percentage, you can be sure. So what?"

"There wereno residuals."

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"No residuals, no foreign rights, no reprints. You were, not to put too fine a point on it, a drug on the market."

Matthew was silent for a long minute. "Are you trying to tell me Gold sent that money out of the goodness of his heart?"

"He sent it because he had faith in your talent. And because he was sorry for you."

"Sorryfor me?" He stood up, and thick hangover blood thudded painfully behind his eyes. "That presumptuous son of a bitch was sorry for me?Well, I'll give him something to be sorry about. When he calls this afternoon, I'll fire his ass!"

Miss Plimsoll tilted her head to the side. "No... I don't... think so."

Matthew's face stretched with mock wonder. "I beg your pardon?"

"I don't think you're going to give Mr Gold the sack, sir." A ghost of a smile creased the corners of her eyes. "Any more than you are going to give it to me." She rose and opened her oversized attache case. As she drew out a large stack of manuscript, some rumpled and old, she said, "Perhaps you have wondered why I began carrying about so cumbersome a case a couple of months ago."

"Frankly, I hadn't spent much time worrying about it."

"No, I suppose not. To do so would imply an interest in others."

"If you're accusing me of not staying awake nights, pondering the hidden implications of the weight and size of your attache case, then I plead guilty. And I assure you that— O-oh! Wait a minute! I get it. You've written a novel! And you want me to help you get it published, as conscience money for giving you the sack. Don't believe that crap about everybody having a novel somewhere inside them, Plimsoll. There are two kinds of people in the world: the storytellers and the audience members. And you, Plimsoll? You're an audience member. You are, in fact, the prototypic audience member. No, I don't want to read your manuscript. I'm not interested in the refined wordsmithery of someone who, has never lived, never sinned, never loved!"

"Oh, I have loved, sir," she said, as she carefully evened the pages of the manuscript by tapping them on her desk.

"No! Don't tell me! Plimsoll in love? It's an image as arousing as a hip bath in ice water. And what poor bastard was the recipient of this uniquely modest gift?"

"You, sir."

"Me?"

She drew a shallow breath. "But that's neither here nor there. What I want you to do now is to read at random from this material. I think you'll find it very-"

"Me?You've been in love with...?" His eye fell on the top sheet of the manuscript. "Wait a minute! What's going on here? This is mywork!" It was indeed two drafts of his latest novel: his own, full of X-ings-out and penciled marginalia, and Plimsoll's neatly typed copy. She had evidently disobeyed his instructions to burn his originals after copying them, to protect his reputation as a natural stylist whose first draft was practically galley perfect-a facet of the Griswald myth that he had not originated, but one he perpetuated.

"Now, Matthew, why don't you sit down and read through some of this manuscript while I make us-"

"Matthew?"

"-while I make us a nice pot of tea."

"I don't drink tea!"

"Well, I'll make some for myself, then. No, on second thought I'll have a glass of your excellent burgundy."

"My burgundy?"

"Just read the manuscript, Matthew. Whatever limitations you may have as a man of compassion, I have complete faith in you as a critic."

While Plimsoll sat at her desk, sipping the wine, her long legs crossed at the ankle, Matthew read, scanning at first with impatient irritation; but his frown deepened as he read with growing-and chilling-fascination. She had made many small deletions and adjustments, an adjective pruned here, a more precise verb substituted there, no one change significant in isolation, but in the mass they made a lean paragraph out of one that had been merely thin, or converted a redundancy into evocative foreshadowing, or transformed the obscure into the ambiguous. He could not quite put his finger on the overall change brought about by her culling and honing, but it had to do with increased celerity. If a minute spent reading his original draft were taken as a norm, compared, for instance, to a heavy, eighty-second minute spent wading through Faulkner's glutinous word-bogs, or stumbling through Henry James's involute parentheticals, then Plimsoll's revision could be said to have swift, light, forty-second minutes. In sum, what the world recognized as the Griswald style existed in Plimsoll's copy and was absent from his original.

He set the manuscript down and stared out the window, his eyes defocused, his stomach cold. For years he had half-known, if never really faced, the fact that he lacked most of the qualities he admired in his characters. He had never really been devoted to the political causes he so pugnaciously espoused, he was too wrapped up in self to care about the anonymous Wad; even his love-making was based more on tactic than emotion; and as for his much-vaunted physical courage? He had climbed those mountains with the aid of guides; he had shot those lions with a backup man covering him with a Holland and Holland; he had made sure he was often photographed, rough and unshaven, with guerrilla fighters, but he had written his famous war coverage at secondhand, closer to hotel comforts than to battlefield dangers. For years he had admitted to himself that if he were not a good writer, he was nothing at all. And now...

"I think I know what you're feeling, Matthew," Miss Plimsoll said softly.

"Do you? Do you really? What a consolation it is to realize that Plimsoll knows how I feel."

"This is something you must understand. I could not have written those novels and stories alone. It's you who have the creative imagination, the experience, the sense of pain and laughter, the pantheon of unique and fascinating characters."

"I'm delighted to have contributed a little something."

"Yours is the voice. I am merely the interpreter. What you lost during the Great Drought was merely... style. And that's the only thing I have provided: just style. Please don't feel miserable, Matthew. We have been a team for some years now, a belle equipe,but it's always been you who possessed the inspiration and the dynamic energy, and I've admired those things in you... loved them, actually."

"I don't want to hear about it," he said wretchedly.

"I know this is unpleasant for you. You've never been exactly avid to face the truth about yourself. So it's inevitable that this truth comes with pain... as it comes to the heroes of our novels."

He reached forward and rubbed his palms along the sides of his battered old typewriter in a kind of tactile farewell.

"I was content with my invisible role," she continued. "I even cherished helping you the more for the knowledge that you were unaware of it, and happy to be so. And I had every intention of going on like that forever. But I have seen something growing in your attitude towards me for the past month or so." She smiled thinly. "You're nothing if not transparent, Matthew."