It would have been easier if she had been a shrew, Howell thought. He looked at Elizabeth across the breakfast table and, as always, was moved by her pert, wholesome, all-American beauty. She looked the part of the well-brought-up young matron, so attractive in tennis clothes, so active on so many committees. It would have been easier if that were all she was. But from a basement jewelry-design workshop, she had built a mail-order business that employed sixty people, grossed some millions of dollars a year and provided the How-ells with a life-style that his own income, even in his best year as a newspaperman and author, could never have made possible. The house was large, comfortable, with a tennis court and pool. There were a Mercedes and a Porsche in the garage, and a giant station wagon for the cook to do the shopping. It was not even as if he was unemployed.

He was on the board of her business and was in charge of public relations. He had even tried to do the damned job, but he wasn’t cut out to be a flack, especially for his wife. She constantly consulted him about the business, sought his opinion, often took the advice he gave, but he knew she would have done just as well if she had never met him – better, probably.

Howell had tried once to figure out at what time of his life he had been happiest, and he reckoned it was before the Pulitzer, when he was on the ground – chasing Klansmen in Mississippi; following waning presidential candidates through the hell of grange meetings and barbecues and rubber chicken dinners in cigar smoke-filled hotel banquet rooms; living in rented cars and Holiday Inns and screwing campaign aides and girl reporters for the lack of anything better to do; impaling some grafting state politician on his long-distance records and credit card stubs; flying through thunderstorms in light airplanes toward hot stories that turned cold before the plane touched down; needling nervous governors with embarrassing questions about their relatives and political appointments; and finally, helping a black police chief in a small Georgia town nail a politically protected maniac who had been burying teen-aged boys in his backyard for more than forty years. On reflection, that had been the one that finished him as a reporter. It had brought him the Pulitzer, it had brought him the book, and it had brought him the most horrible thing of all, the daily column.

There was a moment when it might all have been avoided. He knew that moment well; it came back to haunt him whenever he began to reminisce like this. The two things had come at once. He had been Atlanta Bureau Chief for the New York Times, when the call had come. It was Vietnam, the executive editor had said, in tones conveying that something rare was being bestowed. As it was every professional soldier’s dream, it was every newspaperman’s: a war. Nearing the end, to be sure, but ahead loomed a glory never before imagined by a journalist: the opportunity to report the chaos accompanying a final American defeat. Reporters had been scrambling for the war correspondent’s mantle since the mid-sixties, but not Howell. There were other, even more important things happening at home, he said, whenever the subject had come up. And now, he was being handed the thing on a platter.

He didn’t want it. He had a comfortable life, and he didn’t want to live in tents and athe biweekly; he didn’t want to spend his evenings in Saigon bars with tiny whores draped all over him; he didn’t want to get dirty. But there was more: at the bottom of him, undermining all the ambition and aggressiveness, he was, he knew, flat scared. He’d been brave and foolish too often already, and he felt he’d used up whatever luck he might have coming to him. He didn’t want to get shot at, and especially, he didn’t want to get shot. He didn’t want to die in the mud with his belly full of grenade fragments; he didn’t want to scream his way to the ground in a burning helicopter; he didn’t want to turn to jelly, as he knew he would, when the shooting started. He didn’t want to go, and he couldn’t turn it down. That would have finished him; he would never have lived it down.

And then, when he had said he would go, salvation came. The Atlanta Constitution had called. They needed a name, and he filled the bill. He could do pretty much what he wanted; he told them he wanted a column, and, somewhat to his surprise, he got it. The money was great; he was leaving the Times for something better; and he wouldn’t die in a jungle.

But he hadn’t counted on what the column would do to him. Shoveling a thousand words a day into the omniverous maw of that page-two killer, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, while all the time eating rich lunches, wearing Ralph Lauren suits and trooping from Kiwanis to Rotary to Lions Club for after-dinner speeches at five hundred bucks a pop – all that had wrung him dry in just under three years, had left him ripe for the editorial arguments and final fistfight that had blown him out of newspapers for good. At least he’d got out with his reputation, before the column had lost its bite. In between the humour pieces and the human interest stuff, there had been enough first rate investigative stories to stamp him firmly in his readers’ minds as a first-rate reporter. Since then, though, in spite of the crutch of novel writing, he had been good for nothing but lunch and tennis every day at the club with rich mens’ sons who couldn’t make it in even their fathers’ businesses.

“Look,” he said. “It’s only three months.”

“Can’t you do it here?” she asked, knowing he had already decided he wouldn’t.

“I think it would do me… do us both good if I just lock myself in up there and get this out of the way.”

“I’ll miss you so, Johnny.” She meant it, too.

He shook his head. “I haven’t been much use to you around here,” he said.

“I don’t mind about the sex, really I don’t. You’ll get over it. Maybe if you saw a doctor… ”

He flushed, felt cornered. He hadn’t meant to open that particular subject.

“You don’t have to sleep over the garage, you know. I know I may not be the greatest thing in the world in bed, but…”

“Oh, it’s not your fault, Liz, really it’s not. Look, it was fine as long as I had work of my own. We had some good years when I was still on the paper, and a good year when I was working on the novel. It’s just been the past year, when nobody wanted the book, when I couldn’t come up with something else. Well, now there’s something else. I just want to go away and get this job done, then I can come back fresh, and…”

“You’re not coming back, are you Johnny?” Tears welled up and rolled down her face.

He put a hand on her cheek. “Don’t do that, please, Lizzie. I’m not running out, really I’m not.” He hoped he sounded more convinced of that than he felt. “I’m just no good to you the way things are now, and maybe the time away and the work will put things into some sort of perspective for both of us. We both need the time.” How many times had that line ended a marriage, he wondered.

“I love you, Johnny.”

“I know, I know.” He didn’t return the sentiment; he didn’t know whether it would be a lie, and he didn’t want to lie to her.

“I wish there were something else I could have done, Johnny.” She meant it, she really did, and that made it hurt all the more. “I wish you could have found a way not to feel such guilt about the money.”

Picking his way through the lovely, suburban streets, he wondered how different things might have been if he had gone to Southeast Asia and lived; if he had married a girl who would have been content to live on a reporter’s salary. But when the Pulitzer and the book had happened, who could have resisted the chance to editorialize, to pontificate in a daily column? And who could have resisted the poised and beautiful girl who had been so drawn to the newspaperman? Not many, perhaps, but a wiser man would have been a better politician in a newspaper empire, would have said less of what he thought, would have been less of a pain in the ass to management. A more temperate man would have thought before chucking it all for the risky game of writing fiction. A less volatile man wouldn’t have burned so many bridges. Downtown in an office building there was still an executive editor with three capped teeth and a permanently bruised ego.