He was afraid they weren’t going to buy it. He was afraid they were, and he realized intuitively that his life was going to alter drastically and he didn’t know whether he wanted it to or not.

Oh, Jesus, he said.

Open it, she said. Oh, David, I told you so. I told you you were good.

The letter was from an editor who had liked the book and was full of cautious enthusiasm for it, though they did not feel that the book was the sort that would be a great commercial success they were certainly impressed with his ability and they felt he had the potential to become an important writer.

In effect they were willing to gamble a five-thousand-dollar advance on the book. If Binder was amenable, a contract would be drawn up.

Binder was more than amenable, and the next two years seemed a curious dreamlike altering of time, as if his life was a clock running a shade too fast. The book was published to a virtual world of praise. It was almost unprecedented for a first novel to be so well received. The only note of reservation came from a reviewer for the New Yorker, who, though giving the book grudging praise, thought Binder dealt with the morbid and the dark shadings of life perhaps a bit too lovingly. Binder barely noticed this sentence at the time, but two years later it would creep up from his subconscious and come back to haunt him like a curse or a Gypsy seer’s halfforgotten prophecy fulfilling itself.

The book didn’t sell well. In fact it barely earned back the advance, but it went on to win the Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year, and coincidentally the not inconsiderable monetary sum of ten thousand dollars.

Binder was ten feet high, and he guessed for a Tennessee boy he was chopping in mighty tall cotton. He and Corrie had a better address now and were even thinking about moving back to Tennessee. They had more time. Binder had dropped out of night school. He had decided he didn’t want to be a schoolteacher after all, and on days when he felt he needed a little something to cheer himself up he had only to drive out to the Stewart-Warner plant in the industrial park and listen to the sound of metal perpetually flaying metal and watch the folks file in and out with their lunchboxes in their hands, and know he didn’t have to.

He was working on his second novel, and when he finished it he boxed it up and consigned it to the US Mail. He thought it had gone pretty well and he took a few days off for a welldeserved rest and waited for the check to come rolling in.

There was silence for a time, as if he had walked onto a pier and dropped a box into Lake Erie or dispatched it to the voids of windy space. Then finally he heard. Up there in New York they did not think the book went quite as well as he had: in short, there were faults. Structural faults, stylistic faults, the ending didn’t work. And perhaps another title?

He sat rereading the manuscript with the cold clarity of distance and he was reading it with eyes that seemed to have the scales only recently fallen from them. What a ghastly piece of shit, he thought, possessed with a sardonic sense of amusement, as if someone else had written it. Poor, deformed thing from its mother’s womb untimely ripped. Looking at it now he realized he had written it out of the sheer necessity of stringing words together. Having written one novel he felt compelled to write another, whether he had anything to write about or not. Hadn’t the reviews called him a novelist? He began revising it, but it seemed cold and lifeless, as dead as a letter turning up with a postmark ten years gone. He sat staring at the typewriter but his mind wouldn’t work. Someone had unplugged it, had left the switch on, and the battery had run down, he thought.

The beginning of summer in Chicago that year was fiercely hot. You could feel the sidewalks leaking back the sun through the soles of your shoes. The Windy City lay breezeless and heatbenumbed. Binder took to sitting in a bar on Clark Street and watching the Cubs play baseball on TV and drinking ice-cold beer. The Cubs weren’t having that great a year either.

Along the way he had acquired an agent.