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creditors were becoming impatient.
    Roz sighed. She yawned unhappily, her large breasts drawn into sharp relief against her red jersey shirt. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was hell being a writer, she thought. It was even hell being married to a writer. Oh, it was fine when the good times came—she thought of that time when Warner Brothers bought Naked By Moonlight out of the blue and dropped thirty-five thousand dollars into Linc’s lap. And then the trip to Europe, and the new car, and—
    Those were the good times. And not having to commute, not playing a role in the Ulcer Gulch rat-race, that was good. Being your own boss, working your own hours, planning your own life—those were good things. But the ad men and the PR boys didn’t have to worry about slumps. They could get laid off, they could get dumped with little ceremony, and their jobs were by no means secure. But they never had the awful feeling of a writer in a slump, the feeling of a man trying to draw water from a dry well. The horrible feeling when there were no words to type on sheets of paper, no words at all.
    They could go dry, or stale, and the money still came in every week. They knew just how much was coming in, could budget expenses and plan ahead and know where the money was coming from. They might overspend themselves, but at least they had the chance to plan.
    Not so with Linc. Not so, because he never knew what month would be a good month financially and what month would be a catastrophe. Even without a slump, they could find themselves in a cash bind, with a host of sales in the Soon-To-Be-Paid file and no dough in the checking account. And when a long slump hit—
    There were no children. That kept a certain ceiling on expenditures. But there were the mortgage payments on the house, the monthly payments on the car, the insurance payments, the gas bill, the electric bill, the taxes, the phone bill, a whole bevy of fixed costs before they even got around to putting food on the table. And you couldn’t cut your personal expenses too far. You had to keep up a front for the neighbors, had to make a certain pretense of economic security. You had to entertain now and then, had to find money somewhere to buy expensive liquor for other people to drink. Whether you could afford it or not.
    No money coming in, and money always going out. Linc was advanced to the hilt. He owed his agent three thousand dollars, and was now doing his damnedest to wangle another thousand. That meant four thousand dollars’ worth of work before he would see more money. Two books, say.
    And the slump was still going strong.
    She ground out her cigarette in the grass, sucking in a mouthful of air and struggling to keep the tears back. God, how she loved Linc! She never regretted marrying him, not even in the bad times, especially not in the bad times. These were the times when he needed her, when she had to reassure him that the slump would end, that every cloud had that silly silver lining, that he would write his way out of debt and out of whatever weird and unknowable personal hell was causing the slump in the first place. He needed her, needed the love and consolation she could give him.
    And she needed him.
    Emotionally, because helping her man and sticking by her man were things which made Roz aware of her own essential femininity. And physically as well, because she was a passionate woman, a woman who surrendered her whole being to the sexual embrace of the man she loved. She had been a virgin until Linc made a woman of her in a sagging bed at a rundown motel across the Putnam County line, and since that night no other man had ever held her in his arms. She needed Linc, needed him most of all during the bad times when the slump was at its worst and the typewriter was silent and the bank balance dwindled away.
    Which was markedly unfortunate.
    Because when Lincoln Barclay had a slump, he had a slump. And such a slump was more than a professional