What looked like blood --- but later revealed itself to my home-made barbecue sauce --- was splashed over my computer monitor and keyboard, splashed onto the torn remains of the pages ripped from my printer and strewn all over the living room carpet.

When I passed into my bedroom --- another scene of carnage --- I found my bedclothes splattered also with the blood-like barbecue sauce, the pillows slashed, feathers everywhere, and blood-red on the wall was scrawled:

All of my original hypotheses had been wrong. It was much simpler than a temporal anomaly. Vera had left me.

The two bottom drawers of my chest were still extended and empty. The empty space in my closet grinned back at me, a hideous gap in an injured smile.

Well, this was not the first time I had gone through a break-up, only one of the more dramatic. That is why God invented housekeepers.

Before you decide the worst about me because I could provoke such a violent reaction from Vera, or because I employ a domestic, let us be candid. You know nothing about Vera thus far; she could have been a grade-A bitch. How many apartments have you trashed? And you know very little about me, as yet. Don't make the Politically Correct assumptions about me because I have calculated the value of my own time and determined that it should not be employed cleaning my toilet bowl, vacuuming the carpets, or doing laundry. I am a novelist, after all.

If you had one shred of compassion in your miserable soul, you would be more concerned with the fact that Vera, to whom I had devoted the last ten months of my life, Vera, who everyone believed would make me an Honest Man, has left me. My maid would be the last thing on your mind!

COFFEE WITH HARRY:

"How come your apartment smells like barbecue?"

"My apartment does not smell like barbcue."

"Jack, your apartment smells like barbecue. What happened?"

"Consuelo can't come in until Wednesday. She has other clients. Vera had a little party on her way out."

"You broke up with Vera?"

"No. Not exactly. She left me."

"You selfish prick!"

"What? Am I hearing something wrong here? She left me!"

"I'm sure you deserved it, you jerk."

"Gee, Harry, thanks for your support."

"You know what I mean, asshole," Harry said. "Nobody can trust you. I drink my tea out of a saucer, I scratch my balls, it shows up in one of your books.

"You take a scalpel to everybody comes in contact with you. You have this neurotic obsession with exposing all our fuckin' lives. You're like a damned succubus or something!"

"I love you, too, Harry."

"Fuck you."

Was Harry right? I don't know.

Everything I ever learned, everything I feel, says you should write about what you know. What do I know better than my friends and lovers? It's not like I hide from them or anybody else that I'm a writer. What do they expect?

Harry slurped the beige cream and coffee that had dribbled over into it from his saucer. He placed the saucer back on the raised counter which separated my kitchen and dining area, leaned back on his barstool. "So what you gonnah do now?" he asked.

"Whaddaya mean?" I asked.

"You gonnah try to get back together with Vera?"

"Are you nuts? The bitch thrashed this place! It's gonnah cost me eighty bucks to get the smell outtah here, probably another three hundred to get the gunk out of my computer!"

"So it's all money to you."

"No, dick-lick, it's all about the fact that she went to a helluva lot of trouble to let me know that she was too pissed off to come back. I don't need that kind of Drama Queen shit in my life."

"Whatever.... So who you gonnah hit on now? Elise? Peggy?"

"You done with your coffee?"

Robert Burns wrote: "..Would some power the Giftee g'ie us
To see ourselves as others see us..."

I have always wanted that power. After my morning coffee with Harry I wanted it even more.

Within the last twenty-four hours Vera had called me a dick and Harry had called me a selfish prick. What great recommendations.

It's only natural that when a woman dumps you, you do a little soul-searching, I told myself. I tried to look back over the course of my ten months with Vera and figure out how things had gone so wrong.

On our second date, I took Vera to see "The Commitments." One fun, feel-good movie I thought. But it turned out to be weird because Vera had never been into soul music or R & B. She had never heard Aretha Franklin's "Dr. Feelgood" before, which floored me. Where had this woman been? On the moon?

It worked out. It gave me the opportunity to buy her a lot of great classic soul music. But it also pointed something out: the kind of women I date. I mean, I'm not exactly Paul Newman, and the women I have to choose from certainly aren't Lauryn Hill. Actually, my women fall into a couple of groups: those with a pulse, and those wtih a pulse and the ability to read.

I don't spend too much time or money on the first group. My problem is that with the second group I'm always getting bored. Think about this: I create some damned fine women in my novels. The calibre of women you'd expect to carry on the kind of snappy repartee associated with Bogart and Bacall, Tracey and Hepburn, or Beatty and Benning. Then, here in the real world, I have to settle for women who you would hardly consider a suitable chess partner, let alone count on to carry the other half of a discussion of the Gnostic heresy. So, if they have a pulse and they are literate, I feel like I'm already way ahead of the game. For a couple months, I do. Then I get bored. I long for the "company" of the women in books --- my books or anyone else's, it doesn't matter --- as long as they have some flair or mystery about them. And --- you guessed it! --- that short attention span of mine is a sure relationship killer.

Add to that Harry's complaint: that I cannibalize the life around me, and the first equations in my doom-formular become mathematically clear.

I can see in my mind's eye now the outlines of those storm clouds: Vera's eyes would narrow suspiciously. She would wonder where I had taken some part of her and surreptiously assigned it to a page. When she went this way, the narrowed amber eyes, the angular features of her face, gave her the look of some mad civet cat. She would curl her thin legs up under her body on the mauve sofa, distractedly tuck some of the auburn hair back behind the pale shell of her ear. Her upper lip would take on a glistening patina of fuzzy perspiration. She was distrusting me, suspecting me of betraying my promise never to write about her.

Listen to this: "Jack, you know what your problem is?"

"Which one, Vera?"

"Don't be a wise-ass. I'm talking about this thing inThe Atlantic. Listen to yourself:

"Grant was the kind of guy who knew more about life than you ever could. How did you find this out? You found it out because Grant would tell you himself within ten minutes of meeting you. There would be Grant, a perfect stranger, telling you how his life was better than yours because he hardly had to work, had figured out all of existence, had a wife more beautiful than you would ever have, and probably had forgotten more than you would ever know. You learned this all within the first ten minutes, before you even got to know Grant's name.

"Later on, once you had learned his name and would never forget it, you would learn that nothing important happened in the world in which Grant was not involved, and that --- in fact --- if anything important was happening in the world, it certainly was not anything you were involved in, as you were not Grant."

"I'm waiting," I said.

"How could you be so cruel?" Vera demanded. "What is Walter supposed to think when he reads this?"

"That it's a character, Vera. Just another of my characters. Sure, there are some attributes of Walter in Grant, but Walter's so full of himself he'll never see them."

"That's how you rationalize it, Jack? That we're all so dumb we never see when you're ridiculing us for our weaknesses?"

"I promised I'd never write about you, Vera, and I haven't. So don't use 'we' here. You see Walter in that character Grant because you can see Walter in ways he can't see himself, period. IF he could see himself, he wouldn't be Walter, now would he?"

"You have an answer for everything, don't you?" Vera accused me.

Looking back, I see that's how it all started to crumble. I had promised Vera I would never write about her as long as we were together, but she must have secretly suspected that I was writing about her on the sly. I was not, but I can understand now that she was too suspicious of me to accept that. Vera could not separate the parts of people I appropriated to create my characters from the actual, living and breathing people themselves. Some people can't.

So the next conversation, the one which would spread the toxic waste into our relationship irrevocably, was destined to occur.

Vera came out to the living room, where I was pecking away at the keyboard. Steam was rising from her, almost visibly. She held pages she had taken from my printer in her trembling, blue-veined left hand.

"Who is she?" she hissed.

I sighed. Stopped typing. Looked up into her narrowed amber eyes. "Who is who, Vera?"

"Who is this new whore-bitch-slut of yours, you dick!"

"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about, Vera."

"Harlow Divine! Who is she?"

"Oh her. Harlow is me, Vera."

A mocking laugh. "You really expect me to believe that, Jack? Get real for a second! Since when are you a man-hating, man-baiting, coke-snorting stripper?"

"It's not as outrageous as you might think. Writers are whores. It's just a way of me getting some of my anger out about it."

"So you're not fucking her?"

"Vera, I've got some pressing deadlines back on Planet Earth. Can we talk about this some oth---"

"Fuck you, Jack! Don't play your snappy retorts game with me! I know that Harlow is some new slut you're fucking! Why can't you be man enough to admit it?"

There it was. A complete lack of the suspension of disbelief. Everyone I write about simply must be based on some real person. They are; but Harlow Divine really was me. Try as I might, I knew while she railed and cursed me, I would never in a million y ears convince Vera of that truth....

So I let her scream imprecations at me until she exhausted herself. I held her in my arms as she expelled her tears. I never suspected that I would look back on this episode as our breaking point, the last big fight before she trashed our apartment and left me.