Woman in the Window Read Online Free PDF

stuff you handle.” He laughed quietly, forcing it. “You know what I mean.”
    “Don’t start on that, Tony. It’s a tired story—”
    “Well, aren’t all my stories tired?”
    “Drop it,” she said.
    “I hear your picture in PW is very sexy. I hear it goes on to say that you are hot—”
    “Tony, I really don’t want to have this part of the discussion.”
    “Ah.”
    She closed her eyes, didn’t respond. There was nothing to say, it was all too old, too complicated, too insoluble, too ratty and dog-eared.
    “Nat, are you there?”
    “Barely. Look, I just wanted to thank you for the roses. I have, so now you can go back to work—”
    “Hey, wait a minute. Are you all right? You’re not upset? I mean, really upset?”
    “If you mean am I having an anxiety attack, no, I don’t think so. If I do I’ll give my keeper a buzz.”
    “Come on, Nat, don’t get snotty. Are you okay?”
    She heard the sudden change, the real urgency and concern.
    “Just tired all of a sudden. The champagne. Look, how’s the work going out there? All you hoped it would be?”
    “Nothing’s ever all you hope it’ll be, Nat.” There wasn’t much more to say, the conversation dwindled away. He was right, of course: nothing ever was quite the way you hoped it would be. Maybe that was the last great secret.
    They had married when Tony Rader was thirty-three, a newspaperman, and she was twenty-seven, just beginning to make her way at the Danmeier Agency. Now he was forty-two, a novelist who made his living grinding out paperback originals, action-series stuff and the odd porno here and there. He’d been working on a novel—the quintessential big novel —since college days and it remained ever in revision, always unsold. Determined not to live off the earnings of his bright, fast-rising wife, he’d let his own view of what he called his “grotty little failures” grow higher and higher, a wall between them.
    Natalie had pressed him endlessly, once they could afford it, to stop writing the pulp novels that he could turn out at the rate of one per month and instead devote all his time to what they called his A-material. But he insisted on paying his own way: if there was time left over, he’d attend to that big novel.
    The result, of course, was that he did the junk work at the expense of the good stuff. Nothing ever turned out to be all you’d hoped.
    The breaking point had come three years ago, when she went too far, tried to help. Without Tony’s knowledge she had taken the most recent revision—the first half of that big novel—along with his carefully worked-out outline of the remainder, and tried to connect it. Perhaps she knew the marriage was doomed on its present course, perhaps she knew there was nothing to lose. Maybe she thought she had a chance with the manuscript. She liked it, she found it a satisfying read, full of strong characterizations, just plain good writing. Maybe she’d been kidding herself. … She hadn’t been able to sell it. Tony had found out she’d tried.
    And that had been the end.
    With their lives and ambitions so hopelessly intertwined, there had been no way to smooth it out. Tony went on and on about being robbed of his manhood, his personal worth, his responsibility for his own life. And Natalie hadn’t been able to figure out what he was talking about. Two people loved each other, they tried to help each other out: it seemed so simple to her, so wildly complex to him. He was threatened by her success, her power over his life: boring, tedious arguments, human. And she felt that if she wasn’t allowed to make a contribution to their life together, what was the point? And he would soar off into flights of self-deprecation, rattling on about his inferiority to her other clients. …
    The old story. No survivors.
    She remembered, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, one of their last evenings together. They had gone to see Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Tony had known the music that