Leviathan by Paul Auster Page A

moment that happened, the sump pump shut off, and in less than an hour the cellar was flooded. I spent the better part of the night knee-deep in cold rain, working by flashlight as I bailed out the water with buckets. When the electrician arrived the next afternoon to assess the damage, we learned that the entire electrical system had to be replaced. That cost several hundred dollars, and when the septic tank gave out the following month, it cost us more than a thousand dollars to remove the smell of shit from our backyard. We couldn’t afford any of these repairs, and the assault on our budget left us dizzy with apprehension. I stepped up the pace of my translation work, taking any assignments that came along, and by midspring I had all but abandoned the novel I had been writing for the past three years. Delia was hugely pregnant by then, but she continued to plug away at her own job (free-lance copyediting), and in the last week before she went into labor, she sat at her desk from morning to night correcting a manuscript of over nine hundred pages.
    After David was born, the situation only grew worse. Money became my single, overriding obsession, and for the next year I lived in a state of continual panic. With Delia no longer able to contribute much in the way of work, our income fell at the precise moment our expenses began to go up. I took the responsibilities of fatherhood seriously, and the thought of not being able to provide for my wife and son filled me with shame. Once, when a publisher was slow in paying me for work I had handed in, I drove down to New York and stormed into his office, threatening him with physical violence unless he wrote out a check to me on the spot. At one point, I actuallygrabbed him by the collar and pushed him against the wall. This was utterly implausible behavior for me, a betrayal of everything I believed in. I hadn’t fought with anyone since I was a child, and if I let my feelings run away from me in that man’s office, it only proves how unhinged I had become. I wrote as many articles as I could, I took on every translation job I was offered, but still it wasn’t enough. Assuming that my novel was dead, that my dreams of becoming a writer were finished, I went out and started hunting for a permanent job. But times were bad just then, and opportunities in the country were sparse. Even the local community college, which had advertised for someone to teach a full load of freshman composition courses at the paltry wage of eight thousand dollars a year, received more than three hundred applications for the post. Without any prior teaching experience, I was rejected without an interview. After that, I tried to join the staffs of several of the magazines I had written for, figuring I could commute down to the city if I had to, but the editors only laughed at me and treated my letters as a joke. This is no job for a writer, they answered back, you’d just be wasting your time. But I wasn’t a writer anymore, I was a drowning man. I was a man at the end of his rope.
    Delia and I were both exhausted, and as time went on our quarreling became automatic, a reflex that neither one of us could control. She nagged and I sulked; she harangued and I brooded; we went days without having the courage to talk to each other. David was the only thing that seemed to bring us pleasure anymore, and we talked about him as if no other subject existed, wary of overstepping the boundaries of that neutral zone. As soon as we did, the snipers would jump back into their trenches, shots would be exchanged, and the war of attrition would begin all over again. It seemed to drag on interminably, a subtle conflict with no definable objective, fought with silences, misunderstandings, and hurt, bewilderedlooks. For all that, I don’t think that either one of us was willing to surrender. We had both dug in for the long haul, and the idea of giving up had never even occurred to us.
    All that changed very suddenly in the