Strangers

stop. I had to push you constantly. And after I left Oregon and came back here, when I left you on your own again, you only continued to submit stories for a few months. Then you crawled back into your rabbit hole."
        Dom did not argue because everything the painter said was true. After leaving Oregon and returning to his home in Laguna, Parker continued to encourage Dom through letters and phone calls, but long-distance encouragement was insufficient to motivate him. He'd convinced himself that, after all, he was not a writer worthy of publication, in spite of more than a score of sales he'd racked up in less than a year. He stopped sending his stories to magazines and quickly fabricated another shell to replace the one Parker had helped him break out of. Though he was still compelled to produce stories, he reverted to his previous habit of consigning them to his deepest desk drawer, with no thought of marketing them. Parker had continued to urge him to write a novel, but Dom had been certain that his talent was too humble and that he was too lacking in self-discipline to tackle such a large and complex project. He tucked his head down once more, spoke softly, walked softly, and tried to live a life that was largely beneath notice.
        "But the summer before last, all of that changed," Parker said. "Suddenly you throw away your teaching career. You take the plunge and become a full-time writer. Almost overnight, you change from an accountant type to a risk-taker, a Bohemian. Why? You've never been clear about that. Why?"
        Dominick frowned, considered the question for a moment, and was surprised that he had not thought about it much before this. "I don't know why. I really don't know."
        At the University of Portland, he had been up for tenure, had felt that he would not be given it, and had grown panicky at the prospect of being cast loose from his sheltered moorings. Obsessed with keeping a low profile, he had faded too completely from the notice of the campus movers-and-shakers, and when the time arrived for the tenure board to consider him, they had begun to question whether he had embraced the University with sufficient enthusiasm to warrant a grant of lifetime employment. Dom was enough of a realist to see that, if the board refused tenure, he would find it difficult to obtain a position at another university, for the hiring committee would want to know why he had been turned down at Portland. In an uncharacteristic burst of self-promotion, hoping to slip out from under the university's ax before it fell, he applied for positions at institutions in several Western states, emphasizing his published stories because that was the only thing worth emphasizing.
        Mountainview College in Utah, with a student body of only four thousand, had been so impressed by the list of magazines in which he had published that they flew him from Portland for an interview. Dom made a considerable effort to be more outgoing than he had ever been before. He was offered a contract to teach English and creative writing with guaranteed tenure. He had accepted, if not with enormous delight then at least with enormous relief.
        Now, on the terrace of Las Brisas, as the California sun slid out from behind a band of white jeweled clouds, he took a sip of his beer, sighed, and said, "I left Portland late in June that year. I had a U-Haul trailer hooked to the car, just a small one, filled mostly with books and clothes. I was in a good mood. Didn't feel as if I'd failed at Portland. Not at all. I just felt… well, that I was getting a fresh start. I was really looking forward to life at Mountainview. In fact, I don't remember ever being happier than the day I hit the road."
        Parker Faine nodded knowingly. "Of course you were happy! You had tenure in a hick school, where not much would be expected of you, where your introversion would be excused as an artist's temperament."
        "A perfect rabbit hole, huh?"
        "Exactly. So why didn't you wind up teaching in Mountainview?"
        "I told you before… at the last minute, when I got there the second week in July, I just couldn't bear the idea of going on with the kind of life I'd had before. I was tired of being a mouse, a rabbit."
        "Just like that, you were repelled by the low-key life. Why?"
        "It wasn't very fulfilling."
        "But why were you tired of it all of a sudden?"
        "I don't know."
        "You must