It was not a conventional arrangement. To be honest, it wasn’t how I had pictured myself settling down, but then I hadn’t pictured meeting someone like Lil. At work it was general knowledge that I was living with my girlfriend. I got plenty of cat-and-canary grins from the stiffs in my department, not to mention a few dark looks from the secretaries. Everyone thought I was putting one over. Mr. Hardham himself suggested for the sake of appearances that I wear a ring, but I have never been very interested in what other people think of me. From the beginning, I knew that no one else could make the photographs Lil made, while what I was good at—namely, book promotion—was something plenty of other slobs could do just as well. I suppose it did create a hierarchy in my mind.

As for housekeeping, it was obvious to me that Lil was working as hard as I was, so I did not see why she should do things like laundry or dusting, when at the end of my day I certainly had no desire to do them. I suppose that made us unusual, given the times, but honestly it just felt like common sense.

During the week, I did not see much of her: just the few hours between when I came home and Sam went to bed. This is one area where I made concessions for Lil being an artist since, all things being equal, I would have liked more time with her, but it was not as if I hadn’t known what I was getting into. By the time I finished putting Sam to bed, Lil would be gone. Sometimes, after reading or watching television, I would join her in the darkroom. That was how I came to understand how many pictures she really took. Working with a fixed focus the way she did was not easy. Plenty of days, Lil chose not to print anything. This meant that the only way to see what she had accomplished was to be with her while she made her contact sheets: one contact sheet per roll of film, thirty-six exposures per roll, two to five contact sheets per day. Do the math and that means anywhere between seventy-two and a hundred and eighty shots. Lil would look at each image through her loupe. If she saw something she liked, she would circle it with a red grease pencil and put the sheet aside. On a good day, she might circle three images. She stored the rejected contact sheets in boxes. Our hallway was half bookshelves, half boxes. The shelves were for my books. The boxes were for the thousands of photos that never made it past the size of a matchbox.