When we were first together, she had a real appetite for my work. She’d snatch up pages of manuscript, find a quiet corner and dig in. Total concentration. Wouldn’t let me interrupt her. A better reader than any editor, any fan. And then she would share her thoughts, which were always to the point and always perceptive. I don’t know what excited me more, knowing her criticism would make my work that much better, or knowing that I possessed this amazing woman. Entering her mind was almost as thrilling as entering her body.

She tended my garden and my work thrived because of her. (Maybe. No. It did.) But her influence extended beyond that. Not only did my writing grow sharper because of Elizabeth, but so did my personal style. I matured because of her. I spoke more carefully in public. I was funnier when I sensed she was listening. I dressed better. My sideburns were trimmed properly. And my friends envied me because Elizabeth was mine.

Elizabeth knows all of this. But if I ever read her the paragraph above, she’d claim she had no idea what I was talking about. She doesn’t see things the way I do and that’s what gave her so much insight to me and my work. The irony is that even though I’m delighted she’s been reading my work again, I can’t allow her to see that. It would concede too much. Concede that when I was writing the book, I was always thinking of her.

She continued her attack. “There are people called ‘empaths.’ These are people who feel emotions of others deeply. You’re the opposite, you don’t feel them at all.”

I gazed into her lovely eyes and said, “There’s no such word as ‘empath.’”

“Richard! The book is not that interesting. Can’t you see that? It’s one-dimensional. There is no insight. There’s no interplay between the characters, no subtext. I don’t know who these people are. They are disconnected from any specific circumstance or consequence. They have no context.”

“‘Context’! ‘Empathy’! You sound like a therapist on Oprah! I have a reputation for being objective. That’s my value to the world. I am unsentimental. I am honest.”

A million years ago, when Elizabeth and I were first seeing each other, sleeping together, touching each other, glorying in the unaffected experience of being near one another, she had her opinions and I hung on her every word. But in the beginning, her braininess, which is indeed considerable, only made me love her more. We would dissect my writing as part of a larger, ongoing dialogue on politics, art, philosophy, science, love, humanity, even spirituality. This was before every gesture and remark we shared had become infected with our mutual animosity. By the end, I stopped giving her my opinion on any subject whatsoever. I wouldn’t even bring up a new movie, because any remark of mine, anything at all, would trigger a nasty argument.