My second wife was, at this time, my first wife’s opposite: blonde, energetic, self-sufficient. She owned, she ran, she managed, quite successfully, too, since she was a damn good businesswoman, a sort of gift shoppe with the extra “p” and the fancy “e” at the end of it. It was the sort of place you bought, when there was nothing left to buy, such items as goldplated eyebrow tweezers, things like that, and of course to have a woman who could take care of herself, who was, attractively, on her own, as they say, and did not collapse Mondays and Fridays into blind, self-destructive tears was what, at the time, I thought I needed. Someone I did not have to perpetually buoy up, comfort, lead out of dark alleys. Someone I did not have to medicate, someone I did not have to have pumped out not knowing if the damn pills she’d taken were an overdose or not, someone I did not have to wheedle until my own nerves were on the point of shredding.

Well: there it was, the irresistible contrast. And it was a big affair, too, no doubt about that. She made me feel quite the stud. Sex, like the tweezers in her shoppe, was a luxury item. I began to imagine I was better off than I’d been. She flattered me, too, of course, about my own abilities. I actually made an effort, under her prompting, to finish the incomplete thing that lay in my desk, and then, one day, she moved into the Cheshire Towers, too.

Three floors down. Very convenient. I went out almost every night for a prolonged purchase of a pack of cigarettes. Talk about pursuit: she was in full cry, and I wasn’t even running any more.

About this time, my luck is cyclic, my bad luck is cyclic too, I got my first job with one of the big studios. I was about to leave for the Coast. My first wife now had to leave the apartment. My second wife promptly sold her gift shoppe with the extra “p” and the fancy “e.” I bought her a firstclass ticket on an airline of her own choice. I was about to depart for the land of the everlasting avocado when my first wife decided she did not care to risk the career which she did not have to anything so insubstantial as a prop-driven stratoliner so our plans were altered and we went by train. My second wife decided that four days in a compartment in the Superchief with my first wife was too large a risk to expose me to so she promptly refunded her ticket on the airline of her own choice and acquired a compartment, too, on the Superchief, pocketing, of course, the substantial difference in the fare, and we all rattled happily off together into the glowing and, as the man said, orgiastic future. The town, when we arrived, in those early years after the war, was quite different than it is now: the banks weren’t back to back, they were decently separated every few blocks. We all moved into a hotel. A few days after we were in the hotel it occurred to my first wife that the blonde energetic woman who had lived in the Cheshire Towers and the blonde energetic woman who turned up in the same hotel we were billeted in bore a remarkable resemblance to each other, and she actually stopped wino-ing for a day or so to confirm her suspicions. She confirmed them. Or, at least, on a weepy night, full of accusations and counter-accusations, and the discovery on my part that it was her firm conviction that if it had not been for me she would be that very day among the brighter bulbs on Broadway, I confirmed them for her. We agreed to a divorce. I moved out. That is: I packed my bags, shut the hotel door, and walked up two flights. My second wife was two flights up. She was very understanding. I cried a little: ten years shot to hell, etc. I slept in the twin bed that night. And didn’t leave it, either. A commemorative gesture, I guess. We got married in Tijuana. My first wife went back to New York. I once figured out that with what I paid her in alimony I could have bought a sixty-foot yacht and sailed to Tahiti, if I knew how to sail a yacht and I had any desire to go to Tahiti.