AS WIDOW AND divorced man, Inga and I found the common ground that mutual loneliness offered us. After Genie left me, I realized that most of the dinners, parties, and events we had attended were connected to her rather than to me. My colleagues from Payne Whitney, where I worked at the time, and my fellow psychoanalysts had bored her. Inga lost friends, too, people who had been attracted to the shine of her famous husband and had accepted her as his charming second, but who then disappeared after Max was dead. Although there were many among them whom she hadn’t much cared for to begin with, there were others whose precipitous absence deeply pained her. She did not, however, pursue a single one of them.

Inga met Max when she was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia. He gave a reading at the university, and my sister was sitting in the front row. Inga was a twenty-five-year-old blond beauty, brilliant, fierce, and aware of her seductive power. She held Max Blaustein’s fifth novel in her lap and listened intently to every word of his reading. When he was finished, she asked him a long complicated question about his narrative structures, which he did his best to answer, and then, when she laid her book on the table to have it signed, he wrote on the title page, “I surrender. Don’t leave.” In 1981, Max was forty-seven years old and had been married twice. He not only had a reputation as a major writer but was also known as a profligate seducer of young women, a carousing wild man who drank too much, smoked too much, and was, all in all, too much, and Inga knew it. She didn’t leave. She stayed. She stayed until he died of stomach cancer in 1998 when he was sixty-four.