She didn’t want to have children yet. There was plenty of time, she said. Wait till I sell my novel, she said. I even took this high-paying job, working inside a nuclear reactor, so she could quit the post office and write full-time. I didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind having to eat TV dinners by myself sometimes. I mean, if you love somebody, you put up with them. Hell, I told her to go for it, grab all the gusto she could. But even that wasn’t enough. When we first got married, we’d go to a movie every Friday night. Then on Saturday night, we’d go out somewhere with some of our friends and listen to a band, have a few drinks, do some dancing and just kick up our heels.

And then she started writing. She wrote a novel first. Blasted straight through, seven months, night and day. I’d be in there on the couch watching old Hopalong Cassidy or somebody and hear that typewriter going like an M-6o machine gun in the bedroom. That’s where she writes. I’d stay in there by myself until the movie or Johnny Carson or whatever I was watching went off, and then I’d get up and open the door and ask her if she was ready to go to bed. And most of the time, she’d say she was right in the middle of a scene and had to finish it. She’d give me this sort of pained but patient expression that said clear as glass, Shut the door and leave me alone. What the hell. We had some fights about it. Anybody would. We had some knock-down-drag-outs. I busted a picture that her mother gave us over the goldfish bowl one night, and another time I kicked a hole in the bedroom door after she locked me out.