Sometimes she wouldn’t even eat. She’d get up in the morning and have a piece of cheese toast or something, and she’d go until supper without anything else. She started losing weight, and I bitched at her about that. That made her mad, and she’d retreat into her work. One thing caused another, and sometimes the only time we spoke to each other was during arguments.

But she was getting better. There was no denying it. Sometimes in the morning when I was getting ready for work and she was sleeping, I’d read part of what she had written the night before. You could just see the things the characters were doing, and why they did them. But she got to where she didn’t like for me to read her stuff, said it wasn’t good enough yet, and she’d hide it.

It wasn’t just the sex. I mean, I loved going to bed with her, but more than that, I loved her. I wanted to hold her. Just kiss her. I wanted to spend time with her and talk to her, and I wanted us to be just like other married people we knew. But we weren’t like them. We stayed in separate rooms and only slept together. Half the time I’d have to go to bed before her, because I had to get up. She didn’t have to get up. All she had to do was write and sleep. And I guess I began to get a little bitter.

I started going out at night. She didn’t seem to care. She’d be sitting at her typewriter when I left, and most of the time she’d still be sitting there when I came back in. Or if she wasn’t, she’d be in the bed asleep. I was hardly ever seeing her. I never saw anybody so obsessed. Her appearance went to shit, and she’d dress in the first thing that came to hand. Sometimes she wouldn’t even get dressed, just sit there and work in her nightgown.

And then she started getting published. One story here, another one there. The first acceptance was a great event, and we were happy for a few weeks, and she wanted to throw a big party and invite all our friends. But some of them didn’t show up, I guess because so many of them felt that they had been left by the wayside. I understood it. I told Judy that you couldn’t keep friends like a can of worms and just open the can whenever you needed them. I said that to her after everybody had left, while we were standing in the kitchen after cleaning up the mess. She smiled a strange little smile, and went behind the closed door, and her clattering machine.