THE FORTY-FIRST PAGE

It didn’t look like a marriage to most people.

We spent more time duplicating each other’s apartment keys than buying a wedding ring, even though we had no plans for living together. Her apartment was not large enough for two people and there was no way I would dispose of books to make room for her and Kitty Kat, her cat.

To live with me would be like living alone, so it was better that she maintain her own rent-controlled apartment and I mine. Neither of us had enough money to maintain a place large enough to contain both Comedy and Tragedy. Sleeping together was all either of us really wanted.

I don’t maintain that this was a Marilyn Monroe-Arthur Miller situation, but in the time we were “together” she flourished in the theater, moving from the downtown holes-in-walls to the brighter lights on the Broadway side streets and in time to the even brighter lights of Manhattan movie locations. She thought her talent propelled the career, though it was little more than the celebrity attached to full frontal nudity in a serious commercial film.

I, of course, was no Arthur Miller. I much earlier abandoned any notions of my own writing and continued to read for profit the writing of others.