Stefan was neither stupid nor uneducated, but he was short and foreign and an artist. He groped for words, his English was not fluent, he did work I could not evaluate but could nonetheless be sceptical of. He was also a lapsed Catholic endowed with a missionary zeal for painting that appealed strongly to my own burning moralism. This tipped the balance toward marriage. We met one night at a party in North Beach, not far from the art school where he was a student, and immediately began to discuss the significance of Art, the privilege of being allowed to serve, the promise and the glory, the meaning and the transcendence. The conversation mesmerised us. We met repeatedly to hear ourselves speak the magic words again and again. Very quickly I began to image a life together, intense and high-minded, devoted to the idea of the Great Work.

And he? What did he want from me? The same, the very same. I, apparently, fitted perfectly into the landscape of his imagined life. I was a graduate student in literature: that was good. I was a fierce moralising Jewess: that was better. I worshipped at the shrine of Art: that was best. We told each other that with the stability of a life together we would each do the large work we knew we were meant to do. It was a marriage born of spiritual fantasising. We did not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.