Stefan and I returned to California and set about making a home out of a five-room flat in North Beach. The place was a shambles (crumbling walls, flaking ceilings, broken floors), but the rooms were shapely and the light transforming, and I think we thought at the end of that project we would be real married people. We set to work with hearts that were actually lightened by the prospect of the work ahead of us, hearts made heavy now each day and each night as we tried to negotiate the terrifying reality to which an errant impulse had joined us. For the first time we saw how foreign we were to one another. I had not a bohemian bone in my body, he had not an unrebellious one in his. I could not bear incoherence in the physical surround, he could not bear a room that seemed finished. I cherished clarity of thought, he was drawn to mystic revelation. Each day brought long moments of unhappiness it took hours to recover from. Each night we took to bed our confusion, our longing, our paralysing intensity. Only rarely did our bodies give us relief, and then but for an hour. It was my first experience of sexual love as catharsis, wherein one is left as lonely in the morning as one had been the evening before.