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the demolition crew arrive with their jackhammers that drizzly morning in October, the day I got divorced for the
second
time.
    Three years it took them to strip it down to a skeletal structure of steel girders and dump its columns and statuary in the New Jersey Meadowlands, where you could see it from thePhiladelphia train and weep. I wept. All this with no interruption in service, which New Yorkers soon took for granted, oblivious to the staggering acts of vandalism going on around them—
    Forgive me. I feel about architecture as I do about marriage. What was done to Penn Station was wanton. I hate to see a thing destroyed before its time. I tried to stay busy. I was writing a book called
The Conservative Heart
and lecturing at one of the city colleges, which at least got me out of the building and provided what social life I required. When I received invitations to faculty parties and other functions I tossed them in the trash.
    Months passed, gloomy, solitary months for me.
My spirit walked not with the souls of men.
Fall turned to winter, winter to spring. The pipes in the apartment cooled down but the city itself became unendurable as the temperature started to rise, also the tempers of my restive fellow citizens. Meanwhile
The Conservative Heart
advanced fitfully. One day it was brilliant, the next it stank. The problem was this. I was known to be a brilliant lecturer. What was so hard to communicate on paper was the excitement I aroused when I spoke to a packed lecture hall. I was often swept away when an idea caught fire in my mind, and more was taught then than could ever be expressed in sober prose. Often I despaired as I struggled to articulate, oh, the apparent paradox of romantic conservatism, or the seven principles of inspiration as I’d first formulated them in my postdoctoral work at Oxford.
    I missed talking to Barb about it. How do writers alone survive? What had once been unimaginable was now my reality. But I got used to it, the absence of a domesticity that once hadirritated me but that now I missed. I drove down to Atlantic City to see Howard whenever I could. Barb and I behaved in front of him with stiff formality at first, but later with more warmth. She wasn’t looking well and I guess I wasn’t either. I told her I’d arrived at no startling thesis regarding marriage and its discontents, but privately I’d decided that my own recent performance unfitted me for further service. I shared these thoughts with Ed Kaplan. He’d come by to commiserate some more.
    Ed practiced criminal law but he’d handled the divorce as a personal favor. He was fascinated by the new condition of life he found me in. To live alone in the unmarried state was to Ed an extraordinary thing. As it was to me. He said he didn’t get it. He was married to a lovely dark creature called Naomi and they lived down the block with their four daughters, whom they were apparently raising as anarchists. He liked to ask me what my plans were. What did I intend to do with myself now?
    —Work.
    —Just work? All work? No play?
    —No play.
    —Sidney, trust me, you’re not made for this. You need a woman. You better get out there and see what’s around.
    —Ed, for Christ’s sake. No woman wants me now.
    —You don’t know that until you meet her. You think you’ll never marry again?
    —That’s what I do think.
    —You’re an idiot.
    I didn’t believe him. He left a little later. The apartment was once again as quiet as the grave, apart from the sirens and the screaming and the rest. But he’d unsettled me. A few morningslater an invitation came in the mail. It was to a book party in a townhouse on Sutton Place, I forget whose townhouse and I forget whose book, I even forget why I went unless I sensed it was Destiny Calling. It doesn’t matter now but what I
don’t
forget is the first glimpse I had of a tall blonde girl in a narrow black skirt, thin as a pencil, no makeup, with long legs and a pursed, tight little mouth.