Harry was Out Back. There is the remains of a stable behind the house which he converted into a rudimentary studio, and where he works every morning from whenever he gets up (somewhere between four-thirty and six-thirty, and always well before me) until noon, when he comes in to read the mail and have lunch. If one of his rough drawings gets okayed in the morning mail, he generally works up the finished artwork during the afternoon. If nothing like that happens, he takes the afternoon off. He never opens letters from gag-writers at noon but holds them until the following morning. When he wakes up, things are funny, his sense of humor is on, his visual humor functions. I can’t understand this myself. When I wake up I want to pour coffee over my head and go back to sleep. Well, not exactly that, but along those lines. I can’t imagine anything being funny at daybreak.

We are oddly matched, Harry and I. This thin-wristed insipid blonde Mayflower child, whom one praises as being not quite so scatterbrained as she looks, and this starker, this Jewish oak tree with bitter wit and crackling laughter.

When it became apparent that we were not going to have any children, we discussed our differences and Harry hypothesized that our chromosomes might simply be allergic to one another. “Maybe it’s just as well,” I said. “We’re so different that any children we might have would be absolutely inconceivable.”

He laughed for twenty minutes before I figured out what I said. This always happens.

But I am wobbling all over the place. I hope Rhoda does eventually edit all of this into a cohesive mass. If that’s possible.

Let me see, I went back to the house with the letter. If this were a movie, we could just cut to the next scene. I suppose we could do that here just by leaving a space between this paragraph and the next one.

He read through the letter, tts-ing and chuckling, then looked at me over the top of it. “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “She’s coming. Unless I missed something, it doesn’t say when.”