Let’s party. Let’s get down. Get it on. And wasn’t it, after all, love that Mrs. Drachman’s lessons had been designed to lead to? What used to be called courtship? Weren’t parties supposed to provide ways for people to become closer? To help deepen friendships?

While immersed in that affair, I lost interest in parties — they seemed superficial, a bothersome distraction. It was that single pair of eyes meeting mine when I stepped inside my lover’s door I wanted. The thrill of such attention, even if only for a few hours at a time. And I didn’t have to cook, or clean up, or even try to entertain. He and I were not focused on how we could plan events for other people to enjoy, but only on pleasing each other.

Here I was, tracing patterns of ingestion and gustation in characters who were trying to hold themselves tight against pain, against the threat of annihilation, just as my husband and I were trying to live within a nearly annihilated marriage, trying to piece it back together.

Eventually, though, I called it off, stopped seeing him, determined to make my ten-year-old marriage work. I resigned from teaching in the Berkeley schools and went back to graduate school, writing an MA thesis called “Filling the Void: Eating and Drinking in Hemingway’s Fiction.” And Larry and I continued to do what we did so well—even revving up the pace of our entertaining. It was during this time I took Jack Lirio’s classes; Larry was brewing his own beer in the coat closet of our Oakland apartment, and I was saving for a new copper pot every other month.

The poignancy of my choice of thesis subject didn’t strike me then. Here I was, tracing patterns of ingestion and gustation in characters who were trying to hold themselves tight against pain, against the threat of annihilation, just as my husband and I were trying to live within a nearly annihilated marriage, trying to piece it back together. In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” the woman asks her lover, “Is this all we do? Go to new places and try new drinks?” They’re headed for an abortion, and, we surmise, the end of their relationship, which clearly has become as empty as the woman’s womb is about to be. I was not aware as I traced the metaphoricity of food and drink in Hemingway’s fiction that Larry and I were also trying to fill a void.

In Tombstone, on Friday nights we had sought out Hector and Jimmy, or Bea and Carlos; we had more fun if they were along. Even on our wedding night, we had spent our first connubial hours with Sonja and Richard — I remember Richard finally saying, “Well, you guys, you’re on your own now,” as he stood up from the table. And after we began hosting parties, at the moment friends suddenly recalled the stack of papers waiting to be graded by Monday (a moment that seldom came before 2:00 a.m.), Larry would beg them to stay. You can’t leave yet, he would cry, changing the music, opening another bottle of wine. I squelched the voice inside that asked if he dreaded being alone with me.

We even had people over for “work days,” scenarios reminiscent of Tom Sawyer and his white-washed fence. When we moved to San Antonio and bought a few acres north of town, periodically we’d invite colleagues in the English department, the music department, members of the church choir Larry conducted, and miscellaneous writer friends to come on out for a “Burn Day.” Larry bought a keg, stocked up on cheap wine (though I did notice that more discriminating drinkers brought their own), and we cooked up quarts of chili, pounds of corn bread. Our closest friends arrived about noon and helped fire up the grill, prepare the burn site, and start up the chain saws — every year Larry chose a new spot on our land to clear. The guys went at it with goggles and gloves. “A bunch of academics with chain saws,” our son David once said, describing the ritual to an out-of-town friend, “not a pretty sight.” After Mark cut through half his forearm and I had to drive him into town for stitches, Larry laid down a new rule. No beer till the chain-sawing was finished. As the meat sizzled on the grill, those of us unable or unwilling to wield a chain saw diligently stacked logs and hurled unruly branches onto the fire.