First they got married in Paris. In an old cathedral with a view of the Sacré-Cœur and marble floors and stiff wooden chairs they vowed, “‘till death do us part” there before God and all her friends and family and then he kissed her. It was a Catholic Church. Her parents were Jewish and he had grown up Roman Catholic but they had both been very modern in their youth and didn’t give much credence to any faith. Still, they meant their vows. As wedding presents to each other, she promised to learn how to make gnocchi and he promised to read Victor Hugo.

There were one hundred and forty-seven steps from the altar to the door of the Peugeot waiting for them in the street, and she counted every one breathlessly, expecting at each step to trip over the train of her wedding dress and fall and bring him down with her. Each step was sound, and when the door to the Peugeot closed behind them she felt both relief and triumph, as if she had just crossed a rickety, rotting footbridge across a vast and bottomless chasm. He squeezed her hand and kissed her on the cheek.

For their honeymoon they went to Italy, where his family had come from. It was the year the River Arno overran its banks and flooded the city of Florence, and she cried over the paintings and sculpture that had been lost. In Rome they went to Saint Peter’s Basilica and looked at the relics of the saints and after, when they were having lunch in the piazza, he mentioned that he’d like to go to the Spanish Steps to see the house where John Keats had died. It’d been converted into a museum, and inside they found a reliquary with locks of Elizabeth Barrett’s hair and hair from Milton and Shelley and Keats, and they were both far more impressed by these than by the relics in the church.

They returned to San Francisco in the winter and he went back to law school and she tried to find a job. Her background was in art history with an emphasis in chiaroscuro (the contrast between light and dark), but she didn’t know how that could make her any money unless she started painting, and now that she was married she wanted to be more practical. She found a job as a seamstress at North Beach Leather, sewing designs on custom jackets. She made a jacket that was worn by Neil Sedaka during his comeback special on television, and they watched it one night in their apartment on Geary Street and she felt very proud even though she’d only been paid about fifteen dollars for all the work she’d done.

That spring he graduated law school and got a job at a small firm downtown, and now he was at work all day and didn’t come home until late at night and then he’d have to do work at home and it began to seem to her like he never had any time for her and he began to think she just didn’t understand how hard he was working to get them out of that squalid apartment where the pipes groaned and you could hear the neighbors shouting all hours of the night.

They began arguing more and more. “We never used to argue,” she’d say, and she was right. The next morning he’d vow to be kinder and gentler when he got home from work, but then he’d come home and there’d be so much to do before he went to work the next day that he’d forget the promise he made to himself until the next morning, when he’d make it all over again. This was how it happened, he thought. This was how you got old and fell apart. You made a vow to yourself to be a better person, and every day you broke it, and every day you made it again.

While doing their tax returns that year, they discovered there’d been some loss of paperwork and their marriage in Paris wasn’t recognized in the States. She tried contacting the French Consulate in San Francisco, but it was May, in Paris the students were rioting, France was in upheaval and had no time to look for their marriage certificate. They decided they would get married again. This time their wedding didn’t take place in an old Catholic Church with a view of The Sacré-Cœur, but at the City Hall downtown nearby his office.

He wore the suit he usually wore to court and she wore a long-sleeved blue corduroy dress that she had made herself. They were married by a justice of the peace and witnessed by a county clerk on her lunch break, and the ceremony was very efficient and sober and it was over in about ten minutes. Not once did anyone invoke the name of God.

Afterwards they decided to get something to eat and go see a movie. They went to McDonald’s, but then they couldn’t agree on what movie to go to. He wanted to see the Cassavetes film Faces and she wanted to see The Graduate and eventually they compromised and saw Bonnie & Clyde. They both thought it was very good. She wept and hugged his shoulder at the end when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are shot down, and as they were walking out he cried, “Isn’t that just like everything? You try to do something with passion, a little grace, and they just shoot you down! They shoot you down because they’re afraid of what’s real and true!” She patted his arm and told him not to get so worked up about it, but deep down she wondered if maybe he wasn’t talking about her.

The second ceremony seemed to have done something for them and for a while things seemed to be improving. He tried picking up Les Misérables a couple of times, and while he could never get more than a couple of pages in without falling asleep, she saw that he was trying and appreciated it. She tried to make gnocchi but she wasn’t a very good cook and he took one taste and released her from her promise. Anyway they weren’t more than a bus ride from North Beach where they could find the best gnocchi within a thousand miles.

Then one night something terrible happened. There was a murder. Their neighbor across the hall was a salesman and had been on his way to a meeting in Detroit, but it had been snowing in Detroit and the flight was canceled, and when the husband came home around eleven o’clock, feeling tired, perhaps a little dispirited by his postponed flight (but also, no doubt, a little relieved to be back home so soon), he found his wife in bed with another man. They were both asleep, and the husband took a pistol out of his sock drawer and shot them both in the head. Then the husband called the police and went across the hall and knocked on their door.

They were still awake when the husband came home. They had been arguing again (about the light, he later recalled; something so silly. He’d been writing and she had come in and turned on the light. “You’ll ruin your eyes working in the dark like that,” she’d said, and then he’d just exploded, and when the gunshot went off a few minutes later he’d actually thought for a moment it was some kind of telekinetic charge, as if his own ire and frustration had suddenly manifest itself through nearby gunfire).

She had screamed. When the husband knocked on the door, she had screamed and run to hide in the living room while he went to answer the door. The husband had his eyes downcast, a sheepish look on his face, as if the husband was supposed to be afraid of him, rather than the other way around. “I just shot my wife,” the husband said. “The police are coming. I guess now would be a good time to get a lawyer.”

He stared at the husband. “I practice patent law,” he said.

“Oh,” said the husband, who seemed more embarrassed by this than anything else. “I’m supposed to be in Detroit,” he said, “but it’s snowing in Detroit. The flight was canceled.” The husband shook his head. Then the police came and took him away.

After the police had gone they’d held each other all night, until the sun came up the next morning and he had to go to work. Had they been arguing? They couldn’t remember, and if they were whatever it’d been over didn’t matter anymore. When he came home that evening (earlier than usual and after repeated supplementary phone calls throughout the day), she said she didn’t want to live in the city anymore. He tried to reassure her, but the truth was he was just as affected as she was. He kept thinking of the husband, knocking on their door and asking for a lawyer as simple as if he’d been asking for a cup of milk (“The Missus forgot to get cream for the coffee when she went out and I was wondering if I could trouble you for a bit of yours?”).

She expressed her desire to move to the country, to the small farming town in the north where he’d grown up. He hated the idea and they began quarreling again, but now their arguments lacked the same passion and urgency; it was as if he’d finally accepted what he considered to be the natural order of the universe—that vows are made, broken, and made again, and that it’s not so much the promises that are important but that you keep making them. Within the month he had conceded. They moved to the country and lasted another couple of years before finally divorcing.

The last time they saw each other they were each flanked by their respective attorneys, outside the judge’s chambers at the county courthouse. It was all very simple, very staid, and when the judge asked what reasons they had for divorcing they both stated “irreconcilable differences,” though each could have cited any number of personal inadequacies in the other for the judge’s evaluation. All in all it lasted about thirty minutes and just as it’d been the second time around, God kept himself to himself.

He stopped to shake her hand as he was leaving the courthouse, and as he walked away from her he was sad of course (of course he was sad; there had been moments that he would relive and regret until the day he died), but as sad as he was, it didn’t take precedence. What he felt was more like relief, as if some terrific contest had just been completed, and while he—they—hadn’t necessarily won, they certainly could have come out far worse than they did.

They’re still married in France though. You can look it up.