Larry didn't keep a chequebook; when they went out to dinner, Deborah, at the end of the meal, used her credit card to pay. She paid all their bills, was in charge of investing their savings, had the first and last word on raising their children, dealt with car salesmen when it came time to buy new cars. Charlie Malkin, her colleague at the dental school, was astonished when she told him about the last. "Really, Deborah," he said, "you mean Larry lets you go in there, a woman, alone, to dance with those wolves? Amazing!"

Her older sister Sharon didn't much care for Larry, and didn't mind saying so. Sharon once told Deborah that, in marrying Larry Siskin, it was as if, in the old shtetl culture of Eastern Europe, she had married a brilliant yeshiva student whom her father had agreed to support for five or six years so that he could continue his studies. "Except," Sharon added, cruelly, "Larry turns out to be not all that brilliant, and the five or six years has turned into a lifetime, with you doing the supporting." 

Larry came from a wealthy family, much wealthier than the Pollocks, Deborah's own family. The Siskins lived in a vast apartment at 3400 N. Lake Shore Drive. His father and mother were both lawyers, and his older brother Mel had recently graduated from Yale Law School. He had a younger sister, Roberta, who had intended to — and eventually did — go to law school, Harvard, in fact. Larry joked that the family dog, a cocker spaniel named Rusty, had just been accepted for law school at Fordham. He never quite said that he thought himself too good for law school, but managed to convey that going into law was a pedestrian choice,  a touch demeaning, something rather déclassé. 

As a young man, Larry was handsome, with dark hair combed in an ambitious pompadour, on the model of the pop singers of the day (Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson, Fabian); his flared nostrils gave his youthful face a dramatic look, suggesting, Deborah used to think, reserves of passion. His walk had a swagger, which later turned into something like a sashay; when he entered a room, his presence seemed to announce, All right, I'm here, things can now officially begin. It still did, but nobody any longer cared. 

Deborah used to remind herself of the Larry she married through looking at old photographs. But whenever she took out old family photograph albums, that young man her husband seemed to her a stranger. Larry began to lose his hair in his early thirties, the one physical element in his makeup about which he was touchy. He had put on weight. He had grown sallow, for he had been discovered to have diabetes of a kind serious enough to cause him to take insulin and which slowed him down in various ways, not least in the bedroom. But saddest of all, though you had to look carefully to notice, a look of disappointment insinuated itself in his face, especially when he was tired, which seemed to be much of the time.