We broke up in the middle of the Great Muppet Caper and then sat at opposite ends of the couch through the rest of the movie, very carefully not touching each other and not saying much, either. I’d had my arm around her and my head full of Charles Grodin and Kermit the Frog and she turned her face to me and asked what I wanted out of the relationship. I was stuck for an answer and said something about a friend I could kiss now and then and that was how it ended. After that she curled up in my head and forced out all that about the Baseball Diamond and Lady Holliday and I walked home wondering what had happened.

We met during an improv show when she was going around with a sweetheart of a guy named Ellery. We swirled around each other for five or six weeks before we kissed for the first time just outside the circle of the bonfire. We were both wearing one of my gloves; she’d said her hands were cold and I’d given her the left glove and offered to hold her right hand. All told we were together maybe two months, five weeks of which she’d spent in Iowa and I in Washington. I had no idea how to talk to her and mostly made horrible puns and smiled too much.