One spring afternoon when I was fifteen years old, a kid who was new to the tenth grade showed up at our front door unannounced, with a backgammon set folded under his arm. I had no talent for backgammon or friend-making. I hated games that, like backgammon or the making of friends, depended in any way on a roll of the dice or a gift for seizing opportunities. I disliked surprises and all changes of plan, even changes for the better—except in retrospect. At the art of retrospection I was a young grandmaster. (If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!) True, I might have felt some disposition to like this kid already, but I never would have dared to act upon it. I was an early subscriber to Marxian doctrine as espoused by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, which had been my favorite movie for the last year or so, and the mere fact that this kid wanted to be friends with me at all seemed to impeach his judgment and fitness for the role.

“I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon,” said the kid, gravely mistaken.

I stood there at the front door with nothing in particular to do—I think I was reading a book when he knocked, likely some book I had already read—no good friend my age to speak of, no plausible excuse to send him away, though every strand and dendrite of instinct crying out to be left alone to my friendless but well-planned solitude. I think I might have told him that I had homework, or I had to take care of my little brother, or since my mother was at work, we weren’t allowed to have anybody over. I might have tried to be honestly rude and said that I had no interest in backgammon at all. But the confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.

I said he might as well come in, and he wiped the floor with me several times at backgammon until I confessed—armed with fresh evidence—that I hated the game, and we found something else to do. Within a few weeks he had become the best friend, save one, that I have ever had.

In 1992, almost exactly fifteen years after that afternoon, this kid, grown now to a man, called to tell me about this girl, woman, whatever. She shared a Stuyvesant Town apartment on the Lower East Side with his friend Audrey, and she had just been dumped by her boyfriend, among whose numerous flaws, apart from the chief flaw of not appreciating her, were a staunch Catholicism and a lack of Catholicity when it came to practicing a certain act of oral love-making extremely popular among many women who have tried it.

“I told her I knew a Jewish guy who would give her head,” my friend explained, kidding, not kidding at all. He assured me that the young woman in question was smart, attractive, lively, fun to be around. He had taken her out himself once. Though they liked each other, there was no spark.

“A blind date,” I summarized in a doubtful if not faintly nauseated tone when he had finished unfolding the backgammon set of his proposition.

At this epoch, after a period of adventure and modest uproar, my life had resumed, like Larry Talbot after a lycanthropic spree, its true shape: a dull business. I was living in a small carriage-house apartment in the Hudson Valley, two hours north of the city, in the fifth year of trying to finish my second novel: alone with a book again. Nothing to do, nobody to do it with, nothing going on at all. Just the way I liked it, or rather, just the way I always seemed to fall out, whether I did like it that way or not. When it came to the art of living, the only medium susceptible to my genius was inertia. If someone wanted to get married, I would marry her. If she wanted out, then it was time to get a divorce. Otherwise, in either case, I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed—all I have ever needed—was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot. I hated trouble, but I loved troublemakers. I hated chance and uncertainty, but I was drawn to those who showed up on your doorstep with their own pair of dice.

“Suit yourself,” said my old friend when I declined this girl’s number. He was getting ready to hang up on me and my dial tone of a life.

I could feel the familiar sensation as I said goodbye to him, the train pulling away from the platform, the call to adventure fading on the air, the tumult in the blood as the moon tries to fight its way out from behind a cloud and turn a man to a wolfman. Longing for change and fearing it, caught in a tissue woven from dread and regret shot through with purest gold threads of a yearning to get out of my book, my room, my house, my body, my skull, my life.

“All right,” I said, as I had said to him when he bicycled over with his backgammon board. “Just give me her number.”

Not very long afterward, in an ongoing act of surrender to the world beyond my window, with no possibility of knowing what joy or disaster might result, I married her. And since that afternoon in Berkeley, California, standing along the deepest seam of the Hayward Fault—no, since our first date—this woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake, that I have known or made. I’m grateful for that, because if it were not for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along.

She will have none of that. She is quick, mercurial, intemperate. She has a big mouth, a rash heart, a generous nature (always a liability, in my view), and if my way is always to opt out, to sit in the window seat with a book in my lap, pressing my face against the pane, then her great weakness, indistinguishable from her great strength, is a fatal, manic aptitude for saying yes. She gets herself, and us, and me, into trouble: into noble causes and silly disputes, into pregnancies and terminations, into journeys and strange hotel beds and awkward situations, into putting my money where my mouth is and my name on fund-raising pitch letters for the things that I believe in but otherwise, I don’t know, haven’t gotten around to yet. She is the curse and the wolfman charm in my blood, calling me to shed my flannel shirt and my pressed pants with their sensible belt and lope on all fours into the forest.

Once she and I found ourselves talking about this picture that hangs on the wall of our house. It’s a magnificent Lothar Osterburg photogravure, shadowy and mysterious, of a miniature clipper sailing across a scale-model ocean. This picture seemed to both of us to embody our marriage—I was the sails, and she was the tiller. Or vice versa. Honestly, I can’t quite remember how it seemed at the time. But I know that in considering the image of that great ship in full sail, what we both understood, have always understood, was that whether I am the wind and she is the waves, or she is the rigging and I am the rudder—at this point I have pretty much exhausted my nautical vocabulary—the crucial point for a moral landlubber like me is that we are embarked. I answered the call of adventure; I rolled the dice. I jumped out of the window, holding tightly to her hand. See us, sailing into the blue.