"Two minds?" Messer interrupted. Then he laughed, because old-fashioned teachers have no problem with laughing at students, and he said, "I love it when Miss Goodman makes a mistake."

My mistake was to prove prophetic. For my own marriage is undeniably a union of two minds. It is an intermarriage, but not in the religious sense. It is a yoking of opposites. For my husband is nocturnal and I am diurnal; he is usually late and I am always early; he is a floor spreader, and I a table piler; he is a pacer and I a sitter; he dithers, while I make snap decisions; he is a natural dancer, and I can barely follow his lead; he loves every movie he sees and I tolerate few; he reads our children "The Phantom Tollbooth" and I read them "Little House in the Big Woods"; he has an unerring sense of direction while my grasp of geography is shaky. We are all of these disparate things, and our differences go deeper. For I am a word person, a fiction writer, and my husband is a numbers person. When I say I am a fiction writer, you know what I mean. When I say that David is a numbers person, well, actually, I don't know exactly what I mean. "He is a theoretical computer scientist," I say when asked. "It's a kind of math, um, you know -- theory of computation. His specialties are design of algorithms, graph theory, optimization, network flow ..." I trail off.

When pressed, I rise to the occasion, trying, despite my lifelong math phobia, to help you grasp my husband's work. "He's making graphs flow more smoothly," I say hopefully. "He's making everything faster."

If you ask David what he does, he'll give you a metaphor to describe some famous problem of theoretical computer science. "Imagine that you have some grocery bags and you have to put a certain number of items into them ..." Or, "Suppose you have packages you have to drop off at all these points along a route ..."

The problem is that none of his listeners get beyond the details of these word riddles to grasp what David does. I have an editor who always asks, "How's David and his grocery bags?" I have relatives who think my husband must work for UPS.

Ask my husband what he's working on and he'll get a distant look in his eyes as he mentally backs up, trying to translate and simplify. In the end he'll begin, "Well, as you recall from linear algebra ..." If you're like me and don't recall any linear algebra, your eyes will glaze over right there.

There are couples who have conversations about their work. Couples who give each other advice, or even collaborate. At times I've been slightly envious of them. They enjoy an intellectual dimension in their relationship that David and I will never have. They speak the same language. That is certainly not the case with us. When David gets together with his friends he talks about "shaving logs." I remember hearing about logs -- or logarithms -- in some math class from my distant past, but this talk of log shaving always sounds to me like precision work at a lumber mill. There are conversations about new results and new techniques. I feel David's enthusiasm, but for me, the references remain obscure. "Hey, who was it who thought of that neat trick of flipping over the integral?" David will ask our dinner guests, his colleagues. "Yeah, that was really cute," someone will respond appreciatively.

There's no way around it: When it comes to our work, I speak English and David speaks math. When he is working hard, even his musings are in math, so that instead of humming to himself or muttering, "Where did I put that thingamabob, oh there it is ..." he'll walk around saying, "Say you have two edges and you cut them there ..." In his sleep, in the throes of some problem, he'll murmur, "Where did I put that edge, oh there if you cut it there ..." On occasion he'll wake up and announce that he's got it -- an answer, a miraculous revelation. Other days he'll spend walking around and around the living room, then suddenly the solution will "pop out." In that glowing moment, I am ecstatic that he has found his answer, but I have no idea how he arrived at it. To David I can be of no help along the way. I can only leave him to his long chicken-scratched equations on scraps of paper and the backs of bills. The most I can do is will him luck: "Have a great day sweetie and go for that epiphany!"

How annoying that in our marriage the woman is the literary one and the man the math whiz. How stereotypical. Even in college our roles were clear. When we were 18 and freshmen at Harvard, we had to pass something called the QRR, or quantitative reasoning requirement, which consisted of writing a computer program in BASIC for one of the little machines in the basement of the Science Center. David and I both failed the QRR the first time: He because he'd written his program in C and didn't follow directions and I for more mundane reasons. So on a snowy, winter night I had to go back to the Science Center basement for a second attempt. I was sweating it out, typing my BASIC program, when my machine started talking back to me. I would type PUT 1 or something, and the computer would respond WHY? After struggling with this for several minutes, I looked up and saw David at the other end of the computer room laughing at me. He'd broken into and sabotaged my test. Oooh, that David Karger! It was the late 20th century version of the pigtail in the inkwell. Norman Rockwell could have painted the scene had he lived to see high-tech.

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