Free Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent Page A

and had borrowed her phone.
    We were both devoted to our work. The first time we wrote a groundbreaking front-­page story involving shady politicians in Queens that sparked multiple federal investigations, our editors took a page out of
All the President’s Men
and began calling us Klincent—an amalgam of our last names, Klein and Vincent. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the
Washington Post
journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon with their reporting on Watergate, were famously known in their newsroom as “Woodstein” and did most of their work as a team.
    I often joked with Melissa that she could be the female equivalent of Woodward, tall and patrician with a neat desk and proper files, as played by Robert Redford in the movie. Like Woodward, she also did all the driving in her old but clean Honda. Of course, she pegged me as Bernstein, played by a young, disheveled Dustin Hoffman—tortured, disorganized, brimming with outlandish ideas for stories that more often than not stretched her patience.
    After a hard day’s work, it was especially heartening to know that at least once a week Edward and dinner were waiting for me. Today, whenever I describe my life on Roosevelt Island, I talk about it as the worst time of my life. But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you it was also the best time. Because of Edward.
    One night when I arrived for dinner, he was preparing oysters Rockefeller.
    â€œWhat’s the occasion?” I asked as he arranged the oysters on a baking dish and topped them with a mixture of spinach and bread-­crumbs sautéed in butter and Pernod.
    â€œDo we need one?” he replied, the slight lilt in his voice indicating that I had asked a silly question. “Paula and I never needed an occasion,” he continued. “We never gave each other presents, either, because every ­day we spent together was a gift.”
    I imagined that Edward had lived some kind of fairy tale with Paula—a relationship so rare and fantastical that it could surely never happen to me, or anyone else I knew. At first, it might have seemed an unlikely match. He was a Southern boy, raised in genteel poverty, and she was an urbane Jewish intellectual from Philadelphia, five years his senior. But, as Edward remembered his first glimpse of Paula, it was love at first sight when they met in 1940 at a Greenwich Village theater—both of them aspiring actors, hoping to land a role with the Provincetown Players.
    The group’s playhouse, in a brownstone on Mac­Dougal Street, had been set up in 1916 by some of the original founders who had started the company during their summer vacations in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Early members included Eugene O’Neill and the poet and journalist John Reed. Although the founding group had largely disbanded by 1929, the theater was still known for independent, experimental productions when Edward knocked on its door. But he clearly had more than acting on his mind. During that first tryout, he found himself auditioning for an audience of one—the tall, brown-­eyed actress he had seen when he first walked in.
    Paula had come to New York to be an actress, although her day job was painting cheap jewelry in a factory. She loved to be onstage, both inside and outside the theater. She enjoyed pranks. Sometimes she would tell people that she had grown up in China, the child of missionaries; other times, that she was a secret agent.
    Edward also dreamed of the stage. At 19, he arrived in New York City on a sweltering day in late August, stiff and sweaty from the trip sandwiched between two beefy and seemingly immobile passengers in the backseat of the car that brought him from Nashville. Years later, when he told me about his two-­day ride, he could still remember driving through the Holland Tunnel “in amazement,” patting his jacket pocket where he had stashed the envelope with a recommendation letter and