Story of My Wife

But Trillin had a darker layer to work with, as well.

It gave him access to happiness's flip side, to what cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker once described as "the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything."

Alice Trillin knew that rumble all too well. She borrowed Becker's line for an article she wrote about the existential implications of the lung cancer diagnosis she received in 1976 -- a cancer, her surgeon said, that she had just a 10 percent chance to survive.

'Life Is Long'

Call him Bud -- everyone who knows him does. Ring his Greenwich Village doorbell at the ungodly appointed hour, 7:30 a.m., and you'll find a hospitable fellow of 71 whose regular-guy appearance (not tall, a bit short on hair) makes you suspect that youthful good looks weren't the only thing that attracted that glowing young woman in 1963.

"Life is long," Alice used to say, and what she meant -- according to the Trillin's younger daughter, Sarah -- was, "Don't marry someone who's not going to make you laugh."

The house is a remodeled brownstone across the street from the grade school Sarah and her sister, Abigail, attended. "I got up earlier than Alice," Trillin says, "so I would give them breakfast and then Abigail would take Sarah by the hood of her parka and I would watch them out the window."

He's been out foraging already, to Hudson Bagels. Over breakfast, the subject of his bagel oeuvre comes up -- specifically his futile quest for the Magic Bagel, chronicled a few years back, which he hoped might lure his bagel-loving older daughter back from San Francisco. And he reminisces about a family bagel ritual that involved more extensive foraging on the Lower East Side. On Sundays, they'd go for smoked salmon at Russ & Daughters, bagels at Tanenbaum's, cream cheese at Ben's Dairy . . .

Close families tend to have a lot of rituals. "We found the kids were very conservative," he says. "They don't like changes much."

As for good marriages: They work, Trillin thinks, not because the partners have the same personality but because they share core values. The most important thing he and Alice agreed on was their response to the simple notion that "your children are either the center of your life or they're not."

In the Trillin household, there were no doubts. Whenever you were in the same room with Bud and Alice, says old family friend James Edmunds, "you were going to get the girls."

Trillin met Edmunds on a reporting trip to Louisiana. The New Yorker, at the time, was sending Trillin on the road every three weeks to do a series of pieces called "U.S. Journal." Written straight, without the writer's persona intruding, they helped establish him as one of the great reporters of his era.

With his reporter's hat off, he also wrote comic fiction, including a now-legendary sendup of weekly newsmagazines. (No editor should be permitted to assign a trend story without first reading "Floater.") He applied his deadpan humor to light nonfiction, too, in a first-person voice that dealt more in self-mockery than self-revelation.