Life Its Ownself by Dan Jenkins Page A

families.
    What happened over the next four years was that Barbara Jane and I made love like alligators eating marshmallows and still never missed a cocktail party or night out in New York to pay our respects to all of our cozy barstools.
    Barb combined the roles of homemaker and famous model with an ease that everyone, myself included, found bewildering. How could that lovely cover girl have been such a good little cook and scrubwoman, too? I felt luckier than Cary Grant.
    I continued to be regarded as an all-pro runner despite the nosedive of the New York Giants and the fact that I had to learn how to change light bulbs and carry out trash bags.
    We invited Shake to keep living in the Park Avenue apartment after we were married. He said he would hold on to his co-op shares as an investment, but he really thought he should have his own place. Domestic serenity made him seasick. And he said he needed privacy for his clacker.
    Clacker was what he called his typewriter.
    He said, "Writers have to dwell a lot. They need privacy for their clackers when they work on their dwells."
    The Two Crazy Kids in Love were now Barb and me, not Barb and Shake. We kissed in public places, shared secret glances. We might as well have thrown snowballs, rode bicycles, and gone to street fairs.
    We were the boy and girl in those movies that always have a sequence in which the lovers romp in a park or stroll past a river while leaves turn and dialogue is suspended long enough for a Marvin Hamlisch song to fall out of the sky.
    If Barb and I would begin to act a little too cuddly, Shake would say, "Begin Central Park montage."
    Shake by then had become the guy who occasionally found himself in the company of your killer-stud disco maven.
    Barbara Jane reviewed Shake's girls just as she had once reviewed mine, but her reviews had no effect on Old 88.
    "Some people call it spirituality; I call it a swallow," he said.
    Barb often had difficulty finding something to discuss with Shake's fiancees.
    There was this night when Shake was with another Shelly something-or-other, the usual twenty, the usual creamer, the usual six months removed from Hermosa Beach. The four of us were sitting in a booth at Runyon's.
    We discussed a number of topics and Shelly listened patiently. She interrupted only once to ask if Nigeria was where Zulus came from.
    Barbara Jane made an attempt to lure Shelly into a conversation. Leaning into the table, sipping a fresh young Scotch, she peered into Shelly's vapid eyes and said:
    "Surf, ski, scuba, or skydive?"
    Shelly's "huh?" was punctuated by a frown.
    "What are you interested in, Shelly?"
    Shelly wrestled with the question carefully; then with a bolstered smile, she said:
    "I like shopping!"
    That was when Barbara Jane spewed her drink on the table, and raced madly into the powder room. Barb's howling laughter could be heard at our table.
    Those four years of marriage were the happiest of my life, football excluded. I rigidly believed that if you couldn't be the King of Morocco, the next-best thing was to be married to Barbara Jane Bookman.
    Then came television.

    Now it was that night in early September and I was lying in a hospital bed in New York with a knee that looked like condemned property, and the woman I loved was speaking to me from Los Angeles in a somewhat cheerier voice than I had wished.
    After her opening line about Quasimodo, Barbara Jane said, "I didn't get to watch the game. We rehearsed all day. I looked in the control room to see if they had it on, but they were watching the Dodgers."
    Barbara Jane was calling from her suite at the Westwood Marquis, a hotel to which Hollywood celebs were fleeing now that the Beverly Hills Hotel had been overrun by Midwest paving contractors and Long Island dentists.
    "You missed one of the great two-yard runs," I said.
    "How long will you be out?"
    "It's the medial collateral."
    "Not the medial collateral we know and love?"
    She had heard me talk about football knees,