A MISCONCEPTION among some people is that I wrote the novel “Kramer vs. Kramer” based on my own divorce and custody battle. “How is she doing with his son?” a woman once asked a friend of ours about my wife. Our friend answered, “They have two sons and they’re both hers.”  I was never divorced. My wife, Judy, and I were married 37 years, my only marriage and her only marriage. In our early years, like many would-be writers, I tried to cobble together an income. So after the success of “Kramer vs. Kramer,” when a reporter interviewing me brought up my marital status, I said: “My wife and I never would have gotten a divorce. We never would have been able to figure out who would get custody of the anxiety.”  Judy died in 2004. She was a brilliant public relations strategist who in her last job, at Scholastic, masterminded the publicity for the introduction and publication of the Harry Potter books. Everything you first read and heard in the media about Harry Potter came through her. She was also incomparable at finding things — for our apartment in Manhattan, for our vacation home in Water Mill, N.Y., for friends’ homes. People loved to go antiquing with her.  Between her early career in public relations before our sons were born and her later career, Judy gathered up her good taste and opened a store in Bridgehampton, N.Y., where she sold wicker furniture, quilts and handmade pillows. While shopping for the store, she made sure to look out for things she might buy for our Water Mill house.  I had little to do with her choices except to nod in the way of certain men who don’t have the taste of their wives and offer up “very nice” and “I like it.” In matters of décor, we are The Men Who Nod.  Over the years, Judy was continually adding and subtracting in the house, the piece in the corner of a dealer’s booth that someone else might overlook, the finds she found. I did carve out a modest area for myself in my upstairs office, where I cultivated a look of budget Americana: the original sheet music for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” vintage baseball catcher’s masks. But as I recall, even the first of those masks was something Judy bought as a gift for me.  Her taste was widely respected. When she had the store in Bridgehampton, she sometimes would pull wicker furniture out of the store and place it in our living room if needed for an evening. The price tags might still be inadvertently hanging from the bottom, and on more than one occasion a dinner guest bought the chair he was sitting on.  After Judy died, one of my sons articulated it for all of us: “So much of Mom’s spirit is in this house.” But when I considered putting the house up for a summer rental, a real estate broker advised me to rethink the décor. The broker had received feedback that men were unhappy with the amount of wicker and pillows in the house, that it was too feminine for them.  I suggested all they had to do was go upstairs to my office and see the catcher’s masks and the framed poster-size photo of Mookie Wilson suspended in air, avoiding the wild pitch in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. How’s that, guys?  The broker didn’t think that would do it, so I removed several wicker pieces from the living room and bedrooms and put them in the basement. The point here is that I didn’t get rid of them. I hadn’t discarded anything Judy had chosen for the house.  Now living alone, I moved into a smaller apartment in Manhattan. I took the painter’s color swatches from the previous apartment Judy and I had lived in and had the colors matched for the walls in the new place, and retained various pieces she had chosen. In Manhattan and in Water Mill, I was still living within her taste.  It took quite a while after Judy died before I entertained the thought of going out with women, and when I did and saw their apartments I realized that I, a guy and someone who seldom dressed up except to do something like go out on one of these dates, who considered his New York Giants cap one of his best articles of clothing, lived in far more tasteful surroundings than these women I was seeing.  Avery Corman is the author of several novels.
The house where my wife had had a great time decorating â that house belonged to a life that was no longer mine.