Mine, yours and ours

AFTER A BRIEF, PLEASURABLE stint as an editorial assistant at Simon & Schuster books in New York, I switched gears and moved into the more adrenalin-fueled magazine world, working for several successive Hearst publications.

Helen Gurley Brown was my first boss, and while I rarely had personal contact with her, we’d periodically meet in the ladies room in front of the full-length mirror, where she’d address me as “Pussycat” and ask me about my love life. I was a lot more interested in hearing about hers than in talking about mine, because hers seemed to me immeasurably glamorous and inventive and sexy.

She lived on the East Coast, and her movie producer husband David Brown lived on the West Coast, and they’d meet on weekends in Manhattan or L.A. This, to a lifestyle rube fresh off the boats, was the very essence of a sophisticated relationship, each being given the time and space to do what they needed to do with their burning ambitions.

One morning I rode the elevator with him when he’d just arrived back in the city, and I thought I’d never seen a more delighted man as he made his way down the hall to Helen’s office, like a swain on a third date. That was it exactly: They were a married couple who were still dating and romancing each other, probably, I guessed, because the relationship hadn’t grown stale from constancy. They gave the appearance of being two people who still had new things to learn about each other. I never quite got that off my mind, so enchanted was I by such an arrangement.

Finally, years later, the time came in my marriage when my husband and I tried our own version, living within half a day’s driving distance from each other five days a week, he in San Antonio, I in Houston.

It opened up all sorts of possibilities for rediscovering our separate selves and re-imagining our merged selves. It relaxed the bindings, gave us back some of the lost elements of our lives as singles that we privately pined after, and opened up not just physical spaces but also psychological ones for wandering about and coming upon, usually by surprise, some cranny of buried desires or forgotten intentions that we could bring to life.

The pressures were off to perform as the welded you/me unit, down to the most trivial of daily routines. He, for instance, didn’t feel pressure to be home in time for one of my overly thought-out meals, into which I’d poured my little domesticated heart and soul, and I didn’t feel the pressure to brandish my culinary skills, such as they were. When I did cook for him on his weekend visits, it became an act of conscious flirtation, not to impress him with my wifeliness but merely to please him with my womanliness. Living apart five days a week, was, let me be blunt about it, a lot sexier than living together seven days a week.

The late New York Times columnist Charlotte Curtis married an Ohio surgeon later in life, and in their own cities they were content to remain. “Dearie, it’s the only way,” she once said.

A distance of 2,500 miles separating two coasts or even 200 separating two cities might be a bit long and wide for most people to put between themselves and their mates, however enticing the notion might be. You know what I mean, of course -- when she’s had quite enough, thank you, of his repeating himself at every dinner party (not that old fish story again!) and he’s had enough of her frightful Cruella impersonations same time each month.

But a whole building apart, as the “Six Degrees of Separation” author John Guare and his wife Adele Chatfield-Taylor have chosen as the workable solution to their diametrically opposite aesthetics (she the cool precisionist, he the writer slob) is pretty appealing, admit it.

Ruthie Sommers’ and Luke McDonough’s fresh approach to the question of mine versus yours plus ours -- her floor, his floor, their communal rooms -- has a more modern, more realistic, twist to it. Free to be you and me, free to be us, in hollerin’ distance.

Only a staircase divides their individual spaces, but the journey up and down is made up of just the right number of steps for the pace at which they want to meet on common ground: slowly and surely, if they so choose, or two at a time.

Barbara King is editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king @latimes.com.