: "As we have learnt from Freud, there are no jokes

 The New Yorker, October 2, 1971 P. 36

A Scottish girl in New York, Emm McKechnie, asks about an apartment in an unfinished building, but the landlord refuses to rent to her, saying unmarried girls get roped on the way to the laundromat. She describes her employer, Simpson Aird, who works at home, and his family. She returns to the unfinished building where the landlord is arguing with the construction foreman. She has lunch with the landlord, Murray Lancaster, and soon marries him. She describes his habits, his possessions, and relates a bit of their life together. He dies. She is on holiday at the time and tells what she does to fill up the time. She becomes neurotic, talks to strangers on the bus. She returns to work, becoming an au pair girl for the Airds, doing secretarial work and mothering two Great Dane puppies. Mrs. Aird thinks she ought to get married again, ought to see a psychiatrist. She tells the psychiatrist she wouldn't mind living in a commune. The doctor says that people can get over-individuated in communes and she laughs, asking if that means lonely, The doctor wants to know what she is avoiding by laughing: "As we have learnt from Freud, there are no jokes." She meets a Bulgarian at a party of the Airds, goes out with him. Everything reminds her of her dead husband, but the Bulgarian, with his "dogged clasp on difficulties," blots out her husband's face. The Bulgarian calls her over and over: She is wrecking his life, she is ruining him by saying no. She laughs and hangs up, thinking to herself: "What if he wasn't faking, what if he wasn't funny?"