“It’s so sweet that Diana has her little home office,” she told a colleague of Simon’s at a holiday party. “Simon has always needed a wife who can adapt to his busy schedule.”
Another time, she asked me if I ever planned to take my little design business more seriously by hiring staff. I simply told her that I found income more useful than optics, and she laughed as if I were joking.
Simon often heard these insults but rarely intervened to defend me. Success didn’t make him arrogant all at once, but it did make him selective about where he aimed his kindness.
He became better at being publicly generous while remaining privately distant. He eventually started introducing me at dinners as the wife who kept his life sane or as the artistic one with a great eye.
The public heard warmth in his voice, but I heard a reduction of my entire identity. Eventually, the firm’s founder, Arthur Miller, offered Simon a chance to buy into the partnership.
Simon came home one night looking both thrilled and humiliated because he needed nearly two hundred thousand dollars for the buy-in. He told me he had the talent but couldn’t close the financial gap fast enough.