This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear Twin Beds in Rome by John Optike,

which was published in the New Yorker in February of 1964.

Joan remarked how like a marino marina it was, and it was.

Her intuition had leaped 18 centuries. She was so intelligent.

Perhaps this was what made leaving her as a gesture, so exquisite in conception and so difficult in execution.

The story was chosen by Matthew Klamm, who's the author of the story collection, Sam the Cat and other stories,

and the novel Who Is Rich, which came out earlier this year.

Hi, Matt.

Hi, Debra.

You came on the podcast about five years ago and talked about a story by Charles Dembrosio.

What made you choose Optike this time?

I think it wasn't so much that I wanted to read a story by John Optike,

but that I wanted to read this particular story.

What is it about this story that has compelled you so much?

It's an uncomfortable story about marital agony, but it's also in some ways a funny story.

And it has a certain kind of lightness to it, and it also takes me to Rome where I sometimes want to go.

It takes you to Rome in the midst of a very unhappy marriage, which somewhat downplays the tourism.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a funny thing because ostensibly it's a story that, well, it's a story that introduces the idea of this couple parting

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