TO sleep through the night, I used to pretend that my boyfriend, Jay, was celebrity firefighting. His firehouse is on Houston Street and Avenue of the Americas, so he has responded to alarms at the West Village apartments of the R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe, the model Helena Christensen and the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Although I am not particularly enamored of stardom, I convinced myself that being near famous people would guarantee a happy Hollywood ending for Jay and for all concerned.

This thought ignored the fact that his firehouse lost 11 people on Sept. 11, a leap I was able to make because I did not personally know the men who died, nor did Jay, since he had a different career then.

Jay started out as a film marketer, promoting independent movies like “Sling Blade” and “Croupier.” We began dating eight years ago; I admired his creative spirit, open mind, wicked sense of humor, and easygoing personality that balanced my Type A tendencies. With one foot and 120 pounds separating us, we are also like Mutt and Jeff. Jay, a k a Mutt, is lucky if his head is not cut out of the frame when someone takes our picture.

He was in our apartment two blocks north of the World Trade Center when the planes hit. After the attacks, he took the firefighter test, completing the application days before the 29th-birthday cutoff.

I tried to remain neutral about the idea. I wanted him to find work with meaning, something he had lost in his decade-long marketing job. Yet firefighting was foreign to us.

We were both children of doctors — mine an orthopedic surgeon and lapsed Protestant of Scottish ancestry, his a cardiac surgeon who had emigrated from Pakistan 50 years ago. The insular, paramilitary and predominantly Irish-Italian world of firefighters appeared exotic to both of us, and overwhelmingly dangerous to me.

But two years ago, once Jay was assigned to Ladder 5, I settled in to my celebrity-filled security blanket.

Then, on Aug. 18, my mother called. “There’s a fire at the Deutsche Bank building a few blocks south of you,” she said. “The air may not be safe. You should evacuate. Where’s Jay?” I didn’t have the television on, and our place, on Greenwich Street between Warren and Murray Streets, faces north, so I was not aware of the scene at the Deutsche Bank building. But I tried to reassure my mother. “It’ll be O.K.,” I said. “Jay’s working a tour, so he must be there, but that building’s vacant so they probably won’t even send them in.

“Don’t get hysterical,” I added as I tried not to.

Three months earlier, my reaction to another neighborhood blaze had been different. When an uninhabited condo on Chambers Street caught fire, I sat in our apartment smelling the smoke, listening to the commotion and praying, until I couldn’t take it anymore. Finally, I leashed up the dogs and went over to the site. I stood with the crowd outside the burning building, my whole body shaking, until Jay emerged in full gear, held me, promised that everything would be fine and encouraged me to go home.

In bed that night, I listened to a helicopter circle overhead (it may have been two) and watched the flashlights dance as firefighters punched holes in the roof of the burning building. Eventually Jay did come home, as did the others. After that, I categorized unoccupied buildings as manageable and tried to adopt a take-it-as-it-comes attitude.

SO on the evening of Aug. 18, when Jay called hours later and said, “I’m O.K., but Joey and Bobby are dead,” I was shocked. Robert Beddia was a veteran firefighter; his 24th anniversary with the department would have been this Wednesday. He looked a decade younger than his 53 years, and he had a boyish sense of mischief. Joseph Graffagnino was the father of two young children and a devoted husband who would have celebrated his 34th birthday that Monday. They were two of the most charismatic men and brightest lights in Jay’s house.

“What are you talking about?” I screamed. “There was no one in the building! How could this happen when there was no one to save?” We stayed on the phone dissecting the events and mourning together until he said he had to go back to the men.

Without civilian lives at stake and without access to water (the standpipe, the main artery that would have provided water to the building, had been dismantled), the firefighters had been dropped into a smoke-filled maze of debris. Dozens of men were forced to radio Maydays, the most urgent of distress calls, and the scene quickly devolved into mayhem.

The weeks that followed were filled with bagpipes, drums, eulogies and rituals. Thousands of people — relatives, friends, firefighters from across the country — lined up at the wakes and funerals.

We, the spouses and girlfriends of the men in the house, were labeled “honor wives” and were shuttled around by a doe-eyed probationary firefighter. For Joey, we were bused to Andrew Torregrossa & Sons Funeral Home and St. Ephrem Roman Catholic Church in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. For Bobby, we went to Harmon Funeral Home in West Brighton, Staten Island, and then to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In transit, commiserating with my fellow passengers, I felt myself becoming part of a somber sisterhood.

But when I was with people outside this world, I occasionally felt some distance. During the time I was away from the public relations office where I work, a colleague sent me an awkwardly philosophical e-mail message about the stages of life. When I explained my absence to another colleague, she acted as if I hadn’t said anything at all.

After a memorial at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in SoHo on Sept. 11, the whole group of us went back to the firehouse to eat, talk and decompress. Steve Buscemi, a former Engine 55 firefighter turned A-list actor, showed up. But this time I couldn’t fool myself into believing that the presence of famous names would dictate the ending of the story.