They met 11 years ago, when Mr. Stanko, a trombone strapped to his back, happened past Ms. Cleland in Central Park and stopped to introduce himself with an irresistibly lame line: He noticed she was wearing a cat-theme T-shirt and, guess what? He liked cats, too.

He was a Juilliard-trained musician, the kind who is "paid to be precise," as he puts it. She was a wordsmith, dedicated, she says, to "an unambiguous way of expressing things."

Today, the couple seem as comfortably settled as the four cats patrolling their apartment, a one-bedroom, two-bath rental 13 floors up in a Art Deco building with an East River view, a working fireplace and a jaw-dropping 13-foot ceiling. And stabilized rent, currently $2,506 a month.

Ms. Cleland moved in 15 years ago and almost immediately laid claim to the walls by hiring a French artist, Francine LeClercq, to paint two large murals. The first one went over the fireplace, replacing a mirror that had abruptly fallen to the floor.

The artist found inspiration in the crash. "We had to do something about the memory of the mirror," Ms. LeClercq said. Moved by Jean Cocteau's movie "Orpheus," she painted her version of the Greek myth with a reflection of the gate Orpheus had to pass through as he descended to Hades, lyre in hand, in search of Eurydice. "There is that idea of searching," she said of the painting, done mainly in Ms. Cleland's chosen colors, blue and orange.

"The myth of Orpheus was a metaphor for the fallen mirror: You can't look back," Ms. Cleland added in an e-mail message. "The mirror that existed, once gone, is gone forever, and all images the mirror had ever captured are also lost forever."

It does give the fireplace a certain air.

Ms. LeClercq painted a second, similarly cerebral, piece on a narrow wall in the dining area, incorporating an actual mirror and using painted lines to form a vanishing point engineered to be visible only to Ms. Cleland when she is seated at the head of the table. More compelling, at least to those who live in small New York apartments, is the way the painting, in cahoots with the mirror, reflects the casement windows' striking steel squares, creating a trompe l'oeil that seems to double the space.

Two framed paintings by Ms. LeClercq hang on other walls. One is a comment on the plan of the apartment.

Ms. Cleland, 51, has long made it clear that the only way she intends to leave this place is feet first. Shortly before they married in 2002, Mr. Stanko tried to lure her into "an experiment in country living," as he put it, at a condo in Ossining, N.Y.

She still shudders remembering the night of terror that drove them back to the civilized world of elevators, doormen and dry martinis. “There was a knock at the door,” said Ms. Cleland, the author of the Josie Prescott mystery series. Pause. “It was a wild turkey.”

Far worse things turn up in Ms. Cleland’s books, whose heroine, a truth-telling antiques dealer in Portsmouth, N.H., strives to bring order to the cut-throat world of appraisals and auctions but keeps being interrupted by dead bodies. “ ‘Antiques Roadshow’ fans and mystery lovers will delight,” one reviewer said.

Mr. Stanko, 48, earns his living temping on Broadway, participating in seasonal orchestras, backing up performers like Aretha Franklin and performing in a quartet called Academy Brass.

He describes his art as having less to do with Orpheus than with an ability “to play one note right and then move on to the next one.” Ms. Cleland takes a similar approach to whodunits. “Every 90 pages has to have a surprise,” she said.

Their building, at 310 East 44th Street, which has landmark status, was designed for creative spirits by Raymond Hood, a modernist who helped to build Rockefeller Center. He gave the apartments staggered heights so they fit together like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle.

Most are studios and were marketed to students at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, which was on the same block and is now the Egyptian Mission to the United Nations. Hood and a partner, Kenneth Murchison, financed the building by selling stock in a real-estate investment company. The buildings opened in 1930, three months after the Wall Street crash.

The living area in Mr. Stanko and Ms. Cleland's apartment has the soaring ceiling, while lower ceilings cap their bedroom, baths and galley kitchen. There's also a slip of a terrace, furnished with a large rhododendron and a cat-proof door, designed with an Art Deco-inspired latch by Ms. LeClercq's husband, Ali Soltani.

Originally 37 by 16 feet, the living room was subdivided by a previous tenant into three areas. A step-up, semi-open home office, which Ms. Cleland established early on as a room of her own, is in the middle of the space. A low wall separates it from the dining area and those sky-high casement windows, which meet seamlessly at one corner. "I can look over my shoulder to the terrace," said Ms. Cleland, who turns out a book a year. "I find that so important. I can look back and finish that sentence."

On the other side is the living area, where access to the comfy seating is controlled by two former farm cats, Angela and Emily; an adoptee named Molly; and Louis, a husky Maine coon cat, hard-wired, Mr. Stanko proudly notes, to retrieve socks.

This area is where he prefers to practice, and it is also where he keeps his old-fashioned stereo system — "a work in progress," he says, with a headset attached to a new turntable, all hidden under an afghan pending what he calls WAF, or Wife Acceptance Factor. The two are still negotiating the disposition of his stored record collection, Mr. Stanko said, eyeing glass-front cabinets now filled with Ms. Cleland's collection of rare books.

When the two are both working at home, he plays in the bedroom so that its walls can soften the notes as they travel to Ms. Cleland's alcove. The two have been together long enough to skip a shared lunch, but Ms. Cleland says she likes to know she's not alone.

"When I hear him playing," she said, "all's right in the world."