I don’t regret my alcoholism anymore. Before I left California my youngest son, Joel, came to breakfast. The same son I used to steal from, who had told me I wasn’t his mother. I cooked cheese blintzes; we drank coffee and read the paper, muttering to each other about Rickey Henderson, George Bush. Then he went to work. He kissed me and said So long, Ma. So long, I said.

All over the world mothers are having breakfast with their sons, seeing them off at the door. Can they know the gratitude I felt, standing there, waving? The reprieve.

Well, anyway, after a year we had an affair. It was intense and passionate, a big mess. Jude wouldn’t talk about it. I left him to live by myself with the children. Jude showed up and told me to get into the car. We were going to New York, where Jude would play jazz and we would save our marriage.

We never did discuss Max. We both worked hard in New York. Jude practiced and jammed, played Bronx weddings, strip shows in Jersey until he got into the union. I made children’s clothes that even sold at Bloomingdale’s. We were happy. New York was wonderful then. Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn read at the Y. The Mark Rothko show at MoMA, during the big snowstorm. The light was intense from the snow through the skylights; the paintings pulsated. We heard Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. John Coltrane on soprano sax. Ornette’s first night at the Five Spot.

Max would carry each boy to bed and tuck him in. Kiss him sweet, the way he had kissed his father. Max slept as deeply as they. I thought he must be exhausted from what we were doing, his leaving his wife, taking on a family.

He taught them both to swim and to snorkel. He told them things. He told me things. Just things, about life, people he knew. We interrupted one another telling him things back. We lay on the fine sand on Caleta Beach, warm in the sun. Keith and Ben buried me in the sand. Max’s finger tracing my lips. Bursts of color from the sun against my closed sandy eyelids. Desire.

In the evenings we went to a park by the docks where they rented tricycles. Max and I held hands as the boys raced furiously around the park, flashing past pink bougainvillea, red canna lilies. Beyond them ships were being loaded on the docks.

We stayed very late, until the moon grew high and pale. Don and Max played chess by the light of a kerosene lantern. Caress of moths. Maria and I lay crosswise on a big hammock, talking softly about silly things like clothes, about our children, love. She and Don had been married only six months. Before she met him she had been very alone. I told her how in the morning I said Max’s name before I even opened my eyes. She said her life had been like a dreary record over and over each day and now in a second the record was turned over, music. Max overheard her and he smiled at me. See, amor, we’re the flip side now.

It was the ghostly setting moon that shone upon us as we made love that night. We lay next to each other then under the wooden revolving fan, hot, sticky. Max’s hand on my wet hair. Thank you, I whispered, to God, I think …
In the mornings when I woke his arms would be around me, his lips against my neck, his hand on my thigh.

One day I woke before the sun came up and he wasn’t there. The room was silent. He must be swimming, I thought. I went into the bathroom. Max was sitting on the toilet, cooking something in a blackened spoon. A syringe was on the sink.

“Hello,” he said.

“Max, what is that?”

“It’s heroin,” he said.

For months Sally and I worked hard trying to analyze our lives, our marriages, our children. She never even drank or smoked like I did.

Her ex-husband is a politician. He stops by almost every day, in a car with two bodyguards, and two escort cars with men in them. Sally is as close to him as I am with Max. So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.

Over lunch Ruth told me that she had started to feel old and in a rut so she had joined a support group. The Merry Pranksters, or M.P., which really stood for Meno Pause. Ruth always said this like it was two words. The group was dedicated to putting more zip into women’s lives. They focused on the members themselves. The last one had been Hannah. The group convinced her to go to Weight Watchers, to Rancho del Sol spa, take bossa nova lessons and then to get liposuction and a face-lift. She looked wonderful but was in two new groups now. One for women who had face-lifts but were still depressed and another for “Women Who Love Too Much.” Ruth sighed, “Hannah’s always been the kind of woman who has affairs with stevedores.”

I told Elena to cancel a meeting and an appointment. He spoke all morning, simply and clearly, about their relationship, about her arrest.

I am a defense attorney. I’m cynical. I am a material person, a greedy man. I told him I would take the case for nothing.

“No. Thank you,” he said. “Just please tell her that you’re doing it for no charge. But it’s my fault she got into this trouble and I want to pay for it. What will it be? Five thousand? More?”

“Two thousand,” I said.

“I know that’s too low. How about three?”

“Deal,” I said.

Jesse came out with some guacamole and chips, a fresh drink for me, beers for them. She slid to the ground and he sat. She leaned back against his knees. He held her throat with one fine long-fingered hand, drank his beer with the other.

I will never forget it, the way he held her throat. The two of them were never flirtatious or coy, never made erotic or even demonstrative gestures, but their closeness was electric. He held her throat. It wasn’t a possessive gesture; they were fused.

She laughed. “None of them are young. Ben was never young. I was never young. You probably were an old child too, and you like us because you can act out. It is heaven to play, isn’t it? You like coming here because the rest of your life vanishes. You never mention your wife, so there must be troubles there. Your job must be troubles. Jesse gives everybody permission to be themselves and to think about themselves. That it’s okay to be selfish.

“Being with Jesse is sort of a meditation. Like sitting zazen, or being in a sensory deprivation tank. The past and future disappear. Problems and decisions disappear. Time disappears and the present acquires an exquisite color and exists within a frame of only now this second, exactly like the frames we make with our hands.”

I saw she was drunk, but still I knew what she meant, knew she was right.