Drinking in the bar put me under a double pressure. I didn't want to leave the bar. I had no place to go. People— even friends—were tired of seeing me. Tired of loaning me money or having me drink up all the booze in their house or talking all that ragtime talk of the past and the good old days, tired of the old stories, just generally sick and tired of a pest and in some ways a stranger who was on a different circuit and one that had only one direction— downhill. Mainly I couldn't go back to the room. If I had been able to sleep, it might have been OK, but not to lie there and look at the the ceiling and the four walls in a room that was to be my coffin. The constant vision of my runaway wife. Christ, I couldn't be drinking over her. We hadn't slept together for the last five years, and the last two were miserable. Maybe one preferred misery over lonesomeness.

At night I saw the rats— hard to concentrate on them as the with small angels spelled them off in relief. Small angelic girls with pouty girl faces and the curly golden hair and the straightup wings attached to their backs. My wife had been gone for over ten years and the loneliness didn't come after her departure; no, not until two years ago. We did not get along, and our last years together were a mess, but the mind has the ability to dispel bad memories. Often when I thought of her recently it was Easter. We were on the Marina Green, and my daughter had a Japanese kite high in the sky. My wife was in a pale lemon dress and a floppy white hat and had a white parasol. She had legs that were show-stoppers— even made old men turn around ---and we walked hand in hand, and the girl held my other hand, and as we ate my wife's leg brushed mine and it was intentional. I lit her cigarettes for her, and the girl blew out the matches and we were together like a communion. Often she lapsed into silence and her eyes sparkled and we knew, she knew, I knew, I loved her, and I knew that she knew, and whatever was in my face and the pressure of my hand on hers told her we were one and the church ceremony that had united us made us one and our daughter was a replica of our love and our passion. And after we ate in the Basque restaurant we danced to the accordion player, and he played La Paloma over and over, and the girl sucked on a rootbeer with a straw, and the glow in her face responded to our movements ... La Paloma over and over again.

Her lips were sensual and soft and her teeth nippy and bitty as she consumed me alive. I could hardly watch her nibble asparagus without getting a hard-on. At the same time her cooking im- proved. The nights we spent trout fishing, camping out, and lying in our sleeping bags on the cots, and she listened in silence as I pointed out the constellations to the girl Orion, Cassiopeia. And the sunsets at the bench and the wild abandonment in the surf, caressing and rolling in the surf. The time under the trees in Muir Woods during the monumental rainstorm when my blue blazer shrunk. The Marina Green with me stroking atop her barely under the arcs of the headlights of the commuters going toward the bridge. I whispered, "This is insanity. We have a house and a bed only four blocks away!"

We turned each other on — no whips or tying up or swinging arrangements with other couples, none of that bullshit. Just the expansion of our love into the physical.