The last couple of days have been bats, what with Roscoe going viral and Charlie getting requests for custom videos from the Biden-Harris campaign and Project Lincoln, among others. Charlie had been as stressed as I’d seen him until he got his old saxophone out of the closet. I didn’t even know he played the sax. He apologized in advance and locked himself in the second bedroom with Roscoe. There was a lot of honking at first and long, siren squeaks that sounded like they might rip paint from the walls. For the first time, possibly, I felt sympathy for Roscoe.

Charlie played the horn for hours, the first day, and by the end of his lengthy session he had begun to civilize the thing, playing single notes for so long I feared he’d run out of breath and collapse. But, instead, after the long tones, he started playing recognizable songs like “Greensleeves” and “Amazing Grace.” Charlie also weaved all over the sax with sound patterns that sounded closer to classical music than jazz. At times I could swear he played snatches from some Bach composition or another.

Today I conducted two morning Zoom meetings with clients out on the deck but could still hear the saxophone in the distance, roaming around tunes I’d never heard, punctuated by occasional squawks. My client Carl Sneed asked if I was Zooming from the zoo.

Finally, Charlie emerged from the room with a saxophone strap hanging from his neck and a big smile. Again, he apologized. I told him that he’d begun to sound good and he smiled some more.

“I used to be pretty good in band class,” he said, “but that was a while ago. After I practice some more I’ll be able to play more quietly.”

I asked if he planned to teach Roscoe an instrument and he took my question seriously.

“Roscoe has the ability to sing and, if anything, we’ll do something with that.”

“Yeah, you could work up a fetching duet on ‘Amazing Grace.’ It would go viral for sure.”

Charlie had gone elsewhere. His face had an infinite calm spread across it.   “You look stoned, Charlie.”

“The thing is, playing the sax becomes a form of meditation for me—the thinking kind of meditation. I did so much musing while I noodled around that I solved all kinds of problems.”

“I didn’t know you had that many problems,” I said.

Charlie smiled at me and I tugged on his neck strap until he bent toward me and kissed me sweetly on the lips.

I made a grave mistake yesterday, the consequences of which will be with me for the foreseeable future. It began with me agreeing to have lunch with Vince, who’s been up in Sonoma going on two weeks, since the air turned clear. Every morning when I go for my walk I check to see if his car is still in the carport. Meeting him, I figured, was a way to thank him for not bugging Charlie and me. He’d kept peep. You didn’t see him around the condo the grounds; the only contact he made with us was laying the big Chinook on Charlie. His invitation to lunch was the first time he and I have talked since he came up here.

We met at garden gate of The Girl and the Fig. Vince stood tall in tomato red Bermuda shorts, a white short-sleeve Polo, and slip-on Bally loafers without socks. For some reason he decided to masquerade as a wealthy tourist in a surgical mask.

“You’re looking good, kid,” he said when I walked up. “As much as I can see you in your mask and shades. Where did you get the fancy face covering?”

I’d grabbed a zebra-striped number without much thought, on my way out the door. “Charlie makes them.”

“Charlie sews? Well, I guess he does. He’s quite the fabricator.”

I poker-faced Vince and watched him shift, awkwardly, from one foot to the other. “She’ll have a table for us in a couple of minutes,” he said, indicating the hostess.

“So what else is Charlie fabricating these days? Does he still have his wiggy parrot?”

“Roscoe happens to be a genius, Vince. Charlie’s got him doing campaign messages for Biden.”

“Get out.”

“The funny thing is, nobody believes Roscoe is real. They think he’s an animated manipulation.”

Vince’s lips puckered for a moment and, in a vaguely lewd tone, said, “I bet Charlie is a master manipulator.”

I stood back from Vince. “You know, you look like you’ve just gotten off your yacht, Vince.”

“I wish. Well, at least I look a little better than the last time you saw me.”

“Yes, you’ve always cleaned up well.” The question was: how long could he stay clean? I tried to remember that day that Charlie came to the city with me. We ended up searching the Tenderloin for Vince. I did my best to block it out. It was some time in June. We found him finally on Turk Street, or was it Eddy? His face had open sores and he’d settled against a wall in a small pool of scum—the debonair doctor, the man I referred to as my husband even though we weren’t married, had metamorphosed into a whacked out street junkie. In the aftermath of our meeting, at which I handed him a bundle of cash, I’d felt a tremendous surge of guilt, as if my leaving him had contributed mightily to his demise. I’d shared his bed for seven years, but finally had had enough of his lying and infidelities. And yet his downward spiral had begun long before he knew I’d left.

Now he was looking me up and down.

I stared back at him and said, “You’re appraising me like an old lech, Vince, like I’m a piece of meat.”

Vince, startled by my forwardness, went on a coughing jag. Once, after we made love, he’d actually described me as a cut of meat, a porterhouse steak, no less. I don’t remember being offended at the time. It was amid a short season of playful after-sex banter. “You see, the porterhouse is the champion of the steakhouse,” he said. “It’s quite formidable in stature, two cuts in one, separated by bone, and like you, Pina, one part is very tender while the other is super flavorful.”

The hostess seated us at a secluded corner table in the garden. I gathered that this was what Vince asked for, since there were open tables in the middle of the big yard. The table seemed too small for a couple that was not COVID-bonded and I edged my chair back.

“I have nothing you can catch, Pina. I haven’t been in contact with anybody. What are you going to do, eat on your lap? Maybe you should ask them to bring you a TV tray. Do you remember TV trays or are you too young for that?”

“I know what a TV tray is.”

“They were the glory of the Fifties. You’re not going to believe this after listening to me carry on as a foodie bon vivant all these years, but my ideal was a frozen Swanson TV dinner in a tin tray—fried chicken with mashed potatoes, a medley of cubed carrots, kernels of corn, and very green peas, and a little pocket of cinnamon-flecked apple fritters. That and a cherry coke and I was in heaven. I felt like a free agent. Had everything right in place. You know what I mean? I had my TV dinner on a TV tray as ‘Gunsmoke’ came on the tube.”

“Your mother must have really loved you, Vince. Sounds like the good old days.”

Vince nodded, a little sadly, it seemed. Although he perked up quickly when the waiter arrived at our table. “Will you join me in a martini, Pina?”

“Of course.” I was going to need something to get me through the hour. I didn’t pause to wonder if martinis were part of Vince’s recovery plan.

He certainly knew what he wanted. “I’ll have a Hendricks up with olives and a dash of horseradish.”

Both he and the waiter glanced at me to see how I’d customize my cocktail. You couldn’t just order a martini anymore, but I had to admit that the drink Vince described sounded tantalizing. “I’ll have the same.”

Vince’s eyes sparkled with triumph. When the martinis arrived he lifted off his mask and toasted me: “To old times.”

I undid my mask. “You mean the days of TV dinners on TV trays?”

“No,” Vince said. He shook his head and his eyes assumed a serious cast. “To pre-COVID, pre-addiction, to when you and I were together. To when I was still a doctor.”

“Aren’t you still a doctor?”

“A practicing doctor.”

“To all of that,” I said, and clinked glasses. No sense being acrimonious straight through lunch.

“I want to get to the bottom of some things with you,” Vince said.

I didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything with him. I sipped on the martini, enjoying the faint sting of horseradish.

“I want to level with you.”

I didn’t want to be leveled with and gazed at the menu, which was a card with a barcode that I had to aim the camera of my phone at. I knew I was being rude.

Vince plunged on: “What I had was an existential crisis, Pina. I don’t know what else to call it. I saw what was happening in New York in the hospitals and assumed it was going to be just as bad here. I lost my fucking nerve is the long and short of it. To be honest, it had begun before the pandemic. I never told you this. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you things. Maybe I didn’t want you to see me as weak. But, anyway, I’d started freaking out in the emergency room. More than thirty years in the ER and I was lost. I should have told you way back when, but I was always afraid to show you any weakness. I think I got it into my head that you were too cool, too distant, that when push came to shove you weren’t really sympathetic. I know that’s a terrible commentary on our relationship. Maybe it was all in my head.”

Clearly there was a measure of truth to what Vince was saying, but damned if I was going to engage with his conjecture, which felt like it was edging toward an excuse for his addiction. I wouldn’t allow him to guilt me out for turning “cool” after his string of infidelities. I focused my attention on my martini.

“It’s all instincts in the ER, Pina, and I’d started second guessing myself. Every time a patient died—and their deaths were most likely inevitable—it hit me very hard. Lots of people, nurses mostly, were covering for me.”

Of course, I thought, the nurses. How many of them had he slept with?

“And, you didn’t know this either—nobody did—but I’d been using heroin for quite a long time. Judiciously.”

I mused for a moment about the judicious use of heroin. I suppose I had been a judiciously heavy drinker during my time with Vince and just after. That my drinking has tailed off considerably since I’ve been with Charlie has to mean something, but I’m not sure what. I took a long silver slug of the horseradish martini and told myself to never stop drinking altogether. What a waste that would be.

I could see that Vince was about to launch into the next phase of his big reveal and I preempted it: “Since we’re getting to the bottom of things, Vince, I have a couple of questions. When exactly did you stop being judicious in your use of heroin, and which nurses were you sleeping with at the time?”

Vince gulped for air and his cheeks reddened. I felt briefly like a bitch for getting in the face of a recovering addict, but then I wondered if Vince’s true state was recovery or a checkered return to judiciousness. Now he looked flustered, aiming his phone at the menu card.

The waiter timed his approach perfectly, just as the old doctor vanquished a short attack of hiccups.

This was the moment Vince stopped being courtly. He barged ahead with his order as if he were eating alone. “I’ll start with the steak tartare—now you do it properly here with the raw egg atop, don’t you? And I’ll have a half-pound of the moules-frites. How about a glass of the Sonoma Roadside Grenache for starters?”

The waiter turned toward me. “Madam?” I ordered the fig and arugula salad and a bottle of San Pellegrino.

Vince glared at me once the waiter left. “What, are you on a diet, Pina?”

Vince was never particularly good at provoking me. “No,” I said, “I’m in a less-is-more groove these days.”

“You always had a knack for being spare, Pina. I used to think you had this automatic elegance—you didn’t have to do anything, you just had it. You could breeze through the world like a model, never accruing any baggage.”

“That’s how you saw me?”

“Yes. It made me jealous.“

“Is that because you need to perform all the time?”

Vince’s clean-shaved face had relaxed but now it was halfway back to pinched. His springtime and summer dissipation hardened the leatheriness of his skin and fresh crags carved their way into his chin. The lines crossing his forehead deepened into a music stave without notes. I imagined the notes of a dirge filling the stave as he died. But Vince was still handsome, almost more so, with a hint of an aged, hard-eyed Robert Mitchum.

I shifted my focus to the raw egg atop Vince’s steak tartare. It sat Cyclops-like in a pocket of the beef. Before Vince mixed the egg into the raw meat, I pictured the yolk dripping onto his white polo shirt. But, alas, his storied ER skills returned and he operated with his fork like a judicious surgeon.

Vince looked up at me after eating a couple of mouthfuls of his mash. “Why don’t you have another martini, Pina, while you wait for your salad to come?”

Not only was I tempted by the idea, I gave into the temptation.

Vince’s face again took on a triumphant look as he signaled to the waiter.

I’m not going to make a slew of excuses for what happened later in the afternoon, after quaffing the second martini and half a bottle of $105 Viognier, after barely touching my salad and telling the waiter, who looked unsure where to place the check, to give it to my father. Nor am I going to go on at length about stumbling out of The Girl and the Fig garden and being forced to grab hold of Vince’s arm as we took a weaving path through the tourists, all the way back to the condo complex. When Vince led me up the stairs to his condo I didn’t protest, and when he laid me back on the dining room table and pulled down my jeans and knickers till they puddled around my ankles, I didn’t once say no. In fact, I encouraged him: “Fuck me harder, you prick. Fuck me harder.” Maybe it was because it had happened before—not on the dining room table—but there were plenty of other times when we led each other back to our digs, snookered, and hopped into bed. In fact, I’ve always liked being drunk when I fucked. At first it was the only way I could stand it.

Clearly my self-esteem, at bedrock, is shattered. Why else would I participate in so tawdry an event? Sure, I was smashed, but not beyond reason. I knew what I was doing, what I let happen to me.

After I showered and did my best to wash the smell of Vince from my body forever, I had coffee with him on the deck. At one point I said, “You’re a bad influence on me, Vince.”

“I hope to continue being a bad influence on you, Pina.”

“It’s not going to happen again,” I said, and knew that I meant it.

Relatively sober after three cups of coffee, I stepped gingerly down the stairs and found a spot behind the oleanders to pee. Then I sat in my car for a good hour before driving off.