"It takes an hour for it to work. The class will be over."

"You're welcome to stay and keep painting after the others go. Where is the medication?"

"In my purse. In the studio. By my easel. The old brown bag with the worn shoulder strap."

He brought it to her, and with what was left of the water in the glass, she took the pill, an opiate that killed pain for three or four hours, a large, white lozenge-shaped pill that caused her to relax with the anticipation of relief the instant she swallowed it. For the first time since she'd begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an aging spine took charge of her life.

"Lie here until it starts to work," he said. "Then come join the class."

"I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. "It's so shameful."

"There's nothing shameful about it."

"There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted…"

"In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."

"You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread – it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful."

She's embarrassed by what she's become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn't? They were all embarrassed by what they'd become. Wasn't he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility. By the errors that had contorted him and the blows – both those self-inflicted and those from without – that deformed him. What lent a horrible grandeur to the process of reduction suffered by Millicent Kramer – and miniaturized by comparison the bleakness of his own – was, of course, the intractable pain. Even those pictures of the grandchildren, he thought, those photographs that grandparents have all over the house, she probably doesn't even look at anymore. Nothing anymore but the pain.

"Shhh," he said, "shhh, quiet down," and he returned to the bed to momentarily take her hand again before heading back to the class. "You wait for the painkiller to work and come back in when you're ready to paint."

Ten days later she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

At the end of the twelve-week session virtually everyone wanted to sign up for a second one, but he announced that a change of plans would make it impossible for him to resume giving the courses until the following fall.

When he'd fled New York, he'd chosen the shore as his new home because he'd always loved swimming in the surf and battling the waves, and because of the happy childhood associations he had with this stretch of Jersey beach, and because, even if Nancy wouldn't join him, he'd be just over an hour away from her, and because living in a relaxing, comfortable environment was bound to be beneficial to his health. There was no woman in his life other than his daughter. She never failed to call before leaving for work each morning, but otherwise his phone seldom rang. The affection of the sons of his first marriage he no longer pursued; he had never done the right thing by their mother or by them, and to resist the repetitiveness of these accusations and his sons' version of family history would require a measure of combativeness that had vanished from his arsenal. The combativeness had been replaced by a huge sadness. If he yielded in the solitude of his long evenings to the temptation to call one or the other of them, he always felt saddened afterward, saddened and beaten.

Randy and Lonny were the source of his deepest guilt, but he could not continue to explain his behavior to them. He had tried often enough when they were young men – but then they were too young and angry to understand, now they were too old and angry to understand. And what was there to understand? It was inexplicable to him – the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation. He had done what he did the way that he did it as they did what they did the way they did it. Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect? He was one of the millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family. But did he beat their mother? Did he beat them? Did he fail to support their mother or fail to support them? Did any one of them ever have to beg money from him? Was he ever once severe? Had he not made every overture toward them that he could? What could have been avoided? What could he have done differently that would have made him more acceptable to them other than what he could not do, which was to remain married and live with their mother? Either they understood that or they didn't – and sadly for him (and for them), they didn't. Nor could they ever understand that he had lost the same family they did. And no doubt there were things he still failed to understand. If so, that was no less sad. No one could say there wasn't enough sadness to go around or enough remorse to prompt the fugue of questions with which he attempted to defend the story of his life.

He told them nothing about his string of hospitalizations for fear that it might inspire too much vindictive satisfaction. He was sure that when he died they would rejoice, and all because of those earliest recollections they'd never outgrown of his leaving his first family to start a second. That he had eventually betrayed his second family for a beauty twenty-six years his junior who, according to Randy and Lonny, anyone other than their father could have spotted as a "nutcase" a mile away – a model, no less, "a brainless model" he'd met when she was hired by his agency for a job that carried the entire crew, including the two of them, to the Caribbean for a few days' work – had only reinforced their view of him as an underhanded, irresponsible, frivolously immature sexual adventurer. As a father, he was an impostor. As a husband, even to the incomparable Phoebe, for whom he jettisoned their mother, he was an impostor. As anything but a cunthound, he was a fake through and through. And as for his becoming an "artist" in his old age, that, to his sons, was the biggest joke of all. Once he took up painting in earnest every day, the derisive nickname coined by Randy for their father was "the happy cobbler."

In response he did not claim either moral rectitude or perfect judgment. His third marriage had been founded on boundless desire for a woman he had no business with but a desire that never lost its power to blind him and lead him, at fifty, to play a young man's game. He had not slept with Phoebe for the previous six years, yet he could not offer this intimate fact of their life as an explanation to his sons for his second divorce. He didn't think that his record as Phoebe's husband for fifteen years, as Nancy 's live-in father for thirteen years, as Howie's brother and his parents' son since birth, required him to make such an explanation. He did not think that his record as an advertising man for over twenty years required him to make such an explanation. He did not think that his record as father to Lonny and Randy required such an explanation!

Yet their description of how he'd conducted himself over a lifetime was not even a caricature but, in his estimation, a portrayal of what he was not, a description with which they persisted in minimizing everything worthwhile that he believed was apparent to most everyone else. Minimized his decency, then magnified his defects, for a reason that surely could not continue to carry such great force at this late date. Into their forties they remained with their father the children that they'd been back when he'd first left their mother, children who by their nature could not understand that there might be more than one explanation to human behavior – children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to sustain a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power. Suffering his wrongdoing was all he could ever do to please them, to pay his bill, to indulge like the best of dads their maddening opposition.