What we used to call “promiscuity” had always bothered me. Impersonal love seemed a devaluation of social intercourse. I couldn’t help believing, no doubt pompously, that one of civilization’s achievements was to give value to life, to conversation with others. Or was faithful love only an unnecessarily constraining bourgeois idiocy?

There would be a moment when the other, or “bit of the other,” as we used to say, would turn human. Some gesture, word or cry would indicate a bruised history or ailing mind. The bubble of fantasy was pricked. (I came to understand fantasy as a fatal form of preconception and preoccupation.) I saw another kind of opening then, which was also an opportunity for another kind of entry—into the real. I fled, not wanting my desire to take me too far into another person. Really, apart from with the woman who paid me, when it came to sex I was interested only in my own feeling.

It has, at least, become clear that it is our pleasures, rather than our addictions and vices, that are our greatest problems. Pleasure can change you in an instant; it can take you anywhere. If these gratifications were intoxicating and almost mystical in their intensity, I learned, when something stranger happened, that indulgence wasn’t a full-time job and reality was a shore where dreams broke. It turned out I was seducible.

One of the artists in my group had a four-year-old son. The others were only intermittently interested in him, as I was in them, and mostly the kid watched videos. His loneliness reflected mine. If I’d been up partying and couldn’t sleep the next day, I would, before I cured my comedown with another pill, take him to see the spiders in the zoo. Making him laugh was my greatest pleasure. We played football and drew and sang. I didn’t mind ambling about at his speed, and I made up stories in cafés. “Read another,” he’d say. He helped me recall moments with my own children: my boy, at four, fetching me an old newspaper from the kitchen, as he was used to my perpetual reading.

With his stubborn refusals, the kid reduced me twice to fury. I found myself actually stamping my feet. This jarring engagement made me see that otherwise I was like a spy, concealed and wary. If my generation had been fascinated by what it was like to be Burgess, or Philby or Blunt—the emotional price of a double life, of hiding in your mind—the kid reminded me of how much of one’s useful self one locked away in the keeping of serious secrets.

The kid sent me into an unshareable spin. I wept alone, feeling guilty at how impatient I had been with my own children. I composed a lengthy email apologizing for omissions years ago, but didn’t send it. Otherwise, I saw that most of my kids’ childhood was a blank. I had either been somewhere else or wanted to be, doing something “important” or “intellectually demanding.” Or I wanted the children to be more like adults—less passionate and infuriating, in other words. The division of labor between men and women had been more demarcated in my day: the men had the money and the women the children, a deprivation for both.