Puerto Rico where we were, in Condado, had a vague look of distress. Everything was clean and safe for the tourists but there seemed to be a weariness from the decades of catering to them. On Saturday night at the El San Juan half the crowd was up in a throng watching a boxing match on TVs suspended from the ceiling. The room was ornate and old and retained some of the grandeur of another age when you had to wear formal clothes to gamble. The dealers were aloof, even rude. I sat down at a blackjack table and in between hands the woman to my left lit a cigarette, and the dealer waved off the air before her with a sour look. I rose in protest. Elsewhere dealers were grim and humorless; the cashier girl said neither thank you nor good night.

M. got laid off and wanted to take me to the Indian casino overnight. Like nothing, out of nowhere: in the spirit of spontaneity, that word we batted around when we made our first date last year as winter's feral freeze spied distantly upon torpid August. In a burst I imagined us marching arm in arm, aglow, down the turquoise and lavender carpet between rows and rows of roulette tables and blackjack and pai-gow. We'd laugh the impervious, giddy laugh of losers with nothing to lose.

Maybe catch a show.

Drink, gamble, inhale the heady, judiciously modulated atmosphere of pure oxygen and chlorine. And awake to our senses, we'd retire for two or three hours of fucking, the intensity and erotic thrill of which I am not likely to ever experience again in all my dwindling days.

"I can't make it," I said. "I have to work."

When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.

The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.

Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.

That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.