We all sit down to dinner a little nervously. The drama has been foretold and now the couple is finally here, after a long drive up the coast.  They sit together on one side of the table. He's 18; she's 40.  They seem comfortable, with each other and with the thought that they are being judged.  We've been warned that this is a tremendous scandal and that the boy's mother cannot even speak about it. 'It's beyond contemplation,' she's been telling friends, 'the young man's life is going to be ruined. The woman must be mad. How selfish could a person be? What must her husband be thinking' As the bread basket circles, I am reminded. Once upon a time I was in those shoes.  And the woman was just like this. Blonde, separated, with a daughter, a complete romantic, and reckless, a stunning blend of transparency and secrecy, with pale blue eyes and endlessly sensuous, endlessly adventurous, running off  this way and that, forever awaiting the Hodgkins disease she knew was coming to kill her.