In a La Jolla oceanfront hotel, an elderly anorexic alcoholic picked at tiny oysters bedded in spinach and told me the story of her life. Orphaned at 8, married at 18 — “Married well!” She splayed out narrow fingers to show emeralds. Nodded toward the water, beyond us out the bow window, said she “liked a view.” Sighed.

Had eaten dinner right here — she tickled the pink tablecloth — every night since she buried him. “Didn’t cremate him. Didn’t scatter ashes out over the ocean. God, no!”

A white line of froth rolled toward shore. Sun fell down.

“I buried him.”

“How long ago?”

“Ten years.”

Didn’t deny she drank. For “the company” whiskey gave her. “Whiskey.” She said it with lewd relish. Didn’t play bridge. The grandchildren bored her. Never went to church. Didn’t believe in God. “Never believed.” Hoped I wouldn’t waste time “believing.” What time I had left.

“Don’t,” she warned.

“I was beautiful.” She lifted the ringed fingers to sunken cheeks.

“Was," she said. “Was beautiful. You don’t know yet about ‘was.’ ”

She laughed. “Now, I’ve a face that invites the rapist who hates his mother.” She sought the comer of her mouth with a napkin’s corner. Missed.

Polite protest — mine — was registered. She fluttered it aside, shook the rosy napkin at me. “No, no compliments. Even I can’t any longer be flattered.”

Everything said after that — “Eating is tedious.” “My oldest friend will visit this spring. We graduated together from Stanford.” — was coda. Her goodbye kiss fell down over me in a halo of gin. I hugged her. Remembered wishbones set in windowsills to dry. She was so stooped my nose skimmed the pale thin hair, skunky with tobacco smoke.

Just past midnight, then, I slid into a cab painted candy purple. Salve vida (Life Saver), in white gothic script, floated over dents on the driver’s door.

“Is not a nice street,” said the driver after I gave my downtown San Diego destination.

“Is not a nice life.”

I didn’t say it.

From the radio clipped to the dashboard, a dispatcher’s voice jittered through static. “Can you,” I asked, “turn down that radio?”

He couldn’t. He talked — mourned — above squawks, how at three o’clock that afternoon, he started buying lottery scratch-off tickets, one an hour, “tryin’ to raise 20 dollar.” Dedicated each buy to St. Jude.

He sought out my eyes in the rearview mirror. “And here you come up on the radio. You never know your luck ahead of time.”

We pulled onto the freeway. You never. You never know your luck. I thought of her. Hand on the whiskey tumbler, emeralds under low lamplight. She worked crossword puzzles: “Three Down. Four Across. Late into the night.”

Twenty minutes after setting out, the driver crunched his cab against the curb in front of my hotel. He took my dollars, smoothed them across his palm, and grinned gold teeth. “What you say when a dog goes over a cliff?”

“I don’t know.” I answered out of the darkness.

“Dog-gone. You say ‘Dog-gone.’ ”

The six-story hotel looked across Broadway onto a low-lying honky-tonk block. At night sailors got drunk there, they dared one another to get tattoos or visit the topless bar (GIRLS!GIRLS!GIRLS!), or eat Vietnamese food, or to say hi to one of the young whores, mostly black, who dressed, still, like before she married Sean Penn, Madonna dressed.

“Beautiful night,” said the doorman, from the pool of neon.

“And quiet,” I answered, watching the taxi’s taillights dwindle to quarter-karat at the horizon of the wide main street.

“Until they come along,” the doorman nodded toward three sailors stumbling toward us. One paused. He spread his bulky legs, grimaced. He grunted as weightlifters do. Lifted his genitals from left to right across the crotch seam of his white pants.

He — the ball-handler — locked his eyes on mine. His face was crooked. His nose sat at two o’clock. So near I put up one hand to ward him off. But he stepped closer. Heat off his body brushed my dress. Scraped, scratched. “Come on with us, baby. Even old women can be fun!”

He waggled a neon-lit hand, bid me toward him, grinned.

Quickly at my side, the doorman pushed open the heavy glass door and handed me in, then turned back, shouting, to the sailors.

I punched the elevator’s up button and waited. Out of breath, the doorman approached. “I’m so sorry, ma’am, about — out there.”

“Nothing, nothing,” I said. We looked down at his brown shoes, scuffed and homely on the carpet flowers. The flowers were anemones.

Once inside my room, I did what people do in movies. I rushed to the dressing table mirror. Glass gave back frazzled reddish hair streaked with grey, lipstick eaten off, freckles dark under the harsh light, moles on the neck darker. Where sun never came, at comers of eyes, white lines.

I pulled off over my head the not unfashionable black-and-white checked dress. I leaned over to pick up papers spilled out in a white fan from my briefcase. Flesh fell forward.

Hanging up the dress, teasing off panty hose, tossing the ghosts of thighs and calves into the trash with yesterday’s newspapers. I asked myself, “For how long have I been this old?”

Clerks had called me “ma’am” for several years, and in sympathy, minutes earlier, the doorman bowed his head, said, “Ma’am.” She’d said, as I sipped coffee, “You don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

The previous spring, when I wore a flower-sprigged Laura Ashley dress, didn’t my hostess, older than I, pluck at the capped sleeves where they join, in gathers, to the shoulder seams? Didn’t she say, “There’s always the temptation, you know, to try to pass off mutton as lamb.”

There had been the afternoon, a year before, in Paris, when menstrual cramps doubled me over, and I begged off tramping across the graveled paths of the Luxembourg. “I’ll grab a taxi back to my hotel,” I said to the young American, an acquaintance, who had proposed the walk. His hand on my arm, he said, “Haven’t you gone through the menopause yet?”

In movies, I would have stayed awake all night. Perhaps ordered a bottle up from the bar, called friends. Maybe read the Bible. Maybe sobbed, fallen to sleep.

I thought about people of whom I thought, “They’re old.” Thought about my mother’s ears ringing when she plays Scarlatti, how my father’s hands ached when he picked berries on fall mornings, about my friend Ed, 60, who at night, sleepless, paces his living room. How Ed goes back to bed, and his wife sleepily asks him to scratch her back. He believes it is his fault she never enjoyed sex. Ed gets up again, walks into the bathroom, puts down the toilet seat, sits, with the faucet running, and weeps. “I don’t,” he said, “even jerk off anymore.”

As to getting old, Ed is my idea of the “worst-case scenario.” Short of cancer of the spine.

I thought of myself at 18, trying to get to sleep on a New Mexico adobe’s hard-packed dirt floor, afraid of tarantulas, fearful that the boy who held me had made me pregnant. My leg throbbed where I’d burned it on the tailpipe of the old Indian bike that gleamed in moonlight at the adobe’s door. I had foreseen myself all those years ago on some distant night just such as this, in precisely such a place as this, alone in a room in which books and papers littered the table and I verged on the posthumous.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I ran a finger down the inch-long scar the hot tailpipe left on my leg.

“So, here I am. Dog-gone.”