“I think maybe because your uncle is such a bastard about things like that.”

“Yes, but be nice. Please don’t turn out to be nasty. I couldn’t stand it.” She lifted her face and he discovered that he had to bend his head to kiss her mouth, which was already slack and moving. He fumbled behind her neck to undo the buttons of the wrinkled dress. When finally he gave up and she stepped back to do it herself the towel slipped away from him, the articles of clothing falling one by one to join it on the blue rug. Her released breasts were small but years beyond the bud stage, being in fact slightly overripe, with nipples like fingertips. She wore stockings of suntan on her neat, plump feet and good but muscular legs—a tennis player?—with full thighs like a welcoming committee.

Yet he found to his horror a few moments later that it was just as it had been on the previous evening when, famished, he had ordered a meal and found it impossible to eat.

“Don’t worry,” she said finally, pushing him gently until he lay back on the mattress with his eyes closed, the springs sighing as she got up.

She was very adept.

In a very little while when he opened his eyes her face was covering his universe, a very serious face like that of a small girl intent upon a problem; there was the beginning of perspiration sheen where the nostrils flared at the corners of the cruel curving nose; the gray eyes were very wide, irises wild jet, pupils warm and liquid, all-encompassing; the eyes widened, wider, locking with his and drawing in his gaze until he allowed it to slide inside hers, deep, deep, with a tenderness that was strange and new.

Perhaps, God, he thought fleetingly, a peculiar moment to get religion.

Months later, when for the first time they felt able to discuss that morning with words—this was long before she had become restless again and he had begun to feel her love slipping like sand between his fingers—she told him that she had been ashamed of her skill, sad that she was not able to offer him the gift of innocence.

“Who can?” he had asked her.

Now the moaning noise of the trapped air in the pipes became a hollow whistling. Disgusted, Meomartino abandoned all attempts to concentrate on the paperwork and shoved his chair back from the desk.

Peggy Weld appeared in the doorway, her eyes reddened and her face washed free of makeup. Her mascara must have run, he told himself.

“When do you want to take my kidney?”

“I don’t know, exactly. There are a lot of preliminaries. Tests and things.”

“Do you want me to move into the hospital?”

“Eventually, but not just now. We’ll let you know when.”