I finished the column with just enough time to spare. In the bedroom, Thorpe still lay in his torpor. I shrugged off my dressing gown, sank back down on the damp sheets and curled myself around him once more. He was here, that was all. Had come to life in my bedroom in the middle of the night, still wet from a bath—I smelled the soap on him—and from the squall that had drenched him on the way across the harbor. He’d stopped on Hog Island only long enough to drop off his kit and clean up, he said, and then he had come to me, to Lulu, his Lulu, at last, my God, had spent himself in less than a minute and dropped senseless on my pillow. Just like that. Where he’d slept the night before, I had no idea. Where he’d slept the previous twelve nights, I had even less idea. He was here, that was all. His heart still thudded away, thank God. A snore rasped in his nose. He was alive. I gathered him in my arms and listened to the sounds of his sleep, which—unlike the noise of the airplanes outside—belonged to me, and only to me.

That was all.

I was just drifting off again when he woke. For an instant, his body went rigid, and then he recognized the room, the bed, the whore at his back. I felt his relief like a downpour. He turned in my arms and apologized.

“For what?”

“For last night.”

“Last night? That was nothing. Makes a change from the everyday.” I ran my hand over his hair, which was short and bristling, God knew why. The smell of his soap, how I’d missed it. This humid little intimacy of tangling in bed together at dawn.

“Everyday, eh?” he said.

“Everyday. It’s how most people live, you know, one day the same as the other. Sleeping in the same bed with the same woman, night after night. Some find it a little dull, I guess.”

How that wide, red mouth grinned at me. I still remember that smile, the shape and size of it. He rolled me on my back, kissed me on the lips and throat and breasts. “I believe we can do better than that, my love,” he said. And you know how it is. The sunshine, the smell of the sea through your window, your lover returned to you after an absence. A lover’s body you know as your own, each bone, each sinew, each twitch of muscle, each hair, each flavor, each word before he says it, each thought. When the end approached, I threw back my head and came like the Southern Pacific, and he arched his back and collided head on, an awful crash. Together we shuddered and steamed. The quiet, pale room. The damp sheets, the fan that whirred above us.