Trying to control myself, I untied her apron and slipped my hands beneath her shirt, feeling the smooth skin of her back and her strong ribs. I sat on the untidy bed, the sheets still marked by the creases of the last night before the holiday, and placed my head against her thighs. Dorothy stood calmly in front of me as I undressed her, palms lightly on my cheeks, running her fingers into my mouth as I tasted their scent. An unfamiliar mole marked the skin of her left shoulder, but for a moment I could believe that she was Miriam. I kissed her labia and then sat her on my knees, caressing her vulva as if I had parted its lips on countless afternoons in this bedroom of a loving husband. When I pressed my mouth to her nipples she smoothed away the sweat on my forehead and pushed me back onto Miriam’s pillow.

For these few minutes her duty to her dead sister’s children overrode her loyalty to her husband. She knelt across me, adjusting her knees to my heavier torso. Exhausted and overexcited, desperate for this kindly woman, I tried to press my limp penis into her vulva. Smiling in a distant but reassuring way, Dorothy took it from my fingers and began to massage the head between her hands. She forced a little spit onto her fingertips and moistened the mouth of her vagina. She eased my penis into her, glanced through the window at a passing car, and put her breast to my mouth, looking down at me like a wet nurse caring for a neighbour’s feverish child. When I came, and sank back onto the pillow, she lay beside me and held my diaphragm until my breathing had steadied. I let my fingers into her vulva and tasted the sweet moisture, making sure that I would remember it in the empty months ahead.

She waited until I was ready and passed my clothes to me. Without speaking, she began to tidy the dressing table, lining up the cosmetics and hairbrushes and polishing the finger-smeared mirror. I gratefully embraced her before she left the bedroom for the last time.

*   *   *

From that afternoon I was celibate for nearly a year. Although the children and I often visited Dorothy and her husband, I never again made love to her. She had met her obligations to her dead sister, calming the widowed husband and reminding him that Miriam endured within our affection and shared memories. Greeting us, Dorothy would hold me briefly, keeping alive the link between her lost sister and the women I would know in the future.

But much as I needed other women, I found it impossible to approach them. My friends were careful to invite me to their parties, but a chasm of time and pain separated me from the women I met. Tongue-tied and clumsy, I moved past them in a daze of sexual desire.