To create distance, he took a towel and some clothes and went downstairs to change, telling her as he left that she could wear whatever she wanted. When he returned, in gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt, she was standing by the scullery table, making coffee in an off-white slip and a black brassiere, her hair coiled up in a light blue towel.

“Want some?” she asked, looking over the top of her reading glasses. She’d placed some books on the nightstand. Her skin, he saw, was damp in places.

He nodded.

“Sit down. I’ll bring it to you.”

And as he watched her assemble the coffee press, slipping the carafe into the aluminum frame, screwing the long, hard plunger stem into the round mesh filter, he began to regret his decision to spend a rainy night alone in the company of this great seductress, who had stacked the record changer with bossa nova, to which she was swaying almost imperceptibly now, forcing him to look, pulling him in to wait in anticipation for each shimmer of her fleshy hips, each insidious dip of her waist, which was narrow, but had grown a lip of fat, in which it seemed she stored the oil that kept it supple.

“Oh it smells so good,” she said as she filled two mugs. Pouring from a punctured can, she sweetened them with condensed milk, stopping the flow with her fingertip, which she dipped into her mouth, seducing him from inside himself, pulling from his brain into his belly recollections of her tongue—its hunger, its heat, its artful pliancy.

She brought his coffee and paused in front of him, sipping hers, so he could see for himself that the heftiness between her legs was not a chicken breast, but something just as smooth—for it was shaven—and just as good to eat.

She sat on the swivel chair across from him and crossed her legs, the lower one pinching the underside of the one that lay on top of it.

“Mind if I smoke while we talk?”

He was afraid his voice would betray his weakness so he nodded. She lit a Rothmans.

“You know you shouldn’t be doing that,” he said.

“What am I doing that’s so dangerous?” she asked, shifting her weight and recrossing her legs the other way, luxuriating in her own wetness.

“Smoking,” he said. “After all you’ve been through.”

Uncrossing her legs, allowing her thighs to fall apart, she leaned in his direction, elbows on her knees, the cigarette limp in her rose-colored lips—a pistil between two petals.

“I’m not afraid of death,” she said, lingering over each word as if it massaged her tongue. “I have beaten death. Death should be afraid of me.” She reached behind her and unsnapped her bra, slipping the strap over her sun-baked shoulders, down over her arms and over her wrists and fingers. Cupping her breasts she said, “These are my medals. I wear them with pride.” She ran her hand down her stomach. “Here, I carried my children. Four of them. And in here”—she slid her hand into the waist of the undergarment—“is where I pushed them out, gave them life … breed them, as they say down here. Death, my boy, doesn’t scare me.”