"I'm a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I'll leave," he said.

"No, suh. You ain't got to go. I mean, you don't got to go," she replied.

He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties.

"Mr. Julian, ain't you gonna use somet'ing?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window.

There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person's before.

"You feel bad about somet'ing, Mr. Julian?"

"What I do is a sin. I've made you part of it, too."

She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. "Feel my heart beating? It ain't a sin when a woman's heart beats like that," she said, and held him with her eyes.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck.

"I'm sorry. I didn't give you satisfaction," he said.

"It's all right, suh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet'ing," she said.

Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins, leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience.

Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom.

"I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night," he said.

"I can do it, suh."

"No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That's where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I'm away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you."

There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled.

Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave.

"Good night, Ladice," he said.

She looked at him indifferently and did not answer.

You gonna be back. Won't be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.

The following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle's nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladice climbed the stairs and stood in Airs. LaSalle's doorway in her maid's black dress and frilled apron.

"Yes, ma'am?" she said.

Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grill-work over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle's skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind.

"What happened to the other nigra girl?" she asked.

"Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma'am," Ladice replied.

"That sounds like someone's fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you."

Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle's pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed.

"Why, you're a juicy little thing, aren't you?" she said.

"Ma'am?"

"I'm incontinent. I want you to rinse my panties."

"Excuse me?"

"Are you deaf? Remove my panties and rinse them. I've soiled them."

"I cain't be doing that, ma'am."

"You impudent thing."

"Yessum," Ladice said. She turned and left the room.

That night Mr. Julian was at her door.

"My wife says you sassed her," he said.

"I don't see it that way," Ladice replied.

He opened the screen door and stepped inside without being invited. He was much taller than she, his shadow blocking out the evening light that shone through the trees outside. But she didn't move. She wore jeans and sandals and a blue V-necked T-shirt and a gold-plated chain with a small purple stone around her throat. Her body felt cool and fresh from the cold bath she had just taken, and she had put perfume behind her ears, and one lock of her hair hung down over her eye.

"I need to know what happened today, Ladice," he said.

"If Miz LaSalle want her clothes laundered, I'll be glad to carry them on down to the washing machine. I'll iron them, too," Ladice said.

"I see. I think maybe this was just a miscommunication in language," he said.

She didn't reply. His eyes softened and moved over her face and studied her mouth. His hand touched her arm.

"My momma and uncle are picking me up to go to town," she said.

"Will you be back later?"

She moved the lock of hair from her eyebrow. "I t'ink my momma want me to stay over wit' her tonight," she said.

"Yes, I'm sure she's lonely sometimes. I'm very fond of you, Ladice."

"Good night, Mr. Julian."

"Yes, well, I guess good night it is, then," he said.

But his words did not coincide with his immobility and the longing in his face. She held her eyes steadily on his until he actually blinked and color came into his throat. Then his jawbone flexed and he let himself out the door.

She watched him through the window as he crossed his yard to the back of his house, tearing angrily at the knot in his necktie.

Maybe your wife will let you rinse her panties, she said to herself, and felt surprise at the vitriolic nature of her thoughts.

In her naiveté she thought their arrangement, love affair, whatever people wished to call it, would aim itself at a dramatic denouement, like a sulfurous match suddenly igniting the dryness of her life, bringing it to an end in some fashion, perhaps even a destructive one, that would set her free from the world she had grown up in.

But the long, humid days of summer blended one into another, as did Mr. Julian's nocturnal visits and the depression and sleeplessness they engendered in her. She no longer thought about control or power or her status among the other blacks on Poinciana Island. Her familiarity with Mr. Julian made her think of him with pity, when she thought of him at all, and his visits for her were simply a biological matter, in the same way her other bodily functions were, and she wondered if this wasn't indeed the attitude that all women developed when they coupled out of necessity. It wasn't a sin; it was just boring.

Then it was fall and she could smell gas from the swamp at night and the faint, salty odor of dead fish that had been trapped in tidal pools by the bay. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed and listen to the moths hitting on her screens, destroying their wings as they tried to reach the nightlight in the bathroom. She wondered why they were created in such a way, why they would destroy themselves in order to fly onto an electrically heated white orb that eventually killed them. When she had these thoughts, she covered her head with a pillow so she could not hear the soft thudding of the moths' bodies against the screens.