She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.

She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"

She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.

I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.

"Oh!" she cried.

We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"

Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her she'd been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that she'd lost her husband; he'd been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.

I'd wound up with two clients, one of them the dead man's widow, the other the brother of the man accused of shooting him. I don't know that I did either of them a world of good. The alleged killer, one of the neighborhood street crazies, wound up getting stabbed to death on Rikers Island by someone no saner than himself. The widow Holtzmann wound up in bed with me.

That it happened does not strike me as extraordinary. Traditionally, widows have been regarded as vulnerable to seduction, and as more than ordinarily seductive themselves. My role in Lisa's personal drama, the knight in tarnished armor riding to her rescue, did nothing to hinder our falling into bed together. While I was deeply in love with and committed to Elaine, and by no means uncomfortable with that commitment, there is something in the male chromosomal makeup that renders a new woman alluring simply because she is new.

There had been no other women for me since Elaine and I had found each other again, but I suppose it was inevitable that there would be someone sooner or later. The surprise was that the affair wouldn't quit. It was like the Energizer rabbit. It kept going and going and going…

You didn't need a doctorate in psychology to figure out what was going on. I was obviously a father figure to her, and only the least bit more available than the genuine article. For several years back home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he had come to her bed at night. He had thrilled her with his fingers and his mouth, teaching her to gasp out her pleasure like a lady, softly, so the sounds would not carry beyond her bedroom door. He taught her, too, to please him, and by the time she went off to college she had become skilled beyond her years.

And still a virgin. "He would never put it in," she said, "because he told me that would be a sin."

While she and I had not drawn any such line, in other respects our relationship echoed what she'd had with Daddy. Although she had originally made the first overtures, giving me to understand that she was available to me, since then she had initiated nothing. She never called my home or office. I always called, asking if she felt like company, and she always told me to come over.

We were never together outside her apartment. We never walked down the street side by side, or had a cup of coffee together. One night Elaine and I stopped at Armstrong's after a concert at Lincoln Center, and Elaine spotted Lisa in the crowd at the bar. It was Elaine who had introduced me to Lisa and her husband; the two women had met at a class at Hunter College. "Isn't that Lisa Holtzmann?" she'd said, nodding toward the bar. I looked and agreed that it was, but neither of us suggested going over and saying hello.

In her apartment, in her bed, I could shut out the world. It was as if those rooms on the twenty-eighth floor existed somehow outside of space and time. I would shuck off my life like a pair of boots and leave it at the door.

I suppose it wasn't much of a stretch to say she was like a drug or a drink to me. I'd thought fleetingly of calling the liquor store, reached for the phone, and called her instead. The connection wasn't usually that clearly wrought. I would find myself thinking of her, and wanting to be with her. Sometimes I resisted the impulse. Sometimes I didn't.

I rarely went to her more than once a month, and during the winter there'd been a stretch of almost three months when I'd never even reached for the phone. Shortly after the first of the year I thought of her and thought, Well, that's over, feeling a curious mixture of sadness and relief. Early in February I called and went over there, and we were right back where we'd started.

Afterward we watched the sunset. It must have been around nine. The sunsets were coming later every day now, with less than a week to go until Midsummer Eve.

She said, "I've been working a lot. I got a great assignment, six covers from a paperback western series."

"Good for you."

"The hardest part is reading the books. They're what they call adult westerns. Do you know what those are?"

"I could probably guess."

"You probably could. The hero doesn't say, 'Shucks, ma'am.' "

"What does he say?"

"In the one I just finished he said, 'Why don't you get shed of that petticoat so I can eat that sweet little pussy of yours.' "

"How the West was won."

"It's shocking," she said, "because you think you're reading Hopalong Cassidy, and the next thing you know somebody's getting fisted behind the corral. The hero's name is Cole Hardwick. That's pretty straightforward, don't you think?"

"One gets the point."

"I'm doing a different western scene for each cover. The two constants are guns and cleavage. Oh, and Cole Hardwick's weathered face in the foreground, so you'll know right away it's another book in the series." She extended a hand, ran her forefinger along my jaw. "I almost used this face," she said.

"Oh?"

"I started sketching, and what came out began to look curiously familiar. It was a great temptation to leave it. I wonder if you'd ever have seen one of the books, and if you'd have recognized yourself."

"I don't know."

"Anyway, I decided you're not right for it. You're too urban, too streetwise."

"Too old."

"No, Hardwick's pretty grizzled himself. Look, there goes the sun. Will I ever get tired of sunsets? I hope not."

The show was even richer once the sun was down. A whole rainbow of colors stained the Jersey skyline.

She said, "I've been seeing somebody."

"Somebody nice, I hope."

"He seems nice. He's an art director for an in-flight magazine. I showed him my book and he didn't have any work for me, but he called me the next day and took me to dinner. He's nice-looking and fun to be with and he likes me."

"That's great."

"We've had four dates. Tomorrow we're going to have an early dinner and see Eleven Months of Winter at Playwrights Horizon. And then I suppose I'll sleep with him."

"You haven't yet?"

"No. A couple of, you know, lingering kisses." She clasped her hands in her lap and looked down at them. "When you called, my first thought was to tell you not to come over today. And then I said I didn't want to do anything, and how long did that last? Half a minute?"

"Something like that."

"I wonder what it is with us."

"I've wondered myself."

"What happens if I start sleeping with Peter? What will I say when you call?"

"I don't know."

" 'Come on over,' I'll say. And afterward I'll feel like a whore."