It was four o’clock in the afternoon when she showed up. She was tall and dark-skinned, and called herself Cynthia. She cursed and curled her body into knots, crying out Simon’s name as though they had been lovers for years. Afterward, as she smoked in his bed, she propped herself up on one bare elbow and stared at his profile. Simon gazed at the ceiling and thought about his late wife.

“What you thinking about?”

“My wife,” he said. But it wasn’t Marión’s face that he saw, really. It was more of a smell, fresh and lemony, that he remembered. They would lay in bed together, in this bed, his face cradled against her heart. Just above her breast and beneath her soft neck. Marión would run her nails up and down his back for hours, causing a battalion of tiny goose bumps to rise all along his bare arm.

Cynthia nodded and pinched her cheek. “Are you depressed?”

“No.”

She dropped her cigarette in the vase with the moldy flowers from the funeral. She folded her arms under her head, and he watched her dark breasts fall to each side.

“Are you black?” he asked.

“No,” she smiled. “My family is from South India.”

Sin-thia, she had purred into his intercom. First-timer, the agency lady had told him. He didn’t argue with the lady; he didn’t care about the experience. Lust had blinked like a strobe through his mind ever since he walked out of that cold hospital. The curve of a woman’s body - big tits, round ass, a quiet mouth. Hairless, from the high thigh to the hinging point between her front and backside.

She’s not a virgin, the lady said, but she’ll make you think she was.

* * *

She knocked on his door as Cynthia, and left as Saiya, a tar-skinned, flesh-eating woman. She tore into him and spit him out, his insides pulsing with heat. For many weeks she came, turned him inside out, and left.

One afternoon, during a heavy downpour, they spent an hour pressed together in a vise grip of lust. Simon’s bedroom was hot, the windows steamed with condensation as though he had ran a hot bath. When they were finished, he left her in bed and walked through his apartment. He flicked on the lamps that Marión had tucked into the corners of each room. Lighting, she had once instructed, was an underrated factor of ambiance.

He came back to Saiya in the bedroom, and crawled in bed. Their shoulders, hips, and the tips of their ankles were all soft touch-points between them. He wondered what she was thinking about while he was lighting up the apartment.

Simon felt her face turn ever so slightly to view the bedroom, taking in the objects he had left untouched since the service. The armchair upholstered with the Victorian rose print, the pastoral scenes of farmland in large wood frames. The enormous wood spires of the four-poster bed, the heavy down comforter.

Marión had kept house impeccably. She cooked well, without cookbooks and from instinct. She ironed Simon’s clothes, even his socks and boxer shorts. She reminded him to go to the gym. Marión had a curious habit of spreading the toothpaste onto Simon’s toothbrush each night before bedtime. He would walk in to the bathroom just before bed, and inevitably there was his toothbrush, on the edge of the sink, a fresh cup of water perched next to the soap dish.

“Did you always love your wife?” Saiya picked at the flowered sheet, rubbing the cotton between her long fingers.

“A little in the beginning, more toward the end,” Simon said.

“I see.”

The two lay there while the rain on the window changed rhythms to a soft tapping, then to nothing at all.

“That’s how it happens in India, too,” she said, her accent suddenly thick. “You learn to love in these marriages the families arrange. Then there is no loss of love. This way, there is nothing to regret later.”

He said nothing.

“Do you think you could ever learn to love me?”

Simon turned to her, this exotic bird with endless energy and sexual stamina, unaware of needing anything in return. He thought, she’s just a girl.

“No,” he said.