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look forward to her afternoon visits as the climax of each day.
    She made it her job to find vases for the flood of flowers that Damon’s friends sent him and was coolly correct, although not cordial, when her visits happened to coincide with those of some of the ladies of Damon’s acquaintance. She was sedate and proper and Damon could understand when Biancella, who was a bony and pain-wracked old man, said of his niece, “When she puts her hand on my forehead to see if I have fever, I feel that she is healing me more than all the doctors and nurses and injections combined.”
    By the time Damon had been in the hospital for two weeks he had decided that his divorced wife and most of the girls and women he had known were unbearably frivolous and unstable when compared to Sheila Branch, which was her maiden name, and that despite the difference in their ages (he was over forty and she twenty-five) he would marry her if she would have him.
    But her sensitivity, while fine for a hospital, was sometimes difficult to bear in a prolonged marriage and now, in the first moments after her arrival, as she peeled off the gloves she had worn for driving, she said, “You look awful. What is it?”
    “Nothing,” he said brusquely, sounding irritated, which sometimes stopped her questioning. “I’ve been reading all day and trying to make up my mind what’s wrong with the manuscript and how it can be fixed.”
    “It’s more than that,” she said, peasant stubborn. He had said that to her more than once. “You had lunch with your ex-wife,” she said accusingly. “That’s what it is. You always come back from seeing her as though it’s thundering inside your head. What is it—she want more money again?”
    “For your information, I had lunch alone and I haven’t seen my ex-wife in more than a month.” He was glad of the opportunity to sound innocent and honestly aggrieved.
    “Well,” Sheila said, “look better—or at least different when we go out to dinner.” She smiled, ending the argument, at least for the moment. “I’m the one who should be looking like thunder after two days with Madonna.”
    “You look beautiful,” he said, and meant it. Although she never would have been chosen by the model agencies to be photographed for the fashion magazines, the stern, prominent lines of her face, the great dark eyes, the coarse, thick black hair, cut shoulder length, the strong, generous, olive-skinned body, had over the years become the standard against which he judged the worthiness and character of women.
    Despite that, he had been attracted briefly but irresistibly to many women, and as he had with his Iberian beauty, taken his pleasure with a number of them: The long years of joyous bachelorhood after the break-up of his marriage had been given over to two things—work and appetite, and his second marriage had not changed him in those respects. He was not a religious man, although when forced to think about religion, he opted for agnosticism. Still, he had a sense of sin, if appetite itself was sin. He did not blaspheme or bear false witness or steal or kill, although from time to time he did covet his neighbor’s wife. His appetite was strong and natural and he made very little effort to curb it, although when possible he tried to do no harm either to himself or his partners in satisfying it. New York during those years was not a center of abstinence. He had been handsome when young and as people who have been good-looking in their youth are likely to do, conducted himself with ease and assurance even when age had left its grim traces on his appearance. He had not tried to hide this side of his character from Sheila. In any event, it would not have been possible—she had seen the parade of women who had come to visit him in his hospital room and arranged the flowers they had sent him. The lady from Spain had angered Sheila because of her indiscretion. To tell the truth, it had annoyed him, too, and he had