We carried the plates into the kitchen and she washed while I dried. An oldie was playing on the stereo, nice and slow, and I turned her to me and we started to dance. She put her head on my shoulder and I wished this moment could go on forever, not bed, or making love, just this moment, forever and ever and ever.

The song ended and she looked up at me and said, “That was nice.”

I kissed her softly, putting into it all that I was feeling at that moment, and she did the same. The kiss seemed to last forever, which is the way I wanted it, not wanting it to end, and neither did she. At last we broke.

She looked up at me and said, “You don’t have to sleep on the sofa tonight.”

There was no feeling of triumph in me, no congratulations to myself for all my careful planning, for the wine or for anything else. It was just the opposite. I wished I hadn’t bought the wine because maybe that was what had brought about this special moment, so pure to me, and I didn’t want it tainted in any way. I kissed her again, the same way, and we hung there, enjoying the closeness of each other, until we could keep our lips together no longer.

She gave me a long slow smile, catlike as if she were purring, and said, “I’ll be waiting.”

A man always worries about the first time with a woman. After you’ve been together awhile you get to know her, what she likes and what she doesn’t like, how to please her, and what she expects from you. You can have a bad day, or night, and maybe laugh at it, too much liquor, a hard day at work, whatever, you’ll do better next time. But the first time has to go well because there’s no racing form on you to tell how good you were in your last outing, so the pressure to perform is on you, and you know it. Some of these thoughts went through my mind as I got my pajamas out of the duffel bag in the living room.

“I’ll be waiting,” she had said, the words I dreamed of since our first meeting, and now I had the jitters, almost like the way you feel when the coach calls your name to go into the game.

Everything will be okay, I told myself, and I was right. I was so head over heels in love with her that night I could do no wrong. I rolled off her and felt like lighting up two cigarettes, like the guy in the movie, handing one to her and asking, “Was it good for you?”

But then she crawled up on top of me looking for more and there was none. I was like a fighter I used to watch at the Olympic in L.A., a young Irish kid who would bless himself when the bell rang for the first round and run from his corner throwing punches from all angles at his opponent. Sometimes he knocked the other kid out but if that didn’t happen there was nothing left for the second round. He had punched himself out. I was in a ten rounder, at least, and I was hanging on for my life. It was humiliating, or at least ironic, that what I had dreamed of all day was on top of me and my poor spent gladiator, moving up and down in sexual frenzy, and I couldn’t do anything about it. She didn’t seem to care, which was a blessing. She would rest awhile, and I would think she was finished, but then she would moan and start up again. I tried to count the number, got up to at least eight, and longed to get back into the game, but my side had retired from the field. I cursed the gladiator under my breath for fleeing the battle, the dirty little coward. She finally seemed to be satisfied but every now and then she would shudder and move up and down briefly on her cowardly opponent, rubbing in the complete and total victory she had achieved over him. Sometimes her shudders would start her off again and I would increase the count by one, sometimes not. This was her way of cooling down, like walking a thoroughbred racehorse, until she fell asleep, still on top of me.