“When I was little,” Riva tells me, “my father would play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the slow movement, while I was falling asleep. It’s one of my favorite memories of him.” She puts one of her father’s old LPs, Rubenstein playing the Moonlight, on her father’s old record player. Then she takes me by the hand and leads me to the bedroom. Invariably we are still making love when the music ends.

Riva herself is not a bad pianist, but she is a better painter. She took piano lessons from Herr Stulmann, a kindly middle-aged man. There was never anything untoward about Herr Stulmann, which is why Riva finds it hard to explain her painting, titled “Piano Lesson.”

She started the painting by doing a Hopperesque scene of the buildings across the street from Stulmann’s second floor studio. Then she painted in Stulmann’s studio, itself, with the windows open to allow the sounds of the street to enter and the sounds of her music to exit, which, perforce, required the old upright piano as well as herself standing at the keyboard, and after that she added Herr Stulmann himself, directly behind her, his posture impeccable, his stalwart cock buried deep in her girlish bottom.

Riva has never had anal sex, but sometimes, when our lovemaking gets to a certain point, a certain pitch of excitement, she doesn’t resist when my finger presses her there, when it enters her anus a scant half inch. Usually she comes within second or two after that, and I find the contractions so exceptionally strong and deeply arousing that invariably, immediately, my orgasm splashes into hers.

Then it is my job to take the tonearm from the phonograph record, shut down the machine, put the record back into its sleeve, and store it on the shelf with the rest of Riva’s dad’s collection. By the time I get back to the bedroom, Riva is always asleep. If I were a painter, I would paint Riva asleep after sex, lying in our bed, moonbeams streaming through our open window, bathing her beautiful, freshly-fucked ass in an innocent pool of dreamy, semen-colored light.

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A couple of days later after I’ve shown Riva what I’ve written about her piano picture, she laughs and says, “You’re such a romantic.”

“But your painting must mean something,” I say, to which she replies, “A painting should not mean but be.” Then she tells me about the time she was visiting her aunt, and one of her young cousins was playing with dolls. “Little Bethie had one of her dolls say to another, ‘You can just kiss my ass.’ Much as I might have wanted to, there was no way I could paint that. But come with me.”