for what we had—no: it couldn’t be called love. It would never have occurred to us, Gisela and me, to call it that. Mutual attraction, affection, great liking—yes: all that. But not the mawkishness of love. Not its moistening need for tenderness. No suffering whatsoever at the withdrawal of that tenderness. No urging and shaking and quaking to find entry into the soul of the other (who doesn’t even know what you’re talking about). No metaphysics, but all the brisker, all the more pleasurable copulation: the fixed advance payment eliminated any possibility of misunderstanding even here; it was sexual intercourse without dross or sediment, an art form with itself as its own subject, so to speak, not “it means” but “it is.”

No: it was not love, thank goodness, that made Gisela a pure joy for me (and perhaps me for her), more cherished in memory than some of my great passions. We were quite in control of our well-tempered, well-balanced, well-wishing and -meaning emotions. Between our brain glands and our reproductive glands (both delightfully animated), our metabolisms functioned perfectly: no increased blood pressure because of spiritual exuberance, no diaphragm flickering from psychic interference with our calm metabolic rhythms. Our mutual affection was as cool and deep as a well, and we didn’t even try to wage the battle of the sexes; we confronted each other in an armed-to-the-teeth armistice in which sex did not interfere but ran conflict-free on the ball bearings of financial arrangement, ruffled neither by the transcendent nor certainly by the transcendental.

So we were also spared the torments of jealousy; our friendship was purged of this mire. Moreover, the idea that she slept with other men or helped them to achieve pleasure in a different way (always pasteurized by financial arrangement) did not deflate my ego; instead, it inflated and expanded my experience, for the ones she found worth mentioning were not lovers glued to her by the mucous filaments of sentiment but interesting cases of sexual psychology.

(Cousin Wolfgang, taking the volume of Krafft-Ebing from my hand and thoughtfully weighing it, says: “For me, dear cousin, this is nothing but the grossest obscenity,” and I, quoting my favorite verse from Romeo and Juliet, “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d . . .” )

sometimes those lovers were authors of felicitous linguistic creations, which we preserved like objects found on a stroll along the beach, seashells and colored pebbles (the dockworker, a heavy man, who as he ejaculated cried out, “Trials and tribulations!” or the retired cavalry officer expressing his delight at the fullness of her breasts with the words “If a flea galloped over those things, it would split a hoof!”)