“It’s true,” Vanya now, “look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.” A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.”

“‘Absolute’?” Rebecca coming forward on her bare knees to hand him the bread, damp, melting from the touch of her wet mouth, “Two people are—”

“Two people is what you are told,” Rudi does not quite smirk. Through her attention, sadly and not for the first time around here, there passes the phrase male supremacy … why do they cherish their masturbating so? “but in nature it is almost unknown. Most of it’s solitary. You know that.”

“I know there’s coming together,” is all she says. Though they have never made love she means it as a reproach. But he turns away as we do from those who have just made some embarrassing appeal to faith there’s no way to go into any further.

Leni, from inside her wasted time with Franz, knows enough about coming alone. At first his passivity kept her from coming at all. Then she understood that she could make up anything at all to fill the freedom he allowed her. It got more comfortable: she could dream such tendernesses between them (presently she was dreaming also of other men)—but it became more solitary. Yet her lines will not deepen fast enough, her mouth not learn hardening past a face she keeps surprising herself with, a daydreaming child’s face, betraying her to anyone who’ll look, exactly the sort of fat-softened, unfocused weakness that causes men to read her as Dependent Little Girl—even in Peter Sachsa she’s seen the look—and the dream is the same one she went to find while Franz groaned inside his own dark pain-wishes, a dream of gentleness, light, her criminal heart redeemed, no more need to run, to struggle, a man arriving tranquil as she and strong, the street becoming a distant memory: exactly the one dream that out here she can least allow herself. She knows what she has to impersonate. Especially with Ilse watching her more. Ilse is not going to be used.