In the garden, they’re swift and efficient. Consummation, that’s all. They lie stunned with relief afterward, listening to all those croaks and chirps, while their hearts thump like drums and the perspiration rolls from their skin. Not a word. What possible words? The whole world is wet and hot and stuck together. At last he eases himself out and helps her with her drawers, her skirts. She finds his shirt. They wander in a daze back to the house. In the kitchen, Elfriede chips ice from the block in the icebox and pours a pitcher of water to take upstairs. Wilfred follows her without a sound.

Elfriede’s bedroom is pale and prim and hot. The windows are screened; she opens them to slight refreshment. Now there’s time to undress each other. They have all night. She unpins her hair and Wilfred takes up handfuls to rub against his cheeks and his lips. He uncovers her breasts and her belly for the first time and falls to his knees on the braided rug. The moon’s risen above the nearby sea, and Wilfred tells Elfriede how she glows in its light. He kisses every curve and hollow. He licks the salt from her skin. Like a penitent he worships her. Twice she bursts into climax—she’s a bowstring, tightly wound, and each release is the flight of an arrow—and while she lies there basking a second time, he parts her damp hair from her shoulder and apologizes.

“For what?”

(They speak in whispers, because of the children.)

“I meant to ask you something, out there in the garden, and instead I forgot myself entirely.”

Elfriede rolls atop his chest and presses her fingertips to his mouth.

“The answer’s yes,” she says, and she straddles him the way Charlotte straddled Gerhard in his chair in that far-off study, she rides him the way Charlotte rode Gerhard, vigorous, sweating, ecstatic, shockingly deep, but when he spends a few moments later, he doesn’t close his eyes and roar like a lion. He lifts his hands to cradle her face between his palms, and there, then, staring reverently inside her, he groans from his chest as if he’s dying. La petite mort, as the French call it.