Back to bed. Yes, the wedding night was a tearful disaster, but Gerhard was remorseful. The next evening he took greater care, and—a man of discipline—didn’t allow himself the pleasure of penetration until he had coaxed Elfriede’s first orgasm from between her legs, sometime past midnight. Following this victory, he became determined that they should experience climax at a simultaneous instant, in order to achieve the sublime, transcendental union of which he dreamed. In fact, so determined that Elfriede, touched but not inexhaustible, learned it was sometimes easier to simply pretend that she was about to reach the desired peak, so that Gerhard could join her there, or rather imagine he’d joined her.

Then she could go to sleep, stunned by the weight of his body.

Still, she can’t discuss these things with Wilfred. Something sacred should remain of that time, she thinks. Anyway, once she’s recovered from her breakdown, once Herr Doktor Hermann determines she’s completed her course of treatment, she must return to her husband and family. And can she face Gerhard again if she’s disclosed these intimate secrets to another man? Another man than Herr Doktor Hermann, of course, who is a professional. (Although she hasn’t described her conjugal experiences to Herr Doktor Hermann, either, despite how often he insists that her successful treatment depends on such revelations. That’s the bind, in fact—she can’t return to her husband until she’s completed her treatment, and she can’t return to her husband if she’s completed her treatment.)

“Fair play, I suppose,” says Wilfred. “We’ll leave that aside. But what would you do, if not marriage?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. It would be like wishing he were dead.”

“All right. We can speak in the abstract, if you like. If not marriage, then what?”

Elfriede draws her knees up to her chin. “I might travel.”

“Travel where?”

“Everywhere. I want to see the ocean, first. I used to dream of traveling on a liner across the sea, and ending up in some exotic place, like America.”

Wilfred laughs. “America’s not as exotic as you think. Maybe the western part.”

“Have you been there?”

“I went to Boston with my father, one summer. It was hot and dirty and businesslike, and the people were surprisingly prim. They draw from Puritan stock, I believe. Then we went to Cape Cod for a couple of weeks, which was rather nicer. It sticks out right into the ocean, you see, curling like a scorpion’s tail, and we swam in the surf every morning at sunrise.”

“Heaven,” says Elfriede.

Wilfred struggles upward to sit beside her. “Not quite.”

“Why not?”

“This is more like heaven, if you ask me.”

A breeze comes upon them, stirring Elfriede’s clothes. Stirring his. The sky is clear above the greens and grays of the mountaintops, except for a single, small cloud that sticks to the highest peak. The air smells of warmth, of sunbaked grass, and occasionally of Wilfred when his scent steals close enough.