And everything Frederik then did, he did with as much assurance as if he’d already studied a map of my body for years, as if that map were hanging on Frederik’s wall in Japan, as if he had stood before it and memorized all the routes.

I had no map of Frederik’s body. I didn’t know where to start and fluttered my hand over his chest and stomach.

Frederik took hold of my hands and said, “You don’t need to do a thing.” He took my shoulders and pressed my upper body onto the mattress.

“Frederik?” I whispered when he was far below, concentrating on topology with his mouth and hand, which didn’t need to look for the way.

“Yes?” he murmured, as if I were knocking inopportunely on his door when he was in the middle of a revolutionary invention.

“Your … your precision is incredible.”

Frederik looked up at me.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing one says about electric razors?”

He smiled at me. His eyes were no longer cyan blue or turquoise, but almost black. I remembered what the optician told me about pupils when I was a child: that darkness or joy makes them dilate.

Frederik came back up and laid his head at my throat and his hand on my breast, under which my heart hammered like someone outside not being let in. My heart doesn’t have anything in common with the heart of a blue whale, I thought.

“Why are you so calm?” I asked.

Frederik kissed me and said, “I’m so calm because you’re so nervous.”

He stroked my neck with the back of his hand.

“I did tell you that you didn’t need to do anything,” he whispered.

“But I’m not doing anything.”

“Yes, you are. You’ve been thinking the whole time.”

I turned my head toward him. My mouth touched his forehead.

“You’re not thinking at all?”

“No,” Frederik murmured into my throat, and laid his hand on the hollow between my ribs and my hip, “not right now. I probably will tomorrow.” He laid the flat of his hand below my navel, and that was the end of my not doing anything. I wrapped my arms around him. “I’ll do a lot of thinking tomorrow,” he whispered, pushing my legs apart with his, “but not right now, Luisa.”

I’d already stopped listening.

Around three in the morning I woke up. Frederik lay asleep next to me, on his stomach with his face turned toward me, his arms folded under his head. I watched him for a while, then stroked his rough elbow with my finger.

“Remember all this well,” I said softly to myself and to the blank far away on the windowsill.