Letters

But as I recoiled she caught my sleeve, and with the same smile led me into Peter’s house. Its stone walls were raised now to the level of first-floor windows; partition studs were up and rafters strung across the framing, but as yet we were not roofed. The moon grew smaller, brighter, harder. At length, striped in shadows and white light, I lay spent and began to taste the wormwood of our deed. But Magda lay easily as I had imagined, naked on the rough subflooring — large legs apart, hands under her head — contemplated the moon through our angled beams, and calmly said: “They say the whole universe is winding down.”

Daily I labored on the house; at night it was our trysting place, though I was not frequently permitted copulation. Magda was no tease: when the urge was on her she would initiate embraces or respond to mine with an ardor that half alarmed me, and if I did not bring her to orgasm she would earnestly complete the job herself. When she did not feel erotic and I did — rather more than half the time — she would say so and quickly “relieve” me by hand or mouth so that we could talk, or walk, or quietly count meteors. She did not mind the taste of semen, I was astonished to learn, so long as it was chased with Coca-Cola. (Yes, she did recall that afternoon in the toolshed seven years earlier, but only with a shrug: “Kids, I swear.”) But when she guessed, and she was never wrong, that my lust was as it were hypothetical, “caused” by no more than the possibility of its own satisfaction, a wish to be aroused rather than an actual arousal — then nothing doing. She seemed to me to know herself uncannily well; in her company I felt myself to be at worst a concentricity of pretensions, at best a succession of improvisations and self-ignorances. Unerringly — and unfailingly, and never disagreeably — she pointed them out. In moments of pique I was moved to retaliate, and finding nothing with which to tax her in the moral sphere, I would suggest that she lose some weight, or crudely complain that women’s crotches were ill odored.

Magda laughed. “How many have you sniffed?” Then she chided me for both my discourtesy and my misinformation: I would find, she said, that some women were fortunate enough to smell fresh of crotch even after a night of doucheless love, just as some, like some men, perspired almost inodorously. Others, like herself, were less lucky, however fastidious: Love learned not to mind, if not positively to enjoy. As for her “weight”—by which she assumed I meant her figure, as she was not overweight for her height, build, and age — Peter had compared her to the nudes he’d found in one of the art books Uncle Wilhelm had shipped home from France, and lovingly called her his oda — odie-something-or-other.

“Odalisque,” I groaned, contrite. “I’m such a jerk, Magda.”

“Odorless is what you want,” she said mildly. “Those dainty little things in the underarm ads.”

Mother’s health declined. In late July, radical mastectomy, which the surgeon assured us would arrest, before it reached her lymphatics, the malignancy he’d biopsied in her breast. But he had been Aunt Rosa’s hysterectomist; we were not much comforted. One Sunday morning, after visiting her in the hospital, I lay perspiring in Peter’s living room. Magda discovered a large blue mole on my chest.

“Look here, Ambrose. That could turn into something serious.”

Her eyes shone. I stroked her back as she explored the new hair of my chest for more. She discovered six in all, arranged more or less like the stars in Cassiopeia, and saluted each with an eager small cry. Then, despite our Sunday worsteds and seersuckers, the hour and circumstance, she waxed more ardent than I’d ever known her. Presently I cried: “For heaven’s sake, marry me!”

She wiped sweat from her lips, smiled, shook her head. “Your brother’s the one for me. He’s got a heart, he has.”

The phrase put me painfully in mind of Mother. As we left, straightening plackets and shirttails, I glanced up toward the hospital solarium. There stood Father and Karl, impassively regarding us, their heads wreathed in my uncle’s blue cigar smoke.

That evening at supper Peter telephoned from Germany, where it was already past midnight. He would be discharged in six to ten weeks. Magda could plan the wedding for early October. I was to be best man. We should proceed with footings for the “lookout tower,” if we hadn’t already. He wished we could see the ones he’d seen over there, just like in Aunt Rosa’s egg. The word in German was Turm; a castle was a Schloss; he was a regular linguist these days…

No one home except Father and me. Hector rubbed his nose and regarded, from the side porch of the Menschhaus, the lights of the cars returning from Ocean City over the New Bridge toward the Bay ferries and the mainland.