“Six years or six hundred; it’s soon over.”

Schopenhauer was supplanted by Spengler, Spengler by Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiasticus by Magda. At the vernal equinox I was postpolitical; by the summer solstice I had given up reading altogether. For all it was my freshman-year professors, some months later at the university, who taught me the second law of thermodynamics, Magda had brought its meaning home to my soul already that summer. It was Independence Day. Earlier that evening, families had gathered along the shore to watch the fireworks shot off from Long Wharf: punk sticks glowed and smoked against mosquitoes; citizens chuckled at the squibs and chasers; they murmured at the rockets that thudded skywards, flowered green and copper, and broadcast reverberating jewels; they held ears and breaths against the ground-shaking mock Bombardment of Fort McHenry at the climax, applauded the final set-pieces of Old Glory and (for some reason) Niagara Falls, and went home. A great moon rose from the Atlantic. Magda and I lingered behind, drank beer from bottles at world temperature, slapped at mosquitoes.

She observed: “You don’t go out with girls anymore.”

“No.”

“I wonder is that my fault.”

In the moonlight I saw the perspiration that often beaded her upper lip, and through her blouse the stout straps of her undergarments. I told her for the hundredth time how much I esteemed my brother. “But you know, I can’t believe he sees what I see in you. Peter hasn’t got an awful lot of… imagination.”

“And you’ve got too much.” Magda turned to me beaming and kissed my lips as on that evening in the foyer of the Menschhaus. But I was three long years older: we leaned into the clover and opened our eyes and mouths.

Presently I declared: “I think more of you than he does.”

She chuckled. “Peter loves me, Ambrose.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, well, me.” An amazing smile. My weight on her meant nothing; she plucked absently at my collar point as at a daisy. “It’s your brother I love. He’s better than you, don’t you think?”

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.

“Your Uncle Karl and I have talked it over,” he said to me. My heart drained. He lit a Lucky Strike, managing the book match with one hand. “One part lime to three sand from now on, is what we think. Pete won’t mind. No Portland except for pointing. It’s all damned nonsense. D’you follow me?”

N, O, et cetera

“No, I don’t!” I should have cried, Yours Truly; and “No, I shan’t!” dear Germaine. But oh, I did, I followed them, follow them yet, shall follow them finally and readily into our ultimate plot in the Dorset boneyard, where Uncle Wilhelm’s unmarked stone still marks his grave. M ends this fragment and my first “love affair,” which, with that water message, began my vocation and my trials as an nomme de lettres: still laboring to fill in the blanks, still searching for an exit from that funhouse, a way to get the story told and rejoin my family for the long ride home.

“Nonsense,” says Arthur Morton King, my drier half: “It’s all damned nonsense.” He abandoned “personal” literature long since, as tacky, smarmy. He could not care less that, come fall, the Narrator went off to college (along with the unnamed other laborer on Mensch’s Castle that summer, his friend and fellow writer-to-be); that Peter came home, married Magda, entered the firm as Karl’s partner, and took over completion of his ill-founded house. I tell and tell, Germaine; yet everything is yet to tell: how Ambrose got from ’47 to ’69; from the sandy basement of the Castle to its “Lighthouse” camera obscura; from his realization that that water message must be replied to, through his maverick noncareer as A. M. King, to his present commitment (first draft now two-sevenths complete and sent to Reggie Prinz in New York) to make a screenplay from his fellow laborer’s labors. Along that way, for romantical interest, four other affairs: two with Magda, one with the would-be star of Prinz’s current project, one with wife Marsha, mother of his backward angel.