“Facing him, she saw what she didn’t need to see to know. Even if most wives experienced being washed by a fully aroused, naked husband, they would never know this — a man no words had been invented to describe, beyond handsome, beyond beautiful. His skin glowed copper in the light from the fire, shadows emphasizing the curves of muscle and planes of bone. His erection was hers, for her.”

“Then the sluice gates opened and Lotte said it had been a long time since she saw her brother, that her son was in prison in Mexico, that her husband was dead, that she had never remarried, that necessity and desperation had driven her to learn Spanish, that she still had trouble with the language, that her mother had died and her brother probably didn’t even know it, that she planned to sell the shop, that she had read a book by her brother on the plane, that the shock had almost killed her, that as she crossed the desert all she could do was think of him.”

“Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, his back rounded and soft -ah this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her.”

“It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point.”

“More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.”

“His fair landlady was in despair. She would most willingly have made M. d'Artagnan her husband--such a handsome man, and such a fierce mustache!”