I breathed deeply through my mouth. With an unusual deliberation, I rooted out my tobacco and cigarette papers, a saucer and matches. Carried them to the unmade bed and deposited them on the floor in reach of the pillow. As I smoothed the sheets and removed my uniform, a gentle fatigue began to sneak up the backs of my calves. It felt so good to lie down, to notice the small nagging pains of my body only as they were fading.

It seemed incredible that I should feel so empty and clean so short a time after I had been overcome with that lunatic misery; perhaps I was careful to edit my thoughts to only what I wanted to remember. As I lay in bed, I told myself time would begin again after some sleep. There were plenty of years left for bad thoughts, for replaying Mr. Chesbrough’s bleeding hand, my indiscreet, self-indulgent maundering, and the events of the night before. Morning could bring the grief and shame again, but not before I had rested. I did not even smoke, but slid off wondering, with a grin, if everything had happened because I had so nearly managed an orgasm at some other hand than my own.

In that night of peace, those hours of necessary indifference, the possibility of solitude occurred to me. Lying sprawled there, unwatched, was so very comfortable. I did not feel mortified by the width of my thighs, the size of my buttocks, the thickness of my wrist, the flab beneath my arms and chin, the odor of my feet. If only, I thought, I could be sure of never going hunting again, of never being driven out into the night by my own desires. No more rooting and scavenging for listeners, no more posturing, no more clumsy experiments meant to attract. I mourned all the energy I’d spun away in my futile attempts to secure a back to hug for a night.

I thought of myself as a spider quivering in the center of a web while swearing off flies. I was harmless when I was only chasing and dreaming, but in those few terrible cases in which I had snared some poor prey, made them captives of my cross-eyed, ravenous devotion, the consequences had been strangely poisonous.

Now, on clear mornings, after coffee and an undisturbed hour with a book, I am able to confess that the injury I have produced has been mainly to myself, that those I have afflicted with my heedless acts or stupid talk have bled for longer in my reflections than they ever did in reality.