LATE ONE AFTERNOON, no one around, he went into the ocean. A girl his age whom he didn’t know appeared on the beach and came in beside him; she took her bathing suit down to the waist and said she would take it off altogether if he would do the same. She looked angry and mocking, and he wondered if she was crazy. He stared at her breasts, hoping that as she turned with the small waves he would see some swelling, but the breasts were flat. He wanted to see her genitals, but the thought overwhelmed him; he left and went up to his bungalow. For the rest of the summer and all through the next he looked for the girl, on the beach, in the water, in church, on his nightly walks; but he didn’t see her again. Had she been a one-time visitor? Was that why she had taken such a chance? When he was fourteen a minister’s daughter invited him to her house for dinner; he had recently taken her to a party because a friend had said that all minister’s daughters were wild. After the meal the minister and the minister’s wife went out. The daughter sat him on a couch and read from a child’s biology text a passage called “Wonderful Mr. Penis”: how the penis, usually soft and small, voided liquid waste but at certain times swelled with blood and could be inserted into the vagina, where it emitted sperm, which fertilized an ovum. As she read he felt she wanted him to demonstrate at least some of the passage; he wanted to also, but he stared into his lap, said little, and went home as soon as the minister and the minister’s wife returned. At a dance in his high school to which groups of Catholic girls had been invited he watched one girl all evening; when the dance was over he followed her into the lobby, introduced himself, and asked her to another dance a month hence. She wore a riding derby, seemed amused, said yes, and gave him her number. He learned next day from a classmate that her father was an architect and she lived an hour from the city. Telling himself that it would be too hard to pick her up and drop her off, he didn’t phone her. (Years later when his marriage was failing he remembered her and wondered what it would have been like to deal with educated in-laws: whether they would have helped him overcome the mixture of subservience and contempt he felt toward older people.) In his first year of college he called the minister’s daughter, who he had heard was taking courses in the college drama school. Did she remember him? Yes. Would she like to go out? Yes, although she knew, she said, why he was asking her. He stood her up. The army and navy offered separate programs to college students: the army promising only that those who joined would be exempt from the draft and would be called up together; the navy that those who joined would be sent to midshipman’s school and made ensigns if they qualified, sailors if not. He and his friends joined the army program; if any of them had joined the navy program they would have been dropped from the group. “You have to be careful what you take seriously,” was the principle as described by one of the group, who was himself dropped for publishing in the college magazine. After two years as a soldier he was stationed in a navy town. Naval officers seemed more fortunate even than civilians: they would survive the war and be heroes too. His dentist, who practiced on the thirty-third floor of a midtown building, one day tilted the chair forward, pointed across the street to a twenty-story building, and said, “During the depression I could have had that for back taxes. Do you know what I’d be doing now?” His mouth was full of equipment, so he raised his eyebrows; the dentist, however, just nodded. He hears many regrets from people who didn’t invest in stocks, land, plays; he doesn’t think more money would have improved his life, except perhaps to have saved his marriage: his wife might have valued him. When he can make love no more than once in an evening he will sometimes wonder whether, if he had not masturbated, more sex would be left to him, like bullets. During bouts of hypochondria he will regret having smoked, worried, drunk, breathed city air. When one of his books fails he will tell himself that he should have written a sequel to one that had succeeded; he will think that he should have been a playwright (“My dialogue was good,” he will write to a graduate student who is doing a paper on him, “my psychologizing was…well, I’ll leave that up to you”) or a poet (“The confessional mode was popular in my middle age, it might have been my answer”). In his last illness he will be particularly sorry that he had not gone to China or seen Cape Horn, where, he had heard as a child, there were the highest waves in the world.