IF HE WAS TOLD NOT to cross a certain street or play with certain friends and wanted to, he would anyway. If he was asked then whether he had, he would lie. When he was old enough to shop by himself he sometimes took coins from his mother’s purse or from the change his father spread on the bureau after getting home from work. He wrote spelling lists in a fine hand on small pieces of paper, intending to consult them during tests; usually the act of writing was enough to make him remember the spelling. When he began to study geography he bought a pocket loose-leaf notebook and traced in it maps of countries, one to a page, noting on the maps the major cities and beneath the maps the national products. He kept the book between his legs during tests and was so adept at using it not even the other students knew about it. In his last year of grammar school he played cards for money on the sidewalk. The favorite game was banker and broker. Every few days he would put a new deck into play. After an hour it would be scuffed from the concrete. In the evening he would further scrape the corners of the face cards and aces. He would put the deck back into play the next day, and from the corners of the bottom cards he could pick the winning piles. One day when he was banker and the pot was high a black boy asked him if he could run fast. He said no; the boy scooped up the money and ran. The other players were surprised that he was amused. After a few weeks he gave the game up out of anxiety and boredom. In high school he could learn Latin but not Greek. For final tests in Greek he cut the pages from a translation of the term’s text—Xenophon’s Anabasis, say—putting Book One in the right-hand side pocket of his jacket, Book Two in the left, Book Three in the inside pocket, and so on; and when the lines to be translated were announced by the proctor he would take out the appropriate pages and slip them under the test paper. In this way he did as well in Greek as in Latin. On one test he caught a proctor observing him cheat; the proctor didn’t turn him in, and later he wondered whether the reason had been sympathy or apathy. When he began having adulterous affairs he often lied to his wife about where he had been or where he was going; otherwise he told her the truth, even concerning his opinions about her. Once in anger she said to him that there was nothing he wouldn’t say. He knew that it would often be convenient to lie, but he thought people would be able to detect it. When he was seeing an analyst he developed the theory that the habit of repression is due to children feeling that parents can read their minds. One day a book critic, confident of an affirmative answer, asked him if he didn’t think true novelists enjoyed lying. He said no, he told the truth whenever he could. The critic did not press the point, but he could see that the critic preferred to maintain the notion rather than think of him as a novelist. When asked, he has told writers what he thinks of their work, unless it is very bad, in which case he has praised it. On another day, at lunch, a novelist asked him if he thought his books were better than the novelist’s. He said indeed he did. Then, wanting to soften the judgment, he added that their books were not comparable: “Mine are literary, yours are not,” he said. “What do you mean by that?” the novelist said. “Mine are written in a certain style; all the styles they are not written in are implied by not being used. Your books are catch-as-catch-can.” “Well, fuck you!” the novelist said and left the table. A woman friend he told this to said, “He wanted to know whether you thought yours was bigger than his. He should just come out of the closet and settle down.” He and the novelist did not speak for a year; then one day the novelist asked him out for a drink and said that it had become clear that his remarks about their books had been hostile. “Why would I have been hostile?” he said. “Because you were jealous,” the novelist said. “Why would I have been jealous?” “Because I’m better-looking,” the novelist said. He avoided the novelist completely thereafter. Once in Rome with an English girl he cashed an American traveler’s check in the train station. A few minutes later he was summoned to the exchange by loudspeaker. The clerk said he had taken too many lire. He said he was sorry, he had not done it on purpose, and returned the overpayment. The girl said he was a fool for having given back the money and especially for apologizing. “It would have paid for another day here,” she said. He half agreed with her but never felt the same about her afterward. He continues to be honest and forthright and thinks that the world would be better without lies and self-deception. However, later he will meet and mix with well-off people and will be struck by the fact that neither they nor their servants want to see the implication of the relation. More than anything else this will convince him that although honesty is possible to some people and attractive when achieved it is not a natural human quality. One of his friends will die from cancer and will have known from the initial diagnosis that he would die. Near death, although not in pain or anticipation of pain, the friend will say, “As soon as the doctor knew, he should have told me the tests were negative and put me to sleep like a cat.”