HIS MOTHER GAVE him everything he wanted, within reason, so that he became careful not to take advantage of her. Some days he would stay home after school and follow after the woman who helped his mother clean and cook. Olga, a short, German blonde, who claimed to be an expert in American crossword puzzles, and Alice, English, with thick glasses, who had lived for years in Alaska with her grown son, liked to talk with him and answered his questions. Sometimes his mother would return just before dinner and tell him that she preferred he go out and play in the afternoon. His brother looked down on him, and although his father tried to guide him his father’s advice was useless. He could win over almost all his grammar school teachers—nuns and laywomen—with his manner, dress, and bearing. In the same way, he charmed the mothers of his friends and, when he went with girls, their mothers. He studied phrases in the letters from girls for signs of their true feelings about him: what did it mean when a girl said, “You are important to me”? Sex became so powerful in him that a small attention from a girl meant more to him than the concern of his parents. In high school the Jesuits seemed to like him, but not the lay teachers. His friends among the students were small, poor, and smart; he liked to talk to them about his girls, and they seemed to like to listen. When one of these friendships failed it was unimportant, like an animal’s not taking food from him; when a girl dropped him, however, he felt he had done something wrong. In the army he occasionally met an officer who seemed to like him, usually a desk officer, young and a college graduate; noncommissioned officers disliked him: one of them often said he was “on top of the shit list,” another that he would do close-order drill “till his shit had muscles.” He completed marches, was a good marksman, kept his bunk, uniform, and rifle clean; but after he had been in the army awhile he understood that the job of noncommissioned officers was to get him into a position where he could be killed; he felt they knew he knew that. The year between his discharge and marriage he frequently asked his fiancée if she loved him; she almost always said she did. For the first few years of marriage he thought his wife loved him; but when she began denying him sex he thought she didn’t, not because she didn’t enjoy the sex but because she didn’t want to please him. The woman he had his first adulterous affair with cared about his well-being to the extent that it served her interests, and he valued this to the extent that it served his. His second mistress was a beautiful younger married woman who affected simplicity and was simple, claimed to be selfish and manipulative in certain ways and was in others. She said that as a girl she sometimes exposed a strand of pubic hair from the crotch of her bathing suit. “It drove the boys wild,” she said. By not sleeping with him she tried to force him to do certain things, but since what he wanted was a desirous woman he lost interest in her when she did this. His third mistress said that sex with him was better than it had been with anyone and that she trusted him more than she had anyone, but she had had so many disappointments in her life the compliments were not convincing. The fourth approved of everything about him that kept them together; she gave him expensive presents and cultivated his daughters; eventually the attention irritated him as his mother’s had. He could not be sure of the feelings of these women, because he felt they were looking for new husbands. Then he finally fell in love with a young woman who seemed to be happily married; after he had taken her away from her husband it occurred to him that it might have been this that had enabled him to fall in love. Later, when they began to argue, he claimed that she couldn’t have been happily married: happy marriages can’t be broken up. One day when he expressed this idea to the young woman’s mother the mother said, “But you told her she was the most beautiful woman you had ever seen.” He now holds to a theory of romantic love in which the lover hopes to satisfy some extrasexual desire, like the desire for money, social preferment, or a sense of one’s worth. The lover is not conscious of this desire, so that it mixes with sex and becomes obsessive. If the lover’s hidden desire is frustrated he seeks greater satisfaction from sex; if this fails, love dies. He could not discern what his own hidden desires had been. In later years he will conclude that success in love is like success in anything, not available to those who don’t know what’s possible.