IN THE SUMMER HE stayed out at night till the lights went on along the walk. He felt that if his parents had allowed it he would have stayed out all night and slept on the beach or at a friend’s house. He didn’t like getting into bed; it meant the fun was over. In his house a person sleeping in the day was not awakened except for meals. His mother often said, “Anyone who falls asleep needs a sleep.” The summer he was thirteen a friend arranged a date with two girls he didn’t know. The plan was for him and the friend to meet the girls on the girls’ beach, four miles away. The night of the date he went to bed in a bathing suit. The friend scratched on the screen at midnight and he climbed out of the window. They waited at the side of the bungalow to see that they had not awakened anyone, then walked and trotted the four miles along the shore to the girls’ beach. His girl was prettier than his friend’s girl. There was a full moon, and the couples separated. He and his girl watched the phosphorescence in the water, and she told him that her favorite book was Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie. They agreed to meet eight years hence on her twenty-first birthday at 8 p.m. in the lobby of a certain midtown hotel, and they kissed on it. On the way home he asked his friend why the friend had arranged for him to have the prettier girl. “Mine jerked me off,” the friend said. He was in the army on the girl’s twenty-first birthday. When marching or training, the soldiers had a ten-minute break every hour; he usually slept through the ten minutes, lying down and falling asleep with his pack on as soon as the whistle blew, and waking when it blew again. His wife often woke him for trivial reasons when he was sleeping in the day: to ask a question or make a comment. She slept so deeply he sometimes could not wake her even by sitting her upright and whistling in her ear; he envied her until he realized that probably she had developed the ability against the noisy household of her childhood. In his thirties he heard from a friend that the girl he had met on the beach at night remembered him and on learning that he had published a book said, “I knew it: I should have held on to that one.” Presumably she was unsatisfactorily married, and he thought of looking her up but didn’t. He also heard that the friend who had arranged the date was dead, having had a stroke and on subsequent examination been found to be “riddled with cancer.” Shortly afterward he became afraid that he was going to die; and he would come home from his office after work, eat dinner, and sleep for fourteen hours. Only the first two or three minutes after waking in the morning were free from the fear. This fear enabled him to have his first adulterous affair: not because he had nothing to lose but because sex was the only thing that continued to interest him. One evening he told his mistress that he wanted to take a nap before they dressed to go to their homes, and he slept with his head on her stomach, listening to the sounds of her innards. He woke in a few minutes exalted: his doctor, a homosexual, said that this meant the woman was a friend as well as a mistress. After he left his family his initial sleep at nights was often a drunken stupor, and when he woke from it he would listen to an all-night classical music station. Once the announcer played Gregorian chants intermixed with readings from Gibbon on Pope Gregory the Great; the announcer was fired soon after for mocking the commercials. When he first slept all night with the woman he had fallen in love with he stayed awake in order not to miss the pleasure of her presence. When they moved in together sleep became a problem: she complained that he woke at night, lay tense, and thereby woke her; or he snored or tossed and thereby woke her. Now he sleeps in another room, about which she also complains. He feels that the difference between sleeping and waking is diminishing: when asleep he is aware that he is asleep, and when awake he often falls into reveries. Up and in company after 10 p.m. he will nod, particularly when drinking. Only once in a while will he sleep through the night; he will never sleep so deeply that he does not know where he is on waking. His dreams will most often be confused extensions of the day’s concerns. Near the end of his life, after not dreaming of his father for years, he will have a dream in which his father taunts him for looking old. He will try to take the offensive by pointing out that his father had always looked older than his mother and that usually those who look old for their age die younger than those who look young for their age. He will explain the thought as well as he can, but as he talks his father’s face will turn into the face of a self-satisfied rodent.