HE AND THE OTHER BOYS were told not to be rough with girls, girls were built differently and were easily injured. Girls had long hair, which put them at a disadvantage in games and fights. In the city, he stopped playing with girls when he became bigger and stronger than girls his age. For a while some of the girls tried to stay equal with boys by fighting with them and taking dares, but the girls lost the fights and failed the dares; also, girls wept without shame. Soon the boys and girls hardly greeted one another. They never got together again, because when they started dating they went outside the neighborhood for partners. In his summer community, however, the boys and girls played together until they were thirteen or fourteen and then paired off. At the beach girls could fall on sand or in the water without getting hurt; girls swam as fast as some boys; the games were mostly word, board, and card games, at which girls were as good as boys; and because there was more room, leisure, and pleasure than in the city there was less fighting. When he was twelve girls began wearing playsuits, one-piece cotton garments with short pants and overall tops. Standing beside a girl in a play-suit as she pitched horseshoes, he sometimes could see the edge of her breast; there were no such delights in the city. One evening in the city when he was fifteen and had given up fighting he playfully insulted a thirteen-year-old girl in her parents’ apartment. She slapped him; automatically he hit her face with the flat of his hand and knocked her to the floor. As he helped her up he was surprised at how small she was and realized that except for dancing and light necking he had not touched a girl for years. When he was on the wrestling team the coach asked him and the one-hundred-and-seventy-pound varsity wrestler to take on together the varsity heavyweight, who was national champion and had no effective opponents to practice with. The heavyweight picked them up, one under each arm, knelt down, and pressed their backs to the mat. His wife was tall and thin like him and for a time seemed a perfect mate in bed. When he began having love affairs some of the women were small; always when seeing such a woman naked for the first time she seemed like a child, unlikely to be able to bear his weight and thrust, whereas before seeing her naked she had seemed his physical equal. He was used to feeling bigger than most people, and once when talking to a very tall man he stood on a chair in a compulsive joke to complete the conversation. After he left his family he lived in a small apartment with frail furniture. The apartment was burgled; two burly policemen came to investigate; they seemed bull-like in the place, where he had been entertaining, he realized, only women and small men. The policemen addressed him by his first name; he felt they thought he was homosexual. The woman he finally fell in love with was broad-hipped, broad-shouldered, and fleshy. He had not touched a body like hers since dancing as an adolescent, when fleshiness put him off. He liked her to lie on him, which she would do but then not, saying that it made her feel like a dinosaur. Occasionally he dreams of her as a South American Indian statue, imposing and implacable, but with short, feckless arms. When she leaves him he will sleep with women of various sizes, and sometimes when lying at rest after intercourse, his hand on the woman’s back, he will feel the same satisfying deep flesh but will not like the woman’s color, smell, movements, or some other quality that in the woman he had loved was perfect. One day soon before his mother’s death he will find her fallen in a faint on her bedroom floor. She will have soiled herself; he will clean her while waiting for the doctor and think how inapplicable to him the Oedipus complex is. When he is too old to trust to sexual encounters—not from inability, he feels, but from fear of offending a partner’s sensibilities—he will understand that nothing had been so beautiful and ugly to him as human bodies.