HE STUDIED THE OLDER BOYS and admired those he thought were handsome, helpful, and modest. He hoped to be like them, but when the time came he wasn’t. He was not picked for class office or team leadership (at best he was chosen spokesman: say, to deliver a complaint to a storekeeper or be prosecutor in a class trial). When someone fair and authoritative was needed it turned out to be one of the even-featured and thoughtful-looking boys, who were slow to speak and laugh, who let younger boys play in games, and who were listened to by adults. When he began to be attracted to girls, he liked those who had the same serene and selfless faces he had admired in the boys. He looked for kindness, stability, and understanding in a girl’s face; prominent bones meant long-lastingness, large eyes honesty, clear skin clear-headedness and loyalty. His first girl friend among his summer friends had a perfect face; actually, she was secretive and moody; and it wasn’t until years later, when he looked her up, that her face had changed to fit her character. The girl he married had an open, delicate, boyish face; and on account of it he thought she would be the perfect companion for him. When he was introduced to the woman he would have his first adulterous affair with he didn’t like her looks or manner: she was slight and soft, had an almond-shaped face, and spoke piercingly, wittily, and condescendingly. In their year and a half together they made love every Wednesday—ass Wednesday, they called it—and although her face became precious to him it did not fit the early model: this may have kept him from feeling that he loved her. One evening at a party he had gone to alone he met a sharp-and-goofy-looking woman from Ohio. He took her home, and they necked until dawn. Through her clothes she let him play with her genitals, but she would not let him touch her breasts, which when she finally was about to undress she said were small. She told him that she was divorced and that she had denounced her husband, a college teacher, to the school administration as a homosexual, although, he discovered, she based this judgment of her husband on the husband’s inability to make love to her. They made love once a week for a few months. One evening she asked him to put off his orgasm, and he fucked her for an hour. She asked him to withdraw so they could switch around on the bed, then wouldn’t let him re-enter. He was so angry he wrecked his car on the way home. He didn’t see her again; but her once-comic looks—long face and nose, buck teeth, target-centered eyes—came to seem ominous in recollection. A colleague invited him on a blind date to meet two girls, one of whom was the colleague’s mistress and the other the mistress’s friend. The friend had a plain face and an ordinary mind. At the end of the evening she promised to go to bed with him on their next date. He asked her to lunch the following day and said he thought they should quit, one of them would get hurt. “Which one?” she said. “You,” he said. “Let me take care of myself,” she said, so they began going to bed. He visited her one Saturday morning because it was her birthday, brought flowers, and fucked her all day, intending to compensate in quantity for what was wanting in quality. Although he had two showers her perfume stayed on him, and he vomited and shat all night; by morning he had lost ten pounds and understood that he had a taboo against sleeping with a woman he liked nothing about. He slept with a young married woman he had known since she was a child. She had the most beautiful face he had ever seen, and while making love to her he would raise his body to watch her. She was used to compliments, and he did not feel he could make her understand how beautiful she was to him. She was concerned only with commonplace things; still he could listen to her for hours on the phone because her voice evoked her face. Sometimes they would masturbate together over the phone: “All right,” he would say, “let’s synchronize our crotches.” The woman he finally fell in love with after leaving his wife had a strong face, from her mother, but unmarked by experience; the mother’s face showed that life had been better to her than she had expected it to be. The daughter is full of anger, which shows on her face frequently but leaves no traces; nor will it so long as he knows her. His own mother will look cheery till a year before her death, when her eyes will roll and look inward, her forehead be full of crosses; her nose and ears seem to grow; and her upper lip and chin turn brown at times like a muzzle.