HE AND HIS BROTHER slept in the same room in separate beds. His brother was seven years older than he and went to bed later. Sometimes he was awake when his brother came in, and they joked. If he woke in the night his brother would be there. When he was six and his brother was about to begin high school his parents decided that his brother needed a room to himself to study in. The family moved to a larger apartment. He did not like sleeping alone. To be happy he had to be with a friend and the friend had to do what he wanted. If a friend would not do what he wanted he was disappointed but not so much that he preferred to be alone. His best city friend from the time he was two till he went into the army was a year younger than he, not so smart as he, weaker, and did almost everything he wanted. On Sunday afternoons they walked across a bridge over a river. One cold Sunday their noses ran. They wiped them on their sleeves until there were no dry spots left. Then they wiped them on the iron railing of the bridge and laughed so they couldn’t walk until they separated. (After the war, when he had gotten his first job, his friend told him that when they were children the friend imagined that he would grow up to be a janitor; this surprised him because he thought he had been a hero to the friend.) When he became interested in girls he didn’t mind solitude so much. He often sat for hours in his room reading, writing, or thinking. He read plays so that someday he could become a playwright and meet Katharine Hepburn; he wrote poems and letters to the girl he liked at the moment; and he thought a lot about the future: what he would look like when he was a man, where he would live and travel, what it would be like to be married or have love affairs. In the army he was alone only on night guard duty, when he would experiment with madness by trying to see and hear things; sometimes he thought he had succeeded and that if he could repeat the effect in daylight he could get out of the army; in daylight, however, he always felt sane. On one weekend pass he so yearned to be alone that he took a hotel room and from Friday night to Monday morning had his meals sent up, spent hours in the bath, and made no phone calls. He often daydreamed that after the war he would build a square, soundproof, concrete house on a deserted stretch of beach; it would have a roof of glass bricks and no windows; only his girl friend would be admitted, and she not always. Actually after the war he married, and he and his wife moved into a small apartment. He enjoyed his wife’s company except in sleep. Occasionally when his wife had risen and gone off to work he would call in sick to his office and spend the morning in bed alone. When his marriage broke up, a sixty-year-old Polish friend, a man with an accent and a lisp, told him, “Never get divorthed. If you divorth you will remarry. It followth, the night the day. You are theparated? Thtay theparated, it ith the ideal condition.” “Suppose my wife gets divorced,” he said. “Then lie. I have been theparated thirty yearth. I would not think of getting divorthed.” “Is that really true?” he asked the friend. “That ith my thtory.” At another time the friend said, “Never let a woman thtay over. I did onthe, and it took me three month to get rid of her. I had to buy her a plane ticket to Europe.” When he fell in love he took a large apartment with the woman. If she was in another room he went there once an hour to touch her. Despite their troubles it was a great pleasure to sleep in the same bed with her. Even on sweaty summer nights they tucked themselves back to front, front to back, or pressed against one another back to back. Near the end of the relationship he will be surprised to hear her complain that he had never left her alone: he had thought that she liked these attentions. He will have a problem maintaining an interest in solitary activities: he will plan a leisurely, newsy letter to a friend, say, then stop midway and phone the friend instead. For a short period he will donate time to a hospital, chatting with patients who have no visitors. Nurses and sometimes a doctor will tell him how much his visits mean to patients. Occasionally he will see jealousy in a patient that he is well and will outlive the patient. He will often wonder how much life there is left to him and think that if he knew exactly he would be able to act in a way more satisfying to himself. He will also consider what he would do if he had his life to live over: certainly he would marry a woman with whom he had more in common, and yet that would mean his children would not exist; certainly he would not spend so much time on the solitary act of writing, and yet nothing that he might have done instead will occur to him.