HE DIDN’T STOP sucking his thumb until he was eleven. For a long time his parents had been after him to give up the habit, but it was too great a source of consolation. His mother asked the help of the family doctor, a self-satisfied and all-knowing man who could tell a patient’s condition from stools (“To see the world in a grain of sand,” the doctor would say). The doctor advised covering the thumbs with adhesive tape; later, painting them with iodine; later, promising rewards. Nothing worked, although it must be said for the doctor that rewards were not tried. The thumb-sucking had forced a space between his two front teeth; and his father, projecting his own business concerns, explained how important personal appearance would be for him in the adult world. “Someone who makes a good appearance, a doorman opens the door immediately. Someone who doesn’t make a good appearance, the doorman wants to know him first. The point I’m making,” his father said, “is that for a good-looking person the doors fly open.” Rather than give up thumb-sucking, however, he accepted the inevitability of ugliness and secretly planned to compensate by dressing splendidly (his father also often commented on the importance of clothes). As his twelfth Christmas approached, in the middle of the depression, he went to his father and promised to quit thumb-sucking if he could have as a present the same kind of camera his brother had bought for himself with saved money. His father agreed, recognizing that finally he wanted something more than thumb-sucking. He kept the bargain but shortly afterward started smoking cigarettes on the sly with friends. This sometimes gave him an erection. He felt that the association of naughtiness with smoking and sex accounted for the erections. (In later life an analyst reminded him that when he was very young and taken into his parents’ bed at night he would sleep on his father’s side and hold his father’s thumb, which smelled of tobacco.) When he was fifteen he announced to his father that he had started smoking and intended to smoke at home. He didn’t enjoy smoking in his father’s presence and did it only in the cause of independence. He also began biting his fingernails, not so much nervously as cosmetically, and instead of spitting out the severed parts he lovingly passed them back and forth between his teeth with his tongue. Shortly after he married he went down on his wife, intending it as homage, and found that he enjoyed the taste and texture. The next girl he slept with disliked foreplay and did not allow cunnilingus. She said she was afraid he might expect her to do the same thing and she didn’t want to. It was no privation at the time, but now cunnilingus is an important part of lovemaking for him: he brings a girl to the point of climax with his tongue, enters her, and either comes with her or comes later at his leisure. His taste for sucking breasts has diminished; also his taste for kissing. When he is with a woman he thinks of his mouth as auxiliary genitals. The lips of beautiful girls remain attractive to him; he likes to look at them, touch them with his fingers; but the fitting place for his mouth is in contact with their genitals. He will be drinking an Italian liqueur with a girl in bed and suggest that he pour some onto her cunt and taste it. It will sting her, so she will have to douche. When she returns to bed he will let her pour some on his penis. It will sting him too; after mock roughhouse and laughing they will fall asleep for the night. As he ages and is fearful that the next time or soon he will not be able to achieve a second erection he will reassure himself with the thought that he can always go down on a girl without end. One woman will tell him that a single fuck with affection and snuggling is all that’s needed and anyone who wants more is a hog. He will act on this advice, not offer more, and never lose a woman because of sex as far as he knows. At a certain point—he will think it is when he can no longer organize his gray and thinning hair into a conventional form—women on the streets and in shops will discard him in quick looks just as he had discarded unattractive women all his life. Still he will be able to make connections at social gatherings by saying that he is interested and able, and before he gives sex up he will pride himself that he had never been impotent while sober. “My sex life,” he will tell a young male interviewer at lunch after two drinks, “was troubled and full of waste but triumphant.”