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There was a long stretch of my life, unhappily, when I was not able to be faithful to anyone, not to a single woman, not to the best woman I’d known, my first wife, Molly. I used to assert—this was my rationale—that I was faithful to her in every way except sexually (actually I was), and I used to …

I found many women were working off the same kind of thing I was. They were getting back at squadrons of men, and would go to extraordinary lengths to play out their grudges. Sometimes I thought they actually preferred breaking the marriage laws in their own beds. And if an infant, the fruit of the…

Remember that for years, when I was a very young man, every time I entered a bed where a girl was waiting for me I’d be entering a courtroom where I’d lost many decisions. Doesn’t every culprit wish to turn the tables on his judge, deflate his eminence, show him up, kill him? Wasn’t it natural, sin…

I generalized from this disaster that the most precious things in life were forbidden by authority (my father) and that everything I wanted most I would have to obtain secretly. I learned to conceal my longings and to work to fulfill them surreptitiously. I stopped feeling guilty about the beautifu…

I spent afternoons after school in the stacks of the New Rochelle Public Library, reading books that might explain the intimate problems of my life. Or in the movie houses. Movies became my passion. They were dreams, like my dreams. I didn’t have money, so I found a way to sneak into Loews New Roch…