A girl was reading Franny and Zooey. Or maybe it was Nine Stories. The important thing is that the girl was a girl I had fallen badly for, and the book was lying on the floor of her dorm room, and after I had made my intentions known, and she reciprocated, and I reciprocated, and we reciprocated ourselves right out of our clothes, I saw the small white book sitting on the floor and picked it up as she ran off to the bathroom, bare knees buckled together, to wash off the least important part of me. While she was gone, I began reading, and then she returned and began to get dressed and said she had to go class, but asked if I wanted to stay, and I said, all right and so I kept on reading. I read all afternoon in this girl’s bed whom I hardly knew, turning the pages, enjoying the sour milk smell of the girl’s sheets, the glorious perfume of her faint sweat and shampoo and toothpaste. And there was something about reading that book, in that particular room, at that particular time in my life that made an inimitable impression on my life. When I was finished, it was dark outside and I went out into the dark and wandered around, stumbling, reaching out to touch the leaves on the trees, the petals of flowers, an iron fence, and for the first time in my life, I was struck dumb by a profoundly serious sort of wonder, which, in the end, is the exact same thing as falling in love.