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up the books that had fallen out of the bookcase. Most of them were Signet paperbacks, including several issues of
New World Writing
. My real ambition was to get something publishedin
New World Writing
—getting a whole book published was not so much a real ambition as a fantasy. As soon as the steam cleared out of the bathroom Sally got up and went to the John.
    “I guess when the advance money comes we ought to get a bigger apartment,” I said, when she came back. “We’ll have to get a bigger place anyway, if we have a baby.”
    “Good-o,” she said. She sat on the bed and ruffled my hair with one foot. Obviously she no longer considered that we were at odds. She never really got tense, so it was easy for her to stop being at odds. She stretched out her legs and put the soles of her feet against my shoulders. It was clear from the way she did it that she was interested in screwing some more, but I didn’t respond to the invitation. I had stopped feeling tense, but I felt extremely wan. The evening had taken something out of me. I don’t think Sally ever felt wan in her life and I didn’t think she’d understand it if I tried to talk about it. For some reason my spirits were sinking straight down to zero. Marriage was beginning to look awfully complicated. I really sort of felt like being alone.
    Sally shook her legs free and made a beautiful V with them, for my benefit. She kicked herself a few times, with her heels, and rubbed herself casually with one finger. When she saw I wasn’t going to leap up and screw her her face became petulant. One of the things I had already learned about her was that she wasn’t at all patient.
    “I wish you weren’t so clean-cut,” she said. “You’re nothing at all like Godwin.”
    “I’m not clean-cut,” I said. “What made you say that?”
    “Because you are. Just because you haven’t been to the barbershop lately doesn’t mean you aren’t clean-cut.”
    The remark really made me mad. “Don’t be so arbitrary,” I said. “Just because I don’t feel like screwing again rightnow doesn’t mean I’m clean-cut. I’m not clean-cut at all. If you think I am you ought to explain what you mean. I’d like to argue about it.”
    But Sally was never interested enough in any argument to stay with it for more than two sentences. Arguments didn’t really involve her. Her face became utterly expressionless and her eyes stopped taking me in. Not only was she not interested in pursuing the argument, she no longer cared to believe I was there. My spirits came rushing back, but they were very hostile spirits. I started putting on my sneakers. I wasn’t just about to spend the night with somebody who didn’t believe I was there.
    Sally got up and went into the kitchen. I grabbed a shirt and started to leave, but I looked in the kitchen to see what she was doing. There was no light in the kitchen except the light from inside the icebox. Sally was leaning on the icebox door, eating a piece of chicken. I was choking with things I wanted to say to her, but they were all jammed together in my throat. I left, got halfway down the driveway, and then came back in and got my novel out from under the bed. I might want to read it before I came back. I looked in the kitchen again. Sally was still leaning on the icebox, finishing off the chicken. She didn’t say a word and I didn’t either. I felt like yanking all the shelves out of the icebox and shoving her in for a while. Nobody but her could give total silence quite such an uncomfortable quality. The few sentences she uttered were like eternal judgments. I stood in the door a whole minute, hoping she would say something so I could yell and scream at her, but she could have leaned on the icebox door until daybreak without uttering a sound. She was eating a drumstick when I left.
    As I was walking across the library parking lot, carrying my novel, I saw an odd thing. A man in a green filling-station attendant’s uniform was