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bouncing a golf ball on theparking lot. He was fantastic. He must have been the world’s greatest golf ball bouncer. He leaped in the air, to get his weight behind the ball, and flung it against the asphalt of the parking lot with all his strength. I would never have imagined that a golf ball could bounce so high. It went up and up, out of sight in the darkness, higher than the library, and came down and bounced back up fifty feet and came down again in diminishing bounces until the guy finally caught it. He instantly leaped in the air and flung it again. It was drizzling slightly. The parking lot was lit and shone with rain. I watched for a good ten minutes, trying to understand what the guy’s motive was. It was one o’clock in the morning. He was smiling and his hair was wet and hanging down in his face, and a terrific passion came into it when he leaped and flung the golf ball, as if each time he was going for the world’s record bounce. I put the box my novel was in on my head and used it for an umbrella while I watched. Finally the man stopped for a breather. He was a friendly guy. “It keeps you on your toes,” he said.
    I sloshed on into the library and slept on a couch. Henry was at the front desk, writing a screenplay. In my mind I was still arguing with Sally about whether or not I was clean-cut. I kept arguing with her for a long time—the waxing people were coiling the long black cords of their waxers when I finally relaxed and shut my eyes.

4
    DAME JULIANA woke me up. She was a short, robust redhead whose real name was Mrs. Norwich. Flap Horton had nicknamed her Dame Juliana. She had never much fancied me, but she ran the library and I did my best to coexist with her. She was the only bosomy librarian I had ever known. In horny periods I had fantasies about her in which I generously gave her not only much better legs than she really had but a far more loving disposition too.
    The couch I had gone to sleep on was in the PR section, which was English literature. A thirty-nine-volume set of John Ruskin was shelved just at my feet. I had often meant to dip into it, but when I sacked out in the library I was almost never sober enough to read.
    “I thought you got married,” Dame Juliana said. “Even if you’re as smart as people say you are I don’t see that it’s our place to provide you a bed.”
    “No ma’am,” I said. “I guess I just read too late and fell asleep.”
    “Nobody could get that scruffy reading,” she said. I might be clean-cut to Sally, but I was anything but to Mrs. Norwich.
    “I sold my novel last night,” I said. “We had a little celebration.”
    “What kind of publisher would wait until after dark to buy a book?” she asked. “Your feet stink, you know?”
    “I was just going home to wash.”
    “Your wife must have something wrong with her nose, otherwise she couldn’t live with you,” she said, hurrying off to wake up other couch-rats who hadn’t made it home the night before. People were always flaking out on those couches and waking up with Dame Juliana’s indignant bosom hanging over them. The history graduate students were always plotting ways to get her into the library at night, so they could gang-rape her, but nothing ever came of their plots. The gang-rape of Dame Juliana was just their collective fantasy. It kept them going year after year, while the microfilm machines destroyed their vision. Some of them already had to grope their way to the couches after a hard day in the cubbyholes.
    Walking home, I felt very good. My novel was going to be published and Sally was probably still in bed, all warm and sleepy. I wasn’t mad at her anymore—on such a nice morning it was hard to remember what I had been so mad about. Beyond the trees of Rice, huge white Gulf clouds were rolling into one another—tremendous clouds. They only meant it would rain and make the floor mats soggier, but I liked to watch them anyway.
    When I got to the apartment there was no