To some of my friends, then, I would have to excuse myself for what I had already done; to others, I would have to make excuses for what I had failed to do. To myself, I had nothing much to say. In a minute, an hour, or on the morrow, my reasons, moods and motives would change once more and my behavior might be different. Hence this empathetic review had merely shown again how men behave according to sets of compulsions--patterns of conscious virtue, conscious sin, or conscious animalism--which stem in every case from arbitrary mores. And neither amongst the overtly virtuous nor the subtly sinful is the pattern valuable; it makes hypocrites of the former and deprives the latter of joy. The animalists, too, have no solution: they fornicate as through a wall, knowing a person exists on the other side but not what a person is. So any instinct, when unseen, compels men to abide by some formulation of itself. They accept a Faith and are then obliged to play they are the God who rules that Faith. So, too, a man like myself, who quests beyond these compulsive faiths (and is therefore called faithless by Believers of every stamp) foolishly plays God whenever he does not quite know himself. I sat there, sneering at the pompous fashion in which I had behaved and wondering how to make peace with my solitude, my recovered mortality. Even I had wanted more than I had found for myself. Not redheads and ash blondes abed in the night of that heat-glazed city, but their company, their tempting presence. It would be a matter worth thinking about in the future--if my future was to be long enough for that kind of thought. I came close, again, to calling Ricky, at that point. Telling her. Summoning her. And I thought that most of the men I knew would do precisely that. They like to ride downhill alone; but when the burden grows heavy and the grade steep, their wives become wheels on the wagon of their difficulties. So American marriage is too often both trouble-sharing and a private sport. "If you love her," they would say, "and if she loves you, it is your duty to let her know and she would be hurt if you did not." These, I think, are little boys married to their mothers. If I had known the truth of my condition, Ricky would have been the next to know. But I was not certain--quite. Let her sleep the night through, then. Live two more contented days. She is my wife. She nurtures me and I her and if I told her when I did not need to tell her, that would be a true weakness in my lexicon. Even while thinking that, I looked at the phone again and touched it. But I am not quite such a schoolboy. I may be the only male in America who feels as I do but my feeling is definite: from the age of about six, I did not want a girl who was necessarily just like the girl that married dear old dad. It may be that there are no real men left in America. America may be as barren of actual masculinity as Sodom of holy folk.