The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

and sodas. Hardly the recommended diet for players engaged in a clash with finely trained athletes—rested and ready for the game against those ‘tough guys’ from Brooklyn. Puzzy gave the team a pep talk at halftime and the second half was a different story.

“Puzzy, Allie, and Artie began hitting their shots. The game ended in a tie. We played two overtimes and lost by a basket. The Yale captain thanked us and paid me the hundred dollars, twenty of which immediately went to the farmer-driver to drive us back to the bus station in Wilton. We got on board the bus around midnight and arrived back in New York at about six A.M. The players made a dash for the Automat (now defunct; you placed nickels in food slots, and out came the food, from main dishes to dessert). I distributed what was left: each player got a few bucks. I took nothing. We had enough for subway fare—five cents back to Brooklyn—and the game was history. It soon became a neighborhood legend.

“A month later, Kappy went back to Wilton for the inquest. He was declared innocent. We never played another game.”

Why Lionesses Prefer Dark Brunettes, or Why Both Men and Women Are Attracted to Deep Voices

The olfactory system—the sense of smell—bypasses all the brain’s thinking processes and directs its information exclusively toward the regions that control sex and aggression. In order to mate with a female hamster, male hamsters must have this system functioning. Male mice need it in order to respond to female fertility signals, and female pigs need it to be aroused by boars. In humans, scent no longer dominates sexual response; scent is nowhere near as significant for us as it is for the rest of the animal kingdom.

Sight is much the most important human sense; appearance is what attracts us. “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” but lionesses prefer dark brunettes, which are believed to have higher testosterone levels and potentially better genes.

Humans and many other species find voices attractive. In humans, deep, husky voices—considered sexually attractive by both sexes—are also correlated with high testosterone levels and therefore potentially high sex drive and good genes.

Fear and terror, not shared pleasant experiences, are more likely to result in mutual attraction. The release of stress hormones activates the brain’s neurochemical systems that promote attachment bonds. In a famous experiment, an attractive woman interviewed young men on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet above a river, and also on the ground. Midway through the interview, she gave them her phone number. Over 60 percent of the men she interviewed on the rope bridge called her back; only 30 percent of the men on the ground did so.

I was 17, as was my girlfriend, Carla, and neither of us was sexually experienced. Rain fell like needles, but Carla’s parents’ cabin’s back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, kept us dry. I wanted to sleep outside, catch cold. I wanted to share disease and shudder. Carla wanted to brush her teeth. She liked the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats. Toothbrush and towel in hand, she pushed open the screen door and sought linoleum.

I unfolded the sleeping bags and unrolled them on the wooden floor, fluffing up our backpacks, tucking them into the mouths of the sleeping bags. I pushed the bench out of the way into the corner of the porch. I rearranged things and waited.

“Everything’s wet out here,” Carla said when she emerged. “Let’s sleep inside.”

“No,” I said. “The rain’ll stop soon.”

I shut the door to the house, jiggled the doorknob, and pronounced the door locked. The only way to get in was to find the key somewhere on the porch come morning.

Carla got under the covers and lay down next to me in her sleeping bag.

“How do I look?” she asked.

I searched my mind for adjectives. I wanted to please her, choose the right ones by being descriptive. “Kissable. Dreamy. Exquisite.”

“H-H-How do I look?” I asked. I stuttered less when I was alone with Carla than I did with anyone else, but it still cropped up occasionally.

Carla laughed and avoided the question. Whenever she asked me how she looked, she knew that whatever I answered, she was irresistible. She wanted me to be handsome, but I wasn’t. My pimples wouldn’t go away; I wouldn’t go away. I was who I was. I wasn’t handsome. Carla knew that. She could see. She wasn’t blind. She loved me, nevertheless. She loved me for the complexity of my soul—something like that. Anyone can have clear skin (as my father does), blue eyes (ditto), wavy hair (till middle age), a mellifluous voice (still).

We touched fingertips, interlocked fingers, pressed palms together like flat stomachs, squeezed tight. I spread her middle fingers, moved my index finger up and back between her fingers. I held the back of her neck, closed my eyes, kissed her. Surprisingly, she sat up, kissed me, and then we bumped foreheads while I was undoing the zipper of my sleeping bag and sliding closer to her. She laughed at what she took to be my clumsiness. I kissed her pug nose. We joined lips and twisted our heads until I said, “We’re destined to make love tonight.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m ready. It’s cold. I really need to use the bathroom first.”

She got out of her sleeping bag, gathered up a few things from her backpack, tried the door.

“It’s locked,” I said.

She turned the doorknob, pushed the door open.

“Liar,” she said.

“I honestly thought I’d locked the door,” I said.

She closed the door softly behind her while I lay down on the sleeping bag. Outside, tree limbs swayed like broken arms and thick sheets of cutting rain erased the sky. I waited for Carla, who could easily be another few hours. She got lost in bathrooms. She felt safe in them, at home, locked in. She had a toilet kit like a suitcase. She liked to be clean. She talked about towels and soaps and different kinds of tissues—their warmth, their softness. She liked to play with faucets. Transfixed on beauty, she stared into mirrors for hours, scared away blemishes.

I was, in a sense and for the moment, one of those blemishes: I wasn’t Carla’s dream boy. I didn’t have a deep, husky voice. I wasn’t the lioness’s dark brunette.

My father, reminiscing to me recently about his first girlfriend, said, “For about five years, from the time I was twenty-three until twenty-eight, I dated one of your Aunt Fay’s friends, Pearl Feinberg, a tall and very attractive young woman whose statuesque figure evoked appreciative whistles and oohs and aahs from onlookers. (Don’t think we called it ‘dating’ back then, but you know what I mean.) Pearl was employed as a secretary and part-time model for one of New York’s big apparel firms. I had a good job (working for the Journal- American), a lovely girlfriend, a knock-your-eyes-out tan Ford convertible (which looked like today’s VW Cabriolet), some money. I felt like I had the whole world in my twenty-five-year-old hands.

“Pearl and I were always busy when we saw each other on the weekends: the movies, the theater, picnics, parties, lectures, and tennis in nearby Highland Park. Although we dated steadily for five years—all our friends expected us to be together forever—we never talked marriage. The fault was mostly mine. We were both well past the age of consent, but I was too immature, afraid to the point of being phobic about taking on responsibility. I was the least sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old in the Western Hemisphere.

“The Journal-American, like all the other daily newspapers in New York, was suffering huge losses in advertising as a result of the still-lingering Depression and made big cuts in staff. In 1938 I, too, became unemployed. I managed to land a job with the New York Post, but six months later that was wiped out. That summer, after three months of unemployment, I decided to take a job at Chester’s Zunbarg, the Catskills summer resort, maintaining the tennis courts and occasionally trying to teach tennis to overweight fur salesmen and Bronx schoolteachers. It was there and it was that summer that I met Helen [his first wife], who had just been divorced from a New York Times business page writer and was planning to spend most of her summer at Chester’s.

“Helen was a very sophisticated woman—by my lights, anyway. I learned all about sex and politics from her. She was, even then, deeply involved in Communist Party politics. In fact, one year after we met, she left her Wall Street job—she was a librarian—to work as a volunteer for the Party.

“That torrid summer—emotionally, not the Catskills’ fifty-degree climate—I forgot all about Pearl. At the end of the summer, I came back to Brooklyn and lived with Helen for several months before we got married. Never saw