The Bell Jar (13 page)

               
Constantin’s restaurant smelt of
herbs and spices and sour cream. AU the time I had been in New York I had never
found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where
they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at
a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

               
To reach this restaurant we had
to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.

               
Travel posters plastered the
smoke-dark walls, like so many picture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and
Japanese mountains and African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles, that
seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green
in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light round each table
where the faces floated, flushed and flamelike themselves.

               
I don’t know what I ate, but I
felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my
vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth
might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

               
Constantin kept refilling our
glasses with a sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark, and I found myself
telling him how I was going to learn German and go to Europe and be a war
correspondent like Maggie Higgins.

               
I felt so fine by the time we
came to the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I would let Constantin
seduce me.

Ever
since Buddy Willard had told me about that waitress I had been thinking I ought
to go out and sleep with somebody myself. Sleeping with Buddy wouldn’t count,
though, because he would still be one person ahead of me, it would have to be
with somebody else.

               
The only boy I ever actually
discussed going to bed with was a bitter, hawk-nosed Southerner from Yale, who
came up to college one weekend only to find his date had eloped with a taxi
driver the day before. As the girl had lived in my house and as I was the only
one home that particular night, it was my job to cheer him up.

               
At the local coffee shop,
hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of people’s
names gouged into the wood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked
frankly about sex.

               
This boy--his name was
Eric--said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood
around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view,
necking madly before the one o’clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see
them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we?
Animals.

               
Then Eric told me how he had
slept with his first woman.

               
He went to a Southern prep
school that specialized in building all-round gentlemen, and by the time you
graduated it was an unwritten rule that you had to have known a woman. Known in
the Biblical sense, Eric said.

               
So one Saturday Eric and a few
of his classmates took a bus into the nearest city and visited a notorious
whorehouse. Eric’s whore hadn’t even taken off her dress. She was a fat,
middle-aged woman with dyed red hair and suspiciously thick lips and
rat-colored skin and she wouldn’t turn off the light, so he had had her under a
fly-spotted twenty-five-watt bulb, and it was nothing like it was cracked up to
be. It was boring as going to the toilet.

               
I said maybe if you loved a
woman it wouldn’t seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking
this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he
would never go to bed with her. He’d go to a whore if he had to and keep the
woman he loved free of all that dirty business.

               
It had crossed my mind at the
time that Eric might be a good person to go to bed with, since he had already
done it and, unlike the usual run of boys, didn’t seem dirty-minded or silly
when he talked about it. But then Eric wrote me a letter saying he thought he
might really be able to love me, I was so intelligent and cynical and yet had
such a kind face, surprisingly like his older sister’s; so I knew it was no
use, I was the type he would never go to bed with, and wrote him I was
unfortunately about to marry a childhood sweetheart.

The
more I thought about it the better I liked the idea of being seduced by a
simultaneous interpreter in New York City. Constantin seemed mature and
considerate in every way. There were no people I knew he would want to brag to
about it, the way college boys bragged about sleeping with girls in the backs
of cars to their roommates or their friends on the basketball team. And there
would be a pleasant irony in sleeping with a man Mrs. Willard had introduced me
to, as if she were, in a roundabout way, to blame for it.

               
When Constantin asked if I would
like to come up to his apartment to hear some balalaika records I smiled to
myself. My mother had always told me never under any circumstances to go with a
man to a man’s rooms after an evening out, it could mean only the one thing.

               
“I am very fond of balalaika
music,” I said.

               
Constantin’s room had a balcony,
and the balcony overlooked the river, and we could hear the hooing of the tugs
down in the darkness. I felt moved and tender and perfectly certain about what
I was going to do.

               
I knew I might have a baby, but
that thought hung far and dim in the distance and didn’t trouble me at all.
There was no one hundred percent sure way not to have a baby, it said in an
article my mother cut out of the
Readers Digest
and mailed to me at
college. This article was written by a married woman lawyer with children and
called “In Defense of Chastity.”

               
It gave all the reasons a girl
shouldn’t sleep with anybody but her husband and then only after they were
married.

               
The main point of the article
was that a man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions
are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two
worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly. My mother said
this was something a girl didn’t know about till it was too late, so she had to
take the advice of people who were already experts, like a married woman.

               
This woman lawyer said the best
men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren’t pure, they
wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try
to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon
as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if
she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up
by making her life miserable.

               
The woman finished her article
by saying better be safe than sorry and besides, there was no sure. way of not
getting stuck with a baby and then you’d really be in a pickle.

               
Now the one thing this article
didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.

               
It might be nice to be pure and
then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure
after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn’t stand the idea of
a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double
life, one pure and one not.

               
Finally I decided that if it was
so difficult to find a redblooded intelligent man who was still pure by the
time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and
marry somebody who wasn’t pure either. Then when he started to make my life
miserable I could make his miserable as well.

               
When I was nineteen, pureness
was the great issue.

               
Instead of the world being
divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white
men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people
who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only
really significant difference between one person and another.

               
I thought a spectacular change
would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

               
I thought it would be the way
I’d feel if I ever visited Europe. I’d come home, and if I looked closely into
the mirror I’d be able to make out a little white Alp at the back of my eye.
Now I thought that if I looked into the mirror tomorrow I’d see a doll-size
Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me.

               
Well, for about an hour we
lounged on Constantin’s balcony in two separate slingback chairs with the
victrola playing and the balalaika records stacked between us. A faint milky
light diffused from the street lights or the half moon or the cars or the
stars, I couldn’t tell what, but apart from holding my hand Constantin showed
no desire to seduce me whatsoever.’

               
I asked if he was engaged or had
any special girlfriend, thinking maybe that’s what was the matter, but he said
no, he made a point of keeping clear of such attachments.

               
At last I felt a powerful
drowsiness drifting through my veins from all the pine-bark wine I had drunk.

               
“I think I’ll go in and lie
down,” I said.

               
I strolled casually into the
bedroom and stooped over to nudge off my shoes. The clean bed bobbed before me
like a safe boat. I stretched full length and shut my eyes. Then I heard
Constantin sigh and come in from the balcony. One by one his shoes clonked on
to the floor, and he lay down by my side.

               
I looked at him secretly from
under a fall of hair.

               
He was lying on his back, his
hands under his head, staring at the ceiling. The starched white sleeves of his
shirt, rolled up to the elbows, glimmered eerily in the half dark and his tan
skin seemed almost black. I thought he must be the most beautiful man I’d ever
seen.

               
I thought if only I had a keen,
shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a
famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.

               
And then I wondered if as soon
as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he
came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy
Willard and the boys before him.

               
The same thing happened over and
over:

               
I would catch sight of some
flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately
saw he wouldn’t do at all.

               
That’s one of the reasons I
never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and
to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted ‘change and excitement and
to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of
July rocket.

I
woke to the sound of rain.

               
It was pitch dark. After a while
I deciphered the faint outlines of an unfamiliar window. Every so often a beam
of light appeared out of thin air, traversed the wall like a ghostly,
exploratory finger, and slid off into nothing again.

               
Then I heard the sound of
somebody breathing.

               
At first I thought it was only
myself, and that I was lying in the dark in my hotel room after being poisoned.
I held my breath, but the breathing kept on.

               
A green eye glowed on the bed
beside me. It was divided into quarters like a compass. I reached out slowly
and closed my hand on it. I lifted it up. With it came an arm, heavy as a dead
man’s, but warm with sleep.

               
Constantin’s watch said three
o’clock.

               
He was lying in his shirt and
trousers and stocking feet just as I had left him when I dropped asleep, and as
my eyes grew used to the darkness I made out his pale eyelids and his straight
nose and his tolerant, shapely mouth, but they seemed insubstantial, as if
drawn on fog. For a few minutes I leaned over, studying him. I had never fallen
asleep beside a man before.

               
I tried to imagine what it would
be like if Constantin were my husband.

               
It would mean getting up at
seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in
my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates
and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day
he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty
plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.