The Bell Jar (35 page)

               
But all I felt was sharp,
startlingly bad pain.

               
“It hurts,” I said. “Is it
supposed to hurt?”

               
Irwin didn’t say anything. Then
he said, “Sometimes it hurts.”

               
After a little while Irwin got
up and went into the bathroom, and I heard the rushing of shower water. I
wasn’t sure if Irwin had done what he planned to do, or if my virginity had
obstructed him in some way. I wanted to ask him if I was still a virgin, but I
felt too unsettled. A warm liquid was seeping out between my legs. Tentatively,
I reached down and touched it.

               
When I held my hand up to the
light streaming in from the bathroom, my fingertips looked black.

               
“Irwin,” I said nervously,
“bring me a towel.”

               
Irwin strolled back, a bathtowel
knotted around his waist, and tossed me a second, smaller towel. I pushed the
towel between my legs and pulled it away almost immediately. It was half black
with blood.

               
“I’m bleeding!” I announced;
sitting up with a start.

               
“Oh, that often happens,” Irwin
reassured me. “You’ll be all right.”

               
Then the stories of
blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already
deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and
lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I
couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of
a great tradition.

               
Surreptitiously, I applied a fresh
section of white towel to my wound, thinking that as soon as the bleeding
stopped, I would take the late trolley back to the asylum. I wanted to brood
over my new condition in perfect peace. But the towel came away black and
dripping.

               
“I...think I better go home,” I
said faintly.

               
“Surely not so soon”

               
“Yes, I think I better.”

               
I asked if I could borrow
Irwin’s towel and packed it between my thighs as a bandage. Then I pulled on my
sweaty clothes. Irwin offered to drive me home, but I didn’t see how I could
let him drive me to the asylum, so I dug in my pocketbook for Joan’s address.
Irwin knew the street and went out to start the car. I was too worried to tell
him I was still bleeding. I kept hoping every minute that it would stop.

               
But as Irwin drove me through
the barren, snow-banked streets I felt the warm seepage let itself through the
dam of the towel and my skirt and onto the car seat.

               
As we slowed, cruising by house
after lit house, I thought how fortunate it was I had not discarded by
virginity while living at college or at home, where such concealment would have
been impossible.

               
Joan opened the door with an
expression of glad surprise. Irwin kissed my hand and told Joan to take good
care of me.

               
I shut the door and leaned back
against it, feeling the blood drain from my face in one spectacular flush.

               
“Why, Esther,” Joan said, “what
on earth’s the matter?”

               
I wondered when Joan would
notice the blood trickling down my legs and oozing, stickily, into each black
patent leather shoe. I thought I could be dying from a bullet wound and Joan
would still stare through me with her blank eyes, expecting me to ask for a cup
of coffee and a sandwich.

               
“Is that nurse here?”

               
“No, she’s on night duty at
Caplan....”

               
“Good.” I made a little bitter
grin as another soak of blood let itself through the drenched padding and
started the tedious journey into my shoes. “I mean...bad.”

               
“You look funny,” Joan said.

               
“You better get a doctor.”

               
“Why?”

               
“Quick.”

               
“But...”

               
Still she hadn’t noticed
anything.

               
I bent down, with a brief grunt,
and slipped off one of my winter-cracked black Bloomingdale shoes. I held the
shoe up, before Joan’s enlarged, pebbly eyes, tilted it, and watched her take
in the stream of blood that cascaded onto the beige rug.

               
“My God! What is it?”

               
“I’m hemorrhaging.”

               
Joan half led, half dragged me
to the sofa and made me lie down. Then she propped some pillows under my
blood-stained feet. Then she stood back and demanded, “Who was that man?”

               
For one crazy minute I thought
Joan would refuse to call a doctor until I confessed the whole story of my
evening with Irwin and that after my confession she would still refuse, as a
sort of punishment. But then I realized that she honestly took my explanation
at face value, that my going to bed with Irwin was utterly incomprehensible to
her, and his appearance a mere prick to her pleasure at my arrival.

               
“Oh somebody,” I said, with a
flabby gesture of dismissal. Another pulse of blood released itself and I
contracted my stomach muscles in alarm. “Get a towel.”

               
Joan went out and came back
almost immediately with a pile of towels and sheets. Like a prompt nurse, she
peeled back my blood-wet clothes, drew a quick breath as she arrived at the
original royal red towel, and applied a fresh bandage. I lay, trying to slow
the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.

               
I remembered a worrisome course
in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died, palely and nobly, in
torrents of blood, after a difficult childbirth. Perhaps Irwin had injured me
in some awful, obscure way, and all the while I lay there on Joan’s sofa I was
really dying.

               
Joan pulled up an Indian hassock
and began to dial down the long list of Cambridge doctors. The first number
didn’t answer. Joan began to explain my case to the second number, which did
answer, but then broke off and said “I see” and hung up.

               
“What’s the trouble?”

               
“He’ll only come for regular
customers or emergencies. It’s Sunday.”

               
I tried to lift my arm and look
at my watch, but my hand was a rock at my side and wouldn’t budge. Sunday--the
doctor’s paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors
with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts,
doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

               
“For God’s sake,” I said, “tell
them I’m an emergency.”

               
The third number didn’t answer
and, at the fourth, the party hung up the minute Joan mentioned it was about a
period. Joan began to cry.

               
“Look, Joan,” I said
painstakingly, “call up the local hospital. Tell them it’s an emergency.
They’ll have to take me.”

               
Joan brightened and dialed a
fifth number. The Emergency Service promised her a staff doctor would attend to
me if I could come to the ward. Then Joan called a taxi.

               
Joan insisted on riding with me.
I clasped my fresh padding of towels with a sort of desperation as the cabby,
impressed by the address Joan gave him, cut corner after corner in the
dawn-pale streets and drew up with a great squeal of tires at the Emergency
Ward entrance.

               
I left Joan to pay the driver
and hurried into the empty, glaring lit room. A nurse bustled out from behind a
white screen. In a few swift words, I managed to tell her the truth about my
predicament before Joan came in the door, blinking and wide-eyed as a myopic
owl.

               
The Emergency Ward doctor
strolled out then, and I climbed, with the nurse’s help, on to the examining
table. The nurse whispered to the doctor, and the doctor nodded and began
unpacking the bloody toweling. I felt his fingers start to probe, and Joan
stood, rigid as a soldier, at my side, holding my hand, for my sake or hers I
couldn’t tell.

               
“Ouch!” I winced at a
particularly bad jab.

               
The doctor whistled.

               
“You’re one in a million.”

               
“What do you mean?”

               
“I mean it’s one in a million it
happens to like this.”

               
The doctor spoke in a low,. curt
voice to the nurse, and she hurried to a side table and brought back some rolls
of gauze and silver instruments. “I can see,” the doctor bent down, “exactly
where the trouble is coming from.”

               
“But can you fix it?”

               
The doctor laughed. “Oh, I can
fix it, all right.”

I
was roused by a tap on my door. It was past midnight, and the asylum quiet as
death. I couldn’t imagine who would still be up.

               
“Come in!” I switched on the
bedside light.

               
The door clicked open, and
Doctor Quinn’s brisk, dark head appeared in the crack. I looked at her with
surprise, because although I knew who she was, and often passed her, with a
brief nod, in the asylum hall, I never spoke to her at all.

               
Now she said, “Miss Greenwood,
may I come in a minute?”

               
I nodded.

               
Doctor Quinn stepped into the
room, shutting the door quietly behind her. She was wearing one of her navy
blue, immaculate suits with a plain, snow-white blouse showing in the V of the
neck.

               
“I’m sorry to bother you, Miss
Greenwood, and especially at this time of night, but I thought you might be
able to help us out about Joan.”

               
For a minute I wondered if
Doctor Quinn was going to blame me for Joan’s return to the asylum. I still
wasn’t sure how much Joan knew, after our trip to the Emergency Ward, but a few
days later she had come back to live in Belsize, retaining, however, the freest
of town privileges.

               
“I’ll do what I can,” I told
Doctor Quinn.

               
Doctor Quinn sat down on the
edge of my bed with a grave face. “We would like to find out where Joan is. We
thought you might have an idea.”

               
Suddenly I wanted to dissociate
myself from Joan completely. “I don’t know,” I said coldly. “Isn’t she in her
room?”

               
It was well after the Belsize
curfew hour.

               
“No, Joan had a permit to go to
a movie in town this evening, and she’s not back yet.”

               
“Who was she with?”

               
“She was alone.” Doctor Quinn
paused. “Have you any idea where she might be likely to spend the night?”

               
“Surely she’ll be back.
Something must have held her up.” But I didn’t see what could have held Joan up
in tame night Boston.

               
Doctor Quinn shook her head.
“The last trolley went by an hour ago.”

               
“Maybe she’ll come back by
taxi.”

               
Doctor Quinn sighed.

               
“Have you tried the Kennedy
girl?” I went on. “Where Joan used to live?”

               
Doctor Quinn nodded.

               
“Her family?”

               
“Oh, she’d never go there...but
we’ve tried them, too.”

               
Doctor Quinn lingered a minute,
as if she could sniff out some clue in the still room. Then she said, “Well,
we’ll do what we can,” and left.

               
I turned out the light and tried
to drop back to sleep, but Joan’s face floated before me, bodiless and smiling,
like the face of the Cheshire cat. I even thought I heard her voice, rustling
and hushing through the dark, but then I realized it was only the night wind in
the asylum trees....