Материал: CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

beautiful girls were all heading to the ball—but you must understand that I was so grateful just to be around these showgirls. If anything, this exchange was more beneficial for me than it was for them. Listening to their gossip was an education—the only education I had ever really longed for. And because somebody always needed my sewing talents for something, inevitably the showgirls started to coalesce around me and my powerful Singer. Soon, my apartment had turned into the company gathering place—for females, anyhow. (It helped that my rooms were nicer than the moldy old dressing rooms down in the basement, and also nearer to the kitchen.)

And so it came to pass that one day—less than two weeks into my stay at the Lily—a few of the girls were in my room, smoking cigarettes and watching me sew. I was making a simple capelet for a showgirl named Jennie—a vivacious, adorable, gap-toothed girl from Brooklyn whom everyone liked. She was going on a date that night, and had complained that she didn’t have anything to throw over her dress in case the temperature dropped. I’d told her I would make her something nice, so that’s what I was doing. It was the kind of task that was nearly effortless, but would forever endear Jennie to me.

It was on this day—a day like any other, as the saying goes—that it came to the attention of the showgirls that I was still a virgin.

The subject came up that afternoon because the girls were talking about sex—which was the only thing they ever talked about, when they weren’t talking about clothing, money, where to eat, how to become a movie star, how to marry a movie star, or whether they should have their wisdom teeth removed (as they claimed Marlene Dietrich had done, in order to create more dramatic cheekbones).

Gladys the dance captain—who was sitting next to Celia on the floor in a pile of Celia’s dirty laundry—asked me if I had a boyfriend. Her exact words were, “You got anything permanent going with anybody?”

Now, it is worth noting that this was the first question of substance that any of the girls had ever asked about my life. (The fascination, needless to say, did not run in both directions.) I was only sorry that I didn’t have something more exciting to report.

“I don’t have a boyfriend, no,” I said.

Gladys seemed alarmed.

“But you’re pretty,” she said. “You must have a guy back home. Guys must be giving you the pitch all the time!”

I explained that I’d been in girls’ schools my whole life, so I hadn’t had much opportunity to meet boys.

“But you’ve done it, right?” asked Jennie, cutting to the chase. “You’ve gone the limit before?”

“Never,” I said.

“Not even once, you haven’t gone the limit?” Gladys asked me, wide-eyed in disbelief. “Not even by accident?”

“Not even by accident,” I said, wondering how it was that a person could ever have sex by accident.

(Don’t worry, Angela—I know now. Accidental sex is the easiest thing to do, once you get in the habit of it. I’ve had plenty of accidental sex in my life since then, believe me, but at that moment I was not yet so cosmopolitan.)

“Do you go to church?” Jennie asked, as if that could be the only possible explanation for my still being a virgin at age nineteen. “Are you saving it?”

“No! I’m not saving it. I just haven’t had the chance.”

They all seemed concerned now. They were all looking at me as if I’d just said that I’d never learned how to cross a street by myself.

“But you’ve fooled around,” Celia said.

“You’ve necked, right?” asked Jennie. “You’ve got to have necked!”

“A little,” I said.

This was an honest answer; my sexual experience up until that point was very little. At a school dance back at Emma Willard—where they’d bused in for the occasion the sorts of boys whom we were expected to someday marry—I’d let a boy from the Hotchkiss School feel my breasts while we were dancing. (As best as he could find my breasts, anyway, which took some problem solving on his part.) Or maybe it’s too generous to say that I let him feel my breasts. It would be more accurate to say that he just went ahead and handled them, and I didn’t stop him. I didn’t want to be rude, for one thing. For another thing, I found the experience to be interesting. I would have liked for it

to continue, but the dance ended and then the boy was on a bus back to Hotchkiss before we could take it any further.

I’d also been kissed by a man in a bar in Poughkeepsie, on one of those nights when I’d escaped the Vassar hall wardens and ridden my bike into town. He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz) and suddenly the next moment—wow! He had pressed me up against a wall and was rubbing his erection against my hip. He kissed me until my thighs shook with desire. But when he’d reached his hand between my legs I had balked, and slipped from his grasp. I’d ridden my bicycle back to campus that night with a sense of wobbly unease—both fearing and hoping that he was following me.

I had wanted more, and I had not wanted more.

A familiar old tale, from the lives of girls.

What else did I have on my sexual résumé? My childhood best friend, Betty, and I had practiced with each other some inexpert renditions of what we called “romantic kisses”—but then again we had also practiced “having babies” by stuffing pillows under our shirts so that we looked pregnant, and the latter experiment was just about as biologically convincing as the former.

I’d once had my vagina examined by my mother’s gynecologist, when my mother grew concerned that I had not yet begun menstruating by the age of fourteen. The man had poked around down there for a bit—while my mother watched—and then he told me I needed to be eating more liver. It had not been an erotic experience for anyone involved.

Also, between the ages of ten and eighteen, I’d fallen in love about twenty dozen times with some of my brother Walter’s friends. The choice benefit of having a popular and handsome brother was that he was always surrounded by his popular and handsome friends. But Walter’s friends were always too hypnotized by him—their ringleader, the captain of every team, the most admired boy in town—to pay much attention to anyone else in the room.

I was not totally ignorant. I touched myself now and again, which made me feel both electrified and guilty, but I knew that wasn’t the same thing as sex. (Let’s just say this: my attempts at self-pleasure

were something akin to dry swimming lessons.) And I understood the basics of human sexual function, having taken a required seminar at Vassar called “Hygiene”—a class that taught us about everything without telling us about anything. (In addition to presenting diagrams of ovaries and testicles, the teacher gave us a rather concerning admonition that douching with Lysol was neither a modern nor a safe means of contraception—thus planting in my head a vision that disturbed me then and still disturbs me now.)

“Well, when will you go the limit, then?” Jennie asked. “You’re not getting any younger!”

“What you don’t want to have happen,” said Gladys, “is that you meet a fellow now, and you really like him, and then you’ve got to break the bad news to him that you’re a virgin.”

“Yeah, a lot of guys don’t care for that,” Celia said.

“That’s right, they don’t want the responsibility,” said Gladys. “And you don’t want your first time to be with somebody you like.”

“Yeah, what if it goes all wrong?” said Jennie.

“What could go wrong?” I asked.

“Everything!” said Gladys. “You won’t know what you’re doing, and you could look like a dummy! And if it hurts, you don’t want to find yourself blubbering in the arms of some guy you like!”

Now, this was the direct opposite of everything I’d been taught about sex thus far in life. My school friends and I had always been given to understand that a man would prefer it if we were virgins. We had also been instructed to save the flower of our girlhood for somebody whom we not only liked, but loved. The ideal scenario—the aspiration which we’d all been raised to embrace—was that you were supposed to have sex with only one person in your entire life, and that person should be your husband, whom you met at an Emma Willard school prom.

But I had been misinformed! These girls thought otherwise, and they knew things. Moreover, I now felt a sudden sting of anxiety about how old I was! For heaven’s sake, I was nineteen already; what had I been doing with my time? And I’d been in New York already for two entire weeks. What was I waiting for?

“Is that hard to do?” I asked. “I mean, for the first time?”