by James Jones
Gwen rose and picked up the cup and mixer and carried them down to the sink and ran them full of water to soak so they would be easier to wash. She felt as though a sudden gust of wind had blown her skirt around her ears, exposing her completely, and revealing she had no panties on—a thing she was wont to do sometimes because it was more comfortable.
She turned back to the room. The thought of exposure had been enough to send another crushing, sick wave of embarrassment through her. The theme papers still lay in a pile beside the one of the two reading chairs she used. She didn’t feel like doing anything; there wasn’t anything she felt was important enough to do. And yet she wanted to be doing something badly. Anything.
Sort of aimlessly, she wandered back down the room and sat down at the big table. She rested her elbows on it and propped the sides of her long face between her hands and stared back cat-eyed at the fire.
A virgin. A virgin, at thirty-five. Oh, how people would howl with laughter.
Her face resting between her supporting palms, Gwen turned her head to look around the cleaned-up table. The extinguished dinner candles still on it caught her eye and she looked at them, and at their drippings congealed into dead-white droplets down their rounded sides. You could see sex symbols in just about everything, if you looked for them.
The other thing was still there, back down there in the bottom of her mind. She tried to put it aside and think about Dave Hirsh instead.
Dave was one of the good ones, and she knew it. There was just something about them. You could tell. A sort of dumb innocence and a basic inherent sweetness of soul, combined with a ridiculously great vanity, and the meanness of a fiend which cropped out every so often especially if they were drinking. Wally Dennis had the same quality. So did Mac Price, who had gone off to Chicago—and not been heard from since. Mac had been in love with her, too. She suspected Wally Dennis was, too, although he had never mentioned it since that one time he had asked her to sleep with him. It was a little hard to tell about Wally, his reactions were somewhat hampered by the fact that he felt she was too old for him. They all fell in love, and out, and then back in, with such a confusing rapidity that it was hard to keep up with it. And they all had that other thing—that same quality so pronounced in Stendhal and Tolstoy—of desperately needing to indulge in self-exposure.
That didn’t mean they had made the grade. But it did mean they had the qualities that could make it. But the more of those qualities they had, the more it seemed they would never make it. Look at Mac Price, running off to Chicago, to be an artist. Life beckons, he had said. I need love, he said. I need to live. He had had a good novel well on the way, when he had left here. He was probably drinking and sexing himself into a stupor in Chicago.
They were all like runners, Gwen thought, runners with enormous feet. They were dependent upon their feet to run. But those same feet were always tangling them up and tripping them. And if they ever did win a race, it was both because of their feet and in spite of them.
But none of them knew this. All they knew was that they loved their big feet, for making them different, while they hated them bitterly for making them conspicuous. Such children.
Nobody knew what drove them. Probably it was a need for love. But then everybody had a need for more love. What made the difference with the Macs and Daves and Wallys? She didn’t know. But she knew she could always pick them. She could always recognize them by the fact that they were such absolute fools, she thought smiling, if for nothing else.
Gwen got up from the table and strode on down to the fireplace again, but this time she avoided looking into the coals for pictures.
That Dave. He was probably still convinced the only reason he had stayed in Parkman and was embarking on this book was because he was in love with her and wanted to seduce her. He was really very sweet. She had noted how he carefully kept himself from getting physically close to her all evening. That was thoughtfulness. There was a quality of great gentleness about him, she thought, which belied all the harsh bitter things he liked to say. He was astute, too. He had known there was something odd going on all evening. But he couldn’t tell what, so he had gone ahead and made his deduction. Yet he had had legitimate reason to think that: He ingenuously accepted her as honest. Nobody but a writer would ever do that, with a woman. He was such an ass, she thought almost lovingly, and so gullible. God, what a sucker he would be for any little flip who came along. The only reason he wasn’t married right now was because no female ever had considered him a worthwhile enough prospect. She really did like him a lot. Nobody but a writer would ever sit, and in a tone of elated discovery tell a woman to her face she was a nymphomaniac.
Gwen blushed again, and felt again the terrible embarrassment wash over her. It welled up blackly from the bottom of her mind like a flock of slave laborers released from a dungeon into the light. She remembered another time in New York when she had felt like this; one of the rare ones.
She had been dating a boy, one of the bright young Yale men from Time & Life, a genuine wit and a comic. They had had a number of dates. This time—they were going somewhere on the subway—the Eighth Ave, it was—and in the station waiting for the train he had maneuvered her before an ad panel where some child had scrawled the word fuck in huge letters across the face of the advertisement, and then he had talked her around, until she was staring right at it, and as the surprised recognition crossed her face, had laughed delightedly. He had not said a thing, but he knew: The point was, there were other people standing around, and her first thought had been whether any of them had seen her looking. She had felt this same sick embarrassment then and wanted blindly to hide, followed by a fierce anger that was not at him, the fellow—or rather not only at him, but at everything. Everything that could make such a stupidly embarrassing situation even possible.
She could feel that same anger coming over her now, hot and searing, not anger at Dave so much, but at people, at life, and the stupidities of life, at—at all the people who might ever have thought she was a nymphomaniac. There, in New York, she had covered it up as best she could and had laughed embarrassedly and turned away; there wasn’t much else she could do. Here, as she felt it raging up in her, she felt like sweeping the mantel. The brass candlesticks, the three steins, the ashtrays, everything, into a smashed welter on the floor.
Damn them all, and damn their primitive superstitions about sanctity and chastity. In Africa, if a man marries a girl and finds out she is not a virgin, he kills her; or, if he be more business-minded, makes her father add five more cows to the dowry. We were at least as primitive. For that matter, who was to say who was primitive?
In our country, we took the females at an early age and began inculcating them with the mystical admonition that they had above all one priceless possession, their chastity, and that this must never be relinquished until legally and in the eyes of God they were united with one particular male, whose sole property this chastity became, and who would cherish it forever. This union thus acquired a deep religious bliss, and a powerful legal and social approval, and engendered a revered state known as The Family, in which the united male and female and their offspring continued to exist with an utter mysterious happiness the rest of their entire lives, serving God, Country, society, and self with equal joy and spiritual greatness.
You didn’t have much choice not to believe it. If you by some miraculous chance managed to survive the incantations of your very early childhood, as you emerged from the emotional hazards of puberty you were brought up against such a powerful force of propaganda that you scarcely could avoid succumbing. Your undiscriminating eyes were bombarded with such an array of movies and books full of love-ardor and the religious-worship of the empedestaled female vulva, such a collection of popular music crying the same—all just as you were discovering that your life was going to be full of loneliness—that if your vanity did not cause you to acquiesce willingly, your fear would. Who wouldn’t want all that adoration?
Gwen swung a
round, suddenly dangerous in her outrage, and glared around the room as if looking for enemies, or something inexpensive to break.
The bald truth was, she was a very unhappy woman. She was unhappy because she was a woman. Because she was a woman and had no talent nor desire for self-exposure, like Dave and Wally and Mac Price had. Or, if she did, she was afraid to use it. Because she was a woman, and had been taught by a woman that women never never exposed themselves. It had taken her a long time to realize her mother was an ignorant woman; she was still ashamed of it. How was she to have known? She was well educated, she was universally admired, she practically ran her church, she was considered a fine wife and mother, was thought to be beautiful. How was she, a gangling knob-boned girl, to know these judgments and opinions were all wrong, were superficial, and were not even most of the time believed by the ones who said them; were merely part of the network of lies necessary to maintain the great human conspiracy of importance. By the time she found out, it was too late. Her mind and opinions could be changed, yes, but you could never change the emotions that had been built into her brick upon mortared brick from the time she was old enough to have one. They were still there. And would stay there.
Men want to degrade you. That was the upshot of it. About as unoriginal a refrain as you could find anywhere in these twentieth-century United States. But not to a frightened girl, who was already too proud for her own good anyway. Men want to dominate you, and then laugh at you. Men want to take the most precious thing you have, and destroy it, for their own selfish demands, and then throw you away like an old sack. Men want to make you big and ugly and fat with a baby. Men want to degrade you.
Before she even knew what it was all about she was hearing it. That was why she was still a virgin. A virgin, Gwen thought sourly. At thirty-five. It was one thing to understand yourself intellectually, and why you felt what you felt. It was quite another to change the feeling. She had never talked about it with her father. She couldn’t. She was too ashamed; and she would feel too foolish. But she was sure he knew and understood it all. His own life must have been a veritable hell on earth, with her.
If she had been less innocent. More knowing. Other girls ignored parental “wisdom,” and went ahead pursuing the horizon anyway. But not her: She believed.
No wonder she took it out in helping them, these ineffectual weakling male idiots, who did however have one thing, as Dave had said, this burning desire to unzip their soul’s underwear and expose themselves in public.
Poor poor weak pittance. But she did it, because what they did was what she wanted most of all in this world to do. Expose. Her, a schoolteacher, a college English instructor, virgin.
It hammered in her head over and over again, carrying with it a deep blushing sense of shame, of fear that someday someone might find out. There were a lot of paradoxes in the quasi-religious American chastity superstition, and this was one of them. That she should be ashamed of being a virgin. But it followed. And thus it was, that so many librarians, secretaries, technicians and staff assistants (and schoolteachers!) gradually came to lead haunted lives, their ears constantly alert for any laugh, any snicker, which might be directed at them.
And thus it also was, that she herself, Gwen French, would do anything—even be thought a nymphomaniac by everyone—rather than admit to anyone what she really was, a thirty-five-year-old virgin college English teacher.
She sank down on the divan. Then she got up and went to put the pot on, for a cup of coffee.
It was really very funny. In a way. Like the man who took the stack of steel bars, tested them carefully for strength, fitted them meticulously, welded them precisely, never realizing once that what he was building was his own cage, his own cell for life.
There were times, in moments of wildness, when she thought to go out somewhere—Chicago, Indianapolis, anywhere she was not known—and pick up some strange man and get him to sleep with her. Maybe then she could unlax, let down that constant fear of people finding out. Maybe then she could even self-expose. Like Dave and Wally and Mac Price. But she never did. For one thing, being a virgin at thirty-five embarrassed her. For another, she told herself she was wise enough to know beforehand no such simple and artless thing would ever be able to uncage her.
It had been an easy cage to build. So easy she had not even known she was building it. The first stage was back in high school, when she learned the easiest way to handle boys was to tell them you were in love with someone else.
That way they never got mad at you but instead acquired a great respect for you and wanted to be your best friend and confidant to whom you brought your woes—always hoping of course that they could catch you right, and angry enough, some evening. But they never pushed you, and merely waited. It made for nice relationships.
From there, for anyone with any brain at all, it was only a simple logical inference to the second stage at college, when all the girls began having affairs and talking about them: the sly smug look, the little smile, the possessiveness around the men. It was easy to convince the girls. All you had to do was look smug occasionally. She didn’t know, now, how many had been really having affairs, and how many had been pretending like herself. But at the time she thought they all were having them. Except herself. And, drawing from the girls, it was easy to know to tell the men you dated the same thing, and easy to discover they believed it even quicker than the boys in high school. The only difference was where in high school you said “in love” now you said “having an affair.” Let them but think you were just getting over a heartbreaking affair, and they became so tender and solicitous it was unbelievable; much more so than if you had been a simple virgin. And suddenly, although you didn’t really know it yet, your cage was half built.
She could still have crawled out when she came back home from school. Maybe. But what could have been easier than to tell the men at home you were still violently in love with a boy from school? They believed it just as readily as college boys. Once you knew that, once you grasped the principle behind male guilt, it was just as easy when you went off to get your master’s, to use the same trick there. Except now, of course, it was a man back home—from Francis Parkman College, Parkman’s Own Liberal Arts College, Fully Accredited, Vitally Christian. The sign at the city limits said it well.
Only by then, Gwen thought, something had changed, and it was no longer a lark, it had become a huge black shameful secret, her virginity, to be hidden now at all costs. In essence, that was why she had become engaged to Casper Milquetoast as Dave called him, after she came home with her master’s. They were engaged five years. She might even have married him, just to quell any suspicions, if it had not been she was afraid he might find out in bed that she was a virgin. And that would have ruined his romantic picture of her. Of course everyone in town knew right away that they were sleeping together, but of course that was all right, since they were going to be married. Only in this case they weren’t sleeping. When he was killed in a Japanese air raid on some grubby little island in the Pacific, it was as if no one had died. That seemed to be his destiny. But the last stage was set, for her. The cage was finished and she was in it. How could she ever marry any man now, even if she wanted, even if she loved him, in Parkman, Illinois—or anywhere else she was known? Have him discover she was still a virgin? And all the stories only lies?
So she became the woman of the world who had had her share of love affairs and wasn’t interested in sex anymore. Wally Dennis believed it. Mac Price believed it. The bright young Yale men of Time & Life and the publishing world of New York believed it. Dave Hirsh believed it, too, until he saw through it tonight, and realized she was a nymphomaniac.
She hadn’t meant to flirt with him like that. It hadn’t started out to be that, and then suddenly it had slipped into it somehow without her knowing it. And the truth was, her vanity liked it. But it wasn’t fair to do that to a man when you never intended for it to go any further.
The coffee was ready now, but she didn’t wa
nt any. She didn’t know what she wanted. The theme papers still lay in a jumbled pile beside her chair. Certainly, she did not want them. And certainly it was not a man she wanted.
What law, moral or divine, said a woman had to have a man? Oh, the myths and superstitions we civilized people lived by. She stepped to the mirror that hung beside the dining room doorway and studied herself in it. She was not drying up. Her neck was not getting scrawny. She studied her face for signs of spinsterhood. She was just as attractive now as she had ever been—which, while it may not ever have been much, certainly was not getting any lesser. Evening at home, she thought. Miss French’s evening at home.
Damn it all, why couldn’t she be like Doris Fredric, whose father owned the bank, and who taught freshman English in the high school—who took all the men she wanted, and then claimed to be a virgin. That would be more normal.
A half-crazy, inflamed rebellion bubbled up in Gwen. Like the blood of a man machine-gunned through the chest, she thought; there’s an image for you. I should write. She knew what she would do. She would do what she did every time she got rebellious every six months or so. She would get out her father’s pornography collection and look at it. Resolutely, she went to the doorway at the other end, and up the back stairs to his bedroom.
She didn’t know why she did it. She only knew she wanted to do something horrible, and this was the most horrible thing she could think of.
The pictures themselves fascinated her anyway. They were sickening. They always made her think of Suetonius’ description of the orgies of Tiberius in his self-imposed retirement on Capri. You never realized what a really foul thing the human body was until you— She had studied them enough times—and with such pinpointed concentration—that she practically knew each one by heart. That any woman—or any man—would allow themselves to be so degraded—and then allow pictures to be taken of it!—seemed unbelievable. Another thing was that there wasn’t a single really sensitive face among them. Most of them were grossly animal, stupid, as if drunk or drugged. Now and then, there was a face with a trace more, a hint only, of perception; but always where there was any hint of any deeper sensitivity than just animal, it came out manifested as pure hatred. Such pure, utter consuming hatred she had never seen on any human face, such smug degrading domination—as existed on these few slightly more self-sensitive faces. Never was there any trace of even a physical affection. It was a strange, dark comment on the real underlying pressures and motives and emotions of our sexual habits.
