The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  A little boy kept wanting to hold my hand, which led to other little boys, and some little girls, wanting to hold my hand too. I had bought a bag of Tootsie Pops for them but had to ask the nun in charge first if it was okay to give them the suckers, and she said, “Yes, but only after lunch.” So after lunch, which was grilled cheese, white milk, and carrot sticks, I gave the kids the suckers and it was as if I had suddenly turned into Santa Claus right before their eyes, they were so excited.

  Or, wait, maybe they didn’t know who Santa Claus was. Not yet anyway.

  One of the boys from Africa kept running around in a circle after lunch, his arms flapping. He was yelling, “Whatshisname, whatshisname!” until one of the nuns grabbed him by the shoulder and made him sit in a chair.

  “Cool down, Peter,” she said. “Cool down.”

  “Calm down, Peter,” said another nun. “Calm down.”

  It was all a little strange, but I got a kick out of it.

  We left after that and Josh seemed okay for a while, but a week or so later he wanted to go back down to see the kids with their new yo-yos and gym shoes, and so we drove again into the snarl of city traffic, knocked on the orphanage door after we found parking four streets over, and the little nun who had been sitting on the chair near the garden the week before let us in. She smiled and said the head nun was out getting her nails done. Josh and I looked at her, Josh’s face a crumpled-up mess all of a sudden. The little nun laughed and said the head nun was actually at the doctor getting her blood pressure checked. I wondered if this nun was off-kilter, because she probably wasn’t supposed to tell us why the head nun was at the doctor, but what did I know. Maybe they were all very open about their health problems? Maybe it was one of the things they were taught in nun training.

  We waited and when the head nun returned, she was in a new-looking blue Ford Focus; the last two times we’d been there, we’d only seen a dented old Camry with the orphanage name on the driver’s door, its bumpers scratched and gouged. For a second she didn’t seem happy to see us, but then she rearranged her expression and smiled. “Are you here for the letter for your taxes?” she asked. “I haven’t yet had a chance to prepare it, but Sister Jean and I could type it up for you right now if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes.”

  “No, no, we just thought we’d come by and say hi. We were in the neighborhood,” said Josh.

  I looked at him, worrying that if there was an actual hell, he’d be sent there for lying to a pair of nuns.

  “Oh, how thoughtful of you,” said the head nun. Then she and Sister Jean just peered at us, waiting for whatever one of us would say next. We could hear the kids screaming and laughing in some room out of sight and the voice of one of the other nuns scolding them but laughing too. Josh looked at me, and I worried he might cry or else say something strange like he had two days ago when we were leaving our college’s parking lot—“The sow is blinding me.” I knew he’d meant the sun, but the nuns would not have known this.

  He said nothing though, and I said we should probably get going.

  I glanced at the head nun’s and Sister Jean’s feet and saw that the head nun had pink-painted toenails. Her dress wasn’t quite long enough to cover her sandaled feet. Sister Jean’s feet I couldn’t see. Her dress dragged on the ground just a little bit. Later, Josh told me it was called a habit, not a dress. I had forgotten this, I guess. “I’m not Catholic,” I said.

  “Even so, you’d think I’d know,” said Josh.

  “I’d think you’d know,” I said, irritated.

  “That’s what I said,” he said, angry too.

  That night and the next day, Josh didn’t say much else. I was at his house for dinner the next night and his mother gave me two placemats she’d sewn with crooked seams, something that happened once in a while. They had flags on them and were for the Fourth of July. “Thanks,” I said. “You can’t really tell there’s any problem with them.”

  “Oh, you’re so nice to say that,” she said.

  Josh was staring into space and then he left the table and went to his room. His mother and I looked at each other for a minute before she said, “I tried to tell him that if he’s going to do nice things for people, he isn’t going to be able to control how they respond. It’s called growing up.”

  She was so right, but I wondered what he’d said when she’d told him this.

  “Do you think he’s going to be okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yes. That was only his first lottery payment. He has nine others coming to him. He’ll learn not to be such a mope about his good fortune.”

  “Do you think those nuns took advantage of him?”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe, maybe not. But it’s not like they’re in New York on that Wall Street, stealing people’s life savings and getting the government to pay them a billion dollars because they’re such good, upstanding criminals. Those ladies take care of orphans, for Pete’s sake.”

  She had a point, but when I said this later to Josh, he wasn’t impressed. “I might go out West after the semester ends. I need to do some thinking. I’m not sure sometimes if I want to be with people. I’d rather live with coyotes and lizards. They don’t have wallets or cars.”

  “You could come too,” he said. I was glad to be invited but wasn’t sure I wanted to go. How would I get my pills out in the desert, for one? I had to think about it.

  “You could get a vasectomy, you guess,” he said.

  I didn’t mean to laugh, but I did. “Yes, I suppose.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know. It’s nice of you to offer.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  In my head, I saw the little kid in the garden again, yelling “Whatshisname, whatshisname!” He’d looked so happy, as if he liked everyone and everyone liked him. I didn’t know if I’d ever felt that way in my life. I didn’t know if I ever would either. I didn’t say this to Josh, who was staring at his phone, his forehead crimped and serious, probably trying to decide if he should call the nuns.

  THE COUPLEHOOD JUBILEE

  The figure she came up with wasn’t staggering, at least not in terms of the amount that some people might have spent, those with greater means or no fear of credit card debt. Nonetheless, it was much more than she felt comfortable with, and so much more than she had spent on travel and movies and dinners out for herself and Glen in any given year. She did her best to keep track of where her money went, hoping to discourage herself from spending three or four times more on temporary pleasures than she deposited into her retirement and rainy-day savings accounts. A dense bubble of resentment began to form beneath her breastbone as she stared at the sum: $24,900. This was the approximate amount that she had spent on friends’ bridal showers, engagement and bachelorette parties, hotels, plane tickets, dresses, and other wedding-related expenses over the past eight and a half years.

  During that entire time, she had been working as a high school French teacher and had earned an average annual salary of thirty-nine thousand dollars.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars on weddings: well over half of what she earned in a year! The resentment bubble threatened to asphyxiate her. Why had she allowed this to happen? And about half of the people she had shelled out so much money for were already divorced!

  Eventually the bubble migrated to her head, and for a few midday hours, it tried very hard to summon a migraine. At the all-day, end-of-year school meeting where she had surreptitiously added up these wedding-related expenses, she kept thinking, I wouldn’t even spend a third of that amount on my own wedding. Despite their interest in monogamy, she and Glen, her boyfriend of six years, were not interested in marriage nor in what seemed to be the feverish American imperative to marry everyone off, tuck them into minivans and bring on infant-induced sleep deprivation as soon as biologically possible.

  “Why don’t you want to get married?” some of Karen’s unhappily unmarried friends had asked. “Do you think that you or Glen can’t be
faithful?”

  “It’s not like we need to be married to cheat on each other,” she had replied.

  Her friends remained doubtful. “Then what is it? Are you both holding out for someone better?”

  That wasn’t it either. Their reasons were more complicated than their bemused friends and relatives suspected, but if Karen tried to explain her feelings and convictions, their eyes grew hazy with boredom and suspicion or else they argued that she was wrong, possibly egomaniacal, to resist this rite of passage that was good enough for millions of other couples.

  Even so, she did not feel wrong or egomaniacal. She did not understand why she and Glen needed to buy a license and recite certain phrases in front of a judge in order to be declared a committed couple. As if, like someone who wanted a driver’s license, a couple needed to be declared fit and legal to love each other.

  Karen’s parents, however, were worried about her unmarried status for other reasons. Didn’t she know that if she or Glen ever became sick and choices had to be made about medical care and money, the existence of this license was the only way that they were guaranteed the right to make these critical decisions?

  “Common law,” Karen would usually reply to her parents and other critics, brandishing the phrase like garlic in front of a vampire.

  “Sure,” her father said, agreeably enough, “but common law marriages don’t often hold up in court. You’re young now so you don’t care, but wait until the first time one of you has to go into the hospital for something unforeseen, and I guarantee you’ll feel differently.”

  Despite his depressing predictions, she knew that her father meant well. Almost everyone meant well when they told her to march straight to the nearest courthouse or altar and marry herself off. She was thirty-five, for Christ’s sake! What if Glen got tired of her when her breasts plunged to her navel and her knees started to look like a bloodhound’s face?

  “So what if he does?” she’d retort. “Good riddance to him if he’s going to be that damn shallow. Why would I want to hold on to someone who doesn’t want to hold on to me?”

  Another open question that no one seemed willing to acknowledge: If you really were worried about being dumped by your boyfriend, couldn’t you see that you were using marriage as a stand-in for a jail cell? Keep each other locked up in the invisible bonds of matrimony and all will be well …

  Friends sometimes badgered her about her lack of a wedding ring, but the last Karen had heard (from Dr. Phil, from Oprah, from her dentist and hairstylist, and from, well, almost everyone), more than half of the marriages out there ended in divorce. These unfortunate facts were everywhere a person cared to look, glaring and as ghoulishly fascinating as a car crash, yet, so many otherwise-rational souls still continued to invoke the wedding march as if it were music flung down from heaven, meant to relieve them of all of their earthly sorrows.

  Nonetheless, she did not feel smug about her decision to remain unmarried, despite what some people thought. She was happy when a friend or a colleague announced an engagement that he or she had been hoping for. A few of her friends and family members seemed to be happy enough as husbands and wives, and many weddings were joyful gatherings filled with laughter and good food and music and funny speeches, ones where, by the end, Karen’s face hurt from smiling so much, and she couldn’t help wondering if she too might want to get married.

  But the feeling did not last for more than a few days, and eventually something would remind her that most everyone she knew believed they had a right to advise and judge her for how she had chosen to conduct her personal life, as if she would ever seriously consider telling them what to do with their own sex lives and finances.

  Glen was more relaxed about this oppressive rigmarole, but as far as Karen could tell, men weren’t prone to needling other men about their decision to stay unmarried. Men could shack up or sleep around and spend as much time as they wanted to making up their minds about who should be having their babies. Men could relax, because when it came to reproductive urges, they had no ovaries to worry about going out of business in middle age. Men could continue to make their offerings to the gene pool until, in many cases, they were coffin-ready.

  Staring at the horrifying figure (almost twenty-five thousand bucks!) that had materialized before her during the meeting’s midday lull, Karen decided that it was time to get her married (and, in a few cases, recently divorced) friends to return a few favors. She would ask Glen to help her throw a party, a “Couplehood Jubilee,” where gifts were tacitly required, along with suits and ties, fancy dresses and elaborate hairstyles, and hotel rooms and rental cars and designated drivers. She would have to spend some money too, but she would do it. It was time for the married (and divorced) people of the world to understand that they weren’t going to be able to keep skating by when it came to showing a little fiscal affection for their unhitched friends.

  There could be no waffling either. Guests would have to fork over the cash and goodwill for her and Glen’s non-wedding whether they liked it or not, because otherwise, like anyone whose friends and neighbors made up excuses not to attend their weddings, she would resent them. She would not issue any guilt-trips like the kind she had suffered as a bridesmaid, however: “If you can’t afford them … um, I guess we could settle for the cheaper shoes even if they look like something my grandmother would wear.” Or as a guest: “I know Hawaii is really, really far for everyone to travel, but it’s just so beautiful and you can take a vacation there just before or after our wedding, right?” If people said no, she would tell them bluntly that she was disappointed, that they were, melodramatic as it sounded, breaking her heart. She would not smile and say, No problem, I completely understand, while giving the finger to their backs as they slunk away.

  On a grander scale, with her Couplehood Jubilee, she hoped to inspire a social revolution: mass elopements. She single-handedly wanted to bring down the billion-dollar wedding-industrial complex, with its empty promises and guilt-inducing advertisements and wedding-planning mercenaries who seduced newlyweds and their parents into taking on years of high-interest debt.

  But according to Glen, she would be massacring the starry-eyed dreams of little girls and grown women everywhere. And what about all of the jobs that would be lost if she brought down the wedding industry? Had she thought about the repercussions of such an outcome?

  She laughed. “You’re kidding, I hope.” They were in the kitchen eating dinner, which was carryout pizza, because she had a coupon, one that would expire in two days. When she picked up their pepperoni-and-mushroom, the boy behind the register had thrown in a free bottle of Mountain Dew, which Karen loved but Glen thought disgusting.

  Glen smiled, his brown hair flopping over his eyes, sheepdog-like. He needed a haircut, but the stylist he preferred charged sixty dollars a visit, and because he was even more frugal than Karen, he often waited three months between cuts. “Of course I am. Rock on with your assault on the wedding industry.”

  “I hope you mean that, because it’s time to call our married friends’ bluffs.”

  He pried up another slice from the pizza box and put it on his plate. “What are you proposing?” he asked and smiled. “No pun intended.”

  She described her idea for the non-wedding party. “I think it’ll be a lot of fun if we can pull it off. We’ve been together longer than some of our friends have been married. Bill and Ella both, for one. And I wonder about Meg and Freddy now too.” Bill had been married and divorced twice during the time that Karen had been with Glen, and Ella’s marriage had lasted five weeks, but to her credit, it was the only marriage she’d had so far.

  She showed Glen the rough draft of the invitation she’d written after returning home from the meeting:

  PLEASE SAVE THE DATE!

  In honor of our six years together,

  Glen Calhoun and Karen Quinn

  are pleased to host a Couplehood Jubilee!

  We request the honor of your presence for our reception

/>   on July 20 at our home, 2344 W. Pratt, Chicago

  Wine and hors d’oeuvres: 5 p.m.

  Dinner: 7 p.m.

  Dancing: 8:30–11 p.m.

  Black Tie Optional

  We have registered at Macy’s, Pottery Barn,

  Tiffany & Co., and Neiman Marcus

  Blocks of rooms have been reserved in our last names at

  the Four Seasons, the Drake Hotel,

  and the InterContinental

  Please RSVP by July 5

  kquinn22@hotmailspot.com or

  MisterG@hotmailspot.com

  Both Glen and I very much hope to see you at our celebration!

  “When did you become such an advocate of the exclamation point?” he asked.

  She smiled. “J’adore le point d’exclamation.”

  Usually he loved it when she spoke French, but his expression showed misgiving. “‘Couplehood Jubilee,’” he said. “What exactly is that? And the Four Seasons and Neiman Marcus? Who are you planning to invite? George Soros?” He handed back the invitation. “Aren’t you supposed to send out save-the-date cards before the actual invitations?”

  “Yes, but we don’t have a lot of time and I’m not going to send out both. Save-the-date cards are another way the wedding-industrial complex gets people to spend money they don’t have. I’m going to do it all over email anyway.”

  “Karen,” he said quietly. “This Couplehood Jubilee thing is, pardon my French, a fucking scam. If our friends figure out what we’re up to, they might be amused at first, but then they’ll probably feel like they’re being conned.”