Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 16

  By age fifteen, I’d inhabited four different body types. I’d been chubby, skinny, flat-chested, and voluptuous. From this, I’d learned a crucial lesson: size didn’t matter. No matter what kind of figure you had, someone always felt compelled to dream up some sort of asinine and degrading nickname for you.

  Once I had breasts, however, it seemed that boys wanted to play with them. Better yet, I wanted them to. The same hormones that had caused my body to go into overdrive were doing the same thing to my libido. I felt feverish, almost dizzy with longing. I walked around Stuyvesant High School and the whole of New York City in a fugue of perpetual arousal, writhing inside my skin, tingling, emboldened and ambitious with yearning.

  In the past, my mind had been occupied with occasional, semi-useful thoughts such as: If you make decorative covers for all your book reports, you may be able to create the illusion of actually having read the books. Or: By moving the bathroom scale to where the floor warps and climbing onto it after you pee, you can knock a half-pound off your weight. But now, besides becoming famous for as-yet-undetermined talents, almost all I ever thought about was sex. The moment something even remotely reminded me of fooling around, it was like hearing “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” on oldies radio—it inevitably took up permanent residence in my head for the next seven weeks, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

  In school, I’d arrange my face into something I hoped approximated interest, then spend entire class periods staring off into space and reliving some torrid episode in which I’d made out with Mark in the hallway during Ronit Simantov’s Sweet Sixteen.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with me?” I asked my friend Jeff one day. “I think about sex constantly. It never lets up.”

  “Welcome to my world, sweetheart,” Jeff said grimly, clomping me on the back. “And let me tell you: it’s a bitter, bitter place.”

  Having a liberal, hippy-dippy upbringing has its drawbacks, but restraint, sexual repression, and guilt are not three of them. Boys wanted to fool around with me, and I wanted to fool around with them, and we all ended up feeling like we’d just won the lottery.

  I loved fooling around. I loved the buildup to the very first kiss, then the frantic, semi-inept scramble of it. I loved the mounting adrenaline, and the way boys looked at me with astonishment, with reverence. The way their fingertips burned into me, branding my skin with the memory of it.

  But it was also funny. Sexually, boys were about as complicated as a Pez dispenser. You showed them a nipple, they got an erection. It was Pavlovian, not exactly the stuff of higher primates. When boys were aroused and you fooled around with them, they were reduced to babies. Naked in their hunger, greedy in their needs, they whimpered and begged, then became prostrate with gratitude. Oh please. Oh yes. Oh mama, they moaned, crumpling to their knees. Yet afterward, they strutted around purporting to be these great studs, masters of the bedroom, steely with virility. “Oh, man, did I get some this weekend,” they bragged to each other in the hallway at school, as if they’d stolen or won something—when really, of course, we girls were merely being charitable. After all, we were at least as horny as they were.

  This was another discovery, in fact: most of my girlfriends felt at least as overheated as I did.

  “Augh. Don’t you wish we could make out for college credit?” said my friend Jill.

  Every time Jill or I hooked up with somebody, we immediately had to tell each other about it in painstaking detail. We were obsessed: first he was like, then I was like, then he said, then I went … The majority of fooling around we did took place fleetingly and clandestinely, in the urban equivalent of the back seat of a car: in stairwells, on park benches, in apartments where someone’s parent was expected home imminently. Since this was in the Teenage Dark Ages when no one had pagers, cell phones, or e-mail yet, my friends and I actually had to call each other on the family phone and communicate to each other in code.

  “Hey. Can you talk?”

  “Um. We’re just, uh, finishing dinner.”

  “So just say the first initial.”

  “Okay. M.”

  “Michael? Michael Barlow?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That guy from your chemistry class?”

  “Yuh uh. Can you believe?”

  “How far?”

  “Um—hang on a second. No, Ma, I don’t want any more chicken, thanks. Um—”

  “Just give a number.”

  “Well, sort of two. Between two and three.”

  “Between?”

  “You know, on—”

  “But not in?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Ohmygod!”

  Occasionally, as I mashed against walls and wriggled out of my bra, I worried that I’d get branded a slut. But then, after having been called Fatso, Flatsy, Skinny Bones, and Kiddo, “Slut” actually sounded pretty terrific to me. Who, after all, called girls “sluts”? Boys who wanted desperately to fool around with them, and other girls who were jealous. “Slut” was the height of flattery, when you really thought about it.

  Oh, how I loved the idea of being considered wild—a sexual tempest, a roiling tidal wave of desire, a paragon of erotic expertise. “Wow, that Susie Gilman,” I imagined the boys at school saying. “That girl is a volcano.”

  There was only one small problem: how could you be a volcano when you were still a virgin?

  Of course, no matter where you grow up, if you’re female, you somehow get the message that there’s only one way you’re really supposed to lose your virginity. Teenage boys, of course, are encouraged to approach sex like shoplifting—who cares who, what, or where—grab it whenever you can! But girls still get the idea that there’s a right way to lose it, and a wrong way.

  The right way is with a guy you’re totally, completely in love with, and who is so totally, completely in love with you that he’d be willing to die for you—or at least do the next best thing and marry you.

  The wrong way to lose your virginity is, of course, every way else.

  Even in hipper-than-thou New York City, in the pre-AIDS 1980s, Endless Love was still held up as the Gold Standard for Virginity Loss. And yet, almost every one of my friends—God bless ’em—opted to lose her virginity the “wrong” way. In fact, in the hundreds of virginity stories I’ve heard over the years, exactly three women I’ve ever met actually lost their virginity on a proverbial bed of rose petals to their worshipful One True Love. For the rest of us, when it came right down to it, Boredom, Curiosity, Horniness, and Inebriation pretty much won out.

  “Getting it over with” ranked much higher, in the end, than romance. “Well, I don’t know, I was at this party, the guy was cute, and I just thought, ‘Why not?’” my friend Judy shrugged. “Besides, we were on top of a pool table. How cool is that?”

  With so much expectation and gravitas attached to virginity for so long, a lot of girls I knew just said: fuck it, and proceeded to have sex for the first time with as little ceremony as they put into getting a haircut. More than a couple of my friends lost it to guys at “the parents are away” parties out in Brooklyn and Queens, where they fumbled through the act hastily in a paneled rec room while “Stairway to Heaven” blared over the stereo and other drunken kids pounded on the door yelling, “C’mon. Hurry up in there. Tony wants his bong!”

  Yet literary aspirant and drama queen that I was, I wanted to lose my virginity in a way that was special—or that would at least make for good copy. On numerous occasions, I’d had the chance to have sex in a stairwell or on the rooftop of someone’s apartment building. But how would that sound? In the likely event that Hollywood one day turned my life into a made-for-TV biography, I didn’t want to be known as the glamorous, world-famous something-or-other who’ lost her virginity under a heating duct. I didn’t want to “just get it over with” with one of the cute, swaggering, beer-chugging guys at my school, who’d inevitably spend the next Monday morning high-fiving his friends in the hallway and bragging to everyone while tre
ating me, personally, as if I had the plague.

  But what if, by the end of senior year, I was the only virgin left in the entire Tristate Area? This actually struck me as a distinct possibility. And I was certain that, for the rest of my life, my sexual status as a sixteen-year-old would remain my only memorable and defining quality. Oh yes. Susie Gilman, my classmates would say at my twenty-fifth high school reunion. That pathetic girl who was still a virgin at graduation.

  At night, I’d lie awake, watching the lights of the city play over my ceiling, trying to imagine what sex really, actually felt like. I’d been to third base by then (whatever that was—apparently, it’s still being debated), but intercourse itself still seemed so far away somehow, so abstractly momentous.

  “Tell me,” I begged my nonvirgin friends. “What does it feel like?”

  I thought they’d be able to explain to me the exact sensation of having a boy inside you. I had the idea that during sex, you experienced some great shivery, physical epiphany that transformed you on an almost molecular level into a more sophisticated, more evolved human being.

  But all my friend Judy could say was, “What did it feel like? Like I’d impaled my twat on a hockey stick, that’s what it felt like.”

  The problem with wanting to lose my virginity to the “right person,” however, was that I had absolutely no idea who this might be. I had plenty of boyfriends—cute Frisbee players I regularly hung out with in the park—but none of the all-consumptive, gushy, monogamous love I saw portrayed in made-for-TV movies. When my friends Gabi and Melissa sat on the steps after school, describing their “perfect guy” and “ideal relationship,” it occurred to me that, while I had easily mapped out in my mind half a dozen elaborate scenarios in which I’d win the Pulitzer Prize before college, I had only the vaguest idea of what my “perfect guy” might be like. Other than looking like either a young Mick Jagger or an alive Jim Morrison, my “perfect” guy, as far as I could tell, had only one distinguishing characteristic: the ability to read minds. In the scenarios I imagined, he was able to divine all my romantic fantasies and secret longings almost telepathically, then effortlessly fulfill them. He’d be forever appearing on my doorstep with armfuls of roses, declaring his love for me over the school PA system, and making snow angels in the yard beneath my window (in the imaginary house I also happened to live in). To that end, my only concept of an “ideal relationship” consisted of a guy telling me I was beautiful about a thousand times a day and winning stuffed animals for me at amusement parks.

  My friend Jill had an actual steady boyfriend named Kyle. Kyle came over to Jill’s apartment after school several times a week, sometimes staying for dinner or watching college football with Jill’s dad. Over the summer, he joined her family for weekends at their beach house in Fire Island, and conferred secretly with Jill’s mother about what jewelry to get Jill for her sixteenth birthday. He saw Jill every day at school, and once when she got really drunk, Kyle held her hair back for her as she threw up in the bathroom.

  I’d sooner stab myself in the head with an ice pick than let a guy get that close to me. Although I pined away for “a serious boyfriend,” the thought of actually bringing one home made me physically ill. My home life was atrocious. My mother and I fought constantly. We had arguments that were prototypes for parents and teenagers everywhere, based largely on my mother’s fascistic belief that our house was not a hotel, and my reasonable insistence that I was old enough to stay out until 2:00 A.M. on weekends.

  “As long as you’re living in my house, you’re subject to my rules,” my mother would shout. “Do you understand me?”

  “Well, whoever said I wanted to live in your house, huh?” I’d scream back. “I never asked to be born. I never asked to live here. I never asked to have you as my mother with your STUPID, INSANE, TOTALITARIAN CURFEWS. All my other friends get to stay out AT LEAST an hour later than I do!”

  “YOU DON’T LIKE IT HERE? THEN LEAVE!”

  “FINE! I WILL!” (At this point, I’d dramatically yank a duffel bag out of the closet and start stuffing my underwear into it.)

  Not coincidently, most of my girlfriends had equally lousy relationships with their mothers; we were constantly telephoning one another in tears or turning up on each other’s doorsteps. One weekend when Vanessa was home from boarding school, I arrived at her apartment with my duffel bag.

  “Oh, Susan. How very nice to see you,” Vanessa’s mother said sweetly, opening the door. “Are you all right?”

  “Yuunnhh,” I started to sob. “I just had a fight with my mother. She threw me out again.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” said Vanessa’s mom. “I’m so sorry. I would invite you in for a nice cup of tea, but as you can see,” she gestured down the hallway of the apartment, where I could see Vanessa hurling clothes into an opened suitcase on the rug, “I’M THROWING VANESSA OUT THIS VERY MINUTE!” she shouted.

  “YOU’RE NOT THROWING ME OUT!” Vanessa hollered. “I’M LEAVING!”

  “SO GO!” yelled her mother. “TAKE YOUR BLOODY THINGS AND GO!” She turned back to me. “Ever so sorry, Susan,” she said cheerily. “Perhaps next time.”

  Yet like most teenagers, of course, I believed that my family alone was straight out of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” No doubt, if I brought my boyfriends home, my father would wind up telling them one belly-flop of a joke after another, while my mother would walk around in her favorite novelty T-shirt that said “Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down,” and ask them what their zodiac sign was.

  Worse still, what would guys discover if they really saw me? What if they thought my record collection wasn’t cool enough? What if they saw I still had a dollhouse stored in my closet? What if they noticed that my inner thighs touched and I had to keep flipping my hair to keep it from falling flat? Whenever I was with a boy, I assumed that if he knew the “real me,” all he’d see was the former outcast: Fatso, skinny bones, flatsy. Eeeewww.

  Whenever a guy liked me, his desire for me almost instantly branded him a loser. I was as merciless on boys as I was on myself; I could forgive them nothing. A guy could be sweet, doting, and intelligent, but God help him if he met me at the movies wearing a dorky terry cloth shirt and a puka shell bracelet. God help him if he sweated too much, related an inane joke he’d seen on TV, or ordered a silly-sounding cocktail. I couldn’t bear to be around anyone as imperfect as myself, as vulnerable, insecure, or unfinished. A boy’s humanness mirrored my own, and I couldn’t stand the sight of it. Fooling around for a night was one thing, but I wanted—no, I needed—anyone I slept with to be commanding, sophisticated, and more than a little unreal.

  Three of my so-called boyfriends were high school seniors who’d gone on to college. Such age and distance, in my mind, gave them special cachet and worthiness: they were, after all, older men! Whenever they came back to New York during school breaks, I mentally auditioned them.

  Keith was a photographer, a free-spirited Frisbee player. I adored him, and sometimes, when we walked around Greenwich Village and did the I-Ching together, I believed he was my soul mate. But for soul mates, we had an awful lot of parents constantly walking in on us, and then he always headed back to college.

  Jeremy was gorgeous and an excellent kisser, but had the irritating habit of tweaking me on the nose playfully, then chiding, “Virginity isn’t an incurable disease, you know,” which invariably made me feel like I was six years old and sitting on the knee of some perverted Santa Claus.

  Then there was Jake, who had all the charm and dazzling good looks of a young presidential candidate and just about as little sincerity. Whenever he saw me, he’d stagger backward and clutch his chest dramatically, feigning a heart attack. “Whoa, Susie,” he’d gasp. He’d then proceed to use lines on me that he’d clearly picked up from movies. Seeing as I myself was a creature of self-invention, this actually impressed me. Unlike most of the guys I knew, whose idea of seduction was to say, “Hey, wanna check out the stairwell?” Ivy League Jake would take me to
wine bars and order for us both in French. Then he’d lean over the hurricane candle, entwine his fingers in mine, and say, coyly, “So, what are your thoughts on Nietzsche?”

  “Oh, I absolutely love him,” I’d purr. “Especially his earlier films.”

  Best yet, Jake had about a zillion other girlfriends and a sexual appetite that bordered on Attention Deficit Disorder. He was someone I could become completely infatuated with—without any threat of prolonged, actual contact.

  One weekend when he was home, he encouraged me to visit him at college. “You’d love university life,” he said magnanimously. “With your mind and your body, you deserve university life.”

  I don’t think he expected for a minute that I’d actually take him up on his offer, but little did he know: I’d made up my mind. So, in fact, had my friend Jill. We’d decided to lose our virginity on the same night so we could compare notes afterward and talk about it incessantly. “Ohmygod,” we squealed to each other in whispers over the phone, “how totally cool would that be?”

  After the requisite lies-to-parents and logistics were all worked out, I surprised Jake in his dorm room in New England on Valentine’s Day in subzero weather. Conveniently, I neglected to mention to him that I was still, in fact, a virgin, because the weekend, in my mind, was about being fabulously sexy and passionate, which as far as I could tell were qualities that almost by definition required people to misrepresent themselves. As I liked to see it, Jake and I were two brilliant, sophisticated lovers having a weekend tryst that might kick off an epic, decades-long affair that would span several foreign cities and perhaps even cause an international scandal, but that would never, under any circumstances, run the risk of him having to meet my parents or see me in my sweat pants.

  And so.