Chapter 7 | 73
71 lines✦
hoose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing onemeant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, thefigs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped tothe ground at my feet. Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream.All the time I had been in New York I had never found such arestaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, wherethey serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds offancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror. To reach this restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly-litsteps into a sort of cellar. Travel posters plastered the smoke-dark walls, like so manypicture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and Japanese mountainsand African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles that seemed forcenturies to have wept their coloured waxes red over blue overgreen in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light roundeach table where the faces floated, flushed and flamelikethemselves. I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the firstmouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all thefat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen fromthe profound void of an empty stomach. Constantin kept refilling our glasses with a sweet Greek wine thattasted of pine bark, and I found myself telling him how I was goingto learn German and go to Europe and be a war correspondent likeMaggie Higgins. I felt so fine by the time we came to the yoghourt and strawberryjam that I decided I would let Constantin seduce me. Ever since Buddy Willard had told me about that waitress I hadbeen thinking I ought to go out and sleep with somebody myself.Sleeping with Buddy wouldn't count, though, because he would stillbe one person ahead of me, it would have to be with somebody else. The only boy I ever actually discussed going to bed with was abitter, hawk-nosed Southerner from Yale, who came up to collegeone week-end only to find his date had eloped with a taxi-driver the 74 | The Bell Jar day before. As the girl had lived in my house and as I was the onlyone home that particular night, it was my job to cheer him up. At the local coffee-shop, hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of peoples’ names gouged into thewood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked franklyabout sex. This boy—his name was Eric—said he thought it disgusting theway all the girls at my college stood around on the porches underthe porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madlybefore the one o’clock curfew, so everybody passing by could seethem. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what arewe? Animals. Then Eric told me how he had slept with his first woman. He went to a Southern prep school that specialized in buildingall-round gentlemen, and by the time you graduated it was anunwritten rule that you had to have known a woman. Known in theBiblical sense, Eric said. So one Saturday Eric and a few of his classmates took a bus intothe nearest city and visited a notorious whore house. Eric’s whorehadn't even taken off her dress. She was a fat, middle-aged womanwith dyed red hair and suspiciously thick lips and rat-coloured skinand she wouldn't turn off the light, so he had had her under a fly-spotted twenty-five watt bulb, and it was nothing like it was crackedup to be. It was boring as going to the toilet. I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn't seem so boring, butEric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just ananimal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bedwith her. He'd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman heloved free of all that dirty business. It had crossed my mind at the time that Eric might be a goodperson to go to bed with, since he had already done it and, unlikethe usual run of boys, didn’t seem dirty-minded or silly when hetalked about it. But then Eric wrote me a letter saying he thoughthe might really be able to love me, I was so intelligent and cynicaland yet had such a kind face, surprisingly like his older sister's; so
✦