Chapter 7 | 75
70 lines✦
knew it was no use, I was the type he would never go to bedwith, and wrote him I was unfortunately about to marry a childhoodsweetheart. The more I thought about it the better I liked the idea of beingseduced by a simultaneous interpreter in New York City. Constantinseemed mature and considerate in every way. There were no peopleI knew he would want to brag to about it, the way college boysbragged about sleeping with girls in the backs of cars to their room-mates or their friends on the basketball team. And there would bea pleasant irony in sleeping with a man Mrs Willard had introducedme to, as if she were, in a roundabout way, to blame for it. When Constantin asked if I would like to come up to hisapartment to hear some balalaika records I smiled to myself. Mymother had always told me never under any circumstances to gowith a man to a man’s rooms after an evening out, it could mean onlythe one thing. “lam very fond of balalaika music,’ I said. Constantin’s room had a balcony, and the balcony overlookedthe river, and we could hear the hooing of the tugs down in thedarkness. I felt moved and tender and perfectly certain about whatI was going to do. I knew I might have a baby, but that thought hung far and dim inthe distance and didn’t trouble me at all. There was no one hundredper cent sure way not to have a baby, it said in an article my mothercut out of the Reader’s Digest and mailed to me at college. Thisarticle was written by a married woman lawyer with children andcalled “In Defence of Chastity”. It gave all the reasons a girl shouldn't sleep with anybody but herhusband and then only after they were married. The main point of the article was that a man’s world is differentfrom a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from awoman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds andthe two different sets of emotions together properly. My mothersaid this was something a girl didn’t know about till it was too late, 76 | The Bell Jar so she had to take the advice of people who were already experts,like a married woman. This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for theirwives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones toteach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade agirl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon asshe gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying thatif she did that with them she would do that with other men and theywould end up by making her life miserable. The woman finished her article by saying better be safe than sorryand besides, there was no sure way of not getting stuck with a babyand then you'd really be in a pickle. Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider washow a girl felt. It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, butwhat if he suddenly confessed he wasn't pure after we were married,the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn't stand the idea of a womanhaving to have a single pure life and a man being able to have adouble life, one pure and one not. Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-bloodedintelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one Imight as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebodywho wasn’t pure either. Then when he started to make my lifemiserable I could make his miserable as well. When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics andProtestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and blackmen or even men and women, | saw the world divided into peoplewho had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and thisseemed the only really significant difference between one personand another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day Icrossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way Id feel if I ever visited Europe. I'dcome home, and if I looked closely into the mirror I'd be able to
✦