Читать книгу Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” - Lena Dunham - Страница 9

WHEN I WAS NINE, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it. I promised myself, in orange Magic Marker, that I would remain a virgin until I graduated from high school. This seemed important because I knew my mother had waited until the summer before college and also because Angela Chase seemed pretty messed up by her experience at that flophouse where high school kids went to copulate. If my relationship to liver pâté was any indication—and I had recently eaten so much that I barfed—then my willpower left much to be desired. I would need something stronger than resolve to prevent me from having intercourse too early in life, so I wrote the vow up and asked my mother to sign the document. She refused. “You just don’t know what life will bring, and I don’t want you feeling guilty,” she said.

Ultimately, the contract was an unnecessary precaution. The opportunity never arose in high school, nor even during my first year of college at the New School, unless you count a near miss with a stocky, aspiring pilot named James. Though never consummated, that encounter went far enough that I had to fish a mint-colored, never-used condom out from behind my dormitory bunk bed the next day. Everything had been moving along nicely, and my shirt and pants were off, but when I revealed my virgin status, he became (perhaps rightfully) afraid I would form an unbreakable one-way bond with him and fled. Sophomore year, I transferred to a small liberal arts school in Ohio that was known for having been the first college to admit women and African Americans, as well as for its polyamorous, bi-curious student body. I was neither, but it did seem like a good, supportive environment in which to finally get the ball rolling.

Oberlin was a free-love fantasia. During the first rainstorm of the year, nude students took to the quad, slathering one another’s bodies in mud. (I wore a tankini.) People referred to each other as “former lovers, current friends.” There was a student-run sex seminar where every year a boy and a girl were recruited to show their penis and vagina, respectively, to an eager crowd of aspiring Dr. Ruth Westheimers.

I really felt like the oldest virgin in town, and I probably was, save for a busty punk girl from Olympia, Washington, who was equally frustrated; she and I would often meet up in our nightgowns to discuss the lack of prospects. Just two Emily Dickinsons with facial piercings, wondering what life had in store for us and whether we had unwittingly crossed the divide between innocent and pathetic.

“Josh Krolnik ran his fingers along the elastic band of my underwear! What do we think that means?”

“He did that to me, too …”

We even noted, with no small amount of terror, that the guy who wore a purple bathrobe to every class had a girl in Superman-print pajamas who seemed to love him. They looked at each other gooey eyed, deep in their own (no doubt sexual) world of loungewear.

The pickings were slim, especially if, like me, you were over bisexuals. At least half the straight men on campus played Dungeons & Dragons, and another quarter eschewed footwear entirely. The cutest guy I had seen at school so far, a long-haired rock-climber named Privan, had risen from his desk at the end of class to reveal he was wearing a flowing white skirt. It was clear that I was going to have to make some concessions in order to experience carnal love.

I met Jonah¹ in the cafeteria. He didn’t have a specific style beyond dressing vaguely like a middle-aged lesbian. He was small but strong. (Guys under five-foot-five seemed to be my lot in life.) He wore a t-shirt from his high school spirit day (a high school with a spirit day! how quaint!), and his approach to the eternal buffet that was the cafeteria was pretty genteel, which I liked—even the vegans tended to pile their plates like the apocalypse was coming and return to their dorms catatonic from the effort of digesting. I casually mentioned how frustrated I was by my inability to get to Kentucky for a journalism project, and he immediately offered his services. Though struck by his generosity, I didn’t really want to take a five-hour drive with a stranger. However, five to forty-five minutes of sex seemed okay.

The best way to do this, obviously, was to throw a wine-and-cheese party, which I did, in my eight-by-ten-foot room on the “quiet floor” of East Hall. Procuring wine entailed mounting my bike and riding seven subzero miles to a package store in nearby Lorain that didn’t ID, so it ended up being beer and cheese and a big box of Carr’s assorted party crackers. Jonah was “casually” invited in a group email that made me sound a lot more relaxed (“Hey y’all, sometimes on a Thursday night I just need to chill. DON’T YOU?”) than I actually was. And he came, and he stayed, even after all my guests had packed up and gone. That’s when I knew that we would at least go to sloppy second base. We talked, at first animatedly and then in the nervous half exclamations that substitute for kissing when everyone is too shy. Finally, I told him that my dad painted huge pictures of penises for a job. When he asked if we could see them online, I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and went for it. I removed my shirt almost immediately, as I had with the pilot, which seemed to impress him. Continuing in the key of bold, I hopped up to get the condom from the “freshman survival pack” we had been given (even though I was a sophomore, and even though I was pretty sure if the apocalypse did come we were going to need a lot more than fake Ray-Bans, a granola bar, and some mini-Band-Aids).

Meanwhile, across campus, my friend Audrey was in a private hell of her own creation. She had been in a war with her roommate all semester, a voluptuous, Ren Faire–loving Philadelphian who was the lust object of every LARPer and black-metal aficionado on campus. Audrey just wanted some quiet time to read The New Republic and iChat with her boyfriend in Virginia, while her roommate was now dating a kid who had tried to cook meth in the dorm kitchen, warranting an emergency visit from men in hazmat suits. Audrey asked that her roommate not keep her NuvaRing birth control in the minifridge, which the girl took as an unforgivable affront to her honor.

Before coming out to my beer-and-cheese soiree, Audrey had left her roommate a note: “If you could please have quieter sex as we approach our midterms, I’d really appreciate it.” Her roommate’s response was to burn Audrey’s note, scatter the ashes across the floor, and leave a note of her own: “U R a frigid bitch. Get the sand out of UR vagina.”

Audrey ran back to my room, hoping for a sleepover. She was sobbing, terrified that the burnt note was just a precursor to serious bodily harm, and also pretty sure I was alone, finishing the cheese, so she flung my door open without knocking—only to find Jonah on top of me. She immediately understood the magnitude of the occasion and, through her tears, cried, “Mazel tov!”

I didn’t tell Jonah I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” I was sure I had already broken my hymen in high school while crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in pursuit of a cat that didn’t want to be rescued. Still, it hurt more than I’d expected and in a different way, too—duller, less like a stab wound and more like a headache. He was nervous, and, in a nod to gender equality, neither of us came. Afterward we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a good person, whatever that even means.

I awoke the next morning, just like I did every morning, and proceeded to do all my normal things: I called my mother, drank three cups of orange juice, ate half a block of the sharp cheddar that had been sitting out since the night before, and listened to girl-with-guitar music. I looked at pictures of cute things on the Internet and inspected my bikini line for exciting ingrown hairs. I checked my email, folded my sweaters, then unfolded all the sweaters in the process of trying to decide which sweater to wear. That night, lying down felt the same, and sleep came easily. No floodgate had been opened. No vault of true womanhood unlocked. She remained, and she was me.

Jonah and I only had sex once. The next day, he stopped by to say that he thought we’d done it too soon, and we should take a few weeks to get to know each other better. Then he asked me to be his girlfriend, put on my hot-pink bicycle helmet, and proclaimed it was “the going-steady helmet,” giving me a manic thumbs-up. I “dated” him for twelve hours, then ended it in the laundry room of his dormitory. Over Christmas break, he sent me a Facebook message that read, simply: “Your Hot.”

Sex was clearly easier to have than I had given it credit for. It occurred to me that I had, for the past few years, set my sights on boys who weren’t interested in me, and this was because I wasn’t ready. Despite all the movies about wayward prep-school girls I liked to watch, my high school years had been devoted to loving my pets, writing poems about back-alley love, and surrendering my body only to my own fantasies. And I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet. I was sure that, once I let someone penetrate me, my world would change in some indescribable yet fundamental way. I would never be able to hug my parents with the same innocence, and being alone with myself would have a different tenor. How could I ever experience true solitude again when I’d had someone poking around my insides?

How permanent virginity feels, and then how inconsequential. After Jonah, I could barely remember the sensation of lack, the embarrassment, and the feelings of urgency. I remember passing the punk girl arm in arm with her boyfriend senior year, and we didn’t even exchange a survivor’s nod. She was likely having sex every night, her ample bosom heaving in time to some hard-core music, our bond erased by experience. We weren’t part of any club anymore, just part of the world. Good for her.

Only later did sex and identity become one. I wrote that virginity-loss scene almost word for word in my first film, Creative Nonfiction, minus the part where Audrey busted down the door, afraid for her life. When I performed that sex scene, my first, I felt more changed than I had by the actual experience of having sex with Jonah. Like that was just sex, but this was my work.

¹ Name changed to protect the truly innocent.