Chapter 2
When Eve went home that evening she paused, as always, on the threshold of her apartment and surveyed the neat, attractively furnished living room.
She was very proud of her home, and of her housekeeping. She did it all herself, each week, and the rooms always shone with cleanliness and care. To her, living in a messy apartment was the same as wearing a dirty dress or an unironed blouse. Her clothes-when she wore them-were perfection, and so was her home. Both were accessories to her body and her beauty.
A jewel must have a perfect setting....
She put down the plastic beach bag that contained the robe she had worn that week at work. It was time to launder it. She had a dozen or more robes and changed them often. They needed it; chalk dust flew in the air in art classrooms, and the acrid smell of turpentine seemed to seep into everything. She was always very careful not to get paint on her robes; on the few occasions when she had, the robe was tossed out. She would not wear anything stained. To her, it was not arty; just sloppy.
The other models had slovenly habits. They looked like slatterns in their grimy wrappers and those damn rubbery thong sandals that sold for thirty-nine cents at a bin in the supermarket. The inner soles always got black from the bare feet that grew quickly dirty on the dusty models' platforms. There was nothing Eve could do about that; her feet got dirty too, and she couldn't very well run out and wash them after every class. Instead, she wore cordovan leather sandals made in Mexico. These she polished every evening. She had two pairs, identical, and continually switched them. She wiped out the part that her feet touched with spray cleaner.
She washed out the nylon tricot robe and hung it carefully on a plastic hanger to dry, pulling out the folds and creases until the garment was perfectly smooth. Then she dampened a cloth and wiped the plastic satchel in which she carried the robe and slippers.
Now....Pleasant anticipation covered her. It was time for dinner. She was very hungry, a common state of being for her. Eve remained on a perpetual semi-diet She warmed some leftover pot roast and cooked a box of frozen asparagus. She could eat the whole box; it wasn't fattening. Instead of butter, she covered the vegetable with vinegar. While the food warmed, she poured herself a glass of Madeira. On rare occasions, she would have a highball, but she worried so about it afterwards that it was not worth it. She made the wine last; she only allowed herself one glass. It would have been a pleasure to drink, if only to get even with her teetotaling parents, but whiskey was fattening.
The warm, shiny kitchen was pleasing to her.
She had a lovely home....She always likened it to the four-pronged, empty ring base she had seen in a jewelers. She had stood outside the window, staring at her reflection in the highly polished store front, when she had noticed the empty ring. Just then, a clerk had reached into the display and removed it. Peering into the store, Eve saw him discussing something with a customer. They were fitting some kind of stone into the ring.
She had furnished the apartment with exquisite and expensive furniture, choosing everything herself. Often, Eve wondered if people were aware of what a high-paying job modeling was. It had to be-so few women were willing to go into it because of modesty. There was always a great shortage of models, and most of the available women were difficult to deal with.
There were two types: the hippie, out to shock; and the near-skids, as Eve called the ex-waitresses and mentally slow types who, a hundred years ago, would have been scullery maids. The latter were tired and defeated; they simply wanted a job in which they got paid well for sitting absolutely still and doing absolutely nothing.
Both types were undependable and often did not show up, due to drug abuse and arrests, in the case of the hippies. The skids invariably attracted the dismal crises to which women of their class were prone-beatings by boy friends, husbands disappearing and returning, evictions, and hangovers. They had little imagination and no knowledge of art, and they couldn't have cared less about the subject. They were all right for painting classes, in which the model had to sit in the same position for an hour. For drawing, requiring quick changes and esthetic sense, they were terrible. Eve had often seen them stumped, at a loss for what to do next. As a result, she had been given all of the drawing students.
She would say one thing for the sad sacks, though; their lumpy, ruined bodies were much more of a challenge to an artist. It was far more difficult to draw them than to draw a perfect, healthy and slender form.
There was only one exception to Eve's observations on other models. That was an old black woman in the university department. She was so black that the painting students had to use purple to get her proper skin tones. She and Eve often received calls from the various private art schools in the city, to fill in for a missing model. Between the two of them, they held the university department together, and made more house calls than a doctor.
So, at a fixed rate of four dollars an hour, and often working more than forty hours a week, Eve had plenty of money.
And it all came from people looking at her body....
She was glad that they didn't use her in the painting classes. Often, they wanted a robed figure. At first, she had sat through a painting class, totally miserable and swathed in filmy muslin and a sun bonnet, covered from head to foot to simulate a Joshua Reynolds paragon of Victorian virtue. She was supposed to be a young mother in Kensington Gardens, and that was the day she almost quit.
To make matters worse, they only paid three dollars an hour for draped subjects.
That particular painting class was full of Wednesday matinee housewives, the sort of whom Edith Wharton said: "They are so afraid of encountering culture that they have to hunt it in packs."
The women, trying to convince themselves that all was right with the world, cooed over Eve's gold-and-blue aristocratic looks. "She's so sweet. She looks as if she's just stepped out of a Botticelli."
Eve took heart at that; at least Venus was bare assed. But as things turned out, the women so cowed the instructor that she ended up with seven hours of Pinky, doing nothing more daring than arranging the streamers on her leghorn bonnet.
Finally, one day when two hippies absented themselves to attend their preliminary hearing, the chairman of the art department approached her, stroking his chin and refusing to meet her eyes.
"Miss Banner, would you mind very much posing in the nude?"
"Why, no! Of course not! I mean-I wouldn't mind."
Eve took a shower after dinner and watched TV for a little while, until she began to notice a feeling of swollen discomfort in her stomach.
Oh, no....
She glanced at the calendar with an air of resignation. Oh, hell! That would mean four days of wearing pants to work. She got up and took a shower, scrubbing herself vigorously until her skin tingled.
Dirty ... ugly ... nasty ... filth, filth, filth!
She didn't mind it for physical reasons because she suffered only a modicum of discomfort. She didn't care about the question of delicacy; the students knew that she was a young woman and she didn't mind their seeing what she had to wear a few days out of each month.
She minded because she would have to be partially clothed.
There was never any question about it. She refused to insert anything inside her body. She could not ... and did not.
Her woman's body was something that sullied her body. She remembered the muddy rock falling off the bank of the pond and making an ugly, disconnected whirlpool out of her reflection. Ugliness was destruction. There was destruction going on inside her body right now; the walls of her womb were breaking down.
She was losing part of herself!
Eve wondered why she did not have pain at these times. She hated it so much that it would have been natural enough for her to fight it, in her mind, so that severe cramps would have resulted. But her job entailed almost perpetual exercise. She supposed all the moving and stretching had helped her.
She arranged the sanitary accoutrements carefully. The belt was new and white; she used a fresh one every month, throwing the other away. She could not bear to put the same one on her body after ... after this!
She lowered it down on her hips until it would be even with the waistband of the bikini pants she wore. At least she could show her stomach; regular pants would have hid that, too.
She wished she could have an operation to stop it all. Stop the ugliness, stop this prison harness that hid her lovely hips. They could remove her uterus and leave her ovaries, so that she would retain the beautifying benefits of her female hormonal secretions. She had looked into the matter, but the shocked doctor had called it "destructive surgery." There was actually a law against it.
How angry he had been with her! He had sputtered, "But menstruation makes you feel like a woman! It's proof of your femininity!"
"I don't need such hideous proof," she answered tersely, hating him. "I already know it. Stuck pigs bleed but don't!"
He had surveyed her with bitter acrimony. "Suppose men went around having themselves castrated?" he challenged.
Eve rose and pulled on her gloves. "I think that would be perfectly lovely."
He never sent her a bill.
She lay in bed, one knee raised, her hand lying lightly on her stomach as though to hide what was going on inside it. A night light burned on the table beside the bed. She always kept it burning, because of the mirrors. What good was it to have all those mirrors if the room were dark?
There were four of them, and they were enormous. They hung on the walls at such a level as to enable Eve to see herself as she lay in bed. The one that hung over the bed reflected the images in the one that was mounted on the opposite wall. She wished she had one in the ceiling, but it entailed too much work. Besides, the three girls who lived upstairs were always dancing.
The first thing she had bought for herself, years ago when she left home, was a big mirror. She had had no chairs to sit on, no bed to sleep in, but she had to have that mirror. Because of the mirrors in her bedroom, she had done what she had done with various men.
She had never permitted intercourse, but she had done everything else. Always, she looked beyond the red, sweating face of her partner and stared into the mirror at their bodies straining on the bed. She liked to watch her legs, so white and slim, wrapping around the thickness of a male. The contrast was so lovely ... that shimmering band of white cutting across that darker, puissant form.
That's all they were to her; masculine forms.
She loved the expression on their faces the first time they saw her naked. They all looked like a calf waiting for the butcher ... pitiful, afraid, fascinated and trapped.
She loved what they invariably said: "God, you're beautiful ... God...." Sometimes, it was as if a needle had gotten stuck on a record, but Eve never tired of it.
She wanted only one thing from them, and that was something they were always willing and eager to give her. She wanted their mouths. Not their bodies, not their roughly probing fingers that might spoil her, but simply their mouths.
At first, she was amazed how easy it was to get what she wanted. After a few of the men told her the same anecdote, she arrived at a conclusion.
They all told her, eventually, more or less the same thing, but one man had put it more bluntly than the rest.
"You're eating pussy, you know that?"
She had laughed. "What do you mean?"
"Well, a man will lay anything that's warm and moving if he's horny enough, but he won't eat every woman that comes along."
It reinforced Eve's already impenetrable phalanx of self-love. She deduced that his attitude was, whether he knew it or not, a relic from what was really a not-too-distant past when only upperclass, well-to-do women had bathrooms and tubs in their homes. A woman who made it into the oral category was therefore superior in every way-the cream of the cream. The earthy compliment made her feel more pristine and desirable than ever.
It also explained that slurping noise that men so often made when she walked past them on the street. In the entire repertoire of male public silliness, that was the one gurgle she had never been quite able to interpret.
It was not difficult to keep her virginity and have fun, too. In the first place, working in a university setting, Eve met a better type of man; refined, more polished-in other words, gentlemen. Such men were not inclined to beat or rape, especially professors who did not have tenure as yet. She made it a point to stick to the Liberal Arts field, since it included the men who were so sensitive she often wondered how they managed to feed themselves without the aid of an eyedropper.
She also picked the ones who were involved in some way with the civil rights movement. Such professors were men of fairness and feeling and inquiring perspective; they were already suffused with white guilt. Eve decided that they may as well have some male guilt to go with it. It was only one short step from one to the other, so her task was very easy.
When she hit them with the fact of her virginity, fairness and consideration poured out of them-after they recovered from the initial shock. She worked mainly on instinct; she did not keep up much with current events but she figured that oppression was oppression whichever way you sliced it, and guilt favored females. The only thing the men forced on her were lectures on mental health. They were scared to death of virgins, she found out. She could understand why-the man who introduced a woman to sex might be responsible for her entire attitude on the subject, ever after, for the rest of her life. They were all fascinated, but nobody seemed to want to bell the cat. One of them had actually said to her: "I wouldn't touch a virgin with a ten-foot pole."
Under the circumstances of his physical endowment, he needn't have worried.
Whenever things got difficult, she could always burst into hysterical tears.
She avoided as a plague the military and sports types. Especially with the former, you could read the meanness on their faces. She picked only men she could handle, and her woman's instinct told her who they were. As she grew older, she picked some students, checking carefully to eliminate the beer-bust fraternity men. Fortunately nowadays, there weren't many of those left anyhow.
One of her lovers, more argumentative than the rest, had accused her of being a man-hater. He began his probe with a Socratic dialogue.
"What do you think of men?"
"I don't think of men," Eve replied.
It was true. She did not hate them; she merely thought it was a little odd that they weren't women. She could not imagine not being a woman. Men seemed like creatures from another planet, a kind of guest in the world. They really ought to have a seat at the U.N.
The barrier reef that loomed between her and the opposite sex was a simple one to her mind: men did not look like her. Their bodies were so different, and, she thought, it was rather sad. She could not understand the Freudian theory of penis envy, but she supposed that since Freud had been a man, he was waving the flag for his side. To Eve, a woman did not lack something; it was the man who had something extra. The male models at work were proof of that. They never posed nude. They couldn't, because it would interfere with the drawings. The male private parts covered some very important muscles in the inner thigh area that students must master, and learn how to draw. The male models had to wear jock straps.
The male parts were, to Eve, a growth. A growth was a goiter. She shivered.
Goiters were ugly.