Chapter 3
It was on a Friday, on September seventeenth, that I lost my virginity and I noted it in my diary in the following words: "Today, or rather tonight, the hellfire of the Lord descended upon me in the form of a serpent of flesh and screwed me until my blood ran like a river of foul water. His cock was so ugly I want to vomit, and his semen is still dripping out. I hate him and I hate myself." I dreaded going to classes the following Monday, knowing that I would have to face Bill in all his ugliness, look at him and remember what he had done to me. All weekend I stayed in my apartment and worked what had happened over and over in my mind. I remembered every detail of the day and evening, every glimpse of his naked body and every twitch of his penis and every roll of his balls. Images of his genitals flooded my mind and filled my dreams and there was no escape in waking or in sleep. There was one point that remained a mystery to me though, a blank in my memory. I could remember everything up to the point where he had driven into me; the sight of his cock poised between my legs and the pain of his entry were vivid in my mind, and the sensation of him driving deeper and deeper up into my vagina, filling my belly with his enormous organ, I could also remember in minute detail as if I'd had days to feel and study it instead of seconds, but at some point my memory refused to function any more and I knew what point that was but I still couldn't remember it happening nor could I remember anything after it until I felt him exploding inside me. The only thing I could remember out of that lost period while he was screwing me was that I had my hands around his neck and was pulling him tight against me as if I wanted him there, only I couldn't remember why I was doing that or what I was feeling then. That one lapse both frightens and scares me and makes me angry and furious with myself even now as I dress for class after two days of effort at remembering.
It is Monday morning and my dance class is at eleven o'clock and I'm late. I throw on my clothes and for the first time in two days I try not to think about what happened. My cunt doesn't hurt so much this morning, not even as much as the night before, and I leap up in the air and do a couple splits to test it out. There is still some pain but not enough to keep me from exercising. I feel good about that at least. I'm not a cripple from my degradation.
The day is warm and sunny and I enjoy the walk to school, feeling my pulse quicken and my nerves relax in the sunshine. I take my time and stop to look into a window or two as I go, and I know that under my calm I'm still reluctant to face Bill. I skip up the steps into the red brick building and immediately light a cigarette as I walk down the hall to the dressing room. There is nobody there when I open the door and I glance at my watch. Class began a couple minutes ago. I quickly change into my leotard and skip down the hall and en the door into the room where the lessons are held. There are more people today; besides Sandra, Bernie, and Bill there are two other girls and another man, but my eyes fasten immediately on Bill and despite myself I look straight at his crotch as he bends over holding onto the bar for balance. He is facing the opposite way from where I stand and I can look long at his bulging tights without him knowing it. My mind immediately fills with images of him naked and as I look I actually think I see his cock and balls hanging down between his stretched and spread legs, and for a second I wonder at his lack of inhibitions to be exercising naked with the others all dressed around him, then I snap back and realize he is naked only in my own mind. I go to the bar at the end furthest from him and begin doing the exercises along with the rest of them.
The class takes a couple minute break and I know Bill sees me now but I don't even look at him. I'm thankful that I got a chance to see him without having to acknowledge him because it gave me a chance to orient myself to his presence without feeling any pressure to talk to him. I purposely get into a conversation with Sandra during the break so as not to invite his attention by standing idly around. Then for the next forty minutes we concentrate on exercises and when it is over I walk out the door and down the hall toward the dressing room with Sandra still without looking at Bill.
Inside the dressing room I change so quickly that by the time Bill walks in I'm already dressed. Sandra is still in the process of pulling off her tights. I meet Bill's eyes this time and my own eyes are playful and teasing.
"How are you?" he asks me, somewhat disappointed at my already being dressed, I can tell.
"Fine. I had a wonderful weekend, Saturday and Sunday. I met a lovely man, a beautiful man," I lied.
Bill's eyes narrowed at my put down. He scrutinized my face looking for the lie I knew he suspected but I held out against him and finally he turned to Sandra who was bent over struggling out of her tights.
"A virgin one day, a whore the next, isn't that right, Sandra?" he said half joking.
"Who's a virgin?" Sandra laughed. "I haven't seen one in years."
"Yes you have only you don't recognize them any more."
"What do they look like?" Sandra asked.
"Sometimes they can look like Jennifer here, for a while anyway," Bill answered with a cruel grin, and my control melted like butter on a hot stove and I stared at him with undisguised hatred, remembering his touches and loathing him. "But Jenny here is no virgin, let me tell you that."
Sandra looks up at me and smiles lewdly.
"Don't tell me lover boy Bill has already taken a whack at your crack?" she asked me curiously. "It took him a week of sniffing around before I'd let him into my pants."
I feel my face getting red. So Bill has screwed Sandra too. I look at Sandra and can see that she would be an easy lay and still it took him a week to get her, and he got me, virginity and all, in a few hours. I feel my face tighten and my eyes go weak with confusion and I force a thin smile but can't speak. I feel utterly ruined and filthy like a slut. I want to deny it but I'm trapped; if I deny it Bill will have me and if I admit it Sandy will know how really easy I am. But she knows anyway; she can tell from my face.
"Well I'll be damned, Bill," Sandra says. "You must have improved over the summer. If you put a notch on your cock for every cunt you got, like the old gunfighters in the West did when they killed a man, you'd have nothing left by now."
Bill laughs loudly and pinches Sandra on the ass, only he doesn't pinch her on her buns but right up where her pussy is and she giggles happily.
The rest of the dance class walks in then and saves me from any further embarrassment. I light a cigarette and fight to gain back my control as they undress and put on their street clothes. Bill purposely turns his nakedness toward me as he changes and so as to appear unafraid I look at his genitals as he wants me to and I feel a surge of desire in my loins. I puff on the cigarette to keep from showing it but he grins seeing it anyway. Then I begin to turn red again and turn away wanting to cry and run out of the room but I veto that impulse and know that I'll just have to sit it out until I can make a graceful exit. Then Sandra looks up at me again.
"Say Jenny, why don't you come over for dinner tonight? We can get to know each other since we seem to have something in common."
I want to say no but again I'm trapped. Any excuse I give will sound like just that, an excuse, so I say yes with my best smile. She gives me her address and I take the opportunity to leave the dressing room. Out in the hall I breathe easily again, light another cigarette in relief, and walk down the hall and go into the theater area and walk up onto the stage. There are some people experimenting with the lights, part of a class I imagine, and I sit in one corner and open up the script and look through the list of characters until I come to Lilly. Then I go back and see that the play is titled Lilly.
I have two weeks to memorize my part so I begin reading the play which is in two acts. The scene sets the tone of the play immediately. I read: "The first act takes place in a small bar in an isolated area of the Northwest in the Cascade Mountains. The bar is adjoining a bus station in a small town. The season is winter and outside there is a raging snow storm which has halted all traffic, forcing the bus to lay over until the storm subsides. It is about ten at night and most of the passengers from the bus are in the bar drinking and waiting. Everyone is well on the way to getting drunk as the curtain opens." Engrossed and somewhat awed at having been handed the female lead I read: "Lilly, called Lilly of the Valley with an allusion to her beauty as well as her genitals, is in her late twenties and possesses the worn beauty of a woman who has had to use her body to survive. Inherent in her is the childish innocence of a woman who was cheated out of her girlhood and who never lived out her romantic ideas of love and carries them beneath a cynical realism and flint-like hardness that would do justice to a streetwalker. She is a combination of these two paradoxical forces, the romantic buried and the woman of the night evident in her every move. She lets her sex hang out unashamedly in her every action. She is the center of all the mens' attention but out of some long buried impulse allows herself to indulge in a romantic attraction to a young college boy who embodies her buried innocence. It begins as a game for her but as the night advances she gives herself more and more to her romantic impulse until it becomes, momentarily at least, very real for her." I read on eagerly, somewhat afraid of the idea of playing a character so foreign to my own lifestyle. I know enough about the romantic side of her character but the hard sexual side frightens me. I remember what Mark Langstrom said about an actor's hang-ups showing in a bright spotlight when you're on stage, and I begin to worry immediately about my own sexual hang-ups. Then I remember him saying that each of us was going to have to grow and grow fast in our own private lives or we wouldn't make it. Well, I think with ironic humor, Bill saw to it that I began growing sexually the first day of acting school after nineteen years of dormancy. I light another cigarette and read on into the play.
Soon I come to the male lead and read: "Peter Swanson is twenty-one years old and a college student. He is shy, and obviously innocent of much contact with women. He too lives with paradoxical values. His obvious motives are high-minded and not very sexual, yet underneath he would like to live a life of sexual abandon and even depravity. He hides from these underlying desires because he feels unable to attain and satisfy them, and he sees them as sinful and evil when others act them out. He is self-righteous and lives a life aimed at helping others to raise themselves up out of gutters. He hides from the side of himself that would like to crawl into the gutters also." Already the conflict of values between Peter and Lilly are becoming clear to me, or rather the conflict of their apparent lifestyles. As I read on it becomes increasingly clear what is going to happen. Lilly, the hard and realistic woman, is opening herself up to the romantic nature of Peter, opening herself up to trusting in the goodness of people, and Peter is responding to her by allowing his underlying depravity to come out. Lilly is openly bad and turning toward good while, by doing this, she is giving Peter who is openly good an opportunity to act out his repressed desires. I wonder who is going to play Peter but I can't remember who was assigned the part. I read slowly through the first act stopping often to repeat my lines and I try to visualize myself acting them out, try to visualize myself as Lilly. I know enough about make-up to know that when I finally go on stage as Lilly I'll at least look like Lilly on the outside, but whether I'll be able to feel like Lilly on the inside where it counts is something else. In high school back in Topeka just looking like Lilly would have been enough, but I know that Mark Langstrom and New York are going to demand a lot more than outer appearances. Langstrom will want to see Lilly inside and out on that stage.
Before I knew it the day passed and when I looked at my watch it was approaching five o'clock. I told Sandra I would be over by six. When I thought of Sandra I thought of Bill again, and this time I thought about him with a little of Lilly in my head and I felt easier toward him and toward my missing virginity. After all, Lilly wouldn't give a damn about losing her virginity, nor about getting fucked.
Then as I walked out into the late afternoon sun in the busy streets of Manhattan I forgot about both Bill and Lilly and became Jennifer Reynolds again, a young and pretty girl fresh from Topeka wandering the streets of an exciting city all new to me. The endless small shops fascinated me as did the endless variety of people. If ever there was a true melting pot in America it was in New York. Hippies, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Blacks, all walked along with me and all held one thing in common. They were all Americans no matter how much they hated each other. And I was one of them, only at that moment I loved them all because I was grooving with myself again. Lilly had given me a strange kind of confidence, even though I hadn't read far enough to find out what happened to her. But then I hadn't lived far enough in my own life to have much of an idea what was going to happen to me either.