City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

difficult to know which scenario would be worse in this case—silence and kissing? Or no kissing, and this bothersome voice?
    “Does your little kitty cat like tobe petted?” he asked, as he increased his hand’s pressure on my mound. “Is your little kitty cat purring ?”
    “Harold,” I said, “I wonder if I might ask you to kiss me.”
    Perhaps I’m not being fair to Dr. Kellogg.
    He was a nice enough man, and he was only trying to help me out, without alarming me too much. I do believe he did not want to hurt me. Maybe he was applying the Hippocratic oath to thissituation: First, do no harm and all that.
    Or maybe he wasn’t such a nice man. I really have no way of knowing, as I never saw him again. Let’s not paint him as the hero here! Maybe he wasn’t trying to help me out at all, but was only enjoying the thrill of deflowering an uncomfortable and nubile young virgin in his guest room while his wife was off visiting her mother.
    He certainly had no troublebecoming aroused by this situation, as I found out soon enough when he pulled away from me to apply a “safety” to his erection. Now, this would be the first erect penis I had ever seen—and therefore a banner moment—although I didn’t get to see much of it. Partially, this is because the penis in question was covered by a condom and blocked by the man’s hand. But mostly it’s because he was ontop of me in no time.
    “Vivian,” he said, “I’ve decided that the more quickly I enter, the better it will be for you. In this case, I believe it is better not to move by degrees. Hold tight, for now I shall penetrate you.”
    Thus he said it, and thus he did it.
    Well, then. There we were.
    It hurt far less than I’d feared. That was the good news. The bad news was that it also felt far less pleasantthan I’d hoped. I’d hoped that intercourse would be a magnification of the sensations I’d experiencedwhen he’d kissed my breasts or rubbed my mound, but it wasn’t. In fact, whatever pleasure I’d been experiencing thus far, faint as it had been, vanished quite suddenly upon his entering—replaced by something very forceful and very interrupting. Having him inside me was just an unmistakable presence that I could not identify as being either bad or good. It reminded me a bit of menstrual cramps. It was just tremendously odd .
    He moaned and he thrust, and through his clenched teeth he said, “Mrs. Kellogg, I find, prefers it when I—”
    But I never did find out how Mrs. Kellogg preferred her copulation, because I started kissing Dr. Kellogg again, as soon as he began talking. The kissing did helpto keep him quiet, I had found. Moreover, it gave me something to do, as I was being taken. As we’ve established, I hadn’t done much kissing in my life, but I guessed pretty well at how it was done. It’s the kind of skill that you have to learn on the job, really, but I did the best that I could with it. It was a bit of a challenge to keep our mouths linked as he was pounding away at me, but myincentive was great: I really didn’t want to hear his voice again.
    At the last moment, however, he got one more word in.
    He pulled his face away from mine, shouted “Exquisite!” Then he arched his back, gave one more powerful shudder, and that was the end of it.
    Afterward, he got up and went to another room, presumably to wash up. Then he came back and lay next to me for a spell. He held metight, saying, “Little duckling, little duckling, what a good little duckling. Don’t cry, little duckling.”
    I wasn’t crying—I wasn’t anywhere near crying—but he didn’t notice.
    Soon enough, he got up again and asked if he could please check the coverlet for blood, as he had forgotten to put down a sheet.
    “We wouldn’t want Mrs. Kellogg seeing a stain,” he said. “I forgot myself, I’m afraid. I’mgenerally more careful. That suggests a certain lack of foresight on my part, which is not typically my way.”
    “Oh,” I said, reaching