and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Constantinâs restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.
To reach this restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.
Travel posters plastered the smoke-dark walls, like so many picture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and Japanese mountains and African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles, that seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light round each table where the faces floated, flushed and flamelike themselves.
I donât know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.
Constantin kept refilling our glasses with a sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark, and I found myself telling him how I was going to learn German and go to Europe and be a war correspondent like Maggie Higgins.
I felt so fine by the time we came to the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I would let Constantin seduce me.
Ever since Buddy Willard had told me about that waitress I had been thinking I ought to go out and sleep with somebody myself. Sleeping with Buddy wouldnât count, though, because he would still be one person ahead of me, it would have to be with somebody else.
The only boy I ever actually discussed going to bed with was a bitter, hawk-nosed Southerner from Yale, who came up to college one weekend only to find his date had eloped with a taxi driver the day before. As the girl had lived in my house and as I was the only one home that particular night, it was my job to cheer him up.
At the local coffee shop, hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of peopleâs names gouged into the wood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked frankly about sex.
This boyâhis name was Ericâsaid he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one oâclock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
Then Eric told me how he had slept with his first woman.
He went to a Southern prep school that specialized in building all-round gentlemen, and by the time you graduated it was an unwritten rule that you had to have known a woman. Known in the Biblical sense, Eric said.
So one Saturday Eric and a few of his classmates took a bus into the nearest city and visited a notorious whorehouse. Ericâs whore hadnât even taken off her dress. She was a fat, middle-aged woman with dyed red hair and suspiciously thick lips and rat-colored skin and she wouldnât turn off the light, so he had had her under a fly-spotted twenty-five-watt bulb, and it was nothing like it was cracked up to be. It was boring as going to the toilet.
I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldnât seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. Heâd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty business.
It had crossed my mind at the time that Eric might be a good person to go to bed with, since he had already done it and, unlike the usual run of boys, didnât seem dirty-minded
Constantinâs restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.
To reach this restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar.
Travel posters plastered the smoke-dark walls, like so many picture windows overlooking Swiss lakes and Japanese mountains and African velds, and thick, dusty bottle-candles, that seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green in a fine, three-dimensional lace, cast a circle of light round each table where the faces floated, flushed and flamelike themselves.
I donât know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.
Constantin kept refilling our glasses with a sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark, and I found myself telling him how I was going to learn German and go to Europe and be a war correspondent like Maggie Higgins.
I felt so fine by the time we came to the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I would let Constantin seduce me.
Ever since Buddy Willard had told me about that waitress I had been thinking I ought to go out and sleep with somebody myself. Sleeping with Buddy wouldnât count, though, because he would still be one person ahead of me, it would have to be with somebody else.
The only boy I ever actually discussed going to bed with was a bitter, hawk-nosed Southerner from Yale, who came up to college one weekend only to find his date had eloped with a taxi driver the day before. As the girl had lived in my house and as I was the only one home that particular night, it was my job to cheer him up.
At the local coffee shop, hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of peopleâs names gouged into the wood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked frankly about sex.
This boyâhis name was Ericâsaid he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one oâclock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
Then Eric told me how he had slept with his first woman.
He went to a Southern prep school that specialized in building all-round gentlemen, and by the time you graduated it was an unwritten rule that you had to have known a woman. Known in the Biblical sense, Eric said.
So one Saturday Eric and a few of his classmates took a bus into the nearest city and visited a notorious whorehouse. Ericâs whore hadnât even taken off her dress. She was a fat, middle-aged woman with dyed red hair and suspiciously thick lips and rat-colored skin and she wouldnât turn off the light, so he had had her under a fly-spotted twenty-five-watt bulb, and it was nothing like it was cracked up to be. It was boring as going to the toilet.
I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldnât seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. Heâd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty business.
It had crossed my mind at the time that Eric might be a good person to go to bed with, since he had already done it and, unlike the usual run of boys, didnât seem dirty-minded
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