The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

“But I should never be satisfied with a substitute. I’ll take what I can get out of you and if I can’t get enough of you I suppose I shall just have to break my heart over it. I wouldn’t compromise.⁠ ⁠…

“But it just seems as though a hunger were gnawing at me continually. And I know what it is like to be hungry too. One doesn’t forget days like those I spent down in jail in Washington. It’s a continual pain.”

“You ungrateful little wretch, you. After the wonderful breakfasts I’ve given you on the ward⁠—and which I’ve seen you eat.”

“Oh, I can eat your breakfasts all right. I eat with the same appetite. I can’t say that I’m unhappy during the day. I’m too excited to be unhappy, when I can see you a good part of the time. It’s at night that I suffer so. I sleep, of course I sleep. I’m exhausted when I go off the ward at night. But I dream of you all the time. I don’t need to be a psychoanalyst either, to know what the dreams mean.

“Last night I was dreaming of the docks⁠—it wasn’t the East Side docks. I know them pretty well. It was in Brooklyn and the surroundings were strange to me. It must have been down around Furman Street you’ve told me about. I was sitting on the edge of a pier with you. We were throwing daggers at each other and we were only a couple of yards apart so they always hit. We played leisurely as though it was a game. It was a hideous game. I kept trying not to start so as not to show that I was hit.”

“My poor darling,” the words were playful but his arms around her were tender and there was passion in the touch of his lips on her face and neck.

“I am becoming a common little slut,” June maintained. “I slink out at night without telling anyone where I am going and meet you on deserted streets, and we have so little time together that I catch myself scheming. Scheming to get you into back rooms of saloons⁠—desolate, out of the way saloons, where the bartenders are always sleepy and there are never any customers so that I can look at you and you make love to me. Can’t coordinate when you put you arm around me on the street⁠—my knees wobble and I step on your feet.”

“You do seem to be strangely clumsy,” he mused. “And to think I fell in love with you because you held your hands like Mrs. Vernon Castle!”

“Oh dearest, you can say nice things!”

“Yes, I want to become sentimental when you put your hand on my face. They are luring. I want to quote Laurence Hope.”

“You should, if you want to. I’d love it.”

“That’s my weakness⁠—sentiment. I could quote reams of poetry to you but I always stop myself in time.”

“No,” and she liked to argue with him. “You are an accomplished flirt. You merely suggest a sentiment. But you are hard. I fell in love with you because you are hard.”

“It was my broken nose”⁠—in mock disappointment. “It was because I looked like the chipped and degenerate statue of Amenemhat.”

“That’s true, but he was hard. He looks as though he were above the weakness of falling in love. He was probably skilful in his lovemaking and he victimized women. Women love to be victims.” But Dick maintained she was basing her knowledge on an O. Henry story. “Women don’t mind being beaten. They’ll endure anything as long as they can persuade the man that he has the upper hand and they know all the while that they get their own way in the end. It’s true that Mrs. O’Grady or whatever her name was, was the envy of Mrs. Sullivan. But that was because although Mr. O’Grady beat up his wife periodically, she was always the winner. Didn’t he take her to Coney Island and buy her presents? Whereas Mr. Sullivan didn’t beat his wife and didn’t take her out or buy her anything. That’s why she tried to make him beat her.

“I’ll have to give you Schopenhauer’s essay on women to read. That old bird had the right idea of gals.”

June read it, but she was unconvinced. She insisted that it was only another of Dick’s fascinations that he could persuade women (with authorities) that they were the base, wily, and subtle heart breakers that they would like to be.

“Infatuated woman,” he called her, and pretended to be pleased.

“I have never had a virgin,” he ruminated cruelly another time and looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

She did not flinch. “Nothing you can say will hurt me. Nothing will persuade me to give you up. You’re mine, I know it.”

He disregarded her. “They are probably stupid little things that weep and are unnaturally unemotional. Accomplished women of the world have a more decided appeal.

“And yet⁠—I’ve always thought someday it would be nice to find a complete virgin. Not that I think I’ll ever discover one.⁠ ⁠… A completely unsophisticated young girl who has never heard of Freud or birth control and has never talked sex. Someone who is full of inhibitions and suppressions. I’m sure that there aren’t any such unless you catch them very young. And God! Look where that train of thought leads. I find myself convicted of moron tendencies.”

June admitted that she was a demi-vierge.

“You could call me that at the age of six,” she said rashly.

“I don’t doubt it,” Dick told her. “But that, too, adds to the decadent flavor which is one of your chief charms.”

June felt as though they were talking in circles.

When she arrived on the ward one morning she found Dick flitting up and down between the beds of patients holding a sheet high above his head which waved out behind him as he sang blithely, “Goodbye, boys, I’m through.” He stopped his carolling as he saw her enter