The Bell Jar - nubuk.com

mean I'd read about all sorts of people sleeping with each other, and if it had been any
other boy I would merely have asked him the most interesting details, and maybe gone
out and slept with somebody myself just to even things up, and then thought no more
about it.
What I couldn't stand was Buddy's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure,
when all the time he'd been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt
like laughing in my face.
"What does your mother think about this waitress?" I asked Buddy that weekend.
Buddy was amazingly close to his mother. He was always quoting what she said
about the relationship between a man and a woman, and I knew Mrs. Willard was a real
fanatic about virginity for men and women both. When I first went to her house for
supper she gave me a queer, shrewd, searching look, and I knew she was trying to tell
whether I was a virgin or not.
Just as I thought, Buddy was embarrassed. "Mother asked me about Gladys," he
admitted.
"Well, what did you say?"
"I said Gladys was free, white and twenty-one."
Now I knew Buddy would never talk to his mother as rudely as that for my sake.
He was always saying how his mother said, "What a man wants is a mate and what a
woman wants is infinite security," and, "What a man is is an arrow into the future and
what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from," until it made me tired.
Every time I tried to argue, Buddy would say his mother still got pleasure out of
his father and wasn't that wonderful for people their age, it must mean she really knew
what was what.
Well, I had just decided to ditch Buddy Willard for once and for all, not because
he'd slept with that waitress but because he didn't have the honest guts to admit it straight
off to everybody and face up to it as part of his character, when the phone in the hall rang
and somebody said in a little knowing singsong, "It's for you, Esther, it's from Boston."
I could tell right away something must be wrong, because Buddy was the only
person I knew in Boston, and he never called me long distance because it was so much
more expensive than letters. Once, when he had a message he wanted me to get almost
immediately, he went all round his entry at medical school asking if anybody was driving
up to my college that weekend, and sure enough, somebody was, so he gave them a note
for me and I got it the same day. He didn't even have to pay for a stamp.
It was Buddy all right. He told me that the annual fall chest X-ray showed he had
caught TB and he was going off on a scholarship for medical students who caught TB to
a TB place in the Adirondacks. Then he said I hadn't written since that last weekend and
he hoped nothing was the matter between us, and would I please try to write him at least
once a week and come to visit him at this TB place in my Christmas vacation?
I had never heard Buddy so upset. He was very proud of his perfect health and
was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't
breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to
be a psychiatrist instead, but of course I never came right out and said so.
I told Buddy how sorry I was about the TB and promised to write, but when I
hung up I didn't feel one bit sorry. I only felt a wonderful relief.
I thought the TB might just be a punishment for living the kind of double life