CITY_OF_GIRLS_by_Elizabeth_Gilbert

show, collapsed on a pile of old curtains. A ten-minute doze, and I’d be restored, ready to take on the city once more, as soon as the applause died down.

You can live this way when you’re nineteen (or pretending to be nineteen, in Celia’s case).

“Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted.

Oh, our youthful needs!

Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.

—

Ican’t say that I got good at sex during the summer of 1940, although I will say that I grew awfully familiar with it.

But, no, I didn’t get good at it.

To get “good” at sex—which, for a woman, means learning how to enjoy and even orchestrate the act, to the point of her own climax—one needs time, patience, and an attentive lover. It would be awhile before I had access to anything as sophisticated as all that. For now, it was just a game of wild numbers, executed with a considerable amount of speed. (Celia and I didn’t like to hover too long in one location, or with one man, in case we were missing something better that might be happening on the other side of town.)

My longing for excitement and my curiosity about sex made me not only insatiable that summer, but also susceptible. That’s how I see myself, when I look back on it now. I was susceptible to everything that had even the vaguest suggestion of the erotic or the illicit. I was susceptible to neon lights in the darkness of a midtown side street. I was susceptible to drinking cocktails out of coconut shells in the Hawaiian Room of the Hotel Lexington. I was susceptible to being offered ringside tickets, or backstage entrances to nightclubs that did not have names. I was susceptible to anybody who could play a musical

instrument, or dance with a fair amount of panache. I was susceptible to getting into cars with just about anyone who owned a car. I was susceptible to men who would approach me at the bar with two highballs, saying, “I seem to have found myself with an extra drink. Perhaps you could help me out with this, miss?”

Why, yes, I would be delighted to help you out with that, sir.

I was so good at being helpful in that regard!

—

In our defense, Celia and I didn’t have sex with all the men we met that summer.

But we did have sex with most of them.

The question with me and Celia was never so much “Who should we have sex with?”—it didn’t really seem to matter—but only “Where shall we have sex?”

The answer was: Wherever we could find a spot.

We had sex in fancy hotel suites, paid for by out-of-town businessmen. But also in the kitchen (closed for the evening) of a small East Side nightclub. Or on a ferry boat where we’d somehow ended up late at night—the lights on the water all runny and blurry around us. In the backs of taxicabs. (I know it sounds uncomfortable, and believe me it was uncomfortable, but it could be accomplished.) In a movie theater. In a dressing room in the basement of the Lily Playhouse. In a dressing room in the basement of the Diamond Horseshoe. In a dressing room in the basement of Madison Square Garden. In Bryant Park, with the threat of rats at our feet. In dark and sweltering alleyways just off the taxi-haunted corners of midtown. On the rooftop of the Puck Building. In an office suite on Wall Street, where only the nighttime janitors might hear us.

Drunk, pinwheel-eyed, briny-blooded, brainless, weightless—Celia and I spun through New York City that summer on currents of pure electricity. Instead of walking, we rocketed. There was no focus; there was just a constant search for the vivid. We missed nothing, but we also missed everything. We watched Joe Louis train with his sparring partner, for instance, and we heard Billie Holiday sing—but I can’t

remember the details of either occasion. We were too distracted by our own story to pay much attention to all the wonders that were laid before us. (For instance: the night that I saw Billie Holiday sing, I had my period and I was in a sulky mood because a boy I liked had just left with another girl. There’s my review of Billie Holiday’s performance.)

Celia and I would have too much to drink, and then we would run into crowds of young men who’d also had too much to drink—and the whole lot of us would crash together and behave exactly the way you might expect us to behave. We would go into bars with boys whom we’d met in other bars, but then flirt with the boys we discovered in the new bar. We caused fights to break out, and somebody would take a wicked shellacking, but then Celia would choose among the survivors for who would take us to the next bar, where the uproar would begin all over again. We would bounce from one stag party to the next—from one man’s arms to another man’s arms. We even traded dates once, right in the middle of dinner.

“You take him,” Celia said to me that night, right in front of the man who was already boring her. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. You keep this guy warm.”

“But he’s your guy!” I said, as the man reached for me, most obligingly. “And you’re my friend!”

“Oh, Vivvie,” she said to me, in a fond and pitying tone. “You can’t lose a friend like me just by taking her guy!”

—

Ihad precious little contact with my family back home that summer.

The last thing I wanted was for them to know anything about what I was doing.

My mother sent me a note every week, along with my allowance, filling me in on the most basic news. My father had hurt his shoulder playing golf. My brother was threatening to quit Princeton next semester and join the Navy, because he wanted to serve his country. My mother had defeated this-or-that woman in this-or-that tennis tournament. In return, I sent my parents a card every week telling them the same stale and uninformative sort of news—that I was well,

Our drinks made us crazy and lazy. We forgot how to keep track of the hours or the cocktails or the names of our dates. We drank gin fizzes till we forgot how to walk. We forgot how to look after our security once we were good and tight, and other people—often strangers—would have to look after us. (“It ain’t for you to tell a girl how to live!” I remember Celia yelling one night at a nice gentleman who was politely trying to do nothing more than escort us back home safely to the Lily.)

There was always an element of peril in the way that Celia and I thrust ourselves into the world. We made ourselves available for anything that might happen, so anything could happen. Often, anything did happen.

You see, it was like this: Celia’s effect on men was to make them so obedient and subservient to her—until the instant they were no longer obedient and subservient. She would have them all lined up before us, ready to take our orders and serve our every wish. They were such good boys, and sometimes they stayed good boys—but sometimes, quite suddenly, those boys were not so good anymore. Some line of male desire or anger would be crossed, and then there was no coming back from it. After that line had been crossed, Celia’s effect on men was to make them into savages. There would be a moment when everyone was having fun and flirting and playing taunting games and laughing, but then suddenly the energy of the room would shift, and now there was a threat of not only sex, but violence.

Once that shift came, there was no stopping it.

After that, it was all smash and grab.

The first time this happened, Celia saw it coming moments before it occurred, and she sent me out of the room. We were in the Presidential Suite of the Biltmore Hotel, being entertained by three men whom we’d met earlier in the ballroom of the Waldorf. These men had a great deal of loose cash, and they were clearly in a dubious line of work. (If I had to guess, I would wager that their line of employment was: racketeers.) At first they were all in service to Celia—so deferential, so grateful for her attentions, sweating with nervousness about making the beautiful girl and her friend happy. Would the ladies like another bottle of champagne? Would the ladies like some crab legs ordered up to the room? Would the ladies like to see the Presidential Suite at the Biltmore? Would the ladies like the radio on or off?

I was still new at this game, and I found it amusing that these thugs were so servile to us. Cowed by our powers, and all that. It made me want to laugh at them, in all their weakness: Men are so easy to control!

But then—not long into our visit to the Presidential Suite—the shift came, and Celia was suddenly crammed between two of those men on the couch, and they were no longer looking servile or weak. It wasn’t anything they were doing per se; it was just a change of tone, and it frightened me. Something had shifted in their faces, and I didn’t like it. The third man was now eyeing me, and he didn’t appear as though he were interested in joking around anymore, either. The only way I can describe the change in the room was: You’re having a delightful picnic, and then suddenly there’s a tornado. The barometric pressure drops. The sky goes black. The birds go silent. This thing is coming straight for you.

“Vivvie,” said Celia in that exact moment, “run downstairs and buy me cigarettes.”

“Right now?” I asked.

“Go,” she said. “And don’t come back.”

I made for the door, just before the third man reached me—and to my shame, I closed the door on my friend and left her in there. I left her because she’d told me to, but still—it felt rotten. Whatever those men were about to do in there, Celia was on her own. She’d sent me from the room either because she didn’t want me seeing what was about to be done to her, or she didn’t want it done to me, too. Either way, I felt like a child, being banished like that. I also felt afraid of those men, and afraid for Celia, and I felt left out. I hated it. I paced the lobby of the hotel for an hour, wondering if I should alert the hotel manager. But alert him to what?

Celia eventually came down by herself—unescorted by any of the men who had so solicitously led us to the elevator earlier that evening.

She spotted me in the lobby, walked over, and said, “Well, I call that a lousy way to end a night.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m terrific,” she said. She tugged at her dress. “Do I look all right?”

She looked just as beautiful as ever—except for the shiner over her left eye.

“Like love’s young dream itself,” I said.

She saw me looking at her swollen eye, and said, “Don’t squawk about this, Vivvie. Gladys’ll fix it. She’s the best at covering up black eyes. Is there a cab? If a cab would be kind enough to appear, I’ll take it.”

I found her a cab, and we made our way home without another word.

—

Did the events of that evening leave Celia traumatized?

But I’m ashamed to say, Angela: I don’t know. I never talked to her about it. I certainly never saw any sign of trauma in my friend. But then again, I probably wasn’t looking for signs of trauma. Nor would I have known what to look for. Maybe I was hoping that this ugly incident would just disappear (like the black eye itself) if we never mentioned it. Or maybe I thought Celia was accustomed to being assaulted, given her rough origins. (God help us, maybe she was.)

There were so many questions I could have asked Celia that evening in the taxi (starting with “Are you really all right?”), but I didn’t. Nor did I thank her for having saved me from certain attack. I was embarrassed that I’d needed saving—embarrassed that she saw me as being more innocent and fragile than herself. Until that night, I’d been able to kid myself that Celia Ray and I were exactly the same—just two equally worldly and gutsy women, conquering the city and having fun. But clearly that wasn’t true. I had been recreationally dabbling in danger, but Celia knew danger. She knew things—dark things—that I didn’t know. She knew things that she didn’t want me to know.

When I think back on it all now, Angela, it’s appalling to realize that this kind of violence seemed so commonplace back then—and not just to Celia, but also to me. (For instance: why did it never occur to me at the time to wonder how Gladys had come to be so good at covering up black eyes?) I suppose our attitude was: Oh, well—men will be men!

You must understand, though, that this was long before there was any sort of public conversation about such dark subjects—and thus we had no private conversations about them, either. So I said nothing more to Celia that evening about her experience, and Celia said nothing more about it, either. We just put it all behind us.

And the next night, unbelievably, we were out there in the city again, looking for action again—except with one change: From this point forward, I was committed to never leaving the scene, no matter what. I would not allow myself to be sent from a room again. Whatever Celia was doing, I would be doing it, too. Whatever happened to Celia, it would happen to me, too.

Because I am not a child, I told myself—the way children always do.

EIGHT

There was a war coming, by the way.

There was a war happening already, in fact—and quite seriously so. It was all the way over there in Europe, of course,

but there was a great raging debate within the United States as to whether or not we should join it.

I was not part of this debate, needless to say. But it was happening all around me.

Perhaps you think I should have noticed earlier that there was a war coming, but truly the subject had not yet landed in my consciousness. Here, you must give me credit for being exceedingly unobservant. It was not easy in the summer of 1940 to ignore the fact that the world was on the brink of full-out war, but I’d managed to do exactly that. (In my defense, my colleagues and associates were also ignoring it. I don’t recall Celia or Gladys or Jennie ever discussing America’s military preparedness, or the growing need for a “Two-Ocean Navy.”) I was not a politically minded person, to say the least. I didn’t know the name of a single individual in Roosevelt’s cabinet, for instance. I did, however, know the full name of Clark Gable’s second wife, a much-divorced Texas socialite named Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham Gable—a jawbreaker of a moniker that I will apparently remember till my dying day.

The Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium in May of 1940— but that was right around the time I was failing all my exams at Vassar, so I was terribly preoccupied. (I do remember my father saying that all the fuss would be over by the end of summer because the French army would soon push the Germans right back home. I’d figured he was probably correct about that because he seemed to read a lot of newspapers.)

Right around the time that I moved to New York—this would be the middle of June 1940—the Germans had marched into Paris. (So much for Dad’s theory.) But there was too much excitement going on in my life for me to follow the story closely. I was far more curious about what was happening in Harlem and the Village than what had happened to the Maginot Line. And by August, when the Luftwaffe started bombing British targets, I was going through my pregnancy and gonorrhea scares, so I didn’t quite register that information, either.

History has a pulse, they say—but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when it is drumming right in my goddamn ears.

—

If I’d been more wise and attentive, I might have realized that America was eventually going to get pulled into this conflagration. I

might have taken more notice of the news that my brother was thinking about joining the Navy. I might have worried about what that decision would mean for Walter’s future—and for all of us. And I might have realized that some of the fun young men with whom I was cavorting every night in New York City were just the right age to be put on the front lines when America inevitably did enter this war. If I’d known then what I know now—namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific—I would have had sex with even more of them.

If it sounds like I’m being facetious, I’m not.

I wish I’d done more of everything with those boys. (I’m not sure when I would have found the time, of course, but I would’ve made every effort to squeeze into my busy schedule every last one of those kids—so many of whom were soon to be shattered, burned, wounded, doomed.)

I only wish I had known what was coming, Angela.

I truly do.