I thought I lost my virginity to a girl I met at Finley Hall, but afterwards I was never truly sure. I suppose it was a matter of definitions. It wasn't really about the event itself, but rather the woman I was with.
Finley Hall was the Student Center at the City College of New York by the 1970s. It was a huge, sprawling structure and I don't remember now exactly what was contained in the whole place. It wasn't being used for its original purpose; in fact, it hadn't even been built by the city. It had been acquired in the 1950s from a Catholic women's school called the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart.
I guessed that Finley may have been once used for the school's administration and surely for classrooms as well. Perhaps the nuns who had once taught there had their quarters in the building too. It was certainly big enough for all that.
It had been built in 1888 on the foundation of an earlier structure that had been destroyed by fire. Finley had an impressive exterior made of some kind of brown stone, but the interior had turned into a government-issued mediocrity during the two decades of municipal control. There was an air of shabbiness about everything, and it was made more visible by the harsh fluorescents that lit almost every room and hallway. Anything appealing or charming about the inside of the building was long gone.
I was in there one night in May, 1974 because I had joined a student newspaper called
The Salient.
It was one of five papers in a sort of "Newspaper Row" on the third floor. One evening I was in the office by myself past 11:00 PM typing a story.
At five minutes past eleven, I was getting ready to leave when I heard a knock on the door. It was closed but not locked. I doubted it was another staff member; I assumed it was one of the security guards making his rounds. They were ineffectual rent-a-cops from some agency, but usually they were friendly enough.
I went over there and asked who it was. A female voice said, "May I come in and talk to you?"
A lady? Yeah, I'll open it for her.
A young woman was standing in the hallway. "Pleased to meet you, I'm Amelia Thurber, but most people call me Millie."
"Well hi, I'm Paul D'Amato."
"If you don't mind, I'd like to come in as I mentioned." I'm sure that if it had been was some guy I would have found a pretext to deny him entrance and get rid of him. But it wasn't a guy; it was a girl about my age. It seemed that she gave me a few moments to look her over.
Her clothes struck me first. They didn't appear to be contemporary, but I was hard put to say why. She had a white blouse and a very long dark blue skirt; I could just barely see her black shoes. Her hat was the most notable item. It was a dark, brimmed hat with some red ribbons placed on one side that I supposed were there to evoke roses.
I didn't know much about women's clothing, but it didn't look like an outfit that was made out of various bits to approximate a certain look. Instead, there was something authentic about it. Her garments were not elaborate, but I thought,
she's dressed as if it was before the First World War.
She would fit right in with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1953
Titanic
or Judy Garland in
Meet Me in St. Louis.
Then I checked out the girl herself. She wasn't head-turning gorgeous, but she looked pretty good to me. Her face was a bit wide, and she had reddish-brown hair pinned up at the back of her head. She was a substantial girl, about an inch shorter than I was, which would make her about five-seven. Her body wasn't slender; there was, to me at least, a pleasing solidity about her.
The girl next door, 1912 version.
When she smiled, she clinched it for me. "Sure, come in. I guess we can sit back there." There was a shabby red couch over in the corner by one of the windows. The sofa was about the only semi-comfortable place to go.
I was insecure enough to ask, "You did say that you wanted to talk about something?"
"Yes, I'd like that very much."
And I was very willing to talk myself. I was finishing my freshman year and I was still a virgin. I thought I would surely get something going in the last eight months, but I had made no progress and I hadn't had a single date yet. I was craving female attention, and I was going to get some now. That overrode any doubts I had about the lateness of the hour, her somewhat unconventional appearance, and the fact that she somehow had found me in the first place.
I closed the door and we went over to sit down. I said, "I wish I could offer you a drink, but we have nothing here." Not even a soda; the office lacked a refrigerator. When we wanted something, we'd go to the snack bar on the second floor, but that had been closed for hours.
"That's not a problem; I understand."
"So, ah, Millie, I assume you go to school here."
What else could she be doing here?
"That's true, in a way."
I almost missed her odd phrasing, but she got right into whatever was bothering her. "I'd like to talk to you about something personal."
I couldn't help but reply, "So why ask me?"
"Because you're here."
I tried a joke, "So that makes me Mister Right?"
"Excuse me?" She didn't seem to get that.
This chick is a little on the serious side.
I was wondering again how she found me. My name was on the masthead of the newspaper, but what made her come there at that time, so late in the evening?
She put her left hand on my arm. For an eighteen-year-old virgin (well, I'd be nineteen in two weeks), that touch alone was heady stuff. Then she got right into her subject. What she said was pretty heady too.
"This is a little hard to talk about. You see Paul, there's been a lot of, call it repression of my femininity. There's been so much pressure on me to remain chaste."
I heard that, but I couldn't quite grasp it. "Are we talking about your . . ." I had just met her, and I didn't want to risk behind impolite by being too blunt about it. "I mean about your femaleness as you called it, and the feelings that come from that?"
She was rather blunt herself, "Those feelings should really be called desires. There is a strong physical side to them. I admit that is what I meant. Am I being too forward with you?"
I joshed, "Well, it's the seventies now. Anything goes."