Anna Broadway - Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity

CONTENTS

ACT I
THE INNOCENT

ACT II
THE BAWD

ACT III
THE PILGRIM

For all those who wish such love might be true,
especially those who dont think you deserve it.
You are perhaps nearest the grace that awaits; may it find you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Years after reading Anne Bradstreets poem The Author to Her Book, I finally understand the metaphor, though this gestation lasted far more than nine months and took a village of friends and family just to bear the babe. I wont attempt to name all those whose lifeprints helped shape the manuscript, but heart-felt thanks go out to you all, especially those who believed in my writing years before I actually took it seriously.

To Grandpa D., though Im not sure if Im brave enough to actually let you read this, thanks for all those birthday poems and your ever-helpful tips about titles and pseudonyms. Marching Single File almost happened, but Ill leave that title to Sis if she wants it. To Dad and all the rest of the clan whose tales have kept my lungs limber, thanks for modeling good storytelling. Mom, thanks for nudging me into that first journalism classwithout it I never would have put my preteen Tardy Tribune together with efforts to dictate early stories to you and thought I should try writing.

To all the teachers, editors, and bosses who came later, thanks for nurturing and helping hone my instincts. Thanks especially to Mrs. G. for encouraging my prose style, and to Peter for that interview question on five-year goals. This isnt the book I hoped to write then, but its far more than I ever dreamed of accomplishing on that December day in Chelsea. Finally, thanks to Rick for concluding a less-than-stellar performance review with an admonition to write because youd heard I had a gift for it. Youre part of the reason Ill always say this book happened mostly in spite of me.

Jane, Beth, and Trace: youre another big part of that. Thanks for taking a risk on such an unknown and cowardly writer, and for giving me time for that final pass through the book. Annie, you were indispensable on so many different judgment calls and narrative snags, and the redemption of tNP for me. Your friendship will always be one of my sweetest memories of New York. And Garnette, I am eternally grateful for all your help and encouragement with permissions, the sound track, and everything else music-related. Rich is the woman who counts people like you all among her friends.

Finally, profound thanks go to those long-suffering, stalwart souls who gave feedback on the entire manuscript and never flinched from speaking your minds. You have been perhaps my fiercest critics, and thus everything I asked you to be. Thanks for being friends who loved enough to wound when needed; this book owes quite a debt to your feedback. I look forward to the time when we can all rejoice, side by side, in whatever Gods redemptive purpose was for this.

And lastly to all those who prayed for this bookwhether often or sometimes, with me or based on an e-mail or just a sudden thought that you shouldmy deepest thanks. Im no Moses, but you were certainly Aaron and Hur to me and this book. I thank you, my parents thank you, and undoubtedly my editors thank you as well.

PROLOGUE

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

MATTHEW 6:24

M y reckoning started not long before high school, with the recurring dream of facing my deathbed a virgin. That was the choice, anyway. Each time I had the dream, it was the night before the world was ending and I was marooned on a spit of mud with a young man I somewhat liked. The deaths eve dilemma was always whether to pass up this final chance to partake of lifes bestenduring a last, supreme Missing Out for my obedienceor to cave in favor of dying with just a little taste of true heaven. Although I quit having the dream long before adulthood, the longer I lived as a single person, the more God seemed to be shorting me in my share of a normal lifes pleasuresand, worse, denying me a fully realized humanity. I worshipped a God whose son said he came to earth that we might have life and have it to the full, but I feared being a Christian meant living only a half life at most.

Fear anything more than God, and it will take you places you never dreamed you would enter so boldly or blithely.

NEW YORK, FALL 2003

The sex shop was quite neat and tidy insideso much so, you could almost begin to forget you were walking past not the banal wares of the grocer or drugstore but things far too obscene for even Urban Outfitters. Id expected lurid displays and dim-lit shelvesa kind of horror house of sex that gloried in all its trappings and varied sundries of sin. Instead the place could have served neat red-velvet cupcakes like those gobbled up at the famous Magnolia Bakery nearby. Amazing how bright lights diminish guilt, as if whats seen is clean and wholesome. Perhaps it wasnt all bad, this placewasnt that the card deck one of my Christian girlfriends received at a bridal shower?

Only we werent after cards, Best Friend and I; we were on a mission to find specific sweets for teeth lascivious. After scanning the shop unsuccessfully, I marched up to the short-haired, nose-ringed female clerk and asked her where the chocolates might be. She pointed us to a small case we had to access by squatting down and sorted through boxes of Naughty Nibbles. Prurience being what it is, we didnt lack for optionsjust goodwill and funds. No sense being too lavish. This was, after all, intended to taunt an erstwhile date with what hed never get from me.

There had never been much logic maintaining a friendship with a guy who constantly hassled me for sex, but I felt Ad Weasel had few genuine friendsand when I first met him a year before, I had no friends here at all. He probably had the most repugnant character of any guy Ive gone out with, but when I found him on Craigslist, barely two weeks into my New York relocation, all that mattered was that he talked back, and rather well.

Sure, I liked his attentionhad compromised to get it, in factbut beneath the curiosity that muted my nos when Ad Weasel got too frisky on our one date, and behind the loneliness out of which I had first gone out with him, was a deep longing for community. I desperately wanted to re-create what Id left behind on the West Coast, to rediscover what Id been born intoa world of talk and interaction that preceded my existence, thus didnt depend on my life to survive.

As the oldest of four children all taught at home and born into an equally close-knit maternal clan who regularly gathered together en masse, I was nursed on espresso-strength community in my formative years. All that I requiredlove, laughter, intellectual stimulation, and an indispensable role as helper with washing the dishes, making a bonfire, or other choreswas given to me independent of any efforts to seek it. Such freedom, correction, and welcome were like a mothers milk I never consented to be weaned from, and I sensed early on that re-creating this cycle as I grew older depended on getting married myself.

Over time this ambition became an obsession, from which a fixation with sex emerged. How could I find an intimacy as deep as that which a husband and wife exchange? And yet I feared such exposure just as deeply as I longed for it.