He swirled the kilt-skirt around his hips and fastened the big ornamental safety pin, concealing his invention. He could hardly wait until Lieutenant Aster again asked him to dance.
The lieutenant returned at six o’clock, carrying the tray. This time the meal was a large pizza and a bottle of Pepsi. She displayed no reaction to his lack of makeup and wig.
Cornell lay supine on the bed, legs extended and wide apart, letting his hidden invention breathe, as it were.
Aster put the tray on the vanity. “This typical teen-age glop will evoke more useful reactions than if we tried to duplicate the stuff you were served at regular meals in the high-school dining room. You would probably pick at dinner, and then afterwards go down to the pizza joint and gorge.”
Cornell played along. “They called it ‘supper,’ and it was served at five-thirty. Afterwards you could go out, but you had to be back at seven and do your homework in the study hall. At nine you could go to the rec room. By ten you had to be in the dorm, in bed. Saturday nights they had dances, and girls would come over from one of their schools.
“There were never enough of them, because for them it was voluntary, and lots of girls didn’t like to dance. They could go bowling or to the movies, and girls fourteen and older could go to a bar and drink beer. When they were sixteen they could drink whiskey, cocktails, anything. They could save up their stipends and buy cars. After three-fifteen during the week they could go anywhere and do anything they wanted as long as they were back by nine o’clock next morning, and they were off from Friday afternoon till Monday.”
“Uh-huh,” said Aster, to whom this would not be news. “You resented that.”
“I don’t think I did in those days. It was just the way things were.” He swung himself off the bed and bent over the record player. Already waiting on the turntable was “Boxing Glove Love.” He had no trouble now with the switching mechanism. Sarah Heathfield began to belt out the sadistic lyrics. He remembered the album cover: Heathfield in prizefighter’s trunks and jersey, high-laced shoes, and of course the enormous padded gloves. She held her fists at the ready and wore a menacing look under her pompadour.
He straightened up and stood with his back to Aster, waiting for her to take the bait.
But she said: “Turn the volume down, would you? Let it play as a background while you reminisce.”
He walked deliberately away, defying her request. Obliviously she went to the record player and diminished the sound until the song was only a series of remote thuds of drum and bass and distant bestial howls from Heathfield.
“When did you begin to date?”
“Whenever I was asked,” Cornell said in a snotty way. But again the lieutenant proved a cool, or perhaps merely insensitive, customer.
“Naturally,” said she, taking a long, limp triangle of pizza from the tray. “Here.”
“You eat it.”
She calmly put it back and wiped her hands on a paper napkin.
“What kind of girls asked you out?”
“Pretty sad ones.”
“Sad?”
“That was the slang of that day. It meant, well, unattractive, jerky, creepy. The opposite of keen or neat. Ones with skin problems or bad breath. Or awful bores with slicked-down hair and tight suits, who thought they were clever, cracking jokes everybody had heard on TV. Once a football player dated me. Talk about your pizza! She ate a whole one herself, drank two giant malteds, and fell asleep afterwards in the booth.”
“How about sex?” asked Aster. “Did you have any sexual experiences at that age?”
“You’d sometimes get groped,” said Cornell, biting his lip. “In a car at the drive-in movie. But often they wouldn’t even try for a goodnight kiss.”
“Did you want to have sex?”
Cornell stared at her. “Never.”
“Another sore spot,” the lieutenant said in triumph.
“Yeah, that’s right! That’s all it is, soreness, pain. It’s hateful and stupid.”
“Stupid?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“What’s the point?” asked Cornell. “I mean for a man? A girl can boast of her conquests. She proves her femininity. But what does a man gain from it except a bad reputation?”
“Uh-huh.” Aster moved her round chin up and down.
“You never participated in a relationship that made you feel emotionally intimate with your partner? That you were helping each other to fully realize yourselves?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Cornell said. “For me, sex has been merely a stick up my rectum, and I will kill the next woman who tries it. I will put my penis into her vagina and kill her.”
This was a genuine outburst, unplanned.
“Georgie,” said the lieutenant, and walked to him and claimed his hands. “Now, you sit right down.” She pulled him to a seat on the bed. “You’re never going to rape anyone. You’re a normal, gentle man who got sidetracked.” She retained one of his hands and put her other arm about his waist. It was too short to reach his far hip: nature had not constructed her for this. A man could better hold a woman, owing to his longer arms. His larger hands were made to clasp and not be clasped.
Aster squeezed him affectionately, or tried to with her ineffectual appendages.
“Georgie, you can’t kill a woman by inserting a penis into her vagina. That’s an old superstition. Emotionally it would be a perverse act, of course, and socially it would be destructive. It would certainly indicate a hostility to women that would suggest latent homosexual tendencies—but not homicidal ones.”
She squeezed him again. Cornell felt as if he were being suffocated—not physically, of which feat she would be incapable, but morally.
“Men who talk about committing violence seldom do it. Believe me, you’re absolutely harmless.”
He freed himself and jumped up.
“How old are you, Lieutenant?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen. When did you get your M.D.?”
“This June.” She was frowning sympathetically. “Why do you ask?”
Cornell ticked off some fingers. “You must have started when you were twelve.”
“Thirteen, the usual age, in high-school premed. Then the normal two years of med school. In the latter I specialized in psychiatry.”
“I’ll soon be thirty.”
She shook her head. “Georgie, you and your fantasies! You’re twenty-five. I have your records. I never thought I’d hear a man lie about his age to make himself older.”
“I’m a revolutionary,” said Cornell. “I was sent here by an underground male-liberation movement.”
“You’re being silly now,” she said.
He shouted: “Everybody knows that putting a penis into a woman will kill her.”
“Grow up, Georgie. Children used to be told that to discourage them from perverse experiments.”
“If that’s true, then what’s wrong with it?”
“It’s unnatural, obviously. Anatomically, it could result in a disease called pregnancy. Pregnancy might kill a woman, if that’s what you mean. But not the mere insertion of the male organ.”
“It is true that in ages past women bore children in their own bodies?”
“They also burned people at the stake for saying the earth was round, Georgie. It took human beings a long time to understand a lot of things. For centuries they reproduced like animals. Imagine creating new life through illness, distortion of the body, and pain! And society had no control over the population. There were often too many people for the food supply. Most unfortunate of all was that in the final stages of the disease, a woman was incapacitated, unable to practice her profession. Suppose a president were to give birth at a time of national crisis, a general in time of war.”
Cornell shook his head violently.
“There’s something wrong there somewhere.”
“There was something wrong,” said Aster. “Many people could not realize their potential.”
&nbs
p; “People? You mean women.”
She rose, hitching up her trousers and tucking in the shirt where it bagged.
“Know how I got in this mess in the first place?” Cornell asked. “I put on women’s clothes and was arrested.”
“Now there,” said the lieutenant, “is the kind of social control that I find misguided. I can’t see the community is threatened by such a mild form of deviation. In fact, transvestism might work as a safety valve that releases, in a harmless way, certain pressures that if blocked might eventually lead to serious criminal behavior.”
She rubbed her nose with a thumb. “I can’t see that repression yields positive results. I’m not alone, Georgie. There’s a whole new generation of women coming along who believe in persuasion, tolerance, patience, understanding: qualities that have traditionally been called masculine, but wrongly in our view. Not evil, but wrong. There is no intrinsic reason why women cannot be as sympathetic as men. It is not necessary to be brutal to be feminine.”
She fished a rumpled handkerchief from her back pocket and blew her nose.
Cornell went to the phonograph and started up “Boxing Glove Love.”
“You want to dance, Lieutenant?”
“Not now, Georgie. I have to look in on my other patient.” She patted his extended hand. “You’re coming along very nicely. Your defenses are falling away. These passionate outbursts are all to the good. The first step in dealing with a fantasy is to verbalize it.”
He moved in on her, seized her wrist, and lifted her hand.
“Now, now,” she said calmly, “no false aggression.” She stood stock-still. He pulled her against his armored groin, his hand sliding onto her round, fat, firm buttock. “Aha,” she said, still dispassionate, “I can feel something naughty.” She pushed away with a sudden effort and brought her knee forcefully into Cornell’s crotch.
The protective device did not work as well as he had anticipated. The blow pushed the cup against his penis, his phallus pressed against his testicles, and the latter were squashed against his thighs. It was hardly better than no guard at all. He clutched himself and bent over.
She said: “You’re being silly, Georgie. When I come in with breakfast, I’d like to see you back in your makeup and wig. Good night, dear.” She left the room.
For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, 1928
12
CORNELL WAS AWAKENED by the sound of the key in the lock. He was lying, nude below the waist, on his opened skirt; during the writhings of sleep, caused by a dream he could not remember, the waistband closure had burst.
He covered his bare groin with both hands as Aster entered with the breakfast tray, the cup of cocoa and sweet roll. She placed it on the vanity and turned to him. He felt that a guilty effort to close the skirt would be inept and undignified: he had had enough of that sort of thing.
She smiled sympathetically. “Good morning, Georgie. Go right ahead with what you’re doing. As it happens, I got to thinking last night that perhaps we hadn’t gone back far enough in your therapeutic reprise: perhaps the late teen years were too recent, and we should try early pubescence. Instinctively you had already arrived at that conclusion on your own, taken off your makeup and wig, and now I find you playing with yourself. Excellent!”
Cornell stared at her. “I’m not masturbating.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m protecting myself.”
Her smile turned derisive.
“Nobody wants to steal that little thing of yours, believe me.” Now she was candidly sneering. “What would she do with it?”
Cornell leaped up, seized her, and hurled her onto the bed. He ripped at her uniform, but the fabric was too strong for him, and he had to denude her by less passionate means, unbuttoning, unbuckling, and opening the zipper in the standard way. For women’s clothes were rape-resistant, unlike the attire of men.
He had stripped her to T-shirt and jockey shorts when it came to his notice for the first time that she was not resisting, indeed had not moved of her own will since being hurled to the bed, had been lifted and shoved like a dummy filled with sand. She was unconscious. She had banged her skull on the bedstead.
He put his ear to the low bulge of her left bosom. Her heart was ticking stanchly away. He rolled up the T-shirt, exposing the broad flat band of canvaslike fabric which depressed her bosoms. He raised the heavy, warm, unconscious trunk and undid the chest-band fasteners in back: they were of the same sort as those on a man’s bra, though of a thicker gauge of wire. He peeled off the band.
The size of her naked breasts amazed him. Cornell had never seen any except in pornographic pictures of the sort owned by Charlie. Hers were much larger than his synthetic ones had been, though not as well shaped. In fact, hers had no shape at all, being neither spheres nor cones, but big soft blobs of flesh which flowed into her armpits when she lay flat. However, when he elevated her back, they developed the form of canteloupes carried in a string bag, and sagged almost to her waist.
He took one gently into his palm: so warm, so soft and yet massive, substantial, actual. The lieutenant murmured, and through her living flesh he felt the sound.
He looked up. Her mouth was trembling slightly, though not with what seemed discomfort or disgust. He lowered his head and took her nipple in his lips, like a baby with the feeding tube. He had no conscious memory of his own time as an infant, but at one point during his years with Dr. Prine she had suggested he had some sort of fixation on his birth facility, No. 1183, in Jersey City, and as a therapeutic measure on the following Sunday he had gone over there and taken the guided tour.
From a glass-enclosed balcony he and the other visitors, all male, looked down on the ranks of stainless-steel incubating tanks being tended by white-uniformed attendants. Of course he had no way of recognizing which of the capsules had borne him, if indeed it was still in service after all these years.
A high spot of the tour had been the actual delivery of a baby. A technician checked the dials, threw a lever, opened a glass porthole of the type found on front-loading washers, and slid out a tray containing a newborn child. Then she snipped off the plastic umbilicus that attached it to the tray, knotted the end on the child’s belly, held the infant by the ankles, and spanked it into life.
They could hear nothing on their enclosed balcony, but the little upside-down face was contorted as if it were crying. The baby was male. The genitals at birth were already very large relative to the size of the body.
Next they were conducted to a gallery overlooking one of the nurseries, where each rank of infants was separated from the next by a long horizontal cylinder from which feeding hoses ran to the cribs. There he saw babies sucking as he was now.
The tour ended with a visit to the enormous computer that named the new human beings as fast as they were born. It was linked electronically to the master system in Washington, D.C., and could issue every second a first-and-last-name combination which would not duplicate that of any other person born at that facility for a ten-year period. Thus there might now be a Georgie Cornell who was either nineteen or thirty-nine but not another who was twenty-nine in the Mideastern area of the country. That is, if the computer was working properly. One of the technicians ran off a demonstration name for the tour group: the little tag that emerged from the slot read: Jhon Simth.
Cornell encircled the breast with his two hands and pushed and worked and kneaded. The nipple grew until it seemed to fill his throat. His eyes were tightly shut, and he made sounds of the sort that issued from the newborn piglets he had once seen, on a school trip years before to the Children’s Zoo: they sucked the dugs of an enormous sow. Not too long previously, they had come out of her belly. She was a huge, bristly, snouted thing, with ti
ny eyes. She was their “mother.” And they were drinking literal “mother’s milk.” The children of course snickered, and one naughty boy whispered that word to Cornell, who, not then knowing it was obscene, repeated it to the teacher, who subsequently, back in class, made him write fifty times on the blackboard: “I have a foul mouth.”
The lieutenant’s teat was dry. Cornell gave it up at last, took his mouth and hands away, and raised his head. Aster now was looking at him: her eyes were open, anyway, but she seemed to be in a coma.
He was not ashamed, even though he had stripped her to her shorts and himself below the waist, baring her breasts and his penis, because there could be no connection between those mutually exclusive organs, and it had never been his intention to kill her, and he had at no time so much as touched her genital region, and for a moment he was actually thinking that maybe he could get out of it somehow, dress her again, and resume the therapy as if nothing had happened. Because he was really at heart a good boy, and he had had a lot of troubles, and he wasn’t criminal or crazy, and his phallus was limp, and she had always been understanding and generous.
But the blow on the head, or his piggishness at her paps, or both, had worked some awful change on her. She did not respond with voice or even a focus of eye. He had heard that people could be made idiotic by skull damage. He knew that women were killed by complete rape, and suspected they could be driven mad by an attempt—regardless of the lieutenant’s newfangled theories: indeed, look where they had got her, stripped, helpless, supine, non compos mentis.
He climbed into her trousers, which were so tight in the waist that he could not close the fastener, but ran the zipper up as far as he could and hid the opening with the belt buckle. The legs were too short, the hips and seat too ample, but he was covered. Owing to the stoutness of her trunk, the shirt could be managed, though the cuffs came scarcely below mid-forearm. He rolled up the sleeves, and tried to remember how to knot the necktie. He was wearing no underwear. He retained the teenager anklets and penny loafers. He combed his hair female-style, with a part, and was ready to leave.