Giles Goat Boy (102 page)

“Don’t just
allow
me!” I rebuked her—still holding her against me. “Either stop me or join in.”

She looked fretfully to Mother, who however regarded us with blank benignity and went on knitting.

“It doesn’t come
naturally
to me, George,” she complained. “And I’m all upset just now …”

Bracing my heart I asked whether Bray had serviced her. More tears ensued, and blushes; she wrung in her hands the forgotten biscuits. He had not, she thanked the Founder, summoned her as yet, owing to his busy schedule of appointments for Certification. But their rendezvous was set for the coming midnight, in the Belfry; he was to fetch her from the Living Room at eleven o’clock.

“No,” I said. At once she flung her arms about my neck for joy. But I continued: “You go to
him
, Anastasia.
You
do the servicing.”

She wept: she could not, not
ever
. Task enough to submit to every creature’s lust, as I had bid her; if she could manage it at all, it was only at my order, and because I’d taught her how responsible she was for the lust she helplessly provoked; but she besought me not to make her take the initiative.

“You must,” I said. “And not only with Bray. I want you to
seduce
people—even Stoker.”

“Maurice?”
If she was anguished before, now she was simply shocked. “You mean … make love to my
husband?
What would he
think!
”

His thoughts, I told her, were not important; her Commencement was, and it depended on her overcoming the false distinctions I had formerly burdened her with. Yes, she must seduce her own husband, overwhelm him with carnalities of every description, even Conscious Depravities. Moreover, for both their sakes she must cuckold him; commit fornications without his knowledge and against his wishes.

“That’s
impossible!
” she protested. “You know how Maurice is!” But her eyes refilled as she remembered, visibly, that he’d been neither brute
nor pander since my first false Tutoring, but so chaste and docile a spouse he’d often made her cross. “That would be
adultery
, George!”

This last was more plea than refusal, and setting the teeth of my spirit I insisted she deceive her husband, not only with Bray but with for example Dr. Eierkopf and any other creature who crossed her fancy or her path—male or female, human or hound-dog, even animate or inanimate. All discrimination must go by the board.

She shook her head. “That’s flunkèd!”

“Failure is Passage,” I reminded her. She objected no more, but admitted tearfully that Dr. Sear had just finished telling her the very same thing, apropos of “the Peter Greene business,” and though she’d understood it from him no more clearly than from me, even when he applied my reasoning to his own case, she guessed she had no choice but to acknowledge her stupidity and try to obey without understanding, repugnant as was the notion of such lewdness. I asked what business of or with Greene she meant, as she seemed not to be alluding to the spring-term rape—and also how my advice to her had applied to Dr. Sear, for while I was pleased to see he saw my point about her “charity” and the need to invert my former Tutoring, I had not myself considered what ought to be his new prescription. By way of answer, she locked the hall-door and bade me come with her into the Observation Room. As we passed in front of my mother, that lady caught and kissed my hand, the first indication that she knew I was there, and smiled slyly to herself as always. I kissed her hair, and she put down her knitting to make Enos Enoch’s hand-sign on her fallen chest.

“What are you knitting, Mother?” I asked gently, and looked to Anastasia for reply; between her spells of reliving our season in the hemlocks, my poor Lady Creamhair spoke not at all except in confidential whispers to My Ladyship, whom she stayed with constantly, as it seemed.

Anastasia colored. “It’s a baby-sweater, George. Mom—Your mother thinks I’m going to have a baby.”

I considered her belly. “Are you?”

“Of course not!”

Mother nodded to the wee blue wrapper. “Bye Baby Billikins.”

Anastasia colored further. “Sometimes she thinks it’s that WESCAC business again, and
her
that’s pregnant.”

But my mother resolutely shook her head.

“You
do
, sometimes!” Anastasia scolded her; but then confessed what I took to be Mother’s commoner delusion; “other times she seems to think I’m Your
wife
or something …”

I smiled and kissed again Mother’s poor mad hair, and to humor her folly drew Anastasia near, patted her fine flat gut, and nodded.

“That’s cruel, George!” In a little temper My Ladyship went into the Observation Room. “I’m not even
able
to have babies, and You know it!”

My apology seemed rather to encourage than to mollify her petulance; she maintained a more or less injured air while recounting Peter Greene’s strange forenoon invasion of the office. But though I was much interested in her tale, I forgot her vexèd tone when I looked through the one-way glass into the Treatment Room and saw a shirtsleeved man, his head swathed in bandages, lying on the leathern couch—and Peter Greene, white-coated, in the chair at its head!

“Don’t ask
me
,” Anastasia said, before I’d thought to. “Kennard took him in there to calm him down, and next thing I knew it was like that. They’ve been at it since before lunch.”

From her account I gathered that the bandaged man was Dr. Sear; his malady was no curabler than before, but surgical excision of his nose had abated its progress, temporarily, enough for him to resume a limited practice. Anastasia had returned to assist him on the conditions that she be obliged no longer to offer sexual therapy to anyone, even Mrs. Sear, and that her “mother” be permitted to stay with her in the Reception Room. Indeed, it was Mother, I was startled to learn, who in her own recent therapy-sessions had by some means conveyed to Dr. Sear the first reports of my new programme—perhaps by the same fortuitous quotations from the Syllabi that she’d inspired me with. In any case, with his usual acuity Sear had seen my point, and when shortly afterwards Anastasia had come to him, distraught, with word of my strange new advice, he’d not only approved it, but fortified my paradoxical argument with a dozen quotations from
Footnotes to Sakhyan
and other works of “unitary expletivism,” none of which My Ladyship could make heads or tails of.

“ ‘He
is
a Grand Tutor!’ ” she said he’d said of me. “I told him
You
said You weren’t, and he said, ‘That’s the point! That’s what I mean!’ ” She sighed (still a little poutish): thereafter Sear had pressed her in vain to return to the practice of sexual therapy; and it was he, I now learned,
who had suggested that she might secure my release by promising to become Bray’s mistress (he’d also persuaded Bray to release me on the strength of her pledge without waiting for its consummation—not to mention the siring upon her of the child Bray craved). Further, Sear had acknowledged to her that he himself had been desperately flunkèd thitherto, even as I’d said; was flunkèd still, as he’d seen too plainly at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. Hence the decision to end his life. Rescued willy-nilly from the sleeping-capsules, he’d tried to relish the horror of his disease, but the physical decay, it seemed, drove out the intellectual, and he’d found himself terrified instead of diverted by death’s approach. Anosmia was followed by exophthalmos, and as his eyeballs began to pop, the cancer spread to and obstructed his lacrimal ducts, with the result that tears ran from them almost constantly. But it was as much
for
as
from
his condition that he wept. Greatly as he loathed mutilation, now he feared death more, and consented to radical surgery: the tears disappeared, along with his nose and a portion of the sight of both eyes.

With what vision remained to him he’d striven to imagine how my new Answer fit his case. Clearly I would not advise him to refine his amusements or otherwise attempt to become more campusly—the end of
that
road he’d reached already, at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. From my advice to Anastasia he inferred correctly that he should assert whatever it was he had vainly tried to rid himself of; further, he’d concluded that that must necessarily be some kind of ingenuousness or ignorance of himself, inasmuch as he’d devoted his whole life to their opposites. That he could
see
no defect in his insight proved to him that the defect existed, since perfect insight would see its imperfections; had he not been naïve to think himself not naïve? His first prescription, therefore, had been to commit himself to the custody of his wife, who had regressed to the psychological age of five. But much as he’d enjoyed playing “Doctor” with her in the sandbox of the chronic-ward playground, he’d come to realize that however correct his diagnosis and prescription, they were invalid perforce, as he’d arrived at them himself.

“So this morning he asked
me
to tell him what to do!” Anastasia exclaimed. “As if
I
were the doctor! I said he’d better talk to You, that
I
didn’t understand this crazy business—and the way he thanked me, you’d think that was exactly what he wanted to hear! As if he couldn’t have thought of it himself!”

“I see.” And I did see, dimly, his general reasoning, I believed: Scar needed to come to me at the behest of someone else, preferably someone who didn’t understand the situation. It had seemed to bother him,
though, Anastasia continued, when she reminded him that she was only a nurse. But before she could suggest that he consult a professional colleague, their conversation had been interrupted by Greene’s visit.

“You won’t
believe
what he came to tell me!” The memory so renewed her astonishment, she forgot her pique at my having pretended she was pregnant.

I smiled. “He apologized for confusing you with your flunkèd twin sister.”

“How did You know? He’s
crazy
, George! And I hate to say it, but I’m afraid Kennard’s mind has been affected, too. By the cancer …”

I followed her account as well as I could, for it was more arresting and suggestive than I’d anticipated. But my attention was sorely divided: not only was I listening at the same time to the conversation in the Treatment Room, which I’d remembered could be overheard at the flip of a switch; I was also sharply interested in observing through the glass what appeared to be a new development in the strange relation between Greene and Sear.

“
I
thought he wanted to apologize for last spring,” Anastasia said. “In fact, I was going to offer to explain the whole thing to his wife, in case she thought it was
his
fault, what he’d done to me. But when he started in on this
sister
business, and how he was sorry he’d ever thought it was
me
that wasn’t a virgin …! He got more excited all the time, saying his wife was the dearest little wifey on the Founder’s green campus and I was the dearest little sister, and women like Maurice’s secretary and my
sister
were floozies that ought to be horsewhipped! Kennard was right there listening to the whole thing, and when Mr. Greene started saying he’d defend my honor to the death, and pawing me at the same time, I thought Kennard would
help
me! Because it wasn’t the first time, You know, that a patient ever got
fresh
, and I really think Mr. Greene thought he was
protecting
me, or something … But do You think Kennard helped? He was listening to Mr. Greene as if it were the Grand Tutor talking, and when Mr. Greene tried to lay me down on the desk-top, all Kennard said was ‘Remember what George told you, Stacey’!”

In the Treatment Room, as she spoke, Greene had been inveighing against the decline of moral standards in “the present modern campus of today” and recommending that the dunce-cap and birch-rod be restored to their place of honor in New Tammany kindergartens; Sear interrupted him to ask whether, when he played Doctor with Mrs. Sear in the Asylum sandbox, he ought to pretend to be the doctor and Hedwig the patient, or vice-versa: to his mind, taking make-believe rectal temperatures with a forest-green crayon was an apt symbolic affirmation of the element
of childish perversity which had always underlain his sophisticated medical researches; on the other hand, he could see that assuming the “patient’s” role not only in the office, as he was doing presently, but also in the sandbox—baring
his
bum to
Hedwig’s
popsicle-stick—might be said to combine inversion, perversion, reversion, and reversal.

“What do
you
suggest, Doctor?” he inquired.

“Now that’s enough!” Greene said angrily. “That’s just plain dirty talk, is all it is!”

“I
know
,” Sear admitted. “But the fact is, you see, I was a
very
naughty five-year-old. I peeked up the little girls’ dresses and tasted my b.m.’s and showed my pee-tom to the teacher. So what I hope you’ll tell me is whether ‘becoming as a kindergartener’ means returning innocently to childish perversions or pervertedly feigning a childish innocence …”

“Did Greene actually service you, then?” I asked Anastasia.

“He
would
have, I’m sure,” she said, “and thought he was defending my
virginity
the whole time! But when Kennard reminded me of what You’d told me I got all mixed up, because I
don’t
like Mr. Greene—not
that
way, especially since last spring—and yet I
do
believe in You, George, even if You don’t. But it’s so
hard
for me to act like a … a
floozy
, You know …”

“That’s just more smut, Dr. Sear!” Greene was declaring. “You know durn well I’m not any sawbones, say what you want, nor a headshrinker either—excuse the expression! I’m a simple country boy that’s trying to do the right thing by his wife and family and his alma mater. Don’t think I don’t see you’re up to some naughtiness with this playing-doctor business, pull-the-wool-over-my-eyeswise.”