Regiment of Women (2 page)

He pulled up his skirt, lowered his new pantyhose and the bikini briefs beneath them, and bent over the treatment table, forearms on the white-paper cover.

The moment of entry was always worst, after which all else, though scarcely pleasant, was downhill. He looked back along his ribs, head under his left arm.

“Is it lubricated?” he asked, his eyes watering in anticipation.

“You should bring along a cork to bite on,” said the good doctor, skewering him. He closed his eyes and saw a crimson vista, which gradually darkened to deep purple.

“What do you feel?” Dr. Prine asked after several thrusts.

He could have lied, of course, but she was terribly keen.

“Maybe something's happening,” he said through his clench of jaw.

“Don't fake it, Georgie, and don't force it.” She rammed him again. “Unless it happens of its own accord, it's worthless.”

But all he felt, in soul and sphincter, was pain. He had been frigid all his life.

The soothing suppository in place, pants up, skirt down, he paid her in cash.

She counted the bills. “You are fifty short,” she said. “I told you I was increasing the fee to three hundred when you got your raise. I don't want you to run around with extra money in your purse. That's very degenerative. This therapy must mean more to you than a new wardrobe. Unless it represents a certain sacrifice, it will not be efficacious.”

“But I didn't get a raise,” said Cornell. “That must have been someone else.”

“The point is, I've already made up my mind,” the good doctor told him severely.

He gave her another fifty-dollar bill; he would eat no lunches until payday.

“Doctor,” he asked, “do you really see any hope for my recovery?”

“That's not at all easy to say.” She turned to the safe behind her desk, concealing the dial with a shoulder as she twirled it. “A
recovery
is not what we are seeking. You haven't backslid. You've never
been
there. Recidivists are simple to treat. They know what they've lost. You, on the other hand, may quite genuinely not have the capacity to be a man. There are such persons.”

“And what happens to them?”

“Come, Georgie, don't play games with me. You know as well as I. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.” She opened the layered iron door and placed the money on one of the stacks of bills which clogged the interior. She ran a cash-and-carry business, of which the Internal Revenue Service probably did not know the half. Cornell admired her for that: the government flushed tax money down the twin toilets of welfare and military expenditure, supporting degenerates and producing billion-dollar rockets which regularly exploded on liftoff. Yet when a girl friend once gave him a gold brooch, he phoned the IRS to ask whether he should have it assessed and list the value on his next return. “Are you a full-or part-time prostitute?” he was asked. Anyway, the brooch soon turned green.

Dr. Prine closed the safe and tested the handle. She then took a cigar from a desktop humidor and with an onyx-inlaid cutter clipped a wedge from the tip. She proceeded to char the other end with a kitchen match. At last she placed the cigar between her teeth, ignited it with another match, and puffed. Cornell always got pleasure from observing this ritual. He had once been dated by a girl who occasionally permitted him a drag on her cheroot, and he had liked it, even if it wasn't masculine.

“Don't worry,” Dr. Prine said finally, flooding him with rich blue smoke, “you're still some distance from castration.
I
haven't given up, so don't you.” Her eyes crossed as, without taking the cigar from her mouth, she inspected the burgeoning ash. She levered the intercom and told the receptionist to send in the next patient.

The newcomer approached the door as Cornell emerged. They avoided each other's eyes. Cornell saw a pair of exquisite legs in textured stockings, and smelled sandalwood as they passed. He couldn't help it: he flamed with jealousy.

Dr. Prine's receptionist was an ex-convict.

“Goodbye, Paul,” Cornell said to him.

Paul had many years before been a patient of Dr. Prine's, but his illness had proved to be beyond the reach of psychiatry. He had persisted in dressing as a woman, in sweatshirt, baggy pants, and cowgirl boots, refused to shave for days at a time, chewed tobacco and spat into potted flowers. Finally he had lost all semblance of control, appeared at the apartment of a female acquaintance, forced her at knifepoint to strip and don lacy male panties and frothy brassiere and perform an obscene dance while he smoked one of her brier pipes. He was soon thereafter apprehended by the police and subsequently received the maximum sentence. After the emasculation he of course went quickly to fat.

Paul now returned Cornell's congé with a dull, eunuch's smile which hardly creased his bovine face. He must have weighed 250 pounds. His memory was also enervate.

“Goodbye, Mr. Corning.”

Cornell had been coming here for three years.

Cornell's office was only a sixty-block walk from Dr. Prine's high-rent district on the Upper West Side. He went south via Central Park West and its continuous façades of plate glass on both sides, with bumper-to-bumper truck traffic between. At Columba Circle he met Broadway and followed it to the glass monolith on the corner of 53rd Street, the home of the giant publishing firm for which he labored: Philby, Osgood & Huff.

Above the inside elevator doors were listed the various subsidiaries and the floors relevant to each: The Osphil Press, Huff-books, Huff House. Of the three original partners, Philby was dead, Constance Osgood was now in senile seclusion, and only Eloise Huff survived.

Cornell deboarded on the eighteenth floor and greeted the brunette receptionist.

“Morning, Willie.”

“It's almost noon, Georgie,” said this snotty creature. “How some people get away with it is beyond me.” Willie flipped his lacquered bouffant away, and Cornell did something similar with his own swanlike neck, though not without protruding his tongue. Rumor had it that Eloise Huff, the big boss, was getting into Willie's pants.

Speak of the devil. No sooner had Cornell pushed through the glass doors of Huff House than who appeared but old Eloise herself, baggy tweeds, eternal pipe, and brushy mustache: her own lip-hair, and not the paste-on device currently in fashion; she was inordinately vain about it.

On her way to the toilet, her impatient hand already at the top of the zipper. Her kidney condition was well known.

Cornell had not been able to phone in that he would be late. No one would yet have been at work when he left home, and he was closeted with Dr. Prine thereafter. To call en route would have been pointless even could he have found a public telephone that functioned. The last time he tried, he left the booth after depositing three zinc dollars for as many replays of the synthetic monologue of the robot operator.

Luckily, old Eloise was as usual in a state of egocentric oblivion.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said. “Back from lunch already? These mornings get away from me when I'm reading manuscripts. I'll just send out for a malted today, I think.” She burped. “Off my feed these days. Fifteen-twenty years ago I was a three-martini luncher. Could drink most authors under the table.” Her gray mustache was stained yellow from the pipe, and dandruff flecked the shoulders of her old blazer. If she was laying Willie, he was to be pitied. Cornell's stomach rolled at the thought of being touched by such a dirty old woman.

He smiled and murmured something—Eloise never listened to anybody but herself, anyway—and trotted down the corridor. Before he cleared the range of Eloise's reach, however, he felt her sharp pinch of his left buttock. He seethed all the way to his desk, but that was the sort of thing you had to put up with if you were a working boy.

“Kid,” said Charlie, as Cornell reached the cubicle they shared, “Ida's gonna chew your rump.”

Charlie as usual was ill-shaven, and there were grease stains on the front of his dress.

Screw her
, Cornell mouthed silently, with reference to Ida Hind, senior editor and his immediate superior.

“Maybe you ought to,” Charlie cried. “You can use all the help you can get.” Charlie's wig was a fright; he was balding under it. His beefy face wore no makeup. His stomach extended farther than his falsies, and the latter were out of balance, the left one having strayed almost into his armpit.

“I was at my doctor's,” Cornell cried indignantly.

“I told her that you probably were.” Charlie's fat cheeks bulged in humor. “Why you pay that quack to ream you is beyond me. Ida would do it for nothing.”

Cornell put his purse in the lower desk drawer. To gain room for it he had first to push clatteringly back the collection of cosmetic bottles, jars, and tubes there. He saw a spare pair of pantyhose, new in cellophane, which he had forgotten he owned. He sat down and gasped at the sight of the overflowing In-box.

Charlie kept it up. “She's got the hots for you, son. Old Ida is the house stud. Her office door has been closed for an hour. She's probably putting the blocks to that little first novelist who came in from the Midwest. He was unaware that a paragraph in his contract obliges him to lay for his editor. Prone on the desktop, his creamy white hams being violated by her brutal claws searching for the mossy crevice of delight.”

“Come on, Charlie. I've got to get to work.”

“I'm quoting from his book,” Charlie protested. “I did the first reading, you know.” Some of the unsolicited manuscripts were given to the secretaries to read. Cornell generally tried to evade that chore; you got no extra pay for it, and the books were usually hopeless. Not that he thought that much about the books that Huff House published, which lately had been running heavily to memoirs from retired stateswomen, with an exposé or two thrown in of professional wrestling, roller derbies, and the like. Cornell's own taste was for romantic novels, but you hardly ever came across one any more.

“Recommended it unreservedly,” Charlie went on, “as a sensitive, passionate account of a young man's deflowering.”

Cornell ignored him and began to type from a letter that had been dictated by Ida the afternoon before. He had never finished his Speedwriting course, and improvised a good deal, then often forgot what certain
ad hoc
abbreviations signified. The missive at hand was addressed to a has-been named Wallace Walton Walsh, whose first novel had been a super-seller about twenty years before, but whose subsequent volumes had grown ever less successful throughout the years since. The message which Cornell now tried to unlock from his runic scribble was Ida's rejection of WWW's latest manuscript—diplomatically couched, naturally, but in essence an unequivocal No.

Cornell felt sorry for the poor old hack, who, as was well known, had served his term as Ida's paramour.

D
EAR
W
INSOME
W
ALLIE
,

Well, love, what can I say about FRIENDS OR FIENDS? Here and there are unmistakable reminders of the old [what was that word,
mgc
?], but frankly, Wall, most of it you have done before and, if you'll pardon my saying so, better. Remember the characters from UPSHOT[the original blockbuster]—Clara and Harvey and Simone, such rich, rounded ctrzn [
characterization
, of course!].

Now before you start hollering, my darling Three W's, let me assure you I realize you are trying something new, to break out of the [oh, pee! look at this:] stjkt f tdtnl tknk n açv nu mgs, and I admire you for making that effort, Wall, believe me, when you have long since earned the right to sit back and—

Cornell handed his stenographer's notebook to Charlie, glazed fingernail pointing to the cryptic passage.

“Would you have any idea what I wrote there?” The earlier
mgc
, he suddenly understood, meant “magic.”

Charlie was himself typing, sporadically following some copy to the left of his machine while reading an opened book on the right. He took the notebook and provided an instant translation.

“‘Unmistakable reminders of the old magic'”

“No, this one.”

“‘To break out of the old straitjacket of traditional technique and achieve new meanings.' What doo-doo.”

“How can you read my shorthand?”

Charlie laughed. “I started out here working for Ida. She says the same thing in most of her letters.” He passed the notebook back to Cornell. “Not only is Wally getting the boot, but he also has to read that crap. But, as usual, sympathy is misplaced. That's precisely the kind of prose for which WWW is himself noted. She probably picked up his style years ago when she was banging him.” Without transition he said: “When are you going to learn real shorthand? Or the Stenotype—then you could become a court reporter and get out of here.”

“What about you?” asked Cornell.

“I never get around to anything,” said Charlie. “Including suicide.”

“What banned book are you reading today? Certainly nothing published by Huff House.”

“A classic criminal text.” Charlie turned back to it without further identification. He actually did openly read proscribed works, obtained through some underground source of pornography, but always in pocket-sized editions that could be quickly concealed. In the case of some really raw title he might cut off the cover and glue on another from a harmless volume—
The Gentle Man's Guide to Needlepoint
, say, disguising the text of
Men Without Women
, a collection of stories notorious for their shameless perversity, by—

“Hey, Charlie, who was the author of
Men Without Women?”

Charlie shushed him and deftly covered the book with a sheaf of correspondence.

“I don't know, Charlie, you take all kinds of chances, but when it comes to me, I can't even ask—”