Regiment of Women (27 page)

“It's a woman named Harriet, isn't it?”

The lieutenant made her familiar smile. “That I can certainly answer: no. Don't speculate any more, Georgie. Concentrate on your own situation while you're alone. Play the records, dance by yourself, dig into your memories, especially those that are sensitive, even painful.”

She led him out and along a corridor made by the cartons. It went directly to the washroom. Neither en route nor on the return did he see another door behind which his female counterpart might be confined.

Cornell was peering into the mirror. He wore the dark lipstick of his teen years, spots of bright rouge on his cheeks, false eyelashes but no shadow or liner. He picked up a large jar of cleansing cream and thought about throwing it at the clown-face he saw. But he put it down. These impotent gestures of rage were self-degrading. To break material objects, to scream and cry, to lose control—were these the proper work of a man? Instead of hurling the jar at his image, he unscrewed the top, dipped two fingers inside, and brought a supply of cream to his face. He would remove the makeup and thereafter adorn himself no more.

Of course, if somebody squeezed your testicles, you had to dance; if you were attached to a semen-milking machine, you must ejaculate. There were many situations in life in which you obviously lacked power and must acquiesce. But recognizing necessity did not mean you had the concomitant obligation to despise yourself.

Once that was established, you could go on to the next discovery. His face was soon clean. He peeled off the false eyelashes and dropped them into the greasy Kleenexes in the flowered wastecan. The bouffant wig was next to join the rubbish. His own hair was matted in some places, standing up in others. He grimaced at it and otherwise let it alone. He was about to screw the top back onto the jar of cream when he observed that the tin disk was large enough, if bent to conform, to protect the testicles against assault.

He searched awhile for a tool before it occurred to him to take the lid in his two strong hands and bend it with the counterforce of the thumbs. He lifted his skirt and pulled down his panties. It took some more bending and shaping until the lid fitted. The guard covered only the scrotum. When the panties were drawn up, the snug crotchpiece curved the penis around the protector. After an uncomfortable moment the cold metal began to warm, but it still was not pleasant, and walking was awkward. No doubt he would be chafed if he wore it habitually.

He had a better idea. He took another pair of briefs from his lingerie drawer, removed the ones he had on, and putting one pair inside the other, inserted the ball-protector between the double crotch so formed. More shaping was needed, for now it would guard the entire complex of genitalia. Finally, he took a needle and thread he had found in a search of the vanity drawers and stitched the crotches together around the edges of the cup.

He stepped into this garment and tested its efficacy by banging his knuckles against the armor:
tok, tok
. He walked up and down. He was certainly conscious of the device but not physically inhibited by it. With a lovely feeling of invulnerability, he kept grabbing hard objects from the vanity and knocking himself harmlessly in the groin. Hairbrush:
tok-tok
. Hand-lotion bottle:
tok-tok-tok
.

He was now an inventor. Georgie's Ironpants. To be sure, what he wore was but a crude prototype. The production model would be a single pair of briefs, doubled only in the crotchpiece to make a little pocket for the protective cup, which could be removed for laundering the garment. The cup should be rimmed with rubber padding. No doubt a better shape might be molded with the proper tools, the whole thing made neater, more comfortable and convenient.

It was an amusing daydream anyway. He had no clue as to how one went into the manufacture of underwear. And for all he knew, it was illegal for a man to protect his genitals in this fashion. It should be, if women had any sense. He would settle for his own new sense of security and the gratification that came from having identified a problem and conceived a solution in his mind and executed it with his hands.

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.”

“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.