Regiment of Women (6 page)

“Georgie, I warned you again and again that you were putting your ass in a sling with Ida. If you're going to goof off, you must do it cleverly. Trouble with you is, you can't help it. Look, in the long run, I don't do any more work than you, if as much, but I don't lose things and I don't forget things. I haven't got a raise in years, but I never get reprimanded. You call attention to yourself—probably because of your good looks. But then you don't use your looks to benefit yourself. For example, if you had any sense now, you would call Ida at home and ask tearfully if you could come to her house and discuss the transfer. Be hysterical—that scares women. Most of them have some guilt about the way they treat men. If you howl and scream enough, she'll see you. Then when you get there, be all soft and unresisting, weeping sadly. Most of them find that sexy. Basically, they're sadists.”

“I couldn't possibly do that,” Cornell said. “I just couldn't”

Charlie displayed his fat palms. “There you are.”

“I've got some pride,” said Cornell.

“So use it to push your mop,” Charlie said.

“Suppose she made a pass at me.”

“That's the idea,” said Charlie.

“I couldn't go through with it. The idea of being touched by that loathsome creature…”

“O.K., then.”

“It's difficult enough even if I like the girl.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “You mentioned that.” He was bored and unsympathetic. He scratched his belly inside the shirt and looked at his nails.

Cornell swallowed more beer, though he was indeed badly bloated by now, his abdomen pressing against the belt. He also got that way from Coke and other gaseous soft drinks, and sometimes from sheer nervousness. When he suspected he would be offered effervescent beverages, he took the precaution of wearing his panty girdle, but then, of course, he tended to suffocate. It was always a choice of either vanity or comfort. He decided against mentioning the subject now: Charlie's belly was naturally protuberant.

“Do you suppose,” he asked, “that any men really enjoy sex?”

Charlie got interested. “I'll tell you this, Georgie. In my years I've learned one thing: that you never know what's in the other fellow's mind or soul when it comes to that subject. I don't mean just that there are liars around: I mean that I think often enough a man doesn't really know
what
he feels. You know what you are
told
to feel. An anal orgasm is supposed to be a fantastic experience. You can read that in almost any issue of any men's magazine. And wasn't that the point of that sex manual we published last year?”

“I didn't read it.”

“That was one of Myra's projects,” said Charlie, who was secretary to Myra Turlish, another of the senior editors. “Something like thirty-five thousand letters came in, most of them from men, and most of them confessing they had never had an anal orgasm.”

“Frankly, it doesn't surprise me,” Cornell said. “I have never understood how it could appeal to anybody. And what do you suppose a woman gets out of it, when it comes to that?”

“Power,” Charlie said. “Pure and simple.”

“I can understand necking and petting,” said Cornell.

Charlie persisted. “What more brutal and obvious assertion of power could you find? There you are, on your stomach, helpless, and they're riding you.”

“Maybe if the facts were out, something could be done.”

“What?”

“Well, therapy,” Cornell said. “There must be lots of poor boys who don't know where to turn for help. That's sad.” He went ahead and opened his belt before his swollen stomach burst it. He now had room for more beer or more anxiety, whichever was bloating him worse.

“The way you've been helped,” Charlie said. He thrust his mug into the air between them. “Yeah, yeah, I know what you said: you might be worse. But that could be said of anything, right? I developed some back trouble a year ago, and the doctor strapped me in a support which didn't give me any relief but added more discomfort. ‘Without it you'd be worse,' she said. After a while I threw the damn thing away, and the trouble eventually stopped by itself. Cost me a week's pay for nothing.”

Cornell said solemnly: “I didn't have a choice when I first began my therapy, years ago. Either that or killing myself. And now it's gone on so long that I wouldn't know what to do without it. And Dr. Prine's better than the others I went to.” He paused. “I think. She's tougher, but then that's supposed to be good, I think. She insists the whole thing about not being able to experience orgasm is self-indulgence.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “It gives you pain instead of pleasure. It's selfish and lazy to feel that way.”

“Wait a minute, Charlie. It makes sense, you know. I mean, it's reality, isn't it? You can't change it, so you have to accept it. There's no other alternative.”

“There used to be,” said Charlie, tapping the envelope of pictures.

“You mean that deviate stuff.”

“It wasn't perverse in those days.” Charlie shook his head. “I don't know, Georgie, you've been thoroughly brainwashed. You've swallowed everything you've been told. You think that's the masculine role, to sit and wait and accept passively. You're a nice little boy, there's no getting away from that. But if you really were happy with that role, you wouldn't be spending your time at Dr. Prine's—and you wouldn't be a janitor.”

“What would I be? Are you happy?”

“I thought we had already gone over that. Hell, no. But I survive. I accept my position, but I don't accept that it is right. That's the difference between us—or
a
difference anyway.” He smiled stoically. “Another one is that I'm ugly and I'm old. And that's the one that really matters in the end, I guess.”

Cornell suddenly felt desperate. “Charlie,” he said, “what I'm about to tell you I've never told anyone before. Not even Dr. Prine. Maybe that's why I haven't made much progress in the therapy.”

Charlie frowned and put his envelope of pictures back into the sofa-cushion cover. Cornell waited him out before resuming.

“I was eighteen at the time and just about to graduate from high school. I had my first big date. Oh, I was interested in girls, but they weren't interested in me. I didn't have the technique to attract them. Anyway, this one was a college girl, a couple years older than I.”

Charlie drank elaborately, then honked into a handkerchief, peered into it, folded it another way, and returned it to the pocket of his corduroys.

“I was thrilled: not only my first date, but she was taking me to her Junior Prom, at one of the big hotels.

“So there I was, a skinny thing in my first evening gown, a pale-yellow satin number, strapless, and I had very little to hold it up with, so it was hooked so tight I could hardly breathe. She brought me a gardenia. I was a vision, I tell you, of something or other. My face was somewhat broken out already, and the condition got worse from nervousness, so I was plastered with makeup like, a clown. Judith was so handsome in her white dinner jacket and maroon cummerbund….

“We danced till early in the morning. She was a marvy dancer, and dancing was one of my few talents. Every now and again she would pull me off the floor and behind one of those potted palms in the ballroom and whip out a pint of port wine and we'd take a drink. By the end of the evening, we were both pretty tight. The things you'll do as a kid!”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “I used to juice a lot at that age.” He thrust his sneakered feet out at angles.

“I had been too excited to eat all day,” Cornell went on. “Hadn't had a bite since breakfast. And dancing cheek to cheek that way, well—” He was embarrassed and stared into his beer mug. “I got an—erection.”

“Many a one I had in those days,” Charlie confessed smugly.

“I began to get this pain,” said Cornell. “It felt as if I had been kicked in the belly. I was so naive then I thought maybe I had appendicitis. I held out as long as I could, but finally told her I was sick and asked her to take me home to the high-school dormitory. She was plenty annoyed, and I was scared she would never date me again, but by then I could hardly stand straight So she got her car—I forgot to mention she had a really neat white convertible—and she headed north onto the Hudson Sewer Highway—in the opposite direction from my dorm.

“I didn't know what she was up to, but I didn't want to be a wet blanket. Sitting down helped my condition, too. I wasn't in such agony any more. Well, you know those big concrete and steel ruins up at 168th Street? Old bridge pilings, or something?”

“Bridge to Jersey,” Charlie came in authoritatively. “When there was a river there. It collapsed when I was a little kid. They made toy models of it—of the collapsed bridge. I had one. It fell without warning, I believe, during a windstorm. It was used as an overpass above the sewers. Quite a few people were killed.”

He obviously wanted to dwell on this calamity, but Cornell pressed on.

“Judith had had even more wine than I, and she drove at a crazy speed, weaving all over the road. I don't know why she wasn't picked up. But suddenly she put on the brakes and swerved off the highway and in behind a big pile of rubble from that bridge. Mary! She was on me like an animal before the engine stopped turning over. I was a virgin, on my first date. I thought she had gone crazy. It was all so sudden that I didn't even resist at first.

“Then, pinning me down with one arm, she opened the glove compartment and took out this enormous dildo. I had never seen one before except in dirty pictures. I'll never forget the sight of that bludgeon in the light from the dashboard. It was the size of a policeman's nightstick.”

Charlie shouted competitively: “That's what I
got
the first time! I was raped by a cop when I was thirteen! She used her club!”

“She began to strap it on over her tuxedo trousers. The hideous realization came over me of what it meant. I opened the door and tried to get away, but she grabbed me and pulled me back onto the seat. I screamed and howled, but she managed to turn me over and ripped my skirt to the waist and tore my panties off—”

“I fainted when I got it,” Charlie cried. “I tell you—”

Cornell's voice fell away almost to a whisper.

“I can't remember-precisely at what point something clicked in me. I was never an aggressive boy. I certainly don't think I could be called effeminate: I was terrible at sports, totally uncoordinated. In school I was good at sewing and cooking, things like that. I won a prize for my needlework. But when she touched me with that thing, it was like throwing a switch. I lost control of myself. It was as if I turned into another person. I twisted around. I grabbed that loathsome thing and ripped it off her. Now it was me who became animalistic. I tore her trousers off and her undershorts—”

Cornell gulped air. He had gone too far. He should not have begun this. After all, how well did he know Charlie? Charlie stared at him, conquered now, clutching his fat knees, his naked scalp pebbled with sweat.

“Go on,” Charlie cried. “What happened, Georgie?”

Cornell covered his teeth with his lips. He kicked one shoe with the other.

“Who knows what would have happened had not a police car come prowling. That area was a well-known lovers' lane in those days, and muggers had been attacking the cars, robbing the women and raping the men.”

Charlie rubbed his wet forehead.

“You mean they caught you?”

“I sat back and they went by.”

“She didn't scream or anything?”

“No,” Cornell said. “She pulled her clothes together and drove me to my dorm in utter silence. And she didn't report me afterwards. But I can tell you
I
stayed scared for a long time.”

“What do you think you would have done?” Charlie asked in awe.

“I hate to think,” said Cornell. “I don't want to talk about it further. I have probably said too much already.” He squinted at Charlie. “I don't think there's any statute of limitations on attempted rape of a woman by a man.”

“The other way around,” said Charlie, “is only a misdemeanor, and then it has to be proved in a way that humiliates the guy.” He looked at Cornell. Suddenly he showed embarrassment. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have kept pouring the brew.”

Cornell was annoyed at that. “I'm not drunk.” Actually, he was, but he didn't like Charlie's easy assessment, again a form of disparagement. He rose from the chair, and noticed that it felt funnier to stand in women's clothes than to sit.

“I wonder if my dress is dry—dry enough to put on, anyway. I've stayed too long already.”

Charlie maintained his queer expression.

“Georgie,” he said. “About those pictures—I didn't mean to taunt you. How was I to know?” He pulled at his chin. “You always seemed so goddamned masculine to me. All the women at the office have got the hots for you, including old Eloise. I wondered why you didn't use that to do yourself some good. I just didn't understand.”

It was one thing to confess a deviate act, but quite another to see the inference drawn from it—or, rather, not from the event, but from your own account of it.

Cornell scowled.
“I
was a kid, a virgin, and full of port wine. That's powerful stuff, Charlie. I mean,
you
have a couple of been and you put on female clothing. I wonder what you'd do if you tried wine?”

Charlie's mouth fell. “Don't be catty, Georgie. You live in a glass house, after all. There's no harm in what I do.”

“But it
is
against the law, isn't it?” Cornell asked, honing a hostile edge on his voice. “And so are your dirty pictures, and I'll bet if you ever revealed your fantasies you'd be up for castration.”