by John Barth
“I don’t deny you fought like a hero,” Max said. “He won the Trustees’ Medal of Honor, George, for killing so many Bonifacists. A fine thing.”
I was surprised to see that he spoke not at all sarcastically.
“I thank you, sir,” Greene said, in an accent much brisker and clearer than he’d used thitherto: a modest but military tone. I asked him whether it was in combat with the enemy that he’d lost his eye.
“I wish to Sam Hill it was,” he said, and cocked his head ruefully. “Weren’t, though.” He then declared, for reasons not at once apparent, that the opinion commonly held of him outside NTC was a cruel untruth—namely, that he was henpecked; that his wife “wore the pants in the family” and was unhappy with the fit, as it were; that too much complaisance on his part had led her at first to discontentment, thence to shrewishness, and at last to the Faculty Women’s Rest House, and everything kerflooey.
“Fact is,” he said, as if talking about the same thing, “my eyes never were very good, but I didn’t realize it till I was grown up. I used to press against my eyeball to see things when I was a kid, and then like as not I’d see two redskins where there was one, or my eyes would fill up and blur.” Then one day during his courtship of Miss Sally Ann, he said, he’d brought her all the way to Great Mall for the annual Spring Carnival, and it was during their tour of the midway amusements that he’d lost his eye, in the following manner—which he confided in frank detail in order, he asserted, to correct the misrepresentations of malicious gossip. The courtship had been proceeding satisfactorily: pledges of love had been exchanged and intent declared to marry as soon as his position was more securely established, he being then scarcely past adolescence and only begun on his various enterprises. They had learned something of each other’s history: on his part, that he was a rebellious orphan with an undistinguished past but great hope for the future, of small resource but large resourcefulness, short on tutoring but long on ambition, with a craving to Commence and make his mark on the campus, and eager to be married though with little experience of women—he confessed to her solemnly his youthful connection with Old Black George’s daughter, whereof he was so contrite that, going it may be beyond the facts, he declared he was no virgin, the more severely to chastize himself. She had wept but forgiven him, and admitted sorrowfully that she too had something to confess, though not of a guilty nature: she was beset by a Peeping Tom and secret masher, who, though she had provoked him in no wise but by her general beauty, which no amount of modesty could veil, for some time had plagued her by night—peering in her windows, hissing obscenities from bushes, exposing his member to her moonlight view. She would have spoken of it earlier, she declared, but for her fear that Greene might think the man a beau of hers, present or past, and break their engagement.
Beside this disclosure (the more alarming because young Greene, after incarcerating O.B.G.’s daughter, had taken secretly to patrolling the area of Miss Sally Ann’s cabin by night, to prevent exactly such molestation in the rough backwoods, and had seen nothing more sinister than deer and raccoons though his view of her windows was unobstructed) the other details of his financée’s background were of no importance to him. Outraged at the mysterious interloper’s effrontery—Miss Sally Ann had not seen his face, but was convinced of his reality and motive—Greene vowed to marry her at once, despite the insecurity of their position, the better to insure her maiden honor against mischance, and to thrash the masher if he caught him. He would have wed her that same day, but for one nagging detail …
“It’s the simple Enochist Truth,” he said; “I’m a shy one where the girls are concerned. Always have been! Always will be!” He blinked and winked. “That don’t mean I ain’t got an ace or two once the chips are down! But I’m slow to make my play, and the reason is, there weren’t no girls around when I was growing up. O.B.G’s daughter don’t count; not just she’s a darky, but she come on so fast and teased so much she’d scare the starch right out o’ me, despite I’d love to shown the hussy a thing or two … I used to tell her she was lucky I was saving up for marriage, but the fact of the matter was, I’d get me in a state quick enough just a-thinking how she carried on, but once she was right there face to face—no spunk at all! Know what I mean?”
Naturally I did not, except by considerable effort of imagination—what could be more alien to life in the goat-barns than pusillanimity in the face so to speak of erotic provocation?
“You weren’t able to service her?” I hazarded.
Green blushed and glanced out of the booth. Croaker was asleep now in the aisle, my stick in his lap, and the flaring music-box broadcast above our voices a queer loud plaint:
Moreover, it was grown dark, and though the headlit motors came and went from the apron of the Pedal Inn, few noses pressed now to the plate-glass wall beside us.
“I was able!” Greene protested, in a vehement whisper. “I just never could get up nerve enough, is all!”
Yet he had hesitated to commit himself to husbandhood, he said, until his capacity was proved, and Miss Sally Ann (somewhat to his surprise) seeming not finally averse, he had fetched her to Great Mall with the understanding that they’d lose their innocence each to the other before they returned. They took separate rooms in a Great-Mall inn for the three nights of the Carnival, but slept together. On the first night he’d been doubled up with cramps and unable to move—an effect, he believed, less of fear than of shame at the notion of subjecting so passèd a lady girl to his carnal lusts. On the second, nonetheless, they had striven resolutely—but in vain, for failing to find himself in the studly way from the very first kiss, as he thought proper, he so furiously reproached himself that no subsequent ministrations of Miss Sally Ann’s could turn the trick. She had better betake her to some callous stud, he had told her bitterly, who being less confounded by the architecture of her naked flesh could possess it like a master instead of trembling like a truant freshman before the Chancellor’s Mansion. So saying—despite her protests that she was no Frumentian doxy who measured her lovers by the rod, as it were; that for all her willingness to yield love’s fruits to him she was content enough to sleep in his arms as on the previous night; that on the other hand if his pride would but permit him to see himself as curator instead of conqueror of that same Mansion, she was confident they could open its gate as well with a pass-key as with a batter—despite all this he cursed himself back to his room and drank himself into a solitary stupor.
On the third and final day of the Spring Carnival he’d groused about, uncertain whether to destroy himself or merely break their engagement. They watched the ritual Dance of the Freshman Co-eds around the shaft; the ceremonial Expulsion and Reinstatement of the Chancellor, commemorating Enos Enoch’s weekend in the Nether Campus; the coronation of a new Miss University in white gown and mortarboard and her parade down Great Mall on a float of lilies. The more Miss Sally Ann endeavored to raise his spirits by feigning animation, the gloomier he grew: after dinner, when they went to the brilliant midway, he insisted she ride on ferris-wheel, carousel, and roller-coaster—of all which amusements she was shrieking fond—but would not accompany her; he even sent her, against her inclination, alone through the Tunnel of Love and the adjoining Chamber of Horrors. While she made her way reluctantly through the latter, he stood outside in the sawdust and brooded upon his reflection in a row of distorting mirrors near the entrance. In one his neck rose like a swan’s above his body; in another his bulbous trunk perched high on stork-legs. They put him glumly in mind of certain of his dreams wherein a more pertinent piece of him had similarly been drawn out to miraculous length, with astonishing consequence. This memory led in turn to reveries of Miss Sally Ann disrobed, and he was roused in fact, though not beyond human proportions. To conceal his condition he was obliged to sit down on a bench near the exit and cross his legs.
His choice of seats, he discovered a moment later, was not in the best interest of detumescence: the last “horror” of the Chamber was a
grating in the exit ramp-way, a few meters before him, through which when it was trod upon a blast of air blew, to the end of lifting the co-ed’s skirts. I was far enough from goatdom to understand with no further explanation that the consequent brief exposure, not of actual escutcheons but of drawers and female harness, was by virtue of its involuntary nature mortifying to the victims and both amusing and arousing to human male onlookers, who might scarcely take notice of a more comprehensive and prolonged display under other circumstances—lady girls in swimsuits at a pool, say, or their own wives in the showerbath. Peter Greene watched erect, savoring of each blowee the squealing fluster, the vain endeavor to hold down her skirt, the half-second’s glimpse of silk-snugged crotch. Thin girls, fat girls, pretty girls, plain—in his fancy he lusted shamefully for them all, every soft-thighed lass who ever was, had been, or would be; even the blushfullest, he reflected, would in her lifetime admit some man, or several, into that passèd private place: he could not bear that it should not in every instance be himself. How he should have enjoyed that the lot of them be in his power! In a vast subcampus chamber of his own devising, lit by flambeaux and known to none but himself, he would keep them prisoner, not a stitch among them, and perpetrate at his whim exquisitest carnalities upon whom he chose. Perhaps they would all be blindfolded, or bound at wrist and ankle …
“Founder’s sake!” I was moved to exclaim. Max seemed to have joined Croaker in sleep.
“Shucks,” Green scoffed, “ ’tweren’t nothing but a daydream. All a girl’s got to do’s say boo to me, pass her heart, I turn tail and run! Anyhow, I set there hotter’n a fox and watched ’em get their skirts blowed up, till finally along comes Sally Ann, with some old Enochism-teacher she’d met in the funhouse that used to know her, and he’d helped her find her way when she was lost inside. I figured she’d just as leave not show her drawers to him—especially since he seemed to be carrying on right smart for who he was and all—so I jumped up to tell her about the air-hose; but she was laughing at something or other and didn’t notice me till whoosh—up goes her dirndl, and there’s her pretty drawers with the yellow roses on! Right then I hear a whistling and a whooping, and a voice hollering out to Miss Sally Ann to come there and see what he had for her, stuff like that. Made my blood boil! I looked round to see who’d come up, ’cause till then there hadn’t nobody been left of me where the hollering was, you understand? Weren’t even no benches there to set on. What there was was just this tall skinny plate-glass window along the wall, right near the exit, and when I squinched up my eyeballs with my fingers I could see a fellow standing there, bold as brass! First thing struck me, it must be that Peeping Tom she said’d been a-pestering her—seeing he knew her name and was talking so fresh. Anyhow I knew he was the one that was whistling and hollering, ’cause I could see he still had his hand up by his mouth. So I figure, I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget, by Jimmy Gumbo, and I pick me a rock up off the ground. Now I took for granted the window was open, it being such a warm night and him a-hollering so plain; all I had in mind to do was snib him one to show him what was what. But time I hauled off to chunk, I saw he’d got a rock his own self and was set to knock my block off with it, so I let fly all my might. Never did find out if I hit him, ’cause we never saw nor heard from him after that. But he sure got me! What happened was, the durn window was shut—whatever it was—and his rock and mine must of busted into it right the same time. His never hit me, but the glass went flying every whichaway, and a little tiny piece of it struck me in the eye.”
His fiancée’s alarm, he went on to say, soon brought assistance: he was hurried to the Infirmary, where first the glass was removed and later the eyeball, irreparably damaged. Upon reviving from anesthesia he found Miss Sally Ann at his bedside, and they commiserated for the loss of both his eye and their last night to spend together on Great Mall. More to his chagrin, now that making love was out of the question he was splendidly erect, nor did any amount of ironic remark upon this phenomenon at all diminish it. Nay, his pain and the blindfold of bandages notwithstanding, he lusted more powerfully than ever before; her consolatory kisses only inflamed him; he must have her then and there, nurses be flunked; she must close and block the door and come at once to bed. Reluctant at first, she was at last brought blushing to it, rather to his surprise: protesting soft but breathing hard she slipped out of her shoes and between his sheets, and the sweet deed was done.
“Well, sir,” Greene declared—more as one beginning than concluding a story: “I told her the honest truth then: how it was my first time, and I never had actually swived old O.B.G.’s daughter.”
This news, he said (when Max returned to partial slumber after stirring to remark that swive was a fine old verb whose desuetude in all but a few back-campus areas was much to be deplored, as it left the language with no term for service that was not obscene, clinical, legalistic, ironic, euphemistic, or periphrastic), Miss Sally Ann professed not to believe; she’d even scolded him a bit for so exaggerating the importance of what, to her mind, was a mere technicality beside the fact of true and exclusive love that he felt he must deceive her on the point. They married soon after, and directly his wound was healed and his glass eye installed, he immersed himself with equal passion in his work and his newly realized manhood. Greene Timber doubled and tripled its holdings, destroying its competitors, exploiting its workers, depleting the countryside, and diversifying into related areas of manufacture. The Greenes moved from cabin to manorhouse and begot a great number of offspring, whose rearing Mrs. Greene relinquished her profession to supervise; there was no further need for her to work anyhow, and she agreed with her husband that woman’s place was in the home. There she gave orders to a staff of domestics, took up the piano and painting on glass, read long novels, and tatted the hems of pillowslips. They regarded their match as ideal and themselves as blissful in it—but in certain moods, now he was initiated, Greene bewailed his lost opportunities with O.B.G.’s flunkèd daughter and perhaps even consorted with her secretely, in or out of prison, always however berating himself the while for polluting, or thinking to pollute, his perfect marriage. And Miss Sally Ann now and then complained of spells of faintness and that her life was after all as empty as some statue’s in a Founder’s Hall.
Then, sometime in his twenties, for reasons he could not well articulate, Greene’s opinion changed profoundly on the question of Answers and Graduation. Some said he was influenced by disillusioned veterans of the First Campus Riot; others, that this dillusionment in turn was but the popular dramatizing of a state of intellectual affairs that dated from the Rematriculation Period and had long prevailed “across the Pond” in the famous seats of West-Campus learning. Still others pointed out, quite correctly, that Greene was a rustic without classical education or much use for the departments of moral science and the fine arts; they were inclined to relate his new attitude to the loss of his eye or of his adolescent vigor, to the belated realization of character deficiencies, or to domestic and business difficulties.
“Which is putting the cart before the goshdarn horse, them last ones,” he said. “I figure I invented my Answers my own self, just like Sally Ann and me invented making love, no matter how many’d thought of it before.”
Whatever the causes, the effects were unmistakable: they moved from their rural estate to an urban quad; he made his wife a full-time equal partner in his business; they toured distant campuses, learned to smoke cigarettes, drink cocktails, dance to jazz-music, drive fast motorcycles, and practice contraception. Miss Sally Ann now freely admitted enjoying what theretofore she had seemed only to permit: husband and wife put by all inhibition and together tasted every sweet and salty dish in love’s cuisine, improvising some, discovering others accidentally, borrowing not a few from the high-spiced cookbooks of ancient Remus and Siddartha, which Greene no longer perused in secret but shared with his wife. Nay, further, emancipated alike from the stuffy prohibitions of old-fashioned lecturers and the economics of ha
rder terms, they went from twin beds to separate vacations to separate residences and friends, and mortgaged all their assets to extend by daring speculation their business interests and finance their costly extracurricular activities.
This continued to the end of that decade of their lives, and ended, alas, in general fiasco. One memorable night, happening to meet each other en route to their separate apartments from separate illegal taverns, but both drunk on the same distillation, Greene announced impulsively to his wife, whether as confession, boast, or wish, that O.B.G.’s daughter (no longer in prison) was threatening him with a paternity suit, or might one day so threaten for all he knew; and Mrs. Greene replied, between hiccoughs, that for all she knew she might one day threaten O.B.G.’s daughter’s husband with the same, if the trollop had one and he was properly manned. They went then their separate ways, but whether that encounter was the trigger, or certain ominous signs that his speculations were overextended and no longer basically sound, there ensued just prior to his thirtieth birthday a collapse of Peter Greene’s self-confidence and a lengthy spell of profound depression.
“Just seemed like it all went kerflooey at once,” he said. His research and production plants failed, one after another, or were shut down by organized mutinies among his staff, some of whom openly professed Student-Unionism. Greene’s own sympathies were split between affinity for any rebellious cause (a habit of mind carried over from his childhood) and his contempt for anything that smacked of the “welfare campus.” So at odds was he with himself, he would bribe the campus police to put down a demonstration, then find himself marching unrecognized among the demonstrators, in his old forester’s clothes, and take a beating he himself had paid for. Sexually he became subject to periods of impotence; socially he withdrew, lost interest in the few friends he had left, as in himself. Whether he appeared well or ill in the public eye and his own no longer concerned him; he could not even manage to despise himself much, so thoroughgoing was his sense of futility. Much of his time he spent rocking in a chair. To his surprise (for he was not given to speculation of the philosophic sort) he found not only that he no longer regarded himself as Graduated, but that he disbelieved in the reality of Graduation, the Founder, and Final Exams. Nothing in the University mattered in the long run, it seemed perfectly clear to him: one man studied and strove for the good of his classmates, another cheated, lied, and tattled: both soon passed away and were forgotten, with the rest of mortal studentdom, and the blind University went on, and too would vanish when its term expired. To rock the campus, to rock a chair—what did it matter? Mrs. Greene dropped by with the children to spend the weekend, bringing with her a supply of the sleeping-capsules which both had come to depend on for rest; they quarreled, resolved to institute bankruptcy and divorce proceedings, drank a final drink together, and ended by dividing the capsules between them, each swallowing a number he judged most honestly to be on the threshold of lethality, perhaps beyond it.
