by John Barth
“I don’t understand!” she wailed.
But I understood a number of things, some for the first time. It was clear to me now that I (and alas, not I alone!) could do virtually anything I pleased with Anastasia, not because she was a passèd martyr to the needs of others, on the one hand, or on the other a self-deluding nymphomane, but because she simply had not the will to assert her wishes over another’s. Protest she might, refuse never—at least in the matter of carnal demands. This revelation (for so it was to me, however banal or evident, perhaps, to one raised since birth among humans) illumined in a flash not only the aforementioned articles of my Assignment, but the present situation. My “infirmity,” I saw, was neither gimp nor goatness, but the limited insight into human natures unavoidable in one so late discovering his own. “Overcoming” it, then, must consist in just such illuminations as the present. Nay, the two labors were one: to “see through My Ladyship” could only mean to understand Anastasia; that is, to divine the inmost heart of one fellow human—a task impossible without the gift of insight. Divination now achieved, it was I felt certain the accomplishment—“at once, in no time”—of both parts of my Assignment, Q.E.D. Though I might still, for the record, ask a Clean Bill of Health from Dr. Sear (and perhaps a professional confirmation of my analysis of Anastasia), it seemed to me that my principal business there was finished, most satisfactorily. It remained only to demonstrate my thesis to Peter Greene and my “humanity” to Dr. Sear. In a friendly way I said, “Let’s undress you, Anastasia,” and fetched her firmly couchwards.
She fretted: “I don’t want to, George!” But Mrs. Sear, in better reach of her now, said, “Hot dog,” joined me with a will in the couching, and, kneeling over her on the cushion, attacked the fasteners of her uniform.
“This is awful!” Anastasia said crossly, and covered her eyes. “I don’t see the need of this at all!”
I implored her to trust me, as she had once before at the Memorial Service. My plan was a token mounting of Hedwig Sear, for though I sharply craved Maurice Stoker’s wife (the more at sight of her darling flanks again) and had no appetite whatever for Kennard Sear’s, WESCAC’s suggestion that I might be Anastasia’s brother restrained me from following my desire—for her sake, who I imagined would share the prevailing undergraduate view of incest. To service a female person whom I found repellent was surely enough to prove my humanity; more so in my own estimation than to embrace one whom—despite our possible consanguinity and the obligations of Grand-Tutorhood—I had almost said, I loved.
“What Mr. Greene must think!” Anastasia moaned. As Hedwig Sear bent to bite her I remarked with an ardent pang the welt of my own teeth on her belly. Ah, it was true. Once hatched, the thought would not take wing, but stayed a-fledge there in my fancy: I loved Anastasia! And not as my relative or Tutee, but as a human lady girl. And I suddenly dreaded not only that we might be kin but that I might for aught I knew be … not lovable. Horrid possibility! That she admired me was evident; alas, her admiration like her sweet legs embraced many another, and had little to do with love. And Founder pass me, in the yearbooks of campus history what Grand Tutor ever took a mistress?
“George?” It was a rebuke, timid but positive. Anastasia’s eyes were on my hands, which I had laid upon Hedwig’s haunches. Whether by my problematical insights (How my infirmity was overcome!) or Mrs. Sear’s aggressiveness, I had found myself unmanned, so to speak, and been obliged to temporize with idle foreplay. The woman ignored me, but Anastasia sat up now sharply and declared she didn’t like what was happening at all and intended to leave.
“Oh, not now!” Dr. Sear entreated—from the doorway, where he appeared unaccompanied. “I was just about to join you.”
Relieved enough at the interruption, nevertheless I frowned as I lowered my vestment and asked where Peter Greene was.
“Poor chap couldn’t take it, I’m afraid,” the doctor said pleasantly. “White as a sheet when I went in, and your remark about his voyeurisme did the trick. I gave him a sedative for fear he’d faint or commit mayhem, and he went right off to sleep. Like a five-year-old, actually. Very low threshold.” He touched the small of my back with one hand and patted Anastasia’s troubled cheek with the other. “Fine of you to help,” he told her: “I think we really might have jarred some foolishness out of the fellow.” Smiling at his wife he said then, “Mind if I cut in? Then we’ll all have dinner.”
Mrs. Sear did not reply: upon Anastasia’s sitting up she had gone glassy-eyed, and slumped now quite insensible upon the dark beacon of George’s Gorge, that had called G. Herrold to his end.
Anastasia shook her head. “I don’t like this Conscious Depravity business. It’s been a very upsetting day!” Awed by my feelings, I watched her fasten up her clothes once more. Dr. Sear gave me an amiable wry look—an invitation, as I thought, to exercise my will upon her as I knew I could. But I said that I too had spent a toilsome day, by no means over, and had no appetite except for food. He shrugged, lit a cigarette, and repeated his dinner invitation.
“A drink will perk Heddy up, and we’ll ask Greene to come along if we can wake him.”
Anastasia at first declined on the grounds that her husband, who “hadn’t been himself at all” during lunch, might be expecting her at home, and that she would anyhow be ashamed to face Peter Greene for some time. But I pressed her to come with us, as I had serious matters to discuss with her: Max’s predicament, her Certification by Bray—and our relationship. At this last she raised her eyes, as did Dr. Sear his far less liqueous ones. I blushed.
“It isn’t what you think … I’ll explain later.”
“Oh.” She fingered a bracelet. “Well.” She agreed at least to go as far as the Sears’ apartment with us, since it was on her homeward way, and to telephone the Power Plant from there. Dr. Sear welcomed my acceptance of his invitation, declaring I could prove my humanity as easily after filet mignon as before, and with a wink expressed his readiness to be de-Certified if I thought it necessary. He busied himself then with reviving his wife, while Anastasia put her clothes in order; and pleased at the chance to delay my reply I went to attend Peter Greene. Truth to tell, the mention of meat worked counter to all my appetites, as did the recognition that I was beginning to be in love. Though my testicles hurt and my stomach rumbled, I could scarce abide the ideas of sex and food; it was only to speak with Anastasia and Dr. Sear (on the very matter he’d just brought up, among others) that I wanted to dine with them: else I had withdrawn to some private place to examine my heart’s state and what it portended.
It transpired that we ate neither at the Sears’ apartment nor in a restaurant, but had dinner sent up to the office from the hospital kitchens, for both Mrs. Sear and Peter Greene were in no condition to leave the building. The latter, whom I found just waking up on a couch in the Reception Room, greeted me with as woeful a groan as ever I’d heard; he rose to hug or hit me, choked into tears instead, and sat down again, shaking his head.
“Oh, Founder!” he said, with an affecting hoarseness. “She’s the flunkèdest of all!” What he had witnessed from the observation-chamber, it appeared, had shocked him more profoundly than I’d allowed for. As previously he had seemed to believe that the human heart was essentially passèd, so now he declared it essentially flunked; no good my suggesting it was but desperately human. Anastasia was a whore, he vowed, worse than O.B.G.’s daughter, who at least had confined her harlotry to male humans; Dr. Sear and his wife were unspeakable perverts; me he spared, as entering the debauch purely for his benefit—indeed, he thanked me bitterly for opening his eye to the truth as only a Grand Tutor might—but the rest of studentdom, himself included, he now agreed must be as failed as I had described.
“I been a blind durn fool!” he cried. So far did he carry his black despisal, I feared it was wrong-headed as his former optimism. His displeasure with himself, in particular, was intense enough to make him shudder while he spoke, as might a fever. Clearly he was not fit to drive: when Ana
stasia entered the room to beg his pardon, he vomited explosively into a smoking-stand, to her great distress, and it was necessary for Dr. Sear to resedate him into unconsciousness. Hedwig too, the doctor said coolly as he withdrew the syringe, was more than usually hors de combat; her also he had sedated.
“Rotten shame,” he tisked, having telephoned our dinner orders. I wasn’t certain whether he alluded to his wife’s condition, the change in our dining-plans, or Anastasia’s having to clean up Peter Greene’s mess, until he added a moment later, “Pity you didn’t know Hed before she got this way, George: ready for anything then, she was! Full of spirit; nothing fazed her; put Stacey in the shade …” He shook his head and relaxed with a slender cigar on the couch, near Greene’s feet. “What times we used to have! Lately, of course, she hasn’t been herself. Terrible pressures. But it’s still the most genuine marriage I know of. Ideal, in fact.”
I could not conceal my incredulity. Anastasia paused too, paper towel in hand, then went on with her scrubbing. Dr. Sear smiled.
“What I mean is, it’s the only authentic and meaningful kind of marriage, for educated people in modern terms, because it’s based on freedom, frankness, equality, and no illusions whatever. It may not work, but even if it turns out to be impossible, nothing else is worth trying.” He wrinkled his brow in a cordial tease. “I saw through my ladyship from the first, in every respect; and Heddy did likewise.”
“And were you pleased by what you saw?” I asked him. I had been thinking of my own ambivalent insight into Anastasia, but Dr. Sear took the question as a challenge and amiably replied, “You mean her lesbianism, I suppose, and my own homosexual tendencies …”
“No no, sir! What I—”
“Don’t apologize,” he insisted. “I enjoy looking things straight in the eye.” He went on to declare that while these same tendencies (the confrontation whereof in myself, he suggested, might well be the real purport of my fourth Assignment-task) were not inherently either passing or failing in his opinion, he readily seconded the Maxim that self-knowledge is generally bad news, and would yield to none in the degree of his own self-loathing. “By George, there’s another possibility!” he exclaimed, interrupting his confession with a laugh: “Why don’t you just masturbate?”
“Sir?”
“Really, Kennard!” Anastasia’s scold was serious; she was still red-eyed with unhappiness over the events in the Treatment Room, and but half attended our conversation. “Enough is enough.”
“Sorry,” the doctor said lightly. “What I meant to say is that if See Through Your Ladyship means ‘Understand the female elements in your psyche,’ it’s just another way of saying Know thyself, don’t you agree, George? But since this whole Grand-Tutor business has such a Founder’s-Scroll air about it, maybe know should be understood in the Old-Syllabus sense of carnal knowledge. In other words, Fornicate thyself.”
I was not sure to what extent this interpretation was a jeu d’esprit; the earlier part of it struck me as reasonable enough, the more as it didn’t really contradict my own speculations. But Anastasia said he ought to be ashamed of himself.
“Honestly, sometimes I think you like naughtiness,” she declared, and went to take our dinner-cart from the maid at the door. Her remark (which seemed banal to me, love or no love) delighted the doctor.
“I do, as you know,” he said to me. “And I do despise myself, of course. What other feeling is there, for a man both intelligent and honest? I can’t take anybody seriously who doesn’t loathe himself. That’s why I admire Taliped.”
I accepted a salad from the cart, blanched at the fragments of bloody steer-muscle on the plates, and took up the conversation to keep from imagining the bovicide that must be daily wrought to feed carnivorous studentdom its evening meal.
“You say you admire Dean Taliped’s self-loathing, sir. Don’t you actually just envy him his reasons?” The question was sincere enough, but I confess it gave me an un-Grand-Tutorish satisfaction to defend what I knew was Anastasia’s position. Throughout the meal—while Dr. Sear with mild good humor acknowledged his perversions and his wife’s, agreed that her present condition was partly the cumulative effect, on her homely spirit, of their years of libertinism, but defended his biography on the grounds that “total experience,” while ruinous, is requisite to Understanding—I was unnaturally aware of my belovèd’s presence in the room. She said little during our harangue, but as I endeavored to point out to Dr. Sear (first begging his leave) how much of illusion and innocence could still be said to be in his thinking, self-deception in his confessions, and pride in his self-loathing, I watched her flashing eyes from the corner of mine and glowed in the certainty of their approval.
“Admit it, sir: you find your self-hatred … interesting, don’t you?”
He cocked his head judiciously, a bit of flesh impaled on his fork. “Let’s say piquant. Yes, piquant, definitely. Which is, I suppose, just that much more ground for self-hatred, as you term it.”
“That much more piquant, you mean.”
“Very good, George! Really, you amaze me.”
But I was too desirous of Anastasia’s esteem (not to mention Dr. Sear’s final welfare) to be content with bland compliments. What I wanted, I told him, was not that he should be amazed, but that he should Pass, and prerequisite to that end was his real conviction, not merely that he was not passèd (despite Bray’s Certification, which I sensed Sear had no final faith in), but that he was failed.
“Wait now,” he protested more firmly; “you forget what Gynander—”
I interrupted: “Gynander was a proph-prof, sir. Excuse me, but that makes all the difference on campus. Gynander didn’t do things just out of curiosity; he didn’t especially even want to see everything he saw. But he did things; he had … a power. He wasn’t just a spectator.”
Dr. Sear allowed I had a point, and this time his expression of surprise at what he called my “native discernment” was more sincere, and less composed.
“But see here, George,” he said, making a little grimace; “there’s one factor in Hedwig’s condition, and my attitude, that you’re leaving out of account—naturally enough, since I’ve told no one about it except my wife.” He contemplated the ash of his cigar. “The fact is, I won’t be on campus much longer …”
Though he touched the little bandage on his brow as he spoke, I mistook his meaning until Anastasia, with a small compassionate exclamation, put by her tray and hurried to his chair-arm. Pressing his distinguished head at once to her chest, she declared she’d known there was more to “that sore place” than he’d let on. Her tears ran freely into his silver hair; I could almost envy him the squamous-cell carcinoma that provoked such sympathy. It had begun, he told us quietly, as a small growth upon the bridge of his nose, which had commenced to fester, as he’d thought, from daily contact with the frames of his eyeglasses. He himself had subsequently diagnosed it as malignant and arranged for its removal, but the surgeon-friend who excised it had discovered preliminary invasions of both orbits as well as of the paranasal sinuses.
“You’ve noticed,” he said, almost with embarrassment, “that my breath is often foul. The cause of that, happily, also prevents my being able to smell it myself—or anything else.” He attempted to turn this circumstance into a wry example of Tragic Compensation; but Anastasia, who knew the import of his words as I did not, weepingly implored him to cease making light of it, to have the cancer dealt with at once, before his eyesight and very life should go the way of his sense of smell.
“Nonsense, my dear.” He patted her arm. “I have a twenty percent chance of living another decade if I let them cut my nose off; maybe thirty percent if they take the eyes out too. No thank you!” He had, he said, devoted his life to the admiration of beauty and the enlargement of his experience and understanding; he saw no reason literally to deface himself for the sake of a few horrid extra semesters. Moreover, though there was he supposed no end to art and knowledge, he could not but feel surfeited
with both. He regarded his life as having been pleasant and rich in variety; for that very reason he was lately bored with it; nothing had for him any longer the delight of genuine novelty, and he confessed to looking forward to his dying with the temperate enthusiasm of a connoisseur, as the one experience he’d yet to try. To his mind, the only choice was aesthetic: whether to take his own life forthwith or let the cancer make a blind purulent madman of him before it killed him, a year or two hence. The latter course appealed to him, as the more passive and exquisite; he had always rather let experience write upon him than play the role of author. On the other hand he loathed monstrosity and unawareness, particularly in combination; even before the carcinoma reached his brain he would be stupefied with suffering or narcotized against it, and of what value was an experience one didn’t experience?
“Oh well,” he concluded—actually yawning, as if this subject too had begun to bore him; “naturally all this has been a trial for Heddy; she never was much of a philosopher.”
Anastasia kissed him all about the face, but especially upon the fatal bandage; nor would Sear’s tuts and pats assuage her concern.
“If I could help you somehow!” she grieved, and I knew with a sting that had the doctor been a man of normal appetites she’d gratefully close his sorrow in her honey limbs. I too was touched with pity and begged his pardon for my earlier criticisms, though I couldn’t help feeling that the fact of his disease, however grave in itself, had no bearing on our argument. It pleased and chastened me that Dr. Sear acknowledged as much himself a moment later, when Anastasia had gone to the washroom to compose herself.
“I’m aware,” he said, “that my attitude toward dying is quite as perverse as my other attitudes. Contemptibly effete, if you like. And so I’m properly contemptuous of it—which is more effete yet, and so on.”
I asked him to excuse my tactlessness, as I’d had little experience of human attitudes towards dying (the goats, it goes without saying, have no opinions on the subject); no doubt it was presumptuous of me to advise him at all, and particularly in these circumstances …
