by John Barth
“So this morning he asked me to tell him what to do!” Anastasia exclaimed. “As if I were the doctor! I said he’d better talk to You, that I didn’t understand this crazy business—and the way he thanked me, you’d think that was exactly what he wanted to hear! As if he couldn’t have thought of it himself!”
“I see.” And I did see, dimly, his general reasoning, I believed: Scar needed to come to me at the behest of someone else, preferably someone who didn’t understand the situation. It had seemed to bother him,though, Anastasia continued, when she reminded him that she was only a nurse. But before she could suggest that he consult a professional colleague, their conversation had been interrupted by Greene’s visit.
“You won’t believe what he came to tell me!” The memory so renewed her astonishment, she forgot her pique at my having pretended she was pregnant.
I smiled. “He apologized for confusing you with your flunkèd twin sister.”
“How did You know? He’s crazy, George! And I hate to say it, but I’m afraid Kennard’s mind has been affected, too. By the cancer …”
I followed her account as well as I could, for it was more arresting and suggestive than I’d anticipated. But my attention was sorely divided: not only was I listening at the same time to the conversation in the Treatment Room, which I’d remembered could be overheard at the flip of a switch; I was also sharply interested in observing through the glass what appeared to be a new development in the strange relation between Greene and Sear.
“I thought he wanted to apologize for last spring,” Anastasia said. “In fact, I was going to offer to explain the whole thing to his wife, in case she thought it was his fault, what he’d done to me. But when he started in on this sister business, and how he was sorry he’d ever thought it was me that wasn’t a virgin …! He got more excited all the time, saying his wife was the dearest little wifey on the Founder’s green campus and I was the dearest little sister, and women like Maurice’s secretary and my sister were floozies that ought to be horsewhipped! Kennard was right there listening to the whole thing, and when Mr. Greene started saying he’d defend my honor to the death, and pawing me at the same time, I thought Kennard would help me! Because it wasn’t the first time, You know, that a patient ever got fresh, and I really think Mr. Greene thought he was protecting me, or something … But do You think Kennard helped? He was listening to Mr. Greene as if it were the Grand Tutor talking, and when Mr. Greene tried to lay me down on the desk-top, all Kennard said was ‘Remember what George told you, Stacey’!”
In the Treatment Room, as she spoke, Greene had been inveighing against the decline of moral standards in “the present modern campus of today” and recommending that the dunce-cap and birch-rod be restored to their place of honor in New Tammany kindergartens; Sear interrupted him to ask whether, when he played Doctor with Mrs. Sear in the Asylum sandbox, he ought to pretend to be the doctor and Hedwig the patient, or vice-versa: to his mind, taking make-believe rectal temperatures with a forest-green crayon was an apt symbolic affirmation of the element of childish perversity which had always underlain his sophisticated medical researches; on the other hand, he could see that assuming the “patient’s” role not only in the office, as he was doing presently, but also in the sandbox—baring his bum to Hedwig’s popsicle-stick—might be said to combine inversion, perversion, reversion, and reversal.
“What do you suggest, Doctor?” he inquired.
“Now that’s enough!” Greene said angrily. “That’s just plain dirty talk, is all it is!”
“I know,” Sear admitted. “But the fact is, you see, I was a very naughty five-year-old. I peeked up the little girls’ dresses and tasted my b.m.’s and showed my pee-tom to the teacher. So what I hope you’ll tell me is whether ‘becoming as a kindergartener’ means returning innocently to childish perversions or pervertedly feigning a childish innocence …”
“Did Greene actually service you, then?” I asked Anastasia.
“He would have, I’m sure,” she said, “and thought he was defending my virginity the whole time! But when Kennard reminded me of what You’d told me I got all mixed up, because I don’t like Mr. Greene—not that way, especially since last spring—and yet I do believe in You, George, even if You don’t. But it’s so hard for me to act like a … a floozy, You know …”
“That’s just more smut, Dr. Sear!” Greene was declaring. “You know durn well I’m not any sawbones, say what you want, nor a headshrinker either—excuse the expression! I’m a simple country boy that’s trying to do the right thing by his wife and family and his alma mater. Don’t think I don’t see you’re up to some naughtiness with this playing-doctor business, pull-the-wool-over-my-eyeswise.”
“What did you do?” I was wondering vaguely whether the net effect of a seduction of Greene by My Ladyship would be therapeutic or anti-therapeutic, so to speak, in their separate cases; likewise a repetition, under present circumstances, of her previous forcible alleying. At the same time, the conversation in the Treatment Room I found most absorbing, and relevant to my Assignment as well as to Greene’s and Sear’s.
“All I could think of was how crazy that sister idea was,” Anastasia said. “He was trying to take my clothes off, and Kennard was taking Mr. Greene’s clothes off—You know Kennard! I was squirming around on the desk, and Kennard thought I was trying to be sexy—so did Mr. Greene, I guess. But really I was trying to be loose and get loose at the same time, I was so mixed up by what You’d told me. Anyhow, I was shouting in Mr. Greene’s ear that I was Maurice Stoker’s wife and hadn’t been a virgin since I was twelve, and between that and my wiggling around he decided I was the flunkèd sister! So he got off me, thank the Founder—in fact, I could see he couldn’t do anything then, even if he’d wanted to; You know what I mean—and he started lecturing me about disgracing my sister Stacey. Honestly! Then Kennard took him into the Treatment Room to calm him down, even though Mr. Greene said he wouldn’t listen to any more of Kennard’s talk, because he was okay and it didn’t matter anyhow. But Kennard spoke to him very respectfully and said he wanted to ask advice instead of giving it …”
At this point, though my mind remained much on My Ladyship, I stopped listening to her story (which was growing somewhat hysterical anyway) in order to hear with delighted surprise Greene’s counsel to Dr. Sear.
“You ought to quit this playing Doctor and Patient,” he was saying severely. “It don’t become an educated man like yourself, that kind of smartness. And it don’t show proper respect for your wife, neither, that I’m sure is a good upstanding woman …”
“It was her idea,” Dr. Sear complained. His voice grew stubborn as a pre-schooler’s. “It was her crayons and popsicle-sticks, too.”
“That don’t matter,” Greene insisted. “You ought to have a proper self-respect for her. Take yourself, now: except for that there cancer you’re a healthy man! So don’t let your wife’s craziness fool you, all that drinking and messing around with floozies like Lacey—you got to learn to see through a woman like that.”
“I’ve seen,” Dr. Sear insisted half-heartedly.
“I wonder,” Greene chided. “Why, take away her failings and you’ve got a passèd wife and mother!”
“We have no children,” Dr. Sear dryly pointed out.
Greene was not abashed. “Get busy and have some, then! What’s a marriage without children?” Tears rose in his eyes; he fetched out his wallet. “Take a look at these kiddies here and tell me you don’t want a passel of your own! Aren’t they the passèdest little scapers you ever laid eyes on? They’re grown up now, of course …”
Though presumably he could not weep, Dr. Sear wiped the bandages near his eyes with a handkerchief and waved away the photographs as if the sight of them was more than he could bear. Greene sniffled and declared that, fool and flunker though he was in other respects, he’d been a loving father to his children, and Miss Sally Ann a loving mother, nobody could take that away from them, and in this conviction they
could go to the Gate content, fulfill-their-natural-purpose-on-this-campuswise. Satisfied, even inspired, I turned to Anastasia, and was surprised to observe that she too was in tears. I recalled her emotion on the occasion of my own recommending, for very different reasons, that Dr. and Mrs. Sear beget a child, and assumed that now, as then, she was weeping with pleasure for their sakes.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said cheerfully. “That’s about what I was going to tell Dr. Sear myself, with maybe one qualification; but it’s even better for him to hear it from Greene.” I gave her pretty rump a pat, and by way of a cordial tease declared it was high time she herself was bred; if Stoker wasn’t stud enough and Bray should miss his appointment, maybe I’d service her myself …
She cried, “You’re hateful!” and fled into the Reception Room. I followed after.
“I was only joking, Anastasia.”
“You don’t understand anything!” She turned on Mother, who was silently making the Enochist sign with her knit-work. “Will you stop that?”
Shocked as I was, I believed I saw through her anger then: so rare a thing was barrenness among the does, I could not keep in mind that My Ladyship was infertile. I had been tactless; no doubt she’d wanted to breed with Stoker, if only for the improvement that lactation would work upon her udder. I apologized sincerely, and by way of consoling her pointed out that Mrs. Lucius Rexford, for example, was all but flat-chested despite her having been freshened once or twice by the Chancellor; also that I’d heard it claimed (by the free-speaking inmates of Main Detention) that there were men who actually preferred rather udderless women. For all I knew, Maurice Stoker might belong to that fraternity.
She pummeled at my head.
“Stop it, Anastasia! I don’t understand this at all!”
Our scuffling brought Greene and Sear from the Treatment Room; as soon as they opened the door My Ladyship fled inside, turning her face from them. Greene curled his lip, even spat in her direction. Dr. Sear’s reaction I couldn’t observe, owing to the bandages, but we greeted each other warmly. He was delighted to learn I’d overheard his conversation with Greene and approved his reasoning; he embraced us by turns, nowise amorously, and though he was unable to weep or sniffle, his voice caught at the notion of fathering a child.
“We tried last time, George, as you know,” he said with difficulty. “It was so outrageous, taking Heddy to bed—and at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, of all places, like freshman newlyweds! It should’ve been marvelously perverse, just as you intended, but when Hed put on her bridal nightie, and I thought of the incredible things we’d done over the semesters …” It was then, he said huskily, that the ceaseless flow of tears had commenced, and instead of mounting his wife, perversely, in the ordinary way, he had been smitten with the hopeless wish that they could be free, if only for an hour, of the burden of all they’d seen and done, and could come together in simple, bashful love. Impossible, of course: not distaste or disinclination but shame unmanned him; what kind of parents would they be, anyway? they sneered, and contemning each other and themselves they’d gone, she to the bottle and to Croaker in the lobby, he to the sleeping-capsules.
“It weren’t no proper way,” Greene said stoutly.
“Founder help me, George!” Sear exclaimed. “What a blind dunce I’ve been! If a man could only wipe the slate clean!”
“A fresh start,” Greene affirmed. “Being smart never made a man happy. Where there’s life there’s hope.”
The awful triteness of these sentiments made Sear sob. But dared he imagine, he asked me, that even with the aid of what he called “self-hypnotic autoamnesis” he could ever achieve enough unself-consciousness to make love to his wife—not to mention begetting a child in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel?
“If a person wishes hard enough,” Greene solemnly declared, “his wishes’ll come true. Say what you want.”
I smiled. “You might try, anyway, I think, if they’ll let Mrs. Sear leave the Asylum.” In his case, I decided, it was inadvisable to add that he needn’t worry if the plan misfired again, since failure and passage, rightly conceived, were not different. Judging from what he’d told Anastasia, he was acquainted with the truth of that paradox. “Forget about Taliped and Gynander as well as yourself,” I advised him. “Keep telling yourself that you’ll live happily ever after.”
“What I always say to myself,” Greene said: “I’m okay. And what the heck anyhow.”
Sear shook his head, unable to speak.
“I have some business with My Ladyship,” I said. “May I use the Treatment Room for a while?”
When he understood to whom the term referred, Dr. Sear readily granted permission, he being too unsettled to see more patients that day. But for all his absorption in his own “Assignment” (as he called the wife-bedding project), he ventured the opinion that “seeing through my ladyship” must mean denying my male sexuality—or better, affirming and embracing the female aspects which he claimed no male was without—in order to demonstrate that male and female were no realer than any other categories. Was that not the sense of my new Answer? And “overcoming my infirmity,” if he understood Sakhyanism correctly, ought similarly to mean denying either the difference between sick and well or the reality of the “I” alleged to be ill—an attitude he himself meant to take toward his squamous-cell carcinoma if he could. “After all,” he said, “if I’m dying of cancer, then cancer is living of me: in the Founder’s eyes it’s all the same, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “You may be right, sir. But what the heck anyhow.”
He put a fist to his bandaged brow. “I see, I see!” He might have embraced me again, but Greene held up a finger and said, “Ah-ah.”
“Flunk me for ever doubting You, George! You really are the Grand Tutor!”
I shook my head, but Mother in the corner said, “A-plus.”
“A-plus indeedy,” Greene agreed, but added that in his opinion Grand Tutors should have no traffic with the flunkèd likes of Lacey Stoker.
“I’ll be okay,” I assured him, and pointed out that even Enos Enoch in His term had passed a floozy or two. “It’s a curious thing,” I said to Dr. Sear, more seriously; “I think I understand you two pretty well, for instance, and Max and Dr. Eierkopf and the rest. Even Maurice Stoker I can see through, more or less. But My Ladyship’s a mystery; I never know what to make of her.”
“I feel the same durn way about Sally Ann,” Greene confessed.
“I used to think I knew Hedwig inside out,” said Dr. Sear. “But now sometimes I wonder whether I’ve ever known her at all. Or anything, for that matter.”
We may not have been thinking of the same thing: Anastasia’s mysteriousness, I felt, was not just the famous unpredictability of human women or the celebrated difference between male and female points of view; it had rather to do with the insufficiency of any notion I entertained of her. I was reminded of a time long past, in the barns, when Max, more familiar to me than my own face, had seemed suddenly, unbearably other than myself: a stranger, alien and distinct; as who should find that his arm or leg has a will not his, a personality of its own. But in the case of Anastasia this foreignness was the more conspicuous for its contrast with our obscure intimacy: I had never bit Max in a sidecar, after all, or serviced him memorially, or declared to him despite myself (strange words) “I love you!” or chosen him, in the days of my error, as my first Tutee. Bright as Anastasia’s eyes shone on me, I could not see what lay behind their luminosity, or account for her behavior.
“In any case,” I said, “I’ve felt for some time that until I see through My Ladyship I can’t be sure I understand anyone, myself included. That’s the only thing I believed last spring that I still believe.”
“I see your point,” Dr. Sear said. “I may question your definition of the term, but I certainly agree with the principle.”
“If you’ll excuse me, then …” I smiled. “I’m going to try to learn all there is to know about My Ladyship.”
; He opened and closed his hands and admitted he’d like nothing better than to watch us from the Observation Room, but acceded to Greene’s veto of that idea. He could not refrain from pointing out, however, that the Treatment Room was soundproof; that if Anastasia had truly become her old obliging self again, one could do what one pleased with her; but that a closet near the couch was stocked with manacles, whips, and other instruments of sportive interrogation should I need or desire them.
“Now you quit that,” Greene scolded. But he bade me anxiously to be careful, for though he was sure I’d never step out of line, take-advantage-of-the-weaker-sexwise, we would be durned if a floozy like Lacey couldn’t lead The Living Sakhyan Himself astray—look what she’d done to him behind the Old Chancellor’s Mansion! I promised to keep both eyes open, reminded Dr. Sear that I sought merely illumination, not gratification of any appetite, normal or abnormal, and went into the Treatment Room, closing the door behind me.
Anastasia sat half-turned on the leathern couch, hiding her face in its arm and her own. I sat down to apologize for any hurt I’d done her feelings unintentionally; but as soon as I touched her hip in a conciliatory way, she flung herself upon me and wailed into my chest that she was the unhappiest woman on campus, and wished herself passed and gone.
I was freshly confounded. “Then you aren’t angry at me for teasing you about being sterile? It was thoughtless.”
She sniffled into my jail-coat that she knew I hadn’t meant to be tactless, and that anyhow her infertility had been attested by Dr. Sear to be psychological rather than physiological, and thus perhaps not a permanent condition. She drew back to look at me, blushing and grave. “Human women don’t have heats, You know, George—I remember Maurice telling You something silly about that at the Powerhouse—but we’re supposed to have orgasms, and for some reason I don’t. Kennard says there might be a connection between that and not having babies.”
