by Philip Wylie
He had wrestled with the conflict before. He wished he could someday learn more about the feelings of others who had never known any different sex mores. Even Leandra perplexed him. He knew she and he shared a deep sense of what he called “love.” But she had reverted to her indoctrinated ways without much trauma. Maybe she had had other lovers throughout their short affair and surely her necessary return to her old behavior had not caused her the same degree of pain he endured. It was necessary, as was his sexual activity, to maintain that “normal” posture, and not any great strain for her.
But there was a sting in Glenn’s spirit, somewhere. He couldn’t acknowledge jealousy—he had never been faithful, himself. But he couldn’t feel comfortable knowing that his lovely and intelligent Leandra was out having adventures with others, even strangers, as was he. Fun. Thrilling. And you found even a picked-up beauty sometimes related to you in more ways than those that were merely exciting and a wonderful, a happy release. Some became not just alluring women, then, not gorgeous professional call girls, but individuals, who expressed their inner selves and shared your self, as special, separate beings.
Then, too, those women with whom one had intercourse, for the permitted aim of becoming pregnant, didn’t just go through their and your intimacies as if you were mutually pleased by a meal and also hungry, or as if the thrilling (always!) events were for kicks and nothing else. The fact that they were with you to bear children changed each such woman. She felt special, elect, and felt you, her male of the hour, was as special. That gave those relationships a strange, extra quality that was a lovingness. These women would invariably pretend that their time with you wasn’t limited, but that you’d keep meeting to make love forever, or for a long time. And when they became pregnant (which was almost always and very soon, because of the drugs now controlling hormones and the reproductive process) they would try to keep sleeping with you, if that were possible. Their legal and moral and civil duty was done as was yours. But they’d phone, make a point of meeting you somewhere, and then their eyes would say, or they would say aloud, “Come! Let’s get in bed again! You must and I must because you are the father of my child and I, its mother, so the new life needs my erotic arousal by you, to produce a warrant of the truth: fatherhood, motherhood.”
Leandra had even suggested that Glenn’s willingness to respond to that strange, nonverbal yet valid-seeming plea was a “waste,” since her list of girls and grown women who were both lovely and could be or had been given a permit and the medication for his Alpha-plus insemination, was a very long list, and also, open-ended. Yet he continued covertly to “waste himself’ on those he’d gotten with child. After all, he rationalized, with the Aphron and allied medication he had become incredibly potent, fantastically desiring, and no day passed, or no day and night but that he made love to at least two or three women.
He also found it incomprehensible that Leandra, at first by seeming accident but later, with an “explanation,” watched these matings. And her “reason” was not quite as satisfying to Glenn as it seemed to be, to her. “If you don’t want me actually in the room, dear, we can use the visaphone and my wide screen. Then, I can have my lover do what you and your ‘she’ are doing and think it is you, especially—” she’d smiled openly, sincerely, with an expectancy of understanding, “since your girl will be one I chose for you—and so, me, in a way.”
He’d refused. She had insisted.
And she’d made her point by saying, “It would be regarded as totally normal by ‘them,’ darling. And so would a two-way screened display. You watching me and the man I have. Wouldn’t that be—exciting? And close? Closer than not being with each other?”
He agreed to having the facilities installed. But he found it hard to share Leandra’s feelings. Watching her at some moment of intense, multiple orgasm, with a male he had not even seen, while her gaze was not on the man but on the photophonic transmitter so that she climaxed with her eyes seeking his, finding them, even, was anguish for him. Granting, as he had to, that all this was done to conceal a purpose as valuable as, Glenn had told himself, more valuable than, thousands of lives and endless loves, he still felt diminished by this arrangement.
In later discussions he had asked Leandra, “Did you ever make love with a woman?”
“Didn’t you ever, with a male? Man? Boy?”
Leandra had sighed, then, sitting in his living room and sharing their usual double drink. “I was about to ask you why? But I guess I know: Me, the history major.” She gazed at him fondly for a while and finally said, “In your times, I know, homosexuals were regarded as criminals, perverts or worse. And it is, as a basic sexual means to satisfaction, still seen to be abnormal when exclusive, in men. It may also be males aren’t as sexually open, and for cause, as we.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, in all our human past, a woman had to mate with, marry, the best of those males who offered. But a man, any one as similarly bewitching as you, and as I, too, had the chance to pick from hordes of females. Women hadn’t, anyhow, in a million human past years. So? So she may be genetically—what?—more open to all sexuality as appealing—because she must settle for somebody who—asks. If it’s so—and it’s good anthropology, isn’t it?—a normal female may be far less—oh—put off, say, by the idea of making love with another female—than men are.”
He thought that over. Then he smiled a little. “There was a myth,” he said slowly, “in my era, that claimed any woman who once was throughly made love to by another, never, after that, was interested in men, at least, that much.”
Leandra’s response surprised and even alarmed him. It was to go to the wall panel, push a button and request that Lysette come up for some sex teaching. Glenn tried to prevent it but Leandra smiled and refused.
“Your ‘myth’ wasn’t true, of course. But did you ever see women making sexual love?”
“In stag movies, sure. And once or twice when parties got out of control.”
“You love me?” The slanted brown eyes were direct, hot, honest.
“Yes.”
“But you never loved another woman—?”
“I have so! And for quite long spells. Not, though, long enough to make them my wife, wives.”
Leandra was trembling with a curious unawareness of it, and she said, only, “Then, watch a woman you love, making love with a woman, girl, you at least enjoy and like.”
He did.
And what Leandra had meant became clear. It did teach Glenn. Whether or not he could apply the lesson with parallel effect, he could not say. But the long-haired, dark, French-descended Lysette and Leandra, naked and engaged in their most skilled efforts to rouse the most intense and complete erotic pitch in each other, communicated by no words but in a language of sensing and doing, in a kinetic reciprocation, were stunning. Glenn realized why stag shows were so largely this scene. It wasn’t that such passion was freer, because free of such things as pregnancy or disease—or failure, brutality, clumsiness—which released them, but something else.
They took time and took time to “learn” each other. They found places, pressures, durations, wishes for returns to once-stimulated sites, preferences, manners desired, and all similar coordinates that Glenn didn’t know could be so important. And when one wished to come, she indicated that, aware that the other would be even more delighted when her turn came.
Afterward, Leandra lay still, smiling at Glenn. Lysette smiled, too—at Leandra. And Glenn, in a state of extreme physical desire, simply stared. Finally, he said, “Thank you both. That was a sort of graduate lesson. I think you taught me a lot.”
Lysette turned to him, her jingle-bell laughter and her not “naughty” but sexy eyes blazing. “Monsieur! If that is so, you must prove it to us both!”
Glenn felt dazed and his answer surprised him. “That’s wonderful of you. But I think, maybe, I need help? A sort of critical teacher? For one, and then the other?”
Leandra spoke sleepily though she
was far from that state. “Yes. I hoped for that. I shall be your girl guide with Lysette—I’m hostess, right? Then, perhaps, with that practice, you and she will—make Leandra go far, far out.”
In the weeks afterward Glenn found a certain sense of repulsion he’d had in this area was actually a sense of guilt or fear, of bias owing to imperceived truths. He forgave his stag-movie-addicted friends a great deal. He also knew that, when carrying out his civic duties as an Alpha-plus, if he ever fell short of the goal, he would ask for aid. For Lysette. Even, Leandra. But the removal of that inhibition, the insights it gave him to employ, still failed to convert Glenn to the sex games and their constancy, their delight, as a completely ideal set of mores, or of “nonmorals.” Jealousy, rare in him before, ebbed away completely, now. He could watch Leandra and a lover and merely take delight in her ecstatic attainment and her ensuing repose. Happy in his beloved’s joy.
And when Lysette was with child by him, he could and did respond to her desire as she brought his breakfast, came up to “dust,” or to turn down the bed at night. Only—as Leandra had said—it was a “waste”: pregnant women had “odd fantasies.” But what was odd, Glenn wondered and dared not ask, about a mother-to-be of a man’s child wanting that real father again—or, in Lysette’s case—wanting the chance to make oral love, not to protect her inhabited womb, but to show she could always gratify her child’s father?
The whole thing was muddled, he knew.
How, he could not discover, for a long while.
He’d once written an (unsigned) article in his largest, mass-circulation magazine, saying that mankind had never yet found out its meant, innate or ideal, sex mores. It was true of current (then) behavior with its fundamentalist repression by means of filthifying all sex as a barrier. True among promiscuous adults, in “unisex” groups, and everywhere. Nobody knew the right code and all the known codes had been unsuccessful save, perhaps, for some preliterate peoples like the Polynesians. But even their extraordinarily effective creed, that let the children learn sex together in special houses, let the adolescents sleep with one another at will, and then ended in marriages that rarely were failures—even they hadn’t a sexual pattern that technological man could use.
For a constantly unfaithful spouse was simply moved into the lover’s home. The deserted partner found another quickly. And besides, two or three times a year, villages celebrated with other villages and their feasts involved a cancellation of the usual custom. For some days, any man or woman could make love with any other in the visiting or visited village. That would not work in Los Angeles! Besides, Polynesians loved all babies and children! So that vital matter of “tender loving care” was perfectly resolved. But what about those scores of millions of Americans who did not, could not or would not love even their own offspring, let alone, the whole world’s? What about the sickening adult minority, that great one, of children born against the intent and will of their parents?
In Los Angeles, in 2017, people did treasure all children and cared for them lovingly, in their homes, or in special child-adult apartments where everybody was a father or mother to all young people. But it wasn’t quite the Polynesian kind of lovingness: that natural art was gone, after the missionaries arrived and made love a sin and vile. What, then, was hauntingly inadequate or wrong or even vicious, here? The answer, as a general feeling, was easy. Everything was done to suit a wholly impersonal, an actually apersonal aim: improve the breed by preventing the genetically flawed from having children. Was that all?
Not quite! When sex was classified and regulated till it lost some spontaneity and had no lasting linkage, when it was ordered for a scientific end, however rational, and even though the people were, from birth, manipulated, reared, pleasured sexually so as to make that ultimate end seem proper and “rational”—something left you, something that is male for males, Glenn knew, and female for them. Couldn’t they, he speculated, rear children with enough genetic knowledge so they’d pick suitable mates themselves?
But the answer was a negation, I might pick Leandra but she would be wrong from the overview, being unlikely to bear. I would not pick Lysette for a wife; only, for a doll. She would rate genetically a better choice than my Leandra. And, in any case, from the mathematical and genetic viewpoint, as an Alpha-plus male, it would be sensible, even necessary, for me to impregnate as many women as possible, or, at least a great many.
This, he thought, was the opposite of castration. He and others were not desexed but sexually augmented, used, pushed, made supersexed, in a way which, given that view, was not too different from castration. You could not. Or you must, incessantly. Either one was a state you weren’t able to choose, or change. And this pan-sexual society was reared to make that prosexed activity acceptable.
Such mental self-chastisement and questioning occupied him as he lay beside the sleeping Leandra on the night when he’d almost given away the fact that he and she were behaving “normally” for some purpose. He was wide awake. And he realized, finally, it was owing to the fact that he had never before realized that while “his” Leandra was now taking lovers, as was he, for the sake of appearances, she had done that even in their interval of what he’d assumed a complete sharing of each other only. That shocked him and he muttered her name.
She woke and sat up so he asked her.
“One or two,” she said, sleepily. “Or three. Or so. I had to keep myself in line, of course. So I did. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
It hurt. But he wasn’t going to show the pain. She raised her arms up in the dark, presently, and laughed. “I was just thinking. Your partners are my choices, mainly. So you suggested tonight that maybe you ought to choose some for me? It was sarcasm, surely. But look! Mr. Glenn Howard, you are becoming a very big person in USA. On the Board, even! You meet many fascinating men. So, yes, do send me some! It would make me enjoy it more because it would be you—indirectly.”
He said, “Sure. I guess so.”
He didn’t mean it. Or, did he? Was he pleased his “infidelities” were Leandra chosen? Did that or anything matter except smashing USA, Inc.? He couldn’t judge.
And he fell asleep wearily, much later, worrying now about the lass Leandra was assigning to him for the next afternoon. He couldn’t imagine her, whoever, however lovely, as Leandra by proxy. Or could he—if he tried?
Wasn’t he relieved that she chose for him?
But why didn’t this seem enough, or, right?
And his answer came:
Men and women just are not interchangeable—like spare parts. Each is a whole, and each, unique. When you lost that awareness you lost—your very self.
And, here in this place, that loss was a principal aim of education and of all else the remnant civilization was told, shown, allowed to discuss, even, to think about. No person is a true proxy for any other.
Males and females can mate indiscriminately. They can be induced, if caught early, to do so—and even within special limits. But something vital was suppressed, mashed, taken away utterly, by that rule.
All men are part of the Maine, as Donne said. But each is his own part and like no other. To pretend otherwise is to diminish the “Maine,” the whole cosmos.
But nobody, his mind went on while Leandra again fell asleep, even guesses how it will be from where it is and they are. This “new world” was like Huxley’s, in a way: promiscuity was a mere custom, accepted, constant and enjoyed; but Huxley had imagined sex-as-fun because he’d also imagined his new people would create their offspring in lab glassware. Orwell foresaw this power of a central, tyrannical government, all-seeing and entirely upended so love was hate, truth was lies, and so on. Here, there was no Big Brother, but a Board of Directors. The “big-brother-is-watching-you” was selective, here, far from common and not employed to create universal dread so much as for “scientific” reasons.
Glenn pursued those ideas of dire prophets with some hope of help for his own mind. One could say both Orwell and Huxle
y were “close,” in one way, for each: Sex loosed and dictatorship absolute, true. But who saw the real image of the greatest, most certain and by far the worst events in a short future, the eco-cataclysms that had occurred in less than a half century? Malthus? He had come closer than those later-day doom-designers.
Enough was known by 1971, and years earlier, to guarantee man had actually or nearly so contaminated and disordered and denuded and destroyed his habitat and the chain-of-life he depended on even to breathe, to have a steady earth temperature, for water he could safely use for his needs, for food enough—let alone, food sufficiently non-toxic—with all sorts of other truths, thousands—known surely enough in the Sixties, his own “period,” to make it absolutely certain man’s ways, technological, “scientific” (but not truly that) his “civilization” and those aspiring to its bounties, could not be sustained by any means whatever at the going rate or for very long at any similar rate. His expected numbers, his plans for providing for them, or even some of them, added up to zero, to the impossible. The only missing datum was—when?
And that was the cause of the failure. “Not in my life,” we said, Glenn mused sadly. After me—the deluge? Apocalypse. After me. And mine. Later. Sometime in the century beyond us. But there had been no excuse for the illusion, the insane myth. Now, this. And was this, USA, Inc., what he found as a mere result of the clear truth no one could bear to glance at, save a handful of scientists, biologists, specialists, there?
Who could tell? Other nations were similarly governed, bred, by even more ghastly means. Some would perish of their very inhumanity. Would any recover—and if so, recover what? That dignity of man which abides only in his opportunity to determine who he is, what he does, how he thinks, insofar as that liberty does not lead him to impinge on the same freedom of others? A truth that the young revolutionaries of Glenn’s age didn’t manage to grasp, he thought sourly. They sought identity, they said, and in that process they fled from any and every means of self-identification. They dared not face what they were and who they were not, that they imagined they were and imagined as so great!
