Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

  “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?”

&
nbsp; 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.”

  Charlie was pricked.

  “At least I’m no rapist!” he cried.

  “And I’m no ex-whore!” said Cornell, tossing his head in the style he had learned from TV and movies for the expressing of indignation. But it felt strange in these clothes. He must get back into his own, and go home, put on his rightie and drink his warm milk and swallow his pill, and wake up tomorrow morning in reality again—in fact, as a janitor.

  “Get out of my house!” shouted Charlie. “I don’t have to take that sort of thing.” He stamped his foot and looked as if he might burst into tears, revealing a petulant side of his nature that Cornell had never suspected. And he, Georgie Cornell, was supposedly the emotional cripple! He raised his eyebrows and flattened his mouth.

  “You belong in the toilets!” Charlie added, his red, wet, corpulent face quivering with spite.

  Cornell tore his purse from the knob, slammed the door, and marched furiously down the stairs. Well, that was the end of his friendship with Charlie! He had been a fool to drink so much. Reaching the ground floor and the trash-strewn entrance hall, he felt as though he might throw up, but a man was just coming in from the street, a pretty young fellow hardly more than an adolescent, and Cornell’s competitive feelings triumphed over his queasiness. His hand went from his mouth to his hair—and he felt the female wig, looked down and saw the woman’s brogues and the cuffs of the feminine trousers.

  “Excuse me?” asked the young man, fluttering his false eyelashes. “Were you looking for some company?” He was obviously a cheap little streetwalker who took Cornell for a woman.

  “No!” Cornell said in a near-screech. He turned his head and left the building, walking rapidly, awkwardly, in the heavy shoes.

  His clothes! But he simply could not face returning to Charlie’s apartment at this moment. He should not have drunk so much, true; but Charlie had behaved very badly. What a fraud Charlie was. The corduroys and bald head, the cigar and dirty pictures, were but the stage properties for a childish fantasy. Tell him a real story of the worm turning and see him blanch. Charlie was pathetic, but it would take a while to forgive him. Other men were so self-indulgent.

  Terror time: two women turned the corner and came his way. He held his breath and attempted a woman’s walk: square-shouldered, no undue tension in the calves, a coarse, preoccupied expression, and hands swinging.

  They went by without a glance. He had made it! In exultation he looked back. They had stopped. A lighter flared. One sucked on a pipe. The other looked at Cornell, who quickly turned away, too quickly, flipping his hips.

  “Hey, don’t I know you?” called the one without the pipe.

  Cornell began to scurry.

  “Hey!”

  Easy, easy, Cornell told himself, don’t run. Play it smart. It was the worst advice. He stopped, swiveled his head, and said: “Oh, hi.”

  Within a few moments he was arrested as a transvestite by this team of plainclotheswomen. As irony would have it, they were off duty, on their way home from the prizefights.

  Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

  GROVER CLEVELAND, 1905

  3

  “IT WAS THE WALK,” said Detective Elaine Stedman, as they took him to the precinct station.

  “You’re awful big for a woman, and then the walk,” added Detective Carol Corelli, who was herself a big girl, five-foot six or seven, with the weight to go with it. Cornell was five nine. “If you’re going to go in for these kind of things you ought to get the walk down pat.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve worn this type of shoe,” Cornell said ruefully. “They’re so heavy.” He tried to imitate the officers’ long, flatfooted stride; not that it made any difference now.

  “And for shit sake,” Corelli said, in the same not unfriendly tone, “there was some small chance you might have got away with it if you hadn’t been swinging a purse!”

  “Oh, Mary!” said Cornell. “I forgot about that.”

  Corelli guffawed. Her arm was linked with Cornell’s, and she jostled him.

  Stedman was less jocular. “You pervs!” she said. “Maybe the doctors are right: you want to get caught, deep down.”

  Corelli agitated his arm again. “This is just a job for us. Don’t get the idea we like it”

  “You’ve certainly been decent,” said Cornell. “Thank you for not handcuffing me.”

  Stedman said roughly: “We ain’t doing you a favor. That’s policy now. The public might think we was collaring a real woman. How would that look?”

  Cornell’s despair inhibited him from attempting to explain how he had come to this pass. And insofar as he had first put on the clothes voluntarily, he was a transvestite. If such practices were against the law, and they were, he deserved to be punished. He would surely do better to keep mute until he was formally charged, and perhaps even then as well, and at the trial throw himself on the court’s mercy. He certainly could not implicate Charlie.

  But he did not know how much torture he could endure. The police had a fearsome reputation.

  At the station he was booked by a fat sergeant; his purse was emptied and the contents inventoried. He was given a receipt. Then he was fingerprinted.

  “Here’s another mistake,” Cornell said, holding up one of Cornell’s pink-painted nails. She shook her swarthy, pockmarked face.

  Cornell grimaced helplessly.

  He was told to wait on a wooden bench against a dirty wall. He sat down between a wino with a purple face and green teeth and a youthful offender who suffered from acne. The latter wore a black-leather jacket studded in chrome; the former, a vomit-stained ex-Army overcoat. Because of the wino’s stench, Cornell moved closer to the youth, who promptly spoke to him.

  “Hey, girlie, you wouldn’t have a butt on you?”

  “No, and I don’t imagine we are allowed to smoke in here anyway,” Cornell said primly, drawing his knees together.

  “Mother’s milk!” cried the youth, her sneer erecting her pimples. “You’re a perv! Get away from me.” She shoved him towards the wino and shouted at the desk sergeant: “I don’t wanna share no cell with a perv. I got my rights.”

  The sergeant ignored this protest, but soon a uniformed officer came and took the juvenile through a door to the rear of the station.

  “Knifed another kid,” said the wino, in quite a reasonable voice despite her infamous appearance. “That type of punk ought to be locked up. Crime against the person. That’s bad. What you do don’t hurt nobody.”

  Strange where one found sympathy. Cornell smiled at the derelict, who showed some faint evidence of having once been a winsome woman; nor was she all that old. What was her story? But he knew better than to ask. He merely smiled at her.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” the wino said. “You’re disgusting. I just say you’re harmless.” And with that she passed out and fell towards him. He leaped up and gave her the rest of the bench.

  “O.K., Georgie,” Corelli said, coming to fetch him. “Let’s have a little talk.” She led him down a corridor and into a little interrogation room furnished with a plain wooden table and several chairs, on one of which Stedman was already seated, her jacket open and her holster showing.

  No rubber hoses or thumbscrews were in evidence, and no spotlight to turn into one’s eyes. Already Cornell had begun to understand that much of the legend about the police was exaggerated. These two detectives, for example. They were rather pleasant-looking women. Stedman might even be called handsome in a rugged sort of way. There was a glint of ha
rdness in her hazel eye, but not, Cornell thought, anything like potential cruelty. And Corelli had a certain sweetness about her.

  She put her hand on his wrist now, and said kindly: “Tell us about yourself, Georgie. Contrary to what you’ve probably heard, we really want to help people like you.” She unbuttoned her rumpled suit jacket and her tight collar, and loosened the tie.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” she said, with an amiable wink. “It might turn you on to wear a tie, but I can’t wait to get home at night and take mine off. Whoever invented that style for women ought to be sent up the river for life.”

  The reference to imprisonment was, however, chilling to Cornell.

  “I don’t suppose you would believe,” he said quietly, “that this is the first time I’ve ever worn one.”

  Corelli moved her heavy shoulders. “It’s no skin off my ass. Tell us about it”

  But Stedman broke in coldly. “Are you a fag, Georgie?” Cornell vigorously shook his head.

  “Let me put it another way,” Stedman said, her eyes stern. “Do you have, or have you ever had, intimate sex relations with another man? Now we want you to think about that for a while. There’s a pretty wide range, see. What about when you were in school? Think back. Many guys engaged in a little mutual masturbation when they were that age. Nothing really criminal in that, but it’s indicative, see.”

  “Never,” said Cornell. “Absolutely never. I never even much liked other boys and men. I’ve had few friends.”

  “Never the friendly squeeze of a pecker? Come on, Georgie. It’ll show up eventually anyway. Might as well get it over with.”

  “Nothing whatever,” Cornell insisted. “I don’t care how far back you look, you’ll find I’m clean.”