334

by Thomas M. Disch

  Boz shrugged, long-suffering, ever-likable. “I thought it was funny.”

  “Ha,” laughed McGonagall, “that’s what you thought. But what did you feel? Did you want to strike her? Were you afraid? Or secretly pleased?”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  McGonagall’s living body sank into something pneumatic and blue and floated there like a giant white squid bobbing on the calm surface of a summer sea. “Well then, tell me about your sex life, Mrs. Hanson.”

  “Our sex life is pretty,” Milly said.

  “Adventurous,” Boz continued.

  “And quite frequent.” She folded her pretty, faultless arms.

  “When we’re together,” Boz added. A grace note of genuine self-pity decorated the flat irony of the statement. This soon he felt his insides squeezing some idle tears from the appropriate glands; while, in other glands, Milly had begun to churn up petty grievances into a lovely smooth yellow anger. In this, as in so many other ways, they achieved a kind of symmetry between them, they made a pair.

  “Your jobs?”

  “All that kind of thing is on our profiles.” Milly said. “You’ve had a month to look at them. A half hour, at the very least.”

  “But on your profile, Mrs. Hanson, there’s no mention of this remarkable reluctance of yours, this grudging every word.” He lifted two ambiguous fingers, scolding and blessing her in a single gesture. Then, to Boz: “What do you do, Boz?”

  “Oh. I’m strictly a husband. Milly’s the breadwinner.”

  They both looked at Milly.

  “I demonstrate sex in the high schools,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” McGonagall said spilling sideways meditatively over his blue balloon (like all very clever fat men he knew how to pretend to be Buddha), “what are thought to be marital difficulties have their origin in job problems.”

  Milly smiled an assured porcelain smile. “The city tests us every semester on job satisfaction, Mr. McGonagall. Last time I came out a little high on the ambition scale, but not above the mean score for those who eventually have moved on into administrative work. Boz and I are here because we can’t spend two hours together without starting to fight. I can’t sleep in the same bed anymore, and he gets heartburn when we eat together.”

  “Well, let’s assume for now that you are adjusted to your job. How about you, Boz? Have you been happy being ‘just a husband’?”

  Boz fingered the gauze knotted round his throat. “Well, no … I guess I’m not completely happy or we wouldn’t be here. I get—oh. I don’t know—restless. Sometimes. But I know I wouldn’t be any happier working at a job. Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.”

  “Have you ever had a real job?”

  “A couple times. I hated it. I think most people must hate their jobs. I mean, why else do they pay people to work?”

  “Yet something is wrong, Boz. Something is missing from your life that ought to be there.”

  “Something. I don’t know what.” He looked downhearted.

  McGonagall reached out for his hand. Human contact was of fundamental importance in McGonagall’s business. “Children?” he asked, turning to Milly, after this episode of warmth and feeling.

  “We can’t afford children.”

  “Would you want them, if you felt you could afford them?”

  She pursed her lips. “Oh yes, very much.”

  “Lots of children?”

  “Really!”

  “There are people, you know, who do want lots of children, who’d have as many as they could if it weren’t for the Regents system.”

  “My mother,” Boz volunteered, “had four kids. They all came before the Genetic Testing Act, of course, except for me, and I was only allowed then because Jimmy, her oldest one, got killed in a riot, or a dance, or something, when he was fourteen.”

  “Do you have pets at home?” McGonagall’s drift was clear.

  “A cat,” Boz said, “and a rubber plant.”

  “Who takes care of the cat mostly?”

  “I do, but that’s because I’m there through the day. Since I’ve been gone Milly’s had to take care of Tabby. It must be lonely for her. For old Tabbycat.”

  “Kittens?”

  Boz shook his head.

  “No,” Milly said. “I had her spayed.”

  Boz could almost hear McGonagall thinking: Oh ho! He knew how the session would continue from this point and that the heat was off him and on Milly. McGonagall might be right, or he might not, but he had an idea between his jaws and he wasn’t letting loose: Milly needed to have a baby (a woman’s fulfillment), and Boz, well, it looked like Boz was going to be a mother.

  Sure enough, by the end of the session Milly was spread out on the pliant white floor, back uparched, screaming (“Yes, a baby! I want a baby! Yes, a baby! A baby!”) and having hysterical simulated birth spasms. It was beautiful. Milly hadn’t broken down, really broken all the way down, and cried in how long? Years. It was one hundred per cent beautiful.

  Afterwards they decided to go down by the stairs, which were dusty and dark and tremendously erotic. They made it on the 28th floor landing and, their legs all atremble, again on the 12th. The juice shot out of him in dazzling gigantic hiccoughs, like milk spurting out of a full-to-the-top two-quart container, so much they neither could believe it: a heavenly breakfast, a miracle proving their existence, and a promise they were both determined to keep.

  It wasn’t all sweetness and roses, by any means. They had more paper work to do than from all the 1040 forms they’d ever prepared. Plus visits to a pregnancy counselor; to the hospital to get the prescriptions they both had to start taking; then reserving a bottle at Mount Sinai for after Milly’s fourth month (the city would pay for that, so she could stay on the job); and the final solemn moment at the Regents office when Milly drank the first bitter glass of the anticontraceptive agent. (She was sick the rest of the day, but did she complain? Yes.) For two weeks after that she couldn’t drink anything that came out of the tap in the apartment until, happy day, her morning test showed a positive reading.

  They decided it would be a girl: Loretta, after Boz’s sister. They redecided, later on: Aphra, Murray, Algebra, Sniffles (Boz’s preferences), and Pamela, Grace, Lulu, and Maureen (Milly’s preferences).

  Boz knitted a kind of blanket.

  The days grew longer and the nights shorter. Then vice versa. Peanut (which was her name whenever they couldn’t decide what her name really would be) was scheduled to be decanted the night before Xmas, 2025.

  But the important thing, beyond the microchemistry of where babies come from, was the problem of psychological adjustment to parenthood, by no means a simple thing.

  This is the way McGonagall put it to Boz and Milly during their last private counseling session:

  “The way we work, the way we talk, the way we watch television or walk down the street, even the way we fuck, or maybe that especially—each of those is part of the problem of identity. We can’t do any of those things authentically until we find out who we really are and be that person, inside and out, instead of the person other people want us to be. Usually those other people, if they want us to be something we aren’t, are using us as a laboratory for working out their own identity problems.

  “Now Boz, we’ve seen how you’re expected, a hundred tiny times a day, to seem to be one kind of person in personal relationships and a completely different kind of person at other times. Or to use your own words—you’re ‘just a husband.’ This particular way of sawing a person in two got started in the last century, with automation. First jobs became easier, and then scarcer—especially the kinds of jobs that came under the heading of a ‘man’s work.’ In every field men were working side by side with women. For some men the only way to project a virile image was to wear Levi’s on the weekends and
to smoke the right brand of cigarette. Marlboros, usually.” His lips tightened and his fingers flexed delicately, as again, in his mouth and in his lungs, desire contested with will in the endless, ancient battle: with just such a gesture would a stylite have spoken of the temptations of the flesh, rehearsing the old pleasures only to reject them.

  “What this meant, in psychological terms, was that men no longer needed the same kind of uptight, aggressive character structure, any more than they needed the bulky, Greek-wrestler physiques that went along with that kind of character. Even as sexual plumage that kind of body became unfashionable. Girls began to prefer slender, short ectomorphs. The ideal couples were those, like the two of you as a matter of fact, who mirrored each other. It was a kind of movement inward from the poles of sexuality.

  “Today, for the first time in human history, men are free to express the essentially feminine component in their personality. In fact, from the economic point of view, it’s almost required of them. Of course, I’m not talking about homosexuality. A man can be feminized well beyond the point of transvestism without losing his preference for cunt, a preference which is an inescapable consequence of having a cock.”

  He paused to appreciate his own searing honesty—a Republican speaking at a testimonial dinner for Adlai Stevenson!

  “Well, this is pretty much what you must have heard all through high school, but it’s one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel it in your body. What most men felt then—the ones who allowed themselves to go along with the feminizing tendencies of the age—was simply a crushing, horrible, total guilt a guilt that became, eventually, a much worse burden than the initial repression. And so the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties was followed by the dreary Counter-revolution of the Seventies and Eighties, when I grew up. Let me tell you, though I’m sure you’ve been told many times, that it was simply awful. All the men dressed in black or gray or possibly, the adventuresome ones, a muddy brown. They had short haircuts and walked—you can see it in the movies they made then—like early-model robots. They had made such an effort to deny what was happening that they’d become frozen from the waist down. It got so bad that at one point there were four teevee series about zombies.

  “I wouldn’t be going over this ancient history except that I don’t think young people your age realize how lucky you are having missed that. Life still has problems—or I’d be out of work—but at least people today who want to solve them have a chance.

  “To get back to the decision you’re facing, Boz. It was in that same period, the early Eighties (in Japan, of course, since it would surely have been illegal in the States then), that the research was done that allowed feminization to be more than a mere cosmetic process. Even so, it was years before these techniques became at all widespread. Only in the last two decades, really. Before our time, every man had been obliged, for simple biological reasons, to deny his own deep-rooted maternal instincts. Motherhood is basically a psychosocial, and not a sexual, phenomenon. Every child, be he boy or girl, grows up by learning to emulate his mother. He (or she) plays with dolls and cooks mud pies—if he lives somewhere where mud is available. He rides the shopping cart through the supermarket, like a little kangaroo. And so on. It’s only natural for men, when they grow up, to wish to be mothers themselves, if their social and economic circumstances allow it—that is to say, if they have the leisure, since the rest can now be taken care of.

  “In short, Milly, Boz needs more than your love, or any woman’s love, or any man’s love, for that matter. Like you, he needs another kind of fulfillment. He needs, as you do, a child. He needs, even more than you do, the experience of motherhood.”

  5

  In November, at Mount Sinai, Boz had the operation—and Milly too, of course, since she had to be the donor. Already he’d undergone the series of implantations of plastic “dummies” to prepare the skin of his chest for the new glands that would be living there—and to prepare Boz himself spiritually for his new condition. Simultaneously a course of hormone treatments created a new chemical balance in his body so that the mammaries would be incorporated into its working order and yield from the first a nourishing milk.

  Motherhood (as McGonagall had often explained) to be a truly meaningful and liberating experience had to be entered into whole-heartedly. It had to become part of the structure of nerve and tissue, not just a process or a habit or a social role.

  Every hour of that first month was an identity crisis. A moment in front of a mirror could send Boz off into fits of painful laughter or precipitate him into hours of gloom. Twice, returning from her job, Milly was convinced that her husband had buckled under the strain, but each time her tenderness and patience through the night saw Boz over the hump. In the morning they would go to the hospital to see Peanut floating in her bottle of brown glass, pretty as a waterlily. She was completely formed now and a human being just like her mother and father. At those moments Boz couldn’t understand what all this agonizing had been about. If anyone ought to have been upset, it should have been Milly, for there she stood, on the threshold of parenthood, slim-bellied, with tubes of liquid silicone for breasts, robbed by the hospital and her husband of the actual experience of maternity. Yet she seemed to possess only reverence for this new life they had created between them. It was as though Milly, rather than Boz, were Peanut’s father, and birth were a mystery she might admire from a distance but never wholly, never intimately, share.

  Then, precisely as scheduled, at seven o’clock of the evening of December 24, Peanut (who was stuck with this name now for good and forever, since they’d never been able to agree on any other) was released from the brown glass womb, tilted topsy-turvy, tapped on the back. With a fine, full-throated yell (which was to be played back for her every birthday till she was twenty-one years old, the year she rebelled and threw the tape in an incinerator), Peanut Hanson joined the human race.

  The one thing he had not been expecting, the wonderful thing, was how busy he had to be. Till now his concern had always been to find ways to fill the vacant daylight hours, but in the first ecstasies of his new selflessness there wasn’t time for half of all that needed doing. It was more than a matter of meeting Peanut’s needs, though these were prodigious from the beginning and grew to heroic proportions. But with his daughter’s birth he had been converted to an eclectic, new-fangled form of conservatism. He started doing real cooking again and this time without the grocery bills rocketing. he studied Yoga with a handsome young yogi on Channel 3. (There was no time, of course, under the new regime for the four o’clock art movies.) He cut back his Koffee intake to a single cup with Milly at breakfast.

  What’s more, he kept his zeal alive week after week after month after month. In a modest, modified form he never entirely abandoned the vision, if not always the reality, of a better richer fuller and more responsible life-pattern.

  Peanut, meanwhile, grew. In two months she doubled her weight from six pounds two ounces to twelve pounds four ounces. She smiled at faces, and developed a repertoire of interesting sounds. She ate—first only a teaspoon or so—Banana-food and Pear-food and cereals. Before long she had dabbled in every flavor of vegetable Boz could find for her. It was only the beginning of what would be a long and varied career as a consumer.

  One day early in May, after a chill, rainy spring, the temperature bounced up suddenly to 70°. A sea wind had rinsed the sky from its conventional dull gray to baby blue.

  Boz decided that the time had come for Peanut’s first voyage into the unknown. He unsealed the door to the balcony and wheeled the little crib outside.

  Peanut woke. Her eyes were hazel with tiny flecks of gold. Her skin was as pink as a shrimp bisque. She rocked her crib into a good temper. Boz watched the little fingers playing scales on the city’s springtime airs, and catching her gay spirits, he sang to her, a strange silly song he remembered her sister Lottie singing to Amparo, a song that Lottie had heard her mother sing to Boz:

  Pep
si Cola hits the spot.

  Two full glasses, thanks a lot.

  Lost my savior, lost my zest,

  Lost my lease, I’m going west.

  A breeze ruffled Peanut’s dark silky hair, touched Boz’s heavier auburn curls. The sunlight and air were like the movies of a century ago, so impossibly clean. He just closed his eyes and practiced his breathing.

  At two o’clock, punctual as the news, Peanut started crying. Boz lifted her from the crib and gave her his breast. Except when he left the apartment nowadays, Boz didn’t bother with clothing. The little mouth closed round his nipple and the little hands gripped the soft flesh back from the tit. Boz felt a customary tingle of pleasure but this time it didn’t fade away when Peanut settled into a steady rhythm of sucking and swallowing, sucking and swallowing. Instead it spread across the surface and down into the depths of his breast; it blossomed inward to his chest’s core. Without stiffening, his cock was visited by tremors of delicate pleasure, and this pleasure traveled, in waves, into his loins and down through the muscles of his legs. For a while he thought he would have to stop the feeding, the sensation became so intense, so exquisite, so much.

  He tried that night to explain it to Milly, but she displayed no more than a polite interest. She’d been elected, a week before, to an important post in her union and her head was still filled with the grim, gray pleasure of ambition satisfied, of having squeezed a toe onto the very first rung of the ladder. He decided it would not be nice to carry on at greater length, so he saved it up for the next time Shrimp came by. Shrimp had had three children over the years (her Regents scores were so good that her pregnancies were subsidized by the National Genetics Council), but a sense of emotional self-defense had always kept Shrimp from relating too emphatically to the babies during her year-long stints of motherhood (after which they were sent to the Council’s schools in Wyoming and Utah). She assured Boz that what he’d felt that afternoon on the balcony had been nothing extraordinary, it happened to her all the time, but Boz knew that it had been the very essence of unusualness. It was, in Lord Krishna’s words, a peak experience, a glimpse behind the veil.