Regiment of Women (26 page)

“Push? You see it as aggression?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“But you did say ‘push.'” She grinned. “Dancing is supposed to be pleasure, is it not?”

“But it involves two persons,” said Cornell. “That means someone has to lead. Otherwise you'd bump into each other.”

“O.K., then tell me this: what happens when both persons are more or less of an equal size?”

Cornell shrugged. “If another guy really wants to lead, I'd let him. I certainly wouldn't struggle over it. As you say, dancing is supposed to be fun. Anyway, I forget whom I'm dancing with. I shut my eyes.” He deliberated for a moment. “Not everything is a matter of domination.”

“If you really understood that, Georgie, you wouldn't be here. Intellectual opinions are another thing than emotional convictions. But we're making progress.” She went again to the record rack. “How about something fast? The kind of thing you dance to without holding your partner. Wasn't that in fashion in your day?”

He was reminded of her youth. She was smaller, softer, and younger than he: yet she was the doctor and he the patient.

She held up a disc. “How about ‘Rattrap'? Do you recall it? Is it fast?” She looked again at the label. “By Ruthless Ruth and the Rowdies.”

“Well, now I
am
telling the truth,” said Cornell. “I really didn't like that kind of dancing.”

“So, even though you forget your partner, you want to be held. That's significant.” She smiled up at him.

“Whatever you say, Lieutenant.” He sighed and sat down on the stool. Larry, the doll, stared glassily at him.

Lieutenant Aster put the record away and sat down on the bed. “All right,” she said. “We won't bother with that, then. We'll work on the slow songs. There's something there that hasn't quite emerged. Why, if you loved to dance and were very good at it, did you resist when I went to take you in my arms? And explain that strange remark about being an object, please.”

“I've changed since those days.” Cornell touched one of Larry's little silver slippers. “I used to play with dolls, too, at one time.”

“You've got older.”

“I guess.”

“That happens to every boy. You can't change that, but you
can
change your attitude towards it.”

“Why isn't growing old the horror to women that it is to men?”

The lieutenant congratulated him. “Excellent question, Georgie! Do you remember our conversation about relative sizes?”

“I don't remember any
conversation,”
said Cornell. “I remember
your
theory.”

She looked as though she wanted to frown but suppressed the urge in favor of her good-humored optimism, if that is what it could be called. Perhaps he was only imagining this conflict. But perhaps her good humor was another face of tyranny. However benevolent she seemed, she
had
deliberately hurt him in his most sensitive place.

She said brightly: “Oh, we agreed, don't you recall, that anatomical matters were superficial.”

“Yet you were able to get me in motion just now by hurting my testicles! Nature has cursed men with those awful, dangling, grotesque things.
You
don't have to worry about anything like that. You are smaller and weaker, but you don't have those stupid, useless, ugly, and vulnerable organs hanging outside your body. If you had squeezed harder just now, I'd be curled up on the floor in agony.”

Cornell seized Larry, raised the skirt and pulled down the wispy underwear. Larry gave his automatic greeting.

“Look at this ridiculous thing!” Cornell violently spread Larry's cold pink legs and jabbed at the tiny pudenda.

“
This
, and this alone, is why men are basically inferior! All that talk about spiritual and moral differences! Women would be just like men if they had a penis and balls. Why don't men play football? Because they might get hit there. And the same goes for boxing and wrestling. Women might be smaller, but they are invulnerable. It's nature's cruel joke to make men the larger and stronger sex and then give them this, which nullifies everything else.”

Cornell passionately ripped most of the clothing from Larry and waved the nude doll at the lieutenant. A shred of pantyhose hung from Larry's one leg.

“You don't know what it is to have this between your legs! It hangs there all your life. It bangs against your thighs when you run. It gets sweaty and itchy in hot weather. You bump into desk-corners and hurt yourself. Certain kinds of underpants give you a rash. Sometimes you sit down in a certain way or cross your legs and you squeeze it painfully. If anything goes wrong with your bladder, the doctor runs a tube up through the little hole in the end.”

He pointed at Larry's organ, but the plastic molding had not been so precise: the doll's phallus was not equipped with a terminal aperture. “A
huge
tube, thick as a pencil. And to take a semen specimen, the doctor goes in through your rectum and massages the prostate gland, and you ejaculate out front: you can't help it. Not to mention the milking process here: another thing you can't help. Men were constructed to be penetrated and manipulated!

“You might say this nasty thing can be controlled by anyone but its owner. A part of your own body that you can't manage! Can you imagine that? I can lift my arm when I want to, wiggle my fingers, kick my feet, wrinkle my nose.” He had dropped Larry to demonstrate these movements. “I can't move my ears, but neither do they do anything on their own. A penis gets hard and stands up of its own volition—or at the bidding of someone or something outside. When you're riding on a bus, for example. Or when you wake up in the morning and have to urinate. And there are other times.”

Cornell stopped here. He felt hot subcutaneous blood all over his body. He picked Larry up again.

The doll said: “Hi, I'm Larry—”

Cornell thrust it onto the vanity. “Why don't little girls play with dolls? Why do boys need little models, dummies, of themselves, to dress and rock to sleep, and why do they always like small, soft pets, puppies, hamsters, baby chicks?” He slapped Larry's bare crotch. “Because they have this filthy thing—and it's obscene even in its basic functions: urine and semen use the same passage. And it makes them feel totally helpless, and they need to have something living—or that pretends to live, like a doll, talks, opens its eyes—that they can control, or pretend to; that needs them, or pretends to, because nothing and no one really is controlled by or needs a man.”

Cornell could feel his mouth grinning in a ghastly, cruel way. “If you think of it, a penis is a sort of doll.” He seized Larry's miniature member and pantomimed erecting it—which couldn't really be done owing to the stiffness of the plastic and indeed the modest size of the shaft. In falsetto, Cornell said: “‘Hi, I'm Petey. Won't you be my friend?'”

Then in an access of fury, he found a manicure scissors and attacked Larry's pudenda, hacking away, trying to sever them. But the material was adamantine in this immovable part of the doll, and the scissors were dull. He produced only a few scratches and little curly hairlike wisps of pink plastic.

Lieutenant Aster spoke at last. He had forgotten she was there.

She said quietly: “Do it to your own.”

He dropped the scissors and began to cover Larry's nudity with the torn doll's clothes.

The lieutenant said: “If you hate it so much, why then when you were under the drug did you talk only of your fear of losing it?”

He was thirsty all at once. He picked up the milk shake and took the used straw in his lips.

“Georgie, life is not always easy for women either. Does it surprise you to hear that? And I don't mean simply the ulcers and high blood pressure which are traditional in businesswomen, and the greater incidence of heart attacks, the higher female death rate, etcetera. Those are after all the maladies of winners, the price that must be paid for success.”

The shake was lukewarm by now, and Cornell was incapable of compassion for women.

“There are others, however, many more than you would suppose, who cannot cope. They find it difficult to live as women—just as many males find it difficult to live as men. Emotionally disturbed males have more options. They wear women's attire, smoke pipes and cigars, attend boxing matches and football games and identify with the athletes, and so on: in other words, pretend they are women.

“Not so with psychoneurotic females. They seldom put on dresses, crochet, play with dolls, etcetera. No, no. Instead they try more and more strenuously to prove their femininity. If young enough they join the army and volunteer for combat. They go hunting on one of the big-game preserves. They practice karate and other martial arts. Or perhaps they simply get into street and barroom fights. They become auto racers, or merely drive theirs cars in a homicidal manner.

“Sooner or later, if they aren't killed in their violent professions or sports, they will blow out their brains. Many so-called hunting accidents are really intentional suicides.”

The lieutenant paused. Cornell sucked in more of the tepid milk shake. He had known the occasional girl of this absolute type, but actually all women had something of that character. They might be the creative sex, but they were also the destroyers. It was up to men to preserve and maintain—and be bored. Suicide was at least interesting. But you had to have the female tools to commit it: with his manicure scissors he couldn't even sever a doll's pecker.

“These of course are the spectacular types,” said the lieutenant. “At least they go out with a bang, some like the war heroes, in a blaze of glory. Others are not so glamorous. They are modest, mousy persons basically, but somewhere in their souls is a strain that yearns for the kind of assertion that is not possible without, the accompanying courage. They are quite as suicidal in the long run. They continue to live, but in pain, without satisfaction, without hope.”

“Yes,” said Cornell. “Yes.” But as the lieutenant proceeded, he realized she was still talking of the other sex.

“This kind of woman seldom understands her problem until it is too late for help. She grows more and more confused, more and more bitter. She does a bad job at her work, and she knows it; and while superficially she blames others, in her unconscious she is gradually being consumed by self-contempt. She is fortunate if she breaks down in some manner that is visible to her colleagues.”

“Like me,” said Cornell.

Lieutenant Aster's eyes rounded in assent. “Precisely, Georgie. Now, it is the conviction of my school that, contrary to the old psychiatry, the problems of women and men are interrelated. The old way was to treat disturbed women with lectures of the stiff-upper-lip sort and a vigorous regimen of calisthenics and cold showers.”

The lieutenant rubbed her smooth chin. “I've decided to take you into my confidence. I'm doing this because after only two days the results have far surpassed my expectations. The way you lost yourself in that dance, the passionate concentration, was remarkable. Followed by that extraordinary outburst, from the heart, concerning the love-hate relationship you have with your genitals. You may not yet be conscious of the gain, Georgie, but I
am
, and I assure you it is remarkable.

She leaned forward, a hand on each kneecap. Her trousers had ridden up, and white flesh showed between her olive-drab anklets and the cuffs. Years of wearing trousers wore all the hair off a woman's shins. A girl friend of Cornell's had once demonstrated that odd effect.

“I was permitted to have this room built in a storage area of the camp hospital. It is isolated and near the ambulance garage. As I mentioned, the powers that be were none too keen about the experiment in the first place. I bought the plywood for the partitions and the furniture from my own pocket and paid the camp carpenters, who worked here in their off-duty hours.”

She slapped her blunt knees and rose. “Well, Georgie, I must be going. I have other obligations, much as I'd like to give all my time to you. I must put in a shift on the neuropsychiatric ward, where the approach is orthodox. If you'd like to go to the lavatory now…? I won't be back for a few hours.”

Cornell found the blindfold and handed it to her.

She shook her head. “No need for that any more. Distraction is no longer a menace.”

She opened the door. Outside was a large, warehouse-like space, lighted here and there with bare bulbs and furnished with stacks of cartons and medical equipment, sun lamps, treatment tables, and those hatrack-shaped things with bottles hanging on them, which Cornell recognized from TV medical shows as being for blood transfusions.

He hesitated at the door. “Why, then,” he asked, “do I have to be locked up at all? I'm not going to run away. I've got no place to go, I assure you.”

Lieutenant Aster drew him away from the door and closed it. She sighed. “It's always hard to decide how much to tell a patient. There are sometimes unfortunate consequences: rivalries, for example. On the other hand, sometimes rivalry, envy, are beneficial. A healthy contest might develop between patients. They compete in a positive way, each determined to make more progress than the next.”

Cornell said: “You've got more of these special rooms, and patients?”

“Just one.”

“You don't want me to communicate with him?”

“Her,” said the lieutenant. “And not even by accident, on the way to the lavatory. At least not at this time. She hasn't yet made your progress, Georgie, and a confrontation might be unfortunate for both of you. Perhaps later on it might be possible to bring you together.”

She looked at the floor. “But I'm thinking about it.” She raised her eyes and clapped the small of his back. “But not yet.”

“I know who she is,” said Cornell.

Lieutenant Aster hunched her shoulders and opened the door. “Now, that's quite enough to digest for the moment. Perhaps I've already told you more than you should know at this point.”