Giles Goat Boy (80 page)

“I think you should stay here and keep your eyes and ears open,” I told him, as if I were the doctor and he my patient. “I have an idea.” He consented readily, and I made haste to leave the observation-chamber, closing its door behind me as he stepped to the window and Dr. Sear into the Receiving Room.

“Founder’s sake, George!” The doctor’s brows drew down around his little bandage at sight of me, but his frown was amused. He looked back quickly to assure himself that he’d closed the door, and glanced about at the empty office.

“Greene’s in there with the dog-people,” I said; “I’m not sure about the cat-girl.” As he searched my expression for a hint of how much I knew, I smiled and apologized for once again interrupting his wife’s therapy. Hastily then I explained why I had sent Greene to him for sophisticating, especially in the matter of Anastasia’s innocence, and echoed his own suggestion that the treatment-in-progress might be as
therapeutic for Greene to witness as it no doubt was for Mrs. Sear to receive—the more so in view of Mrs. Stoker’s new forwardness.

“Frightfully irregular,” Dr. Sear said, apropos equally of my proposal and Anastasia’s behavior. “Officeful of patients …” But when I volunteered to assist the proceedings in any way I could, in return for his advice on the matter of my alleged infirmity, he admitted that the idea was too entertaining to resist, therapeutic or not.

“It’s five o’clock anyhow,” he said; “I’ll send for an orderly to take the patients back to their wards.” He proposed further, in an offhand tone, that I join his wife and Anastasia in the Treatment Room while he shared the observation-chamber with Greene, the better to interpret for him what he saw and translate his reaction into therapy. It wanted no great sophistication to discern something more in this suggestion than disinterested goodwill: so much the better, I decided, for Greene’s education in the ways of the campus. As for me, inhibition in matters erotic was one infirmity, at least, which kidship had spared me: though my experience was small, shame and shyness in such affairs were emotions I knew chiefly at secondhand, from books and hearsay. Leaving Dr. Sear to his business, I strode therefore unabashedly into the Treatment Room, bid the ladies a very good evening, and inquired of Anastasia, not without irony, whether I could assist in any wise her charitable nurse-work.

She made a sound and leaped from her labors; batted at her blouse and Mrs. Sear’s skirt; snatched up a cast-off underthing—then reddened and defied me, balling the dainty in her hand.

“The
nerve
, George!”

She would have bolted, I daresay, but that she felt responsibility for Mrs. Sear, who, still upon the couch, groggily bade her back to love. I begged her to continue the therapy as if I were Dr. Sear; I quite understood, I assured her, that in medical emergencies common restraints must be put by, and that her present connection with the patient was as impersonal as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for example.

Mrs. Sear raised her head to squint at me and said: “Balls.” Then she flopped chuckling onto her belly and thrust up her haunches. “I’m a nanny!”

“Oh, Heddy!” On the edge of tears, Anastasia hastened to pull the woman’s skirt-hem down; but Hedwig frisked it up again and bleated into the couch-cushion.

“Please
go!
” Anastasia cried to me.

Dr. Sear spoke from a loudspeaker: “No no, Stace, it’s quite all
right. Would you just service Hed once, please, George? Do her a campus of good.”

“Ba-a-a, ba-a-a,”
said Mrs. Sear—presumably mimicking a doe, though the noises were meaningless. Anastasia looked with nervous indignation at a dark mirror on one wall, which I took to be the observation-window.

“I’d really rather not,” I said in that direction. “I’m
not
a goat, you know: that’s one of the things I wanted to discuss with you. Shouldn’t Mrs. Stoker go on with the treatment?”

“Ba-a-a!”
Mrs. Sear now wriggled; and bald as was her rump compared to any doe’s, and gaunt next to supple Anastasia’s, I had not unlearnt my buckish indiscrimination, and was stirred a little.

“This is
awful!
” Anastasia cried. “I’m going home, Kennard!”

But I caught her elbow as she swept doorwards. “Please don’t leave. I’m sorry if I spoke unkindly; it surprised me a little to see you taking the lead for a change.”

Perhaps forgetting that what she held was no handkerchief, she dabbed with the underthing at her splendid eyes and declared: “It’s your fault; I’ve never done it before.” By
it
I assumed she meant taking the initiative, since the therapy itself I understood to have been common practice in Mrs. Sear’s case. And I was the more inclined to believe her because she so readily now gave over the initiative to me: made no attempt to break my light hold on her and even permitted me to stroke her flank with my stick-hand until I remembered to put that pastoral habit behind me. Two things (she sniffled through the silk) had prompted her present shamelessness: my rebuke to her before Scrapegoat Grate, when she’d only been trying to distract Harold Bray for my sake, and her husband’s “behavior at luncheon.” Upon this latter she did not then elaborate—I supposed Stoker had put her to some fresh indignity. In any case, coming on the hooves of my reprimand, it had led her in despair, she said, to become what we’d unjustly taxed her with being: a flunkèd nymphomane.

“Bah,” said Mrs. Sear—more impatient now than lustful, as I thought. “Some stud
you
are.” Indeed her obscene waggling was so deliberate as to have finally chilled me—as did her strange advances at our previous encounter—had not Anastasia’s fine person been so near. When I comforted that girl’s hair upon my shoulder, my amusement grew.

In vain Dr. Sear entreated his wife from the Observation Room to respect my anticaprine sentiments (a misrepresentation, but I let it pass) and either couple with me in some humaner fashion or permit
Anastasia to resume the original therapy: she stubbornly rejected both alternatives, and Anastasia seconded her, declaring them equally repugnant. I was flattered to imagine a note of jealousy in her veto—but it fretted me to see so little getting done in the way of Peter Greene’s education. For that reason I was receptive to Dr. Sear’s next suggestion despite the prurience of his tone, which the intercom did not conceal.

“About this goat-business, George: you want some sort of voucher from me that you’re strictly human, is that it?”

“I
think
that’s what I want,” I said. “My Assignment says
Overcome Your Infirmity
, and it might just be that—”

“Conscious depravity,” Dr. Sear said crisply. I begged his pardon.

“Conscious depravity,” he repeated. “What could be humaner?” I believed he must be alluding—with a tisk of the tongue, as it were—to the behavior of his wife, who now besides waving her brittle posteriors was nibbling a memorandum-pad between bleats, and winking lewdly. But he went on to ask, rhetorically, when a goat, or any other animal than
Homo sapiens
, had ever done a flunkèd deed from simple relish of its flunkèdness. If in the history of studentdom, he maintained by way of illustration, a goat had ever humped a lady girl (as Halicarnassides records in his old
Histories
, for instance), it was no naughtiness on the stud’s part, but mere unconscious lust. The girl, however, must needs have been queer of appetite—unless, like Anastasia with Stoker’s dogs, her motives were uncommonly benevolent, or (as when Croaker beached her) she’d had no option …

I started to protest: was even a man of Dr. Sear’s intelligence and wide experience too bigoted to allow for simple love between the species? But I saw the principle beyond his misapplication of it, and supposed besides that among his motives was the exposition of Anastasia’s past. Therefore I agreed, for Greene’s benefit, that of the scores of males and females with whom the dear girl beside me had coupled, some at least had surely been inspired not alone by lust but by the conscious urge to exploit her submissiveness—a pleasure unknown outside the human species.

“Go on and
say
it!” Anastasia challenged me. “Tell me I’m flunked, like Maurice does!” She shook off my arm and went to Mrs. Sear, who in a fresh fit of disequilibrium seemed about to roll off the couch.

“That isn’t what I meant,” I assured her, though privately I was not at all convinced that it wasn’t at least partly true: when she bent to steady Mrs. Sear, for example, and that surprising person at once thrust
a hand into her crotch, Anastasia wept for sheer distress at this new unpleasantness, but would neither leave the importunate woman nor remove the hand.

“Demonstrate your humanity, George,” urged Dr. Sear. “If the goat-thing’s not to your taste, do something
à trois
. Mrs. Stoker will let you.”

I saw his point, and was not unwilling to implement it in some measure for the sake of my several objectives. But I was less assured than he of Anastasia’s readiness to cooperate in a display of Conscious Depravity, and therefore I told her straightforwardly what was ahoof:

“Peter Greene’s watching along with Dr. Sear, Anastasia.”

At this news she would indeed have fled had I not gripped her pretty shoulders from behind, and Mrs. Sear her escutcheon from before.

“Peter schmeeter,” said Mrs. Sear.

I held Anastasia long enough (against Mrs. Sear’s best efforts to tumble us onto the couch) to tell her of Greene’s mad conviction that she was virginal; his resolve to wed her despite both their spouses, and his inability to see the flunkèd aspects of his own nature—such as the “innocent” voyeurism he was enjoying presently as on certain past occasions. In addition I informed her of the third and fourth articles of my Assignment—
Overcome Your Infirmity
and
See Through Your Ladyship
—and declared she could abet my completion of both projects, and do Peter Greene an ultimate service as well, by granting me a certain immediate license in the Conscious-Depravity way. All this in her ear, as I gripped her around the chest.

“Oh, George!” she complained—and pinched, perhaps, by Mrs. Sear, she jerked back against me. Very nearly I ejaculated, at touch of those perfections; feeling me against them she flinched away, but did not otherwise endeavor to wrest free.

“I don’t under
stand!
” she wailed.

But
I
understood a number of things, some for the first time. It was clear to me now that I (and alas, not I alone!) could do virtually anything I pleased with Anastasia, not because she was a passèd martyr to the needs of others, on the one hand, or on the other a self-deluding nymphomane, but because she simply had not the will to assert her wishes over another’s. Protest she might, refuse never—at least in the matter of carnal demands. This revelation (for so it was to me, however banal or evident, perhaps, to one raised since birth among humans) illumined in a flash not only the aforementioned articles of my Assignment, but the present situation. My “infirmity,” I saw, was neither
gimp nor goatness, but the limited insight into human natures unavoidable in one so late discovering his own. “Overcoming” it, then, must consist in just such illuminations as the present. Nay, the two labors were one: to “see through My Ladyship” could only mean to understand Anastasia; that is, to divine the inmost heart of one fellow human—a task impossible without the gift of insight. Divination now achieved, it was I felt certain the accomplishment—“at once, in no time”—of both parts of my Assignment,
Q.E.D
. Though I might still, for the record, ask a Clean Bill of Health from Dr. Sear (and perhaps a professional confirmation of my analysis of Anastasia), it seemed to me that my principal business there was finished, most satisfactorily. It remained only to demonstrate my thesis to Peter Greene and my “humanity” to Dr. Sear. In a friendly way I said, “Let’s undress you, Anastasia,” and fetched her firmly couchwards.

She fretted: “I don’t
want
to, George!” But Mrs. Sear, in better reach of her now, said, “Hot dog,” joined me with a will in the couching, and, kneeling over her on the cushion, attacked the fasteners of her uniform.

“This is
awful!
” Anastasia said crossly, and covered her eyes. “I don’t see the need of this at
all!
”

I implored her to trust me, as she had once before at the Memorial Service. My plan was a token mounting of Hedwig Sear, for though I sharply craved Maurice Stoker’s wife (the more at sight of her darling flanks again) and had no appetite whatever for Kennard Sear’s, WESCAC’s suggestion that I might be Anastasia’s brother restrained me from following my desire—for her sake, who I imagined would share the prevailing undergraduate view of incest. To service a female person whom I found repellent was surely enough to prove my humanity; more so in my own estimation than to embrace one whom—despite our possible consanguinity and the obligations of Grand-Tutorhood—I had almost said,
I
loved
.

“What Mr. Greene must
think!
” Anastasia moaned. As Hedwig Sear bent to bite her I remarked with an ardent pang the welt of my own teeth on her belly. Ah, it was true. Once hatched, the thought would not take wing, but stayed a-fledge there in my fancy: I loved Anastasia! And not as my relative or Tutee, but as a human lady girl. And I suddenly dreaded not only that we might be kin but that I might for aught I knew be … not lovable. Horrid possibility! That she admired me was evident; alas, her admiration like her sweet legs embraced many another, and had little to do with love. And Founder
pass me, in the yearbooks of campus history what Grand Tutor ever took a mistress?

“George?” It was a rebuke, timid but positive. Anastasia’s eyes were on my hands, which I had laid upon Hedwig’s haunches. Whether by my problematical insights (How my infirmity was overcome!) or Mrs. Sear’s aggressiveness, I had found myself unmanned, so to speak, and been obliged to temporize with idle foreplay. The woman ignored me, but Anastasia sat up now sharply and declared she didn’t like what was happening at all and intended to leave.

“Oh, not
now!
” Dr. Sear entreated—from the doorway, where he appeared unaccompanied. “I was just about to join you.”