Regiment of Women (15 page)

“How did you come to join the Movement?”

Frankie twitched his big, crooked nose.

“I almost beat a girl to death,” he said. “She made advances to me. I went a little crazy, I guess, but I didn't know what to do. I panicked. I was an innocent kid then. They didn't get me. I hid out, living like a rat, stealing food at night, creeping through these tunnels by day—which is how I found this place, and the Movement.”

“When was that?” Frankie was obviously older than Cornell.

“Eight years ago,” said Frankie. “I haven't been out of here since. I'm still wanted, and I could hardly use a disguise. I don't look much like a woman, even in women's clothes. Oh, I guess I could get Jerry—he's our plastic surgeon—to give me a new face and I could get new I.D. papers, and go up as another man, but I kind of like it here, among the Brothers, where I never have to even see a rotten woman. If I went up now, I'd probably kill the first one I came across.”

Frankie was a fanatic. Cornell wondered whether they were all like that. Despite what he told Dr. Prine in his hysteria, he himself had never hated women, and he did not intend to do so now. He did not even hate Harriet. In fact, he had a strangely tender feeling towards her. Why not? They had grappled, and he had won.

Frankie stood erect and inflated his big chest.

Suddenly he said, with piety: “Of course, brutality is not the answer to brutality. We must never become what
they
are.”

“A picture of you appeared on TV last night,” Stanley told Cornell next morning.

In the interim Cornell had been provided with a complete female outfit: chino slacks, knitted shirt in navy blue, and fawn-colored desert boots. Beneath this he wore broadcloth shorts, a T-shirt, and the prison bra. A little tailor shop, administered by a little man named Murray, occupied an end of one of the subway cars. Up in the normal world Murray was an alteration seam-ster at Bergdorf Goodman.

After an enormous breakfast of flapjacks, fried ham and eggs, which Cornell (who until his lunchtime tuna-on-whole-wheat never took much into his stomach but instant coffee) could barely nibble at, Frankie had conducted him to what seemed to be the command car, because Stanley was there. It was otherwise empty.

Stanley wore his janitor's dress, wig, and glasses.

He said: “Actually there were two pictures. One was described as the portrait from your high-school yearbook. You had bobbed hair. The other was a snapshot taken at a beach, more recent than the first, but the face wasn't very clear. You were wearing a white bikini.”

Cornell hadn't slept too well, though the bunk in the dormitory car was more comfortable than the prison cot He kept awakening and trying to remember where he was.

He said: “I never have been photogenic”

Stanley nodded briskly. “What matters to us is that there are very few people who would recognize you on the basis of these shots, if that's all the police have. And it must be, because they have certainly ransacked your apartment by now. What about your friends, lovers, co-workers? Could they provide more recent pictures?”

Cornell smoothed his upper lip with the lower. He missed the taste of lipstick.

“I have this funny way: I look different on every snapshot.”

Stanley suddenly stared at Cornell's breasts and put out a hard finger.

“Those may have to go.”

Cornell's smile was ill.

“We have our own plastic surgeon,” Stanley said. “He's self-trained but quite good. His cover role is as nurse at Beth Israel Hospital. He has assisted at a number of operations and kept his eyes open. He has stolen, one by one, a full set of surgical instruments. Get those tits off and maybe a little work on the nose, and you'll pass anywhere. That should be our first concern—protecting you against discovery. The Movement takes care of its own. Then we shall ask you for something in return.”

Cornell frowned. “The facial change I can understand. But the breasts? Why must they go?” Not only had the silicone injections cost him a pretty penny; the operation had been much more painful than promised; surely taking them off would be even less pleasant. “After all, most men have breasts of some kind.”

“Now, that's an interesting statement,” said Stanley. “In reality it is women who would grow them naturally if they did not bind their chests at puberty. When women produced young, the mammary glands were functional, secreting milk. Is it not degrading, now that tits are useless, that we are the sex who wears them?”

At this moment several other men filed into the car and chose seats on the parallel benches. They were all attired in normal male clothing, i.e., dresses or skirts, no doubt because they would shortly be en route to their respective employments in the normal world. It must have been about seven A.
M
. Cornell had been awakened by Frankie at six and directed to a little stall shower without a door—also without a showerhead! Frankie had dashed a bucketful of icy water on him. They had no running water supply down there. The toilet was chemical. Ugh. Afterwards, that ghastly breakfast.

“Come along,” said Stanley, taking Cornell's arm and leading him up the aisle to the head of the car. “This is our Council.” To the men he said: “This is Georgie.” He gave a brief account of Cornell's jailbreak.

Frankie had left the car, and Cornell had never seen any of the other men before. They were all obviously older than he and none of them was especially attractive. One wore nurse's whites; another, a waiter's peach-colored, matching dress and cap from one of those chain restaurants, Child's or Schrafft's. The rest were probably typists and receptionists, switchboard boys.

“Brothers,” said Stanley, “Georgie's example is instructive in several areas. First, he was by no means a conscious rebel. He was rather a typical male conformist, a serf, a lackey, mindlessly accepting the status quo.

“He even had breast injections.” Stanley turned to Cornell. “I'm not trying to embarrass you, Georgie. The Movement has no time for personalities. We here are your Brothers, not individuals. That is our strength. We are one, not many. The self has but one function with us: self-criticism. No Brother ever criticizes, disciplines, or punishes another. One does these things for himself, in the presence of his Brothers. There is no hierarchy of power here. Don't misunderstand my position, for example. I am an equal among equals. I am addressing the Council because I have something to say. If they disagree, they will let me know in no uncertain terms.”

Stanley resumed speaking to the other men.

“Yet it was Georgie, the tame little robot with no history of militancy, who revolted violently and now is a wanted man, a sexual desperado. What this suggests is that there are other Georgies out there who need only sufficient provocation to rise up and proclaim themselves real men.

“It is our responsibility to provide them with that provocation, that stimulation, and the necessary leadership. I think that Georgie has already begun to understand that the simple revolt is not enough. Were it not for the Movement, he would either have already been recaptured or, alone and impotent, he would have been awaiting that terrible moment when the police arrived.”

Cornell would have liked to sit down. Perhaps he should not have been so rough with Harriet. He remembered the hatred in her eyes. Maybe he should have tried to explain that it had been merely personal. Perhaps he should now confess as much to Stanley and the Council. His predicament was becoming altogether too institutional, too symbolic. Cornell had a profound abhorrence of misrepresentation, yet he often had found himself helplessly acquiescing in a companion's opinion, assumption, or taste—merely to be nice. At the least this frequently resulted in extreme discomfort: having to dine on Mexican food, say. At the most—well, there were inevitable junctures at which self-denial failed. Friends were disabused, felt betrayed: why had he let them go on thinking…? At worst, there had been that evening with Charlie, the issue of which was that he stood here, misrepresented, misrepresenting by his very presence, and Charlie rotted in jail.

But the Movement was the first fellowship to which he had ever been offered entry. These men admired him, felt his cause was one with theirs. That he
had
no cause was the latest item in the series of ironies that had begun with his leaving Charlie's apartment dressed as a woman. Reality had been reversed ever since.

“To me, the most significant, and encouraging, aspect of Georgie's rebellion is his age,” said Stanley, and asked Cornell: “You're still under thirty, aren't you?”

Cornell was flattered by this assumption; also it was again true that he did not want to disappoint his friends.

“Oh, yes.” He smiled at the audience. So he would see the end of his twenties in another five months: Stanley had not said
“well
under thirty.”

“I don't have to remind you,” Stanley went on to the members of the Council, “of our difficulty in attracting young men to the Movement. Our mimeographed manifestoes, distributed surreptitiously near YMCA's, dancing and sewing classes and the like, have, if picked up at all, quickly been discarded on the sidewalks. And while it is true that the average policewoman is a lazy, sub-literate timeserver, there are some zealots on the detective force, pathological man-haters, shrewd and deadly.”

Cornell wondered whether Harriet was of that company. In his experience of her, she had scarcely proved shrewd and not deadly at all, at least in performance.

“And there are also informers.” Stanley shrugged. “We are asking a young man to take quite a risk. He cannot very well stand there openly reading our literature. If he is seen slipping it into his purse for clandestine examination later on, he is putting himself in danger of an even more serious charge.”

Stanley coarsely made a fist. He was an odd mixture of elements, with his janitor's dress on the one hand and his feminine gestures on the other.

“I have always maintained that to move men, especially young men, much more than revolutionary rhetoric is needed. We must offer them something more exciting, something satisfying, an opportunity for the exercise of true pride rather than the temporary pleasures of shallow vanity.

“Enslaved as we are and have been for more than a century, men have survived. We are basically more durable than women. Their death rate has been rising every year as ours has fallen. But there is still no substitute for youth. And that we did not have in the Movement”—he smiled at Cornell—“until yesterday. Now the problem is how to use Georgie to the best advantage. He cannot of course return to the world in his former character. He is a wanted sex criminal. Whichever role he is to play, his appearance must be altered. Something done with his face and also with his figure. Jerry, what do you think?”

The man in the nurse's uniform leaped up and briskly approached Cornell.

“Let's take a look at those boobs,” he said. He was small, dark, and sharp-featured. “Just lift your shirt.”

Cornell lifted the hem of the knitted shirt in his two hands. Before raising it he turned away from the audience.

“Georgie,” Stanley said, “we can't afford false modesty in the Movement.” Jerry, the nurse, seized his arm and turned him around.

Cornell exposed his bra. Jerry deftly reached around to the groove of his spine and undid the hooks.

Oo, his hands were cold!

The nurse peered under, squeezed, and kneaded both breasts. “These aren't injected,” he said. “These are mammary prostheses! Hell, one incision for each and slide it out.” He turned to Stanley. “It couldn't be simpler.”

Cornell said: “I
always
thought they were injected.”

Jerry wrinkled his nose. “You didn't even know what was put into your own body?”

“I guess I didn't look too closely. I can't stand operations.”

“These are much more expensive, a better job all around. They're safer, and they keep their shape. What did they run you, ten thousand?”

“Twelve.”

Jerry sneered. “Know what a pair of those inserts go for wholesale? That's why surgeons drive Rolls Royces.” He checked the bobby pin that held the winged cap on the back of his head.

Meanwhile Cornell stood there with his dugs hanging out.

The nurse had to make his disparaging point. “Two hundred at the outside. It's just a silicone rubber bag filled with gel.” He smirked, shrugged, and, his white nylon skirt swishing, returned to his seat.

“Well, then,” said Stanley, “when could you do it, Jerry?”

“Monday's my next day off.” Jerry's white-stockinged legs were crossed, one squat-heeled shoe dangling.

Cornell lowered his shirt. He had chosen a general anaesthetic for his breast implant. He supposed he had now fallen in the estimation of these men. Jerry was a mean sort. And the idea of a male doctor was not appealing. There were a few around, specializing in men's intimate problems: prostate disorders and the like. But Jerry wasn't even an M.D.

Cornell realized that Stanley had asked him something.

“Excuse me?”

Stanley frowned through his steel-rimmed glasses and repeated the question.

“How do you stand with your sperm service?”

Stanley obviously thought him at least five years younger than he was! You registered at eighteen. If you hadn't been called up by age twenty-five, you were exempt. For once Fortune had smiled on Cornell; his lottery number had been very low, and his years of eligibility were luckily those in which the birth quotas had been receding along with the economy, and also because casualty figures in the Balkan War had dropped away, owing to the long stalemate, etc., etc. All he cared about was that he had missed that loathsome sperm term, six months of living in a barracks, eating a high-protein diet, and being milked every so often.

He found it impossible to admit at this point that he was almost thirty.