John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"It isn't what you think… I'll explain later."

"Oh." She fingered a bracelet. "Well." She agreed at least to go as far as the Sears' apartment with us, since it was on her homeward way, and to telephone the Power Plant from there. Dr. Sear welcomed my acceptance of his invitation, declaring I could prove my humanity as easily after filet mignon as before, and with a wink expressed his readiness to be de-Certified if I thought it necessary. He busied himself then with reviving his wife, while Anastasia put her clothes in order; and pleased at the chance to delay my reply I went to attend Peter Greene. Truth to tell, the mention of meat worked counter to all my appetites, as did the recognition that I was beginning to be in love. Though my testicles hurt and my stomach rumbled, I could scarce abide the ideas of sex and food; it was only to speak with Anastasia and Dr. Sear (on the very matter he'd just brought up, among others) that I wanted to dine with them: else I had withdrawn to some private place to examine my heart's state and what it portended.

It transpired that we ate neither at the Sears' apartment nor in a restaurant, but had dinner sent up to the office from the hospital kitchens, for both Mrs. Sear and Peter Greene were in no condition to leave the building. The latter, whom I found just waking up on a couch in the Reception Room, greeted me with as woeful a groan as ever I'd heard; he rose to hug or hit me, choked into tears instead, and sat down again, shaking his head.

"Oh, Founder!" he said, with an affecting hoarseness. "She's the flunkèdest of all!" What he had witnessed from the observation-chamber, it appeared, had shocked him more profoundly than I'd allowed for. As previously he had seemed to believe that the human heart was essentially passèd, so now he declared it essentially flunked; no good my suggesting it was but desperately human. Anastasia was a whore, he vowed, worse than O.B.G.'s daughter, who at least had confined her harlotry to male humans; Dr. Sear and his wife were unspeakable perverts; me he spared, as entering the debauch purely for his benefit — indeed, he thanked me bitterly for opening his eye to the truth as only a Grand Tutor might — but the rest of studentdom, himself included, he now agreed must be as failed as I had described.

"I been a blind durn fool!" he cried. So far did he carry his black despisal, I feared it was wrong-headed as his former optimism. His displeasure with himself, in particular, was intense enough to make him shudder while he spoke, as might a fever. Clearly he was not fit to drive: when Anastasia entered the room to beg his pardon, he vomited explosively into a smoking-stand, to her great distress, and it was necessary for Dr. Sear to resedate him into unconsciousness. Hedwig too, the doctor said coolly as he withdrew the syringe, was more than usually hors de combat; her also he had sedated.

"Rotten shame," he tisked, having telephoned our dinner orders. I wasn't certain whether he alluded to his wife's condition, the change in our dining-plans, or Anastasia's having to clean up Peter Greene's mess, until he added a moment later, "Pity you didn't know Hed before she got this way, George: ready for anything then, she was! Full of spirit; nothing fazed her; put Stacey in the shade…" He shook his head and relaxed with a slender cigar on the couch, near Greene's feet. "What times we used to have! Lately, of course, she hasn't been herself. Terrible pressures. But it's still the most genuine marriage I know of. Ideal, in fact."

I could not conceal my incredulity. Anastasia paused too, paper towel in hand, then went on with her scrubbing. Dr. Sear smiled.

"What I mean is, it's the only authentic and meaningful kind of marriage, for educated people in modern terms, because it's based on freedom, frankness, equality, and no illusions whatever. It may not work, but even if it turns out to be impossible, nothing else is worth trying." He wrinkled his brow in a cordial tease. "I saw through my ladyship from the first, in every respect; and Heddy did likewise."

"And were you pleased by what you saw?" I asked him.

I had been thinking of my own ambivalent insight into Anastasia, but Dr. Sear took the question as a challenge and amiably replied, "You mean her lesbianism, I suppose, and my own homosexual tendencies…"

"No no, sir! What I — "

"Don't apologize," he insisted. "I enjoy looking things straight in the eye." He went on to declare that while these same tendencies (the confrontation whereof in myself, he suggested, might well be the real purport of my fourth Assignment-task) were not inherently either passing or failing in his opinion, he readily seconded the Maxim that self-knowledge is generally bad news, and would yield to none in the degree of his own self-loathing. "By George, there's another possibility!" he exclaimed, interrupting his confession with a laugh: "Why don't you just masturbate?"

"Sir?"

"Really, Kennard!" Anastasia's scold was serious; she was still red-eyed with unhappiness over the events in the Treatment Room, and but half attended our conversation. "Enough is enough."

"Sorry," the doctor said lightly. "What I meant to say is that if See Through Your Ladyship means 'Understand the female elements in your psyche,' it's just another way of saying Know thyself, don't you agree, George? But since this whole Grand-Tutor business has such a Founder's-Scroll air about it, maybe know should be understood in the Old-Syllabus sense of carnal knowledge. In other words, Fornicate thyself."

I was not sure to what extent this interpretation was a jeu d'esprit; the earlier part of it struck me as reasonable enough, the more as it didn't really contradict my own speculations. But Anastasia said he ought to be ashamed of himself.

"Honestly, sometimes I think you like naughtiness," she declared, and went to take our dinner-cart from the maid at the door. Her remark (which seemed banal to me, love or no love) delighted the doctor.

"I do, as you know," he said to me. "And I do despise myself, of course. What other feeling is there, for a man both intelligent and honest? I can't take anybody seriously who doesn't loathe himself. That's why I admire Taliped."

I accepted a salad from the cart, blanched at the fragments of bloody steer-muscle on the plates, and took up the conversation to keep from imagining the bovicide that must be daily wrought to feed carnivorous studentdom its evening meal.

"You say you admire Dean Taliped's self-loathing, sir. Don't you actually just envy him his reasons?" The question was sincere enough but I confess it gave me an un-Grand-Tutorish satisfaction to defend what I knew was Anastasia's position. Throughout the meal — while Dr. Sear with mild good humor acknowledged his perversions and his wife's, agreed that her present condition was partly the cumulative effect, on her homely spirit, of their years of libertinism, but defended his biography on the grounds that "total experience," while ruinous, is requisite to Understanding — I was unnaturally aware of my beloved's presence in the room. She said little during our harangue, but as I endeavored to point out to Dr. Sear (first begging his leave) how much of illusion and innocence could still be said to be in his thinking, self-deception in his confessions, and pride in his self-loathing, I watched her flashing eyes from the corner of mine and glowed in the certainty of their approval.

"Admit it, sir: you find your self-hatred… interesting, don't you?"

He cocked his head judiciously, a bit of flesh impaled on his fork. "Let's say piquant. Yes, piquant, definitely. Which is, I suppose, just that much more ground for self-hatred, as you term it."