John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

I hung my head. Now it was Lady Creamhair I despised, and the heartless alacrity with which I had struck down what was most precious to me. Yet alas: hating her, I recognized my hateful humanness, and then but hated myself the more. Thus mired and bound I groaned aloud: nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

"I don't want to be a man!" I cried. "I don't know what I want!"

"Bah, you want to grow up," my keeper said. "That's what's at the bottom of it. And you will, one way or the other."

I told him I had sworn to let Lady Creamhair know tomorrow of my decision.

"Let me know too," Max grunted, and lay down for the night.

Sweet sleep: it was a boon denied me. Long after Max had set to snoring I tossed in my corner, remembering his words and reimagining Creamhair's kiss. Anon I was driven to embrace Redfearn's Tommy in his stall; but he was alarmed by the strange scent of me (which my own nose, fickle as its owner, had long since lost hold of), and warned me to keep my distance. I let him be and went next door to the doe pens, envious and smarting. There too my presence caused a stir, but Mary V. Appenzeller knew me under any false fragrance; she and a pretty young Saanen named Hedda, that had been my good friend some seasons past, bleated uneasily when I hugged them, but lay still against each other in a corner and suffered me to turn and return in the good oils of their fleece. Thus anointed, I struck out into the pasture, meaning to bathe my restlessness in night-dew, and there came upon the two human lovers I mentioned before.

They had left their bicycles, climbed the fence, and tramped a hundred meters into the meadow. At first I supposed they were escaping, but when they spread a blanket on the ground and the male returned to fetch cans of some beverage from his machine, I put by that notion. Presently he embraced her with one arm, at the same time drinking from his little can, and I began to realize what they were about. The buck I observed to be in a virile way, and the doe snuggled against his flank with a nervousness I knew the cause of. I took them for superior specimens of their breed: they were shaggier than most, for one thing, and smelled like proper animals. The male had a fine fleecy beard, and neck hair quite as thick as mine, though neither so long nor so ably brushed; his mate had the simple good taste not to shave what little fur the species is vouchsafed for their legs. More, at the first opportunity they shucked off their eyeglasses and leather shoes, thereby rendering themselves more handsome in both odor and appearance. In short, as admirable a pair as I'd yet espied, and I waited with some curiosity to see her serviced.

Imagine my bewilderment when, instead of putting off their wrappers, they began to talk! I suddenly wondered, thinking of Lady Creamhair, whether among humans this did for copulation: if so, the buck at hand was in very truth a stud. With his tin he gestured toward the western glow of New Tammany, and hoarse with ardor said, "Chickie, look at those lights!"

The doe shook her head and gave a shudder. "I know. I know what you mean."

His voice mounted over her. " The Campus … hath not anything more fair …"

"Don't, please," she begged, but laid her head on his shoulder. My breath came faster; I was as fired with desire as he when he next declared, "You mustn't be afraid of it. You've got to let go."

What would she let go of? I hunkered closer and squinted to see. She pressed her nose into his high-necked sweater and protested, "You don't know what that poem does to me!"

"Suffer it," ordered her mate — not Brickett Ranunculus more inexorably mastered his does! "The Pre-Schoolist poets knew what naked feeling was."

"That's just it," the female said. "That's it exactly. I'm — naked to that poem, you know?"

Here I tumesced, for the fellow turned her face deliberately to his and intoned: " These lecture-halls do like a garment wear the beauty of the nighttime …" Was it for pain or joy she closed her eyes, bit her lip? " Labs, towers, dorms, and classrooms lie all bright and glittering in the smokeless air …" She clutched at the wool of his sleeves, fighting as most all nannies against what passionately now she craved; and at length, in hoarse surrender, whispered: " Ne'er saw I, never felt, a surge so deep! The Tower Clock moves on at its sweet will … Oh my! I can't!"

But surely, with no pause in the rhythm of his woo, her buck pressed home: " Dear Founder! See the Library — - glowing keep of all thy mighty mind — resplendent still!"

At that penultimate hiss the female made a little cry and wrenched away. For some seconds she lay as if stricken, while her mate, hard respiring, drained off his drink and flung away the can. I too felt emptied.

Presently in a new voice he said, "Cigarette." She shook her head, then changed her mind and sat up to smoke, as Lady Creamhair often did. They smoked in silence, neither looking at the other, until the male asked her, almost brusquely, how she felt.

"How do you think I feel?" she muttered. "You knew what you were doing."

He drew her down with him on the blanket. "Are you sorry we said the poem?"

No, she said, she didn't suppose she was sorry. "I'm still a little mid-percentile about first dates, I guess. When two people start off with something like that — - what does it leave for later?"

I had moved some paces back lest my heart, still pounding with their late excitement, betray me. But at these words I crept close again. They were kissing now, and a business of their hands gave me to question my original surmise. I barely heard him swear to her that it was not any girl he'd share that sonnet with: she mustn't fear he'd disrespect her for permitting him to recite it on their first evening together.

"I know how you feel," he assured her, caressing her wrapper. "The way things are nowadays, sex doesn't mean a thing. It's just a sport like tennis, you know? The really personal thing between a man and a woman is communication ."

She put his hand away and agreed. "It's all that matters. Because who believes in Passing and Failing these days?"

"Right!"

"And if there's no Examiner and no Dean o' Flunks, nothing a student does makes any sense. That's the way I see it, anyhow."

"You've been reading the Ismists," her companion said, and sought along her leotard with the rejected hand. "And they're right, too, as far as they go. The student condition is absurd, and you've either got to drop out or come to terms with the absurdity." He went on to assert (at the same time parrying with his left hand her parry of his right) that this absurdity had both exhilarating and anguishing aspects, chief among the former whereof he counted the decline — he might even say decease — of conventional mid-percentile morality. "The worst thing about that old prudery — flunk that button! What I was saying, it made everybody so afraid of their desires — -"

"Wait, Harry," she complained. "I don't think… Honestly, now — "

"No," he charged, "you don't think honestly. None of us does, till we learn to be as natural about our bodies as — as goats are. These co-eds that deny their instincts in the name of some dark old lie like Final Examinations — they're the ones that keep the Psych Clinic busy. Here we go."

"Please!" The girl tried to sit up now; there was a note of alarm in her protest. But her companion drew her down.

"Chickie, we communicated, you know? I thought you had a real feeling for the Pre-Schoolists!"

She tossed her head. "I do, I swear!"

"You're not another fake, are you, Chickie?" He seemed angry with her now, and even hesitated just a moment before returning to his work, as if uncertain of her worth. Almost fiercely he declared that nothing in the mad University mattered except Beauty: the beauty of art, of language, and above all, of simple existence. That, he took it — and now they grappled in earnest — was the first principle of Beism, a philosophy both deeper and farther-reaching than anything within the Ismists' compass.