John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

His fiancée's alarm, he went on to say, soon brought assistance: he was hurried to the Infirmary, where first the glass was removed and later the eyeball, irreparably damaged. Upon reviving from anesthesia he found Miss Sally Ann at his bedside, and they commiserated for the loss of both his eye and their last night to spend together on Great Mall. More to his chagrin, now that making love was out of the question he was splendidly erect, nor did any amount of ironic remark upon this phenomenon at all diminish it. Nay, his pain and the blindfold of bandages notwithstanding, he lusted more powerfully than ever before; her consolatory kisses only inflamed him; he must have her then and there, nurses be flunkèd; she must close and block the door and come at once to bed. Reluctant at first, she was at last brought blushing to it, rather to his surprise: protesting soft but breathing hard she slipped out of her shoes and between his sheets, and the sweet deed was done.

"Well, sir," Greene declared — more as one beginning than concluding a story: "I told her the honest truth then: how it was my first time, and I never had actually swived old O.B.G.'s daughter."

This news, he said (when Max returned to partial slumber after stirring to remark that swive was a fine old verb whose desuetude in all but a few back-campus areas was much to be deplored, as it left the language with no term for service that was not obscene, clinical, legalistic, ironic, euphemistic, or periphrastic), Miss Sally Ann professed not to believe; she'd even scolded him a bit for so exaggerating the importance of what, to her mind, was a mere technicality beside the fact of true and exclusive love that he felt he must deceive her on the point. They married soon after, and directly his wound was healed and his glass eye installed, he immersed himself with equal passion in his work and his newly realized manhood. Greene Timber doubled and tripled its holdings, destroying its competitors, exploiting its workers, depleting the countryside, and diversifying into related areas of manufacture. The Greenes moved from cabin to manorhouse and begot a great number of offspring, whose rearing Mrs. Greene relinquished her profession to supervise; there was no further need for her to work anyhow, and she agreed with her husband that woman's place was in the home. There she gave orders to a staff of domestics, took up the piano and painting on glass, read long novels, and tatted the hems of pillowslips. They regarded their match as ideal and themselves as blissful in it — but in certain moods, now he was initiated, Greene bewailed his lost opportunities with O.B.G.'s flunkèd daughter and perhaps even consorted with her secretly, in or out of prison, always however berating himself the while for polluting, or thinking to pollute, his perfect marriage. And Miss Sally Arm now and then complained of spells of faintness and that her life was after all as empty as some statue's in a Founder's Hall.

Then, sometime in his twenties, for reasons he could not well articulate, Greene's opinion changed profoundly on the question of Answers and Graduation. Some said he was influenced by disillusioned veterans of the First Campus Riot; others, that this disillusionment in turn was but the popular dramatizing of a state of intellectual affairs that dated from the Rematriculation Period and had long prevailed "across the Pond" in the famous seats of West-Campus learning. Still others pointed out, quite correctly, that Greene was a rustic without classical education or much use for the departments of moral science and the fine arts; they were inclined to relate his new attitude to the loss of his eye or of his adolescent vigor, to the belated realization of character deficiencies, or to domestic and business difficulties.

"Which is putting the cart before the goshdarn horse, them last ones," he said. "I figure I invented my Answers my own self, just like Sally Ann and me invented making love, no matter how many'd thought of it before."

Whatever the causes, the effects were unmistakable: they moved from their rural estate to an urban quad; he made his wife a full-time equal partner in his business; they toured distant campuses, learned to smoke cigarettes, drink cocktails, dance to jazz-music, drive fast motorcycles, and practice contraception. Miss Sally Ann now freely admitted enjoying what theretofore she had seemed only to permit: husband and wife put by all inhibition and together tasted every sweet and salty dish in love's cuisine, improvising some, discovering others accidentally, borrowing not a few from the high-spiced cookbooks of ancient Remus and Siddartha, which Greene no longer perused in secret but shared with his wife. Nay, further, emancipated alike from the stuffy prohibitions of old-fashioned lecturers and the economics of harder terms, they went from twin beds to separate vacations to separate residences and friends, and mortgaged all their assets to extend by daring speculation their business interests and finance their costly extracurricular activities.

This continued to the end of that decade of their lives, and ended, alas, in general fiasco. One memorable night, happening to meet each other en route to their separate apartments from separate illegal taverns, but both drunk on the same distillation, Greene announced impulsively to his wife, whether as confession, boast, or wish, that O.B.G.'s daughter (no longer in prison) was threatening him with a paternity suit, or might one day so threaten for all he knew; and Mrs. Greene replied, between hiccoughs, that for all she knew she might one day threaten O.B.G.'s daughter's husband with the same, if the trollop had one and he was properly manned. They went then their separate ways, but whether that encounter was the trigger, or certain ominous signs that his speculations were overextended and no longer basically sound, there ensued just prior to his thirtieth birthday a collapse of Peter Greene's self-confidence and a lengthy spell of profound depression.

"Just seemed like it all went kerflooey at once," he said. His research and production plants failed, one after another, or were shut down by organized mutinies among his staff, some of whom openly professed Student-Unionism. Greene's own sympathies were split between affinity for any rebellious cause (a habit of mind carried over from his childhood) and his contempt for anything that smacked of the "welfare campus." So at odds was he with himself, he would bribe the campus police to put down a demonstration, then find himself marching unrecognized among the demonstrators, in his old forester's clothes, and take a beating he himself had paid for. Sexually he became subject to periods of impotence; socially he withdrew, lost interest in the few friends he had left, as in himself. Whether he appeared well or ill in the public eye and his own no longer concerned him; he could not even manage to despise himself much, so thoroughgoing was his sense of futility. Much of his time he spent rocking in a chair. To his surprise (for he was not given to speculation of the philosophic sort) he found not only that he no longer regarded himself as Graduated, but that he disbelieved in the reality of Graduation, the Founder, and Final Exams. Nothing in the University mattered in the long run, it seemed perfectly clear to him: one man studied and strove for the good of his classmates, another cheated, lied, and tattled: both soon passed away and were forgotten, with the rest of mortal studentdom, and the blind University went on, and too would vanish when its term expired. To rock the campus, to rock a chair — what did it matter? Mrs. Greene dropped by with the children to spend the weekend, bringing with her a supply of the sleeping-capsules which both had come to depend on for rest; they quarreled, resolved to institute bankruptcy and divorce proceedings, drank a final drink together, and ended by dividing the capsules between them, each swallowing a number he judged most honestly to be on the threshold of lethality, perhaps beyond it.