Giles Goat Boy (44 page)

But no one was happy. O.B.G.’s daughter refused on the one hand to be
“degradated,” as she put it, to the role of menial, and on the other to be “bought off” with a slightly higher income and the title of Assistant Homemaker. Neither would she take the position he offered her as Special Representative in his Promotion Department, though the job entailed nothing more strenuous than being photographed for advertisements in Frumentian publications: she insisted that he confess his past attraction to and maltreatment of her, that he pay her neither more nor less than he would pay a white male for the same work, and that to redeem his past abuses of her he educate her children along with his, in the same classrooms, summer camps, and Founder’s Halls. His own children showed no such aggressiveness, excepting one son who stole motorbikes for sport and contracted gonorrhea at the sixth-grade prom: they were tall and handsome, their teeth uncarious, their underarms odorless; yet they seemed not interested in anything. As for Mrs. Greene, she had become a scold-perhaps because, though she was still youthful enough in appearance to be mistaken for her daughters, in fact she was approaching middle age. Her moods ran to sudden extremes, more often quarrelsome than otherwise; she complained of her responsibilities; neither she nor her spouse thought it possible to pursue a career, raise the children, and supervise the housework at the same time, yet they could not bear the foolish women who had nothing to do but drink coffee and talk to one another by telephone; they believed in an utterly single standard of behavior for men and women, but practiced chivalric deference in a host of minor matters. She did not think they went dancing often enough; he wished he had more time to play poker with his colleagues.

“I’d swear I wanted her to be her own woman, independencewise, but whenever she’d go to work I’d freeze up and wish she was just a plain wife. Then she’d wife it a while, fix fancy meals and sew drapes and all, and I’d wish she had something more interesting than
that
to talk about! We got to be so much alike and close together, we’d be bored fit to bust for something
different—
but go away one night on a business trip, we’d miss each other like to die. And me getting soft, and overweight, and tired all the time from nothing! And Sally Ann skipping periods, and starting to wear corsets! And both now and then half a-yearning to bust out and start over, but knowing we’d never do as well, compatibilitywise, and loving each other too much anyhow, despite all. Durn if it weren’t a bind! I’d say to myself,
I’m okay, and what the heck anyhow—
but that didn’t help none when she’d bust out crying and go back for another prescription. And them doctors, and them analysts, and them counselors! One’d tell her ‘Stay home and be a
woman
.’ Another’d say ‘Go to work full-time, let it
all go.’ One’d say ‘Get divorced any time you want, that’s the kind of campus we live on nowadays’; another’d say ‘Stay married no matter what, ’cause if the family don’t hold fast there won’t be no character left in the Present Modern College of Today.’ Some told Sally Ann she should let me have my head but tread the straight and narrow her own self, like olden terms; others said to me what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, one way or the other. Take pills; don’t take pills! Go back to Enochism; eat black-strap molasses; practice breath-control! One high-price fellow told Sally Ann she ought to sleep with
him
to cure herself, ’cause his own wife didn’t understand him! I swear to Pete! I swear right to Pete!”

Things had come to a head only recently, he said, when during a pointless midnight quarrel (over a change of analysts and low-fat diets) he explained to his wife his dissatisfaction with their current therapist, who had declared it impossible to help a patient until the latter overcame his “resistances to therapy.” It was, Greene had been in the process of telling her, like announcing to a sick man that he must get well in order to take his medicine …

But in the course of his analogy his wife had interrupted him with a scream, and another, and a third, and a fourth, and another and another, beyond his shocked remonstrances to consider the children, to get hold of herself, for Founder’s sake to stop. He grew frantic; still she lay in their bed and screamed, her eyes tight shut. At last he called in a neighbor lady and O.B.G.’s daughter. By the time the family doctor arrived to sedate her, her cries had turned to wild weeping; the children were awake and had been told that their mother’s nerves were bad from too much work and worry. Did they understand? Solemn-faced, they nodded yes. Next morning it was added that she would be going away to rest, and away she went—to the Faculty Women’s Rest House, whose services she was entitled to by virtue of her one-time position as district schoolmistress. Once she was established in that stately, hushed retreat, where so many were of their acquaintance, her spirits lifted; indeed, she was more calm and optimistic when he went to see her than she’d been for a long while, despite her doctor’s vagueness about how long she’d have to stay; she quietly apologized for her hysteria, for leaving him in charge of the house and children, for whatever was her share of responsibility in their difficulties …

“I missed her so much and felt so flunking flunked I thought I’d die,” he said. “First thing I did, I come home and got drunk as a hooty-owl, all by my lonesome. But drunk or sober, sir, it seemed to me one minute there was something awful wrong with the way we lived, trying to be pals and lovers and equals all the same time, and next minute it wasn’t our fault at
all, we’d come to the right idea, the best idea, but the past was a-gumming us up. Then right in the midst of this pull and haul, who should come into the bar where I went one night but O.B.G.’s daughter—as a customer, mind, and I didn’t even know they served darkies in the place! She asked me how Miss Sally Ann was, all the time a-smiling in her mischievous way, like she was daring me to grab ahold of her, and she said she figured I must be awful upset to be out drinking so late all by myself, a big family-man like me. I knew what she was up to, but I didn’t bear her no grudge for all the things she’d said about me in the papers, and being so ungrateful I’d treated her so white. I bought her a drink, and we talked about poor Sally Ann and old times, and how hard all this was on the kids; and O.B.G.’s daughter said there probably ought to be somebody home with them at night for a while, till they got more used to their mother being gone. All the time she was smiling that smile, that put me in mind how she’d smiled it years ago, when I was just a scaredy-cat kid and her a gosh-durn tease. Her own husband had run off on her a few months before, and their kids were at some sister’s place; I knew she’d come on home with me if I asked her, despite all she’d said. And I was so low down, and so durn hot and bothered, I up and asked her, and of course she came, teasing me all the way for treating her like a South-Quad slavey. What you going to do with a gal like that, and such a mess as me?”

I was unaware then that his question was of the sort that requires no answer. “Well, now, Mr. Greene—” I began with a frown.

“Pete,”
he insisted.

“I find your story quite touching, Pete. I hadn’t appreciated how curious
marriage
is, and I’m interested to learn now whether it’s that way generally. The only other married folks I’ve met are Mr. and Mrs. Stoker and a Dr. Sear and his wife, and their attitudes seemed a little different from yours and Mrs. Greene’s, at least to me.”

“Dr. Sear!” Greene laughed. “You know Kennard Sear? He was my analyst I was telling you about! Heck of a nice fellow, ain’t he? Couldn’t do a passèd thing with me, but he’s a smart one, Sear is.”

I agreed that he seemed a most courteous gentleman, and pressed back to the subject: “I think I still don’t understand why you’re hitchhiking to Great Mall, when you’re so wealthy, and what you’re going to do when you get there.”

Peter Greene was more or less durned if he quite knew either, except about the hitchhiking, which he did purely for the heck of it and to stay “in shape”—the fact being that for all his regimen of calisthenics, vitamin pills, mechanical exercisers, and low-fat diets, he was overweight.
The best reason he could offer for placing his children in a boarding-school (though it had “near killed him” to part with them), closing the house, neglecting his business, and taking to the road, was that while he was absolutely sure he was passed, he was certain he was failed. He had betrayed, deceived, and defiled Miss Sally Ann in the wanton arms of O.B.G.’s hot daughter—whom, however, for better or worse, he had once again found himself impotent with and who, ungrateful as always, had laughed at him in the morning when he’d offered to raise her wage. He’d had no choice then but to discipline such uppitiness. And though he loved, honored, and respected his unhappy wife, he was also profoundly troubled by their reciprocal grievances, which he felt sure were justified albeit unjust. In sum, he was so utterly of two minds about himself and his connections with things that he seemed rather a pair of humans in a single skin: the one energetic, breezy, optimistic, self-assured, narrow-minded, hospitable, out-going, quick-thinking, belligerent, and strong; the other apathetic, abject, pessimistic, self-despising, indulgent, rude, introspective, complaisant, uncouth, feckless, and flabby. He had lost faith initially in the Founder and then in himself—in his ability to pass, as it were, with neither syllabus nor Grand Tutor to aid him, and to Commence himself without believing in Commencement. It was presently the season for his annual inventory and report: for paying his debts, collecting his dividends, assessing the solvency of his various concerns, and establishing policy for the year ahead; but he had found himself unable to address the task. Moreover, he was plagued of late by headaches that made his eye water (I’d observed that he dosed himself with pills and liquids as he talked); his own newspapers were critical of his “deteriorating image,” as they called it, unaware that he was hampered by his thing about mirrors; his neighbors declared he ought either to marry O.B.G.’s daughter or leave her alone, unaware that she was the best-treated darky in the Quad; his children were embarrassed by him and swore they would make themselves into his opposite, whatever
that
might be.

Then a day had come when Miss Sally Ann told him calmly that in a short time she would be ready to leave the Rest House and come home, but not to the situation she had left. She was not, she declared, blaming him—but her survival, not to say well-being, depended on an end to the tensions between them. She had not permitted him to reply: if he was at home when she arrived, after the Carnival holidays, his presence would signify his readiness to Start Afresh; if not, she would assume that he had found himself finally and for all unwilling, or unable, to respond to her
needs—which he would then be free to regard as excessive if it comforted him to do so—and they would legalize their separation.

“I walked down the steps of that there house with my head fit to crack,” he told me. “And on one step I loved Sally Ann and hated myself, and on the next it was vicey-versy. I tried to think
I’m okay, and what the heck anyhow
—but it never did sound just right. So I figured I’d better stroll around some to clear my head, and next thing I knew, I was out along the highway, and I thought I saw a cycle go by with some young slicker a-driving it, and Miss Sally Ann in the sidecar!”

I expressed my astonishment, and Max, who had waked again in time to hear the last few episodes of Peter Greene’s history, said “Hah,” not very sympathetically. But Greene himself seemed more bemused than disturbed by his vision.

“I don’t see how it could of been, do you, George? The fellow weren’t more’n twenty agewise, smiling and flash-eyed; and Sally Ann was a-gig-gling at something he’d said to her, holding her hand to her mouth the way she does, and I swear she looked exactly like she did the first day of that Carnival: happy and fresh as a spring lamb, and pretty as all outdoors. Must of been some co-ed and her date, just looked like her.
Must
of been! Or my oldest girl Barbara May that’s about gone kerflooey herself, playing hooky from school. It don’t matter. All I could think was how sweet and happy Sally Ann was when I took her to the Carnival, and how tore up we’ve been since. And no matter whose flunking fault it is—hers or mine or the terms we live in—I just stood there and bawled to think of it. And then I decided, by Billy Gumbo, I’d thumb me a ride to Great Mall in time for this year’s Carnival. Kind of look things over, you know, back where it all started, and see what’s what.” He sighed, blinked his eye several times, and glanced at his wristwatch. “Which we better get along down the road for, don’t we’ll never find rooms tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” I protested. “You’re just going to the Spring Carnival, and not to register?”

He had initialed our bill for the waitress and was squinting with his good eye at the young hams that flexed and pressed beneath her tight uniform. He reddened and turned at my words, thumbing his chest.

“Look here, sir:
I’m okay
, doggone it! Any man’s liable to have trouble with a strange gal when he’s been married long as I have; that’s the only reason I couldn’t make the grade with O.B.G.’s daughter.”

“I beg your pardon?” Both his terminology and his attitude perplexed me.

“Ah, flunk it. Let’s hit the road.”

As if, having lingered such a while at the Pedal Inn, he found it suddenly unbearable, Greene all but fled the place. As we wakened snoring Croaker (whose vine-work now climbed halfway up my stick) I saw our troubled host doing push-ups on the gravel apron and grinning at the cordial taunts of young couples parked all about. Max shook his head. Outside in the cooling floodlit dark I remounted Croaker and Max the cycle, but before we set out Greene left off the bantering he’d resumed, and took his hand from the throttle briefly to squint up at me.

“S’pose there really
was
a Grand Tutor!” he cried. Max had been sitting with his eyes closed; now he opened them to contemplate his driver’s twisted grin. “S’pose you
were
Him right enough, come to put good old New Tammany on the track again, and you’d heard all the stuff I’ve told you ’bout me and Sally Ann and how everything’s gone kerflooey! What would you
say?
”