“Yet something is wrong, Boz. Something is missing from your life that ought to be there.”
“Something. I don’t know what.” He looked downhearted.
McGonagall reached out for his hand. Human contact was of fundamental importance in McGonagall’s business. “Children?” he asked, turning to Milly, after this episode of warmth and feeling.
“We can’t afford children.”
“Would you want them, if you felt you could afford them?”
She pursed her lips. “Oh yes, very much.”
“Lots of children?”
“Really!”
“There are people, you know, who do want lots of children, who’d have as many as they could if it weren’t for the Regents system.”
“My mother,” Boz volunteered, “had four kids. They all came before the Genetic Testing Act, of course, except for me, and I was only allowed then because Jimmy, her oldest one, got killed in a riot, or a dance, or something, when he was fourteen.”
“Do you have pets at home?” McGonagall’s drift was clear.
“A cat,” Boz said, “and a rubber plant.”
“Who takes care of the cat mostly?”
“I do, but that’s because I’m there through the day. Since I’ve been gone Milly’s had to take care of Tabby. It must be lonely for her. For old Tabbycat.”
“Kittens?”
Boz shook his head.
“No,” Milly said. “I had her spayed.”
Boz could almost hear McGonagall thinking: Oh ho! He knew how the session would continue from this point and that the heat was off him and on Milly. McGonagall might be right, or he might not, but he had an idea between his jaws and he wasn’t letting loose: Milly needed to have a baby (a woman’s fulfillment), and Boz, well, it looked like Boz was going to be a mother.
Sure enough, by the end of the session Milly was spread out on the pliant white floor, back uparched, screaming (“Yes, a baby! I want a baby! Yes, a baby! A baby!”) and having hysterical simulated birth spasms. It was beautiful. Milly hadn’t broken down, really broken all the way down, and cried in how long? Years. It was one hundred per cent beautiful.
Afterwards they decided to go down by the stairs, which were dusty and dark and tremendously erotic. They made it on the 28th floor landing and, their legs all atremble, again on the 12th. The juice shot out of him in dazzling gigantic hiccoughs, like milk spurting out of a full-to-the-top two-quart container, so much they neither could believe it: a heavenly breakfast, a miracle proving their existence, and a promise they were both determined to keep.
It wasn’t all sweetness and roses, by any means. They had more paper work to do than from all the 1040 forms they’d ever prepared. Plus visits to a pregnancy counselor; to the hospital to get the prescriptions they both had to start taking; then reserving a bottle at Mount Sinai for after Milly’s fourth month (the city would pay for that, so she could stay on the job); and the final solemn moment at the Regents office when Milly drank the first bitter glass of the anticontraceptive agent. (She was sick the rest of the day, but did she complain? Yes.) For two weeks after that she couldn’t drink anything that came out of the tap in the apartment until, happy day, her morning test showed a positive reading.
They decided it would be a girclass="underline" Loretta, after Boz’s sister. They redecided, later on: Aphra, Murray, Algebra, Sniffles (Boz’s preferences), and Pamela, Grace, Lulu, and Maureen (Milly’s preferences).
Boz knitted a kind of blanket.
The days grew longer and the nights shorter. Then vice versa. Peanut (which was her name whenever they couldn’t decide what her name really would be) was scheduled to be decanted the night before Xmas, 2025.
But the important thing, beyond the microchemistry of where babies come from, was the problem of psychological adjustment to parenthood, by no means a simple thing.
This is the way McGonagall put it to Boz and Milly during their last private counseling session:
“The way we work, the way we talk, the way we watch television or walk down the street, even the way we fuck, or maybe that especially—each of those is part of the problem of identity. We can’t do any of those things authentically until we find out who we really are and be that person, inside and out, instead of the person other people want us to be. Usually those other people, if they want us to be something we aren’t, are using us as a laboratory for working out their own identity problems.
“Now Boz, we’ve seen how you’re expected, a hundred tiny times a day, to seem to be one kind of person in personal relationships and a completely different kind of person at other times. Or to use your own words—you’re ‘just a husband.’ This particular way of sawing a person in two got started in the last century, with automation. First jobs became easier, and then scarcer—especially the kinds of jobs that came under the heading of a ‘man’s work.’ In every field men were working side by side with women. For some men the only way to project a virile image was to wear Levi’s on the weekends and to smoke the right brand of cigarette. Marlboros, usually.” His lips tightened and his fingers flexed delicately, as again, in his mouth and in his lungs, desire contested with will in the endless, ancient battle: with just such a gesture would a stylite have spoken of the temptations of the flesh, rehearsing the old pleasures only to reject them.
“What this meant, in psychological terms, was that men no longer needed the same kind of uptight, aggressive character structure, any more than they needed the bulky, Greek-wrestler physiques that went along with that kind of character. Even as sexual plumage that kind of body became unfashionable. Girls began to prefer slender, short ectomorphs. The ideal couples were those, like the two of you as a matter of fact, who mirrored each other. It was a kind of movement inward from the poles of sexuality.
“Today, for the first time in human history, men are free to express the essentially feminine component in their personality. In fact, from the economic point of view, it’s almost required of them. Of course, I’m not talking about homosexuality. A man can be feminized well beyond the point of transvestism without losing his preference for cunt, a preference which is an inescapable consequence of having a cock.”
He paused to appreciate his own searing honesty—a Republican speaking at a testimonial dinner for Adlai Stevenson!
“Well, this is pretty much what you must have heard all through high school, but it’s one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel it in your body. What most men felt then—the ones who allowed themselves to go along with the feminizing tendencies of the age—was simply a crushing, horrible, total guilt a guilt that became, eventually, a much worse burden than the initial repression. And so the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties was followed by the dreary Counter-revolution of the Seventies and Eighties, when I grew up. Let me tell you, though I’m sure you’ve been told many times, that it was simply awful. All the men dressed in black or gray or possibly, the adventuresome ones, a muddy brown. They had short haircuts and walked—you can see it in the movies they made then—like early-model robots. They had made such an effort to deny what was happening that they’d become frozen from the waist down. It got so bad that at one point there were four teevee series about zombies.
“I wouldn’t be going over this ancient history except that I don’t think young people your age realize how lucky you are having missed that. Life still has problems—or I’d be out of work—but at least people today who want to solve them have a chance.
“To get back to the decision you’re facing, Boz. It was in that same period, the early Eighties (in Japan, of course, since it would surely have been illegal in the States then), that the research was done that allowed feminization to be more than a mere cosmetic process. Even so, it was years before these techniques became at all widespread. Only in the last two decades, really. Before our time, every man had been obliged, for simple biological reasons, to deny his own deep-rooted maternal instincts. Motherhood is basically a psychosocial, and not a sexual, phenomenon. Every child, be he boy or girl, grows up by learning to emulate his mother. He (or she) plays with dolls and cooks mud pies—if he lives somewhere where mud is available. He rides the shopping cart through the supermarket, like a little kangaroo. And so on. It’s only natural for men, when they grow up, to wish to be mothers themselves, if their social and economic circumstances allow it—that is to say, if they have the leisure, since the rest can now be taken care of.