His thoughts, I told her, were not important; her Commencement was, and it depended on her overcoming the false distinctions I had formerly burdened her with. Yes, she must seduce her own husband, overwhelm him with carnalities of every description, even Conscious Depravities. Moreover, for both their sakes she must cuckold him; commit fornications without his knowledge and against his wishes.
"That's impossible!" she protested. "You know how Maurice is!" But her eyes refilled as she remembered, visibly, that he'd been neither brute nor pander since my first false Tutoring, but so chaste and docile a spouse he'd often made her cross. "That would be adultery, George!"
This last was more than refusal, and setting the teeth of my spirit I insisted she deceive her husband, not only with Bray but with for example Dr. Eierkopf and any other creature who crossed her fancy or her path — male or female, human or hound-dog, even animate or inanimate. All discrimination must go by the board.
She shook her head. "That's flunkèd!"
"Failure is Passage," I reminded her. She objected no more, but admitted tearfully that Dr. Sear had just finished telling her the very same thing, apropos of "the Peter Greene business," and though she'd understood it from him no more clearly than from me, even when he applied my reasoning to his own case, she guessed she had no choice but to acknowledge her stupidity and try to obey without understanding, repugnant as was the notion of such lewdness. I asked what business of or with Greene she meant, as she seemed not to be alluding to the spring-term rape — and also how my advice to her had applied to Dr. Sear, for while I was pleased to see he saw my point about her "charity" and the need to invert my former Tutoring, I had not myself considered what ought to be his new prescription. By way of answer, she locked the hall-door and bade me come with her into the Observation Room. As we passed in front of my mother, that lady caught and kissed my hand, the first indication that she knew I was there, and smiled slyly to herself as always. I kissed her hair, and she put down her knitting to make Enos Enoch's hand-sign on her fallen chest.
"What are you knitting, Mother?" I asked gently, and looked to Anastasia for reply; between her spells of reliving our season in the hemlocks, my poor Lady Creamhair spoke not at all except in confidential whispers to My Ladyship, whom she stayed with constantly, as it seemed.
Anastasia colored. "It's a baby-sweater, George. Mom — Your mother thinks I'm going to have a baby."
I considered her belly. "Are you?"
"Of course not!"
Mother nodded to the wee blue wrapper. "Bye Baby Billikins."
Anastasia colored further. "Sometimes she thinks it's that WESCAC business again, and her that's pregnant."
But my mother resolutely shook her head.
"You do, sometimes!" Anastasia scolded her; but then confessed what I took to be Mother's commoner delusion; "other times she seems to think I'm Your wife or something…"
I smiled and kissed again Mother's poor mad hair, and to humor her folly drew Anastasia near, patted her fine flat gut and nodded.
"That's cruel, George!" In a little temper My Ladyship went into the Observation Room. "I'm not even able to have babies, and You know it!"
My apology seemed rather to encourage than to mollify her petulance; she maintained a more or less injured air while recounting Peter Greene's strange forenoon invasion of the office. But though I was much interested in her tale I forgot her vexed tone when I looked through the oneway glass into the Treatment Room and saw a shirtsleeved man his head swathed in bandages, lying on the leathern couch — and Peter Greene, white-coated, in the chair at its head!
5
"Don't ask me," Anastasia said, before I'd thought to. "Kennard took him in there to calm him down, and next thing I knew it was like that. They've been at it since before lunch."
From her account I gathered that the bandaged man was Dr. Sear; his malady was no curabler than before, but surgical excision of his nose had abated its progress, temporarily, enough for him to resume a limited practice. Anastasia had returned to assist him on the conditions that she be obliged no longer to offer sexual therapy to anyone, even Mrs. Sear, and that her "mother" be permitted to stay with her in the Reception Room. Indeed, it was Mother, I was startled to learn, who in her own recent therapy-sessions had by some means conveyed to Dr. Sear the first reports of my new programme — perhaps by the same fortuitous quotations from the Syllabi that she'd inspired me with. In any case, with his usual acuity Sear had seen my point, and when shortly afterwards Anastasia had come to him, distraught, with word of my strange new advice, he'd not only approved it, but fortified my paradoxical argument with a dozen quotations from Footnotes to Sakhyan and other works of "unitary expletivism," none of which My Ladyship could make heads or tails of.
" 'He is a Grand Tutor!' " she said he'd said of me. "I told him You said You weren't, and he said, 'That's the point! That's what I mean!' " She sighed (still a little poutish): thereafter Sear had pressed her in vain to return to the practice of sexual therapy; and it was he, I now learned, who had suggested that she might secure my release by promising to become Bray's mistress (he'd also persuaded Bray to release me on the strength of her pledge without waiting for its consummation — not to mention the siring upon her of the child Bray craved). Further, Sear had acknowledged to her that he himself had been desperately flunkèd thitherto, even as I'd said; was flunkèd still, as he'd seen too plainly at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. Hence the decision to end his life. Rescued willynilly from the sleeping-capsules, he'd tried to relish the horror of his disease, but the physical decay, it seemed, drove out the intellectual, and he'd found himself terrified instead of diverted by death's approach. Anosmia was followed by exophthalmos, and as his eyeballs began to pop, the cancer spread to and obstructed his lacrimal ducts, with the result that tears ran from them almost constantly. But it was as much for as from his condition that he wept. Greatly as he loathed mutilation, now he feared death more, and consented to radical surgery: the tears disappeared, along with his nose and a portion of the sight of both eyes.
With what vision remained to him he'd striven to imagine how my new Answer fit his case. Clearly I would not advise him to refine his amusements or otherwise attempt to become more campusly — the end of that road he'd reached already, at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. From my advice to Anastasia he inferred correctly that he should assert whatever it was he had vainly tried to rid himself of; further, he'd concluded that that must necessarily be some kind of ingenuousness or ignorance of himself, inasmuch as he'd devoted his whole life to their opposites. That he could see no defect in his insight proved to him that the defect existed, since perfect insight would see its imperfections; had he not been naïve to think himself not naïve? His first prescription, therefore, had been to commit himself to the custody of his wife, who had regressed to the psychological age of five. But much as he'd enjoyed playing "Doctor" with her in the sandbox of the chronic-ward playground, he'd come to realize that however correct his diagnosis and prescription, they were invalid perforce, as he'd arrived at them himself.
"So this morning he asked me to tell him what to do!" Anastasia exclaimed. "As if I were the doctor! I said he'd better talk to You, that I didn't understand this crazy business — and the way he thanked me, you'd think that was exactly what he wanted to hear! As if he couldn't have thought of it himself!"