Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger Page B

being politic, however, Cornell pretended he had been damaged, howled, clutched his midsection, fell onto the cot, and wept. The light went out shortly thereafter.
    Eventually Cornell straightened out, pulled up the blanket, pulled it down again slightly after he smelled the leading edge, and lay there looking into blackness. Harry remained silent. Cornell considered apologizing. He had had no ulterior purpose in addressing Harry as a woman. Pure accident. Violent and female were complimentary adjectives, as even Harry would admit. In blunt-instrument and knife murders, cherchez la femme was the investigatory principle. Yet as Harry had pointed out, they were smaller than we—though not than Harry himself, who was only five-four or five. He must have raped a tiny woman. He was undoubtedly helped by surprise. Perhaps he had been armed. He did not seem terribly strong, could never have pushed Cornell around that way without cooperation. Which was another reason for Cornell’s failure to fight back: he had not felt seriously threatened.
    Cornell frowned, and was conscious of the lump on his head: diminished, less sore now, but still tender. Corelli had been strong enough to give him that, but a blackjack would be effective in the fist of a child.
    Harry was still quiet. You couldn’t even hear his breathing. Should Cornell apologize? It would be awfully uncomfortable if they stayed on the outs, with only nine feet square between them. But then it really wasn’t fair if Harry considered himself the injured party. He didn’t own that steampipe. Pervert! Cornell stuck out his tongue in the dark. The blanket had ridden up again and he got a very unpleasant sensation as he tasted the wool.
    Poor Charlie was now in jail too. What must he think of Cornell? Perhaps Harry could send a message through the steampipe explaining the seeming betrayal. Else Charlie might think it the issue of spite. No man could be blamed for what he said under truth serum. However, Cornell was relieved that he had not been tortured into making the revelation. That would have led to the same end, and he would have suffered considerable pain on the way. He abhorred pain. That’s what he so hated about sexual intercourse: it hurt.
    â€œHyperaesthesia is a symptom of your sickness,” Dr. Prine had told him.
    â€œBut it hurts!”
    â€œYou only think it hurts,” the good doctor would say.
    â€œBut if I think it does, what’s the difference?”
    â€œGeorgie, Georgie…” Then she would proceed to hurt him.
    Cornell had lost his virginity at eighteen. In his last year of secondary school he had majored in art appreciation. His term paper in the senior year dealt with the meaning of that enigmatic simper on the face of Leonarda’s Mono Liso. “Leonarda was a Lesbian,” wisecracked Jimmie Wilhelm, a smart-alecky classmate. “That made Mono laugh.” But Cornell had been very solemn about it, humorless adolescent that he then was. He remembered writing: “Leonarda was undoubtedly madly in love with Signor Liso, but he was promised to another. Mono, however, was touched by the devotion of the great painter, and his smile is one that endeavors to apply the unctuousness of pity.” The teacher struck out the misused word and red-penciled “unction” in the margin. She gave him a B-plus for the paper, the highest grade he had ever gained.
    For a while thereafter Cornell had worn his hair in the style of Mono Liso’s and daydreamed of breaking the heart of some great painter. With this vague project in mind, he had on graduation listed himself with the Employment Facility as seeking “work in art on the administrative side,” and as luck would have it, a midtown gallery needed a boy to do clerical work. Cornell applied and was hired. At the end of the first week, he repelled an attempt at rape by the gallery owner, a husky, hairy Greek-American named Basilica Dondis, who