The Breast (3 page)

 

 

AS FAR AS I KNOW, my only visitors other than the scientists, the doctors, and the hospital staff, have been Claire, my father, and Arthur Schonbrunn, formerly my department chairman and now the Dean of Arts and Sciences. My father's behavior has been staggering. I don't know how to account for it, except to say that I simply never knew the man. Nobody knew the man. Aggressive, cunning, at his work tyrannical—with us, the little family, innocent, protective, tender, and deeply in love. But this self-possession face to face with horror? Who would have expected it from the owner of a second-class South Fallsburg hotel? A short-order cook to begin with, he rose eventually to be the innkeeper himself; retired now, he “kills time” answering the phone mornings at his brother's booming catering service in Bayside. Once a week he comes to visit and, seated in a chair that is drawn up beside my nipple, tells me all the news about our former guests. Remember Abrams the milliner? Cohen the chiropodist? Remember Rosenheim with the card tricks and the Cadillac? Yes, yes, I think so. Well, this one is near death, this one has moved, this one's son has gone and married an Egyptian. “How do you like that?” he says; “I didn't even know they would allow that over there.” It is an awesome performance. Only is it performance? Is he the world's most brilliant actor, or just a simpleton, or just completely numb? Or has he no choice other than to go on being himself?
But doesn't he get what has happened? Doesn't the man understand that some things are more unusual even than a Jew marrying an Egyptian?

One hour, and then he leaves for home—without kissing me. Something new for my father, leaving without that kiss. And that is when I realize he is no simpleton. It
is
a performance—and my father is a great and brave and noble man.

And my excitable mother? Mercifully for her she is dead; if she weren't, this would have killed her. Or am I wrong about her too? She put up with alcoholic bakers and homicidal salad men and bus boys who still wet the bed—so who knows, maybe she could have put up with me too.
Beasts,
she called them,
barnyard animals,
but always she went back to the kettles, back to the cleanser and the mops and the linens, despite the
angst
she endured from Memorial Day weekend to Yom Kippur because of the radical imperfection of our help. Isn't it from my mother that I learned determination to begin with? Isn't it from her example that I learned how one goes on from summer to winter to summer again, in spite of everything? So, still more banality: I am able to bear being a mammary gland because of my upbringing in a typically crisis-ridden Catskill hotel.

Claire, whose equanimity has from the first been such a tonic to me, a soothing antidote to the impulsiveness of my former wife, and I suppose even to my mother's palpitations and all the hotel-kitchen crises—Claire, oddly, was not nearly so good as my father at quelling her anguish right off. What was astonishing wasn't her tears, however, but the weight of her head on my midsection when she broke down and began to sob.
Her face on this flesh? How can she touch me?
I had been expecting never to be handled again by anyone other than the medical staff. I thought, “If Claire had become a penis…” But that was too ridiculous to contemplate—inasmuch, that is, as it hadn't happened. Besides, what had happened to me had happened to me and no one else because it could not happen to anyone else, and even if I did not know why that was so,
it was so,
and there must be reasons to make it so, whether I was ever to know them or not. Perhaps, as Dr. Klinger observed, putting myself in Claire's shoes was somewhat beyond the call of duty. Perhaps; but if Claire
had
become a five-foot-nine-inch male member, I doubt that I would be capable of such devotion.

It was only a few days after her first visit that Claire consented to massage my nipple. Had she wept from a safe distance, I could never have been so quick to make the suggestion; I might never have made it at all. But the moment I felt the weight of her head touch down upon me,
all
the possibilities opened up in my mind, and it was only a matter of time (and not much of that) before I dared to ask for the ultimate act of sexual grotesquerie, in the circumstances.

I must make clear, before going further, that Claire is no vixen; though throughout our affair she had been wonderfully aroused by ordinary sexual practices, she had no taste, for instance, for intercourse
per anum,
and was even squeamish about receiving my sperm in her mouth. If she performed fellatio at all, it was only as a brief antecedent to intercourse, and never with the intention of bringing me off. I did not complain bitterly about this, but from time to time, as men who have not yet been turned into breasts are wont to do, I registered my discontent—I was not, you see, getting all I wanted out of life.

Yet it was Claire who suggested that she would play with my nipple if that was what I most desired.

This was during her fourth visit in four days. I had described to her for the first time how the nurse ministered to me in the mornings. I planned—for the time being anyway—to say this and no more.

But Claire asked, “Would you like me to do what she does?”

“Would you—do that?”

“Of course, if you want me to.”

Of course. Cool, imperturbable girl!

“I do!” I cried. “Please, I do!”

“You tell me what you like then,” she said. “You tell me what feels best.”

“Claire, is anyone else in the room?”

“No, no—just you and me.”

“Is this being televised?”

“Oh, sweetheart, no, of course it isn't.”

“Then squeeze me, squeeze me hard!”

Once again, days later, after I made incoherent conversation about my nurse for nearly an hour, Claire said, “David dearest, what is it? Do you want my mouth?”

“Yes! Yes!”

How could she? How can she? Why does she? Would
I?
I say to Dr. Klinger, “It's too much to ask. It's too awful. I have to stop this. I want her to do it all the time, every minute she's here. I don't want to talk any more. I don't want her to read to me—I don't even listen. I just want her to squeeze me and suck me and lick me. I can't get enough of it. I can't stand it when she stops. I shout, I scream, “Go on! More! Go on!” But I'll drive her away, I will, I know, if I don't stop. And then I'll have no one. Then I'll have the nurse in the morning—and that's all I'll have. My father will come and tell me who died and who got married. And you will come and tell me about my strong character and my will to live.
But I won't have a woman!
I won't have Claire or sex or love ever again! Doctor, I want her to take her clothes off—but how can I ask? I don't want to drive her away, it's bizarre enough now—but I want her clothes off, all of them off, at her feet, on the floor. I want her to get up on me and
roll
on me. Doctor, I want to fuck her! With my nipple! But if I say it, it will drive her away! She'll run and never return!”

Claire visits every evening after dinner. During the day she teaches fourth grade at the Bank Street School here in New York. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Cornell; her mother is principal of a school in Schenectady, divorced now from her father, an engineer with Western Electric. Her older sister is married to an economist in the Commerce Department, and lives with him and four little children in Alexandria, Virginia. They own a house on the South Beach of Martha's Vineyard, where Claire and I visited them on our way to a week's vacation in Nantucket last summer. We argued politics—the Vietnam war. That done, we played fly-catcher-up with the kids down on the beach and then went off to eat boiled lobsters in Edgartown; afterward we sat in the movies, big, hearty, hairy carnivores, reduced in the cozy dark to nothing more than wind-burned faces and buttered fingers. Delicious. We had a fine time, really, “square” as were our hosts—I know they were square because they kept telling me so. Yet we had such a good time. She is something to look at on the beach, a green-eyed blonde, tall and lean and full-breasted. Even with desire on the wane, I still liked nothing better than to lie in bed and watch her dress in the morning and undress at night. Down in the hollow of the dunes, I unclip the top of her bikini and watch it drop away. “Imagine,” she says, “where they'll be at fifty, if they droop like this at twenty-five.” “Can't,” I say, “won't,” and drawing her to her knees, I lean back on the hot sand, dig down with my heels, shut my eyes, and wait with open lips for her breast to fill my mouth. What a sensation, there with the sea booming below! As though it were the globe itself—suckable soft globe!—and I Poseidon or Zeus! Oh, nothing beats the pleasures of the anthropomorphic god. “Let's spend all next summer by the ocean,” say I, as people do on the first happy day of vacation. Claire whispers, “First let's go home and make love.” It's been some time—she's right. “Oh, let's just lie here,” I say—“Where is that strange thing? Yes, again, again.” “I don't want to cut off your air. You were turning green.” “With envy,” I say.

Yes, I admit openly, that is what I said. And if this were a fairy tale instead of my life, we would have the moral now: “Beware preposterous desires—you may get lucky.” But as this is decidedly
not
some fairy tale—not to me, dear reader—why should a wish like that have been the one to come true? I assure you that I have wanted things far less whimsically in my life than I wanted on that beach to be breasted. Why should playful, loverly words, spoken on the first day of our idyllic vacation, become flesh, while whatever I have wanted in deadly earnest I have been able to achieve, if at all, only by putting one foot in front of the other over the course of thirty-eight years? No, I refuse to surrender my bewilderment to the wish-fulfillment theory. Neat and fashionable and delightfully punitive though it may be, I refuse to believe that I am this thing because this is a thing that I wanted to be. No! Reality is just a little grander than that. Reality has
some
style.

There. For those who prefer a fairy tale to life, a moral: “Reality,” concludes the embittered professor who for reasons unbeknown to himself became a female breast, “has style.” Go, you sleek, self-satisfied Houyhnhnms to whom nothing disgusting has yet happened, go and moralize on that!

It was not to Claire that I made my “grotesque” proposal then, but to my female nurse. I said, “Do you know what I think about when you wash me like this? Can I tell you what I am thinking about right now?”

“What is that, Professor Kepesh?”

“I would like to fuck you with my nipple.”

“Can't hear you, Professor.”

“I get so excited I want to fuck you! I want you to sit on my nipple—with your cunt!”

“I'll be finished with you in just a moment…”

“Did you hear me, whore? Did you hear what I want?”

“Just drying you down now…”

By the time Dr. Klinger arrived at four I was one hundred and fifty-five pounds of remorse. I even began to sob a little when I told him what I had done—against all my misgivings and despite his warning. Now, I said, it was recorded on tape; for all I knew, it would be on page one of tomorrow's tabloids. A light moment for the straphangers on their way to work. For there certainly was a humorous side to it all; what is a catastrophe without its humorous side? Miss Clark—as I had known all along—is a short, stocky spinster, fifty-six years old.

Unlike Dr. Gordon, Claire, and my father, who continually assure me that I am not being watched other than by those who announce their presence, Dr. Klinger has never even bothered to dispute the issue with me. “And? If it is on page one? What of it?”

“It's nobody's business!” Still weeping.

“But you would like to do it, would you not?”

“Yes! Yes! But she ignored me! She pretended I'd asked her to hurry up and be done! I don't want her any more. I want a new nurse!”

“Have anyone in mind?”

“Someone young—someone beautiful! Why not!”

“Someone who will hear you and say yes.”

“Yes! Why not! It's insane otherwise! I should have what I want! This is no ordinary life and I am not going to pretend that it is!
You
want me to be ordinary, you
expect
me to be ordinary—in this condition! I'm supposed to go on being a sensible man—in this condition! But that is crazy of you, Doctor! I want her to sit on me with her cunt! And why not! I want Claire to do what I want! What makes that ‘grotesque'? To be denied my pleasure in the midst of this—
that
is the grotesque! I want to be fucked! Why shouldn't I be fucked? Tell me why that shouldn't be! Instead you torture me! Instead you prevent me from having what I want! Instead I lie here being sensible! And there's the madness, Doctor—being sensible!”

I do not know how much of what I said Dr. Klinger even understood; it is difficult enough to follow me when I am speaking deliberately, with concentration, and now I was sobbing and howling with no regard for the TV cameras or the spectators up in the stands … Or is that
why
I was carrying on so? Was I really so racked by the proposal I'd made that morning to Miss Clark? Or was the display largely for the benefit of my great audience, to convince them that, appearances aside, I am still very much a man—for who but a man has conscience, reason, desire, and remorse?

This crisis lasted for months. I became increasingly lewd with the stout, implacable Miss Clark, until finally one morning I offered her money. “Bend over—take it from behind! I'll give you anything you want!” How I would get the money into her hands, how I would go about borrowing if she demanded more than I had saved in my account, I tried to figure out during my long, empty days. Who would help me? I couldn't very well ask my father or Claire, and they were the only two people by whom I was willing to be seen. Ridiculous perhaps, given how sure I was that my image was being mercilessly recorded by television cameras and my daily progress publicized in the
Daily News,
but then I am not arguing that since my transformation I have been a model of Mature Adult Responsible Behavior. I am only trying to describe, as best I can, the stages I have had to pass through on the way to the present phase of melancholy equilibrium … Of course to assist me—to get hold of the money, to make the financial arrangements, either with Miss Clark or, if need be, with some woman whose profession is not circumscribed by a nurse's ethical outlook—I could easily have called upon a young bearded colleague, a clever poet from Brooklyn who is no prude and whose sexual adventurousness has made him somewhat notorious in our English Department. But then neither was I a prude, and once upon a time I had had a taste for sexual adventure no less developed than my young friend's. You must understand that it was not a man of narrow experience and suffocating inhibitions who was being tormented by his desires in that hammock. I had experimented with whores easily enough back in my twenties, and during a year as a Fulbright student in London, I had for several months carried on a thrilling, overwrought affair with two young women—students my age on leave together from university in Sweden, who shared a basement bedroom with me—until the less stable of the pair tried halfheartedly to pitch herself under a lorry. What alarmed me wasn't the strangeness of my desires in that hammock, but the degree to which I would be severing myself from my own past—and kind—by surrendering to them. I was afraid that the further I went the further I would go—that I would reach a point of frenzy from which I would pass over into a state of being that no longer had anything to do with who or what I once had been. It wasn't even that I would no longer be myself—I would no longer be anyone. I would have become craving flesh and nothing more.