Regiment of Women Read Free

was an ex-convict.
    â€œGoodbye, Paul,” Cornell said to him.
    Paul had many years before been a patient of Dr. Prine’s, but his illness had proved to be beyond the reach of psychiatry. He had persisted in dressing as a woman, in sweatshirt, baggy pants, and cowgirl boots, refused to shave for days at a time, chewed tobacco and spat into potted flowers. Finally he had lost all semblance of control, appeared at the apartment of a female acquaintance, forced her at knifepoint to strip and don lacy male panties and frothy brassiere and perform an obscene dance while he smoked one of her brier pipes. He was soon thereafter apprehended by the police and subsequently received the maximum sentence. After the emasculation he of course went quickly to fat.
    Paul now returned Cornell’s congé with a dull, eunuch’s smile which hardly creased his bovine face. He must have weighed 250 pounds. His memory was also enervate.
    â€œGoodbye, Mr. Corning.”
    Cornell had been coming here for three years.
    Cornell’s office was only a sixty-block walk from Dr. Prine’s high-rent district on the Upper West Side. He went south via Central Park West and its continuous façades of plate glass on both sides, with bumper-to-bumper truck traffic between. At Columba Circle he met Broadway and followed it to the glass monolith on the corner of 53rd Street, the home of the giant publishing firm for which he labored: Philby, Osgood & Huff.
    Above the inside elevator doors were listed the various subsidiaries and the floors relevant to each: The Osphil Press, Huff-books, Huff House. Of the three original partners, Philby was dead, Constance Osgood was now in senile seclusion, and only Eloise Huff survived.
    Cornell deboarded on the eighteenth floor and greeted the brunette receptionist.
    â€œMorning, Willie.”
    â€œIt’s almost noon, Georgie,” said this snotty creature. “How some people get away with it is beyond me.” Willie flipped his lacquered bouffant away, and Cornell did something similar with his own swanlike neck, though not without protruding his tongue. Rumor had it that Eloise Huff, the big boss, was getting into Willie’s pants.
    Speak of the devil. No sooner had Cornell pushed through the glass doors of Huff House than who appeared but old Eloise herself, baggy tweeds, eternal pipe, and brushy mustache: her own lip-hair, and not the paste-on device currently in fashion; she was inordinately vain about it.
    On her way to the toilet, her impatient hand already at the top of the zipper. Her kidney condition was well known.
    Cornell had not been able to phone in that he would be late. No one would yet have been at work when he left home, and he was closeted with Dr. Prine thereafter. To call en route would have been pointless even could he have found a public telephone that functioned. The last time he tried, he left the booth after depositing three zinc dollars for as many replays of the synthetic monologue of the robot operator.
    Luckily, old Eloise was as usual in a state of egocentric oblivion.
    â€œHello, Johnny,” she said. “Back from lunch already? These mornings get away from me when I’m reading manuscripts. I’ll just send out for a malted today, I think.” She burped. “Off my feed these days. Fifteen-twenty years ago I was a three-martini luncher. Could drink most authors under the table.” Her gray mustache was stained yellow from the pipe, and dandruff flecked the shoulders of her old blazer. If she was laying Willie, he was to be pitied. Cornell’s stomach rolled at the thought of being touched by such a dirty old woman.
    He smiled and murmured something—Eloise never listened to anybody but herself, anyway—and trotted down the corridor. Before he cleared the range of Eloise’s reach, however, he felt her sharp pinch of his left buttock. He seethed all the way to his desk, but that was the sort of thing you had to put up