Free Dog Tags by Stephen Becker Page B

honeymoon in the mountains, registering with appropriate aplomb and disappearing from human ken for some days. That night they learned what strangers they were, and for the first and only time Benny’s pride and joy failed him. They soon cured this mysterious ailment, and joked about it, and Carol was breathless and acquiescent and curious and obedient. But there was plenty of the ancient Roman in Benny and not all the eagles in the world flying on his right hand would cancel out the omen. He lay awake in the middle watch straining to see through the fog of the future, but he was human, blind, doomed, and the fates were mute.
    Weary, languid, they returned to Riverside Drive, and Carol set about cataloging, ranging, repairing, storing, stitching and baking; she proved severe with tradesmen, and Benny admired. She resolved to work for a year and think later about genetics, but changed her mind almost immediately; adventurous one night, Benny was put off gently, and Carol said softly, “The honeymoon is over.” Benny froze, but she hugged him and went on, “There’s three of us now. Don’t knock him around.”
    Benny sat up and pressed a switch; Carol was grinning as if in guilt. Popeyed, stupefied, he could not speak. “Now everybody’ll know what we’ve been doing,” she said.
    â€œJesus,” Benny managed. He kissed her. “Little mother. So soon!”
    â€œI didn’t know it was loaded,” she said, and he wheezed at the ancient joke. To his acute shame thoughts of other women crossed his mind, and he wondered briefly if unknown Beer by-blows might exist. He recalled himself to order. “Carol! A child. A baby Beer! A crown prince!”
    â€œYup. How’s that for service?”
    â€œOh best of women,” he said, and kissed her again, slowly, warmly; he kissed her eyes, her throat, her breasts; lovingly, firmly, he kissed her downy mound, and said, “Thank you, little mother.”
    â€œYou pig,” she said. “Come back here.”
    They rubbed noses. “Do you want to work anyway?”
    â€œNo. I think I’ll do everything right. Quit smoking and get fat and eat chalk and truffles.”
    â€œDamn right,” Benny said. “As a medical man, madam, I must inform you that frequent intercourse eases childbirth.”
    â€œI married a maniac,” she said. “Well, get on with it.” And Benny, suffused with love, with awe, with the pride of a hundred generations, got on with it; and Carol, sparkling, pummeled him and laughed. In the morning he called Jacob, and she called Amos, who mentioned a trust fund.
    And yet the event diminished Benny; beneath the natural joy an unnatural alteration worked, a confusion, an ambiguous and agonizing demand for new strengths and new dignities. Some of it he understood: a portion of his prodigious, transcendent sexual frenzy was being distilled to compassion; his bawdy Doppelgänger, his ruttish twin, a splendidly psychotic Deutero-Benny, a fiendish gonad in human form, had fallen afoul of a mysterious constabulary. At the obscure command of that enigmatic force he must consciously—if regretfully—subdue his infantile fantasies, deliberately—if regretfully—expurgate and abridge his Kamasutra. He must concede (not without sighs) that the companion of his joys and sorrows deserved a more human lord, and should be spared the scurvy monstrosities of a deranged incubus. She was not a succubus; she was Carol, who might some day be a geneticist, who was now a bachelor of science and a laboratory technician, whose mind and heart he had also married, who bore his child; a certain decorum seemed meet, classical and correct. Where she demurred (and she had) he would not insist; hating slavery, he renounced mastery.
    It was not easy. He was, had been, hoped always to be, frank with himself, freely admitting to the deer park of his mind the most incendiary extremes of