Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Before retiring, Reinhart flushed the shorn locks down the toilet, took two Sominex, and eventually was hummed to sleep on his narrow couch under the window by a duet of mosquitoes to whom his corpus would furnish late dinner.

  4

  Reinhart entered an elevator in the Bloor Building, in the city, a skyscraper that might have been commonplace in New York but was the highest edifice hereabouts, and was projected, with funny ears, to the twenty-seventh floor. His fund of odd information as usual came in handy: he knew that the familiar nightmare of the elevator-rider, given the nod in many films and TV episodes, had no base in reality. The cab never came unhooked and plunged to the bottom of the shaft; because of many safety devices this could not happen.

  But here was his floor. He found the number and opened a frosty-paned door labeled CRYON FOUNDATION.

  “I believe I spoke to you earlier on the phone,” he stated to the young woman who sat behind a kidney-shaped desk of crystal-clear plastic. Her telephone was of a rusty hue that Reinhart had not known was one of the options. She wore outsize metal-rimmed glasses which he doubted were prescription. Her hair was a sort of mane of tan intermixed with black. The bosom of her dress, puffy and colored in pastel streaks, defied the eye to tell whether flesh was immediately underlying, or air, padding, or whatnot. Time was when Reinhart knew exactly what an office girl had beneath her blouse: an impeccably white brassiere, fastened over the groove of her spine with two or possibly three metal hooks sewn into strained elastic.

  “I understand your hangup,” she said. “It takes more than a deep breath to plunge into something like this. Has the death already occurred or is it in the works?”

  “As I told you on the telephone—but perhaps it was difficult to hear: I was in one of those lousy outdoor booths, which was filthy, and furthermore it was so ravaged by vandals that frankly I didn’t expect to get through at all.” It also stank of piss and the glass walls were covered with obscenities written with a wide-tipped laundry marker in green ink and various phone numbers accompanied by sundry promises of a sexual nature. Some years before Reinhart in a desperate moment had dialed one such combination of digits, lifted off the plaster flanking a coin phone in a bar, and got the Public Library.

  “The point is,” he went on, “that I am a personal friend of Mr. Bob Sweet’s. He wrote down the number for me himself.” Reinhart held up the leaf from Sweet’s lizard notebook.

  “Excuse me?” She had a large, pale, fashionable mouth and big white teeth.

  “Well, I’d like to see him if he’s in.”

  “He isn’t.” She cocked her head and, smirking, pronounced an impersonally cute “Really.”

  “May I wait?” He sat down in a half acorn upholstered in lemon Naugahyde and mounted on cat’s-cradles of chromium wire. Ordinarily he would have lingered for the invitation, but he now suddenly felt adrift on a wave of impuissance. The scene at breakfast had been frightful: Blaine with his ravaged head, looking like a wet bird, Genevieve’s swordplay with the breadknife, Winona’s howls. Pretty strong stuff.

  “Mr. Sweet’s in New York for the Jack Alp Show” said the girl. “I don’t know when to expect him.”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “I gather the presentation piqued your curiosity as to what was entailed,” she said in an unreal pronunciation, or perhaps Reinhart heard her faultily as he found himself staring up her generous naked haunches all the way to the bare crotch, which, unless he had gone blind or mad, was smooth as one as a youngster imagined a girl’s to be, without orifice or beard.

  “Sir,” she suddenly cried with impatience posing as compassion, “aren’t you well? Can I get you a glass of water?”

  Reinhart made a croaking sound which the girl took as assent and she rose and strode through a plastic-rosewood door to some inner sanctum. She was tall and hefty. The minimal skirt, of a stubborn stuff which remembered the crumpling it had undergone from the seat of the chair, stayed halfway up her posterior. A crackless behind showed Reinhart that what he had taken as nudity was pantyhose in the color of Caucasian flesh.

  The same garment on a Negro female would not have misled him, though no doubt he might have been accused of racism on some other pretext—he had already picked up a magazine and, leafing urgently past an article written by an eighteen-year-old philosopher, entitled “Why Do You Hate Us?,” had come up another, labeled “Here’s Why We Hate You,” by a writer identified as “a black” or perhaps it was “A. Black,” written without capitals to be pretentious. Further along were the cartoons, peopled by “hippies,” speaking in such terms as “turn on,” “freak out,” etc. Prepositions were in fashion. Up with this I shall not put, Reinhart said Churchillianly to himself, dropping the periodical onto its fellows on a coffee table of leaden, solid slate. His dentist’s old mags were full of “beatniks” and other vanished phenomena.

  The big girl returned with a measure of water in a disposable cup made of hardened, dead-white foam which had no weight when emptied, for Reinhart though not thirsty drained it considerately.

  She said, hanging her breasts over him, “My father gets those attacks.” Girls her age, anywhere from twenty-five to forty-three, often pretended he was old enough to have sired them.

  “Thank you,” Reinhart answered curtly. “As it happened I lunched with Mr. Sweet yesterday and rode partway to the airport with him. We are old pals from high school.”

  “Is that right? Well.”

  Reinhart decided to be avuncular, having nothing else going for him. “And don’t say you thought he was a lot younger. I’m not yet a candidate for your freezer.” Now he could see her big nipples, the pinkish swirls in the multicolored dress being transparent.

  She shrugged, reclaimed the weightless cup, and, having let it fall, which took ever so long, into a wastebasket of woven strips of Philippine mahogany, sat down again at the desk. Now, with his informed sight, Reinhart noticed that her crotch sagged slightly. He had known a very large nurse when in the Army. Today she must be most of the distance towards fifty, having been a few, then meaningless, years older than he. Nowadays he lusted only for teen-agers, but if this receptionist threw herself at him he would catch her. Time enough for that, though, when Sweet hired him.

  “I suppose we will be colleagues soon,” said Reinhart. “I imagine I will be joining Mr. Sweet in the firm.”

  She peered dramatically at an immense watch on a purple patent-leather band around her wrist. “It’s lunchtime, and I have to go out now. Was there anything further? I have to lock the office, you see.”

  “Are you alone here?” Reinhart regretted having put the question when he saw her suspicious, even frightened, glance. He smiled to allay any fears that he might be a potential rapist, but felt his treacherous face assume a leer.

  “People keep coming in,” she said quickly, staring at the door. “We’re just getting under way. We aren’t really organized yet. We don’t even keep any petty cash on hand.” She grew shrill. “And certainly no stamps. We have a Pitney-Bowes postage machine in back.” Her hair fell across her glasses on both sides, and she whip-lashed her neck to throw it back.

  Reinhart lifted himself. “I’m leaving too.” He would have liked a quiet moment to examine his wallet and see if he possessed the wherewithal to buy her lunch. She probably ate copiously; her figure did not suggest the old office-girl’s old standby, tuna on toast.

  “Have several things to do first,” said she, presenting no interstices in which he could put a toe, and went to the outer door and held it open. “I’ll send you our brochure. It answers all possible questions.” She was a good five feet ten, he estimated now they were both erect.

  He reached her and stopped. “Nice to meet you, Miss—” The corridor was thronged with noontime traffic. Some young-executive or office-boy types—you could no longer tell—sauntered by in pinched-waisted summer suits and feathery sideburns. One was saying, “A wedge of Stilton and a pint of nut-brown ale. That’s lunch to me. But where can you ge
t it in this burg?” You fraud, thought Reinhart, who had lately read an article on cheeses of the world, Stilton is scooped out with a spoon. But he saw the girl eyeing them with obvious admiration.

  Her attention cruised reluctantly back to him, and her mouth clamped together. She forthwith abandoned all pretense of courtesy.

  “This way out, man.” She threw a brawny thumb over her shoulder. The crowd made her nervy.

  “You didn’t seem to hear me say I would soon be working with Bob. … But that’s all right,” he added quickly, in response to her expression, which now signified open maleficence. “I’ll let Bob tell you himself when he gets back. Please inform him that Reinhart, Carl Reinhart, was in.”

  She shuddered in revulsion and closed the door behind him. No, he had checked his fly before entering; he had shaved, washed, and deodorized himself that morning. It was simply that women ignored him nowadays and if he tried to assert himself, acted like this girl or the waitress at Gino’s. The only thing that kept him from turning fag was his detestation of men. People were so rotten that why anybody would want to be frozen in order to preserve himself as a human being—the elevator opened its jaws, swallowed him, and he descended its esophagus.

  The strange, almost eerie coincidence was that he had also first met Genevieve, in a similarly unpleasant fashion, on entering an office of which she was the lone functionary. But he had then been twenty-two, which term of years if doubled brought him to his current pass. Now, at forty-four, he had been thrown out of his own home.

  Gen had threatened to put the police on him if he showed up there again. He had not anticipated that she would react so violently to the rape of Blaine’s locks.

  “After all,” he pointed out, “it will grow back.”

  Blaine was still hysterical and, wrapped around his mother, his half-plucked chicken-head against her neck, sobbed into the collar of her housecoat. Her fanatical face, which an infusion of bad blood had turned swarthy as the traditional portraits of Savonarola, stared over him.

  She said: “I’ll see you prosecuted for battery.” She was a lawyer’s daughter—to be precise, a disbarred lawyer’s daughter, but she knew her terms. “That’s just for starters. I’ll ask Daddy to consult the statutes with reference to sexual perversions. There are deviates who snip hair from people in crowds—”

  Reinhart hoped to conceal his fear behind a blustering show of indignation. “Genevieve, you know damn well why I took that measure. Enough is too much. That boy has embarrassed me continually in recent years, and I have reason to believe he does it deliberately. Sheer malice. He admitted as much last night, after we had another set-to.”

  Blaine howled an imprecation into his mother’s collarbone.

  “There, there, dear,” said she tenderly. “I’m going to fix his wagon one for all.” Gen managed somehow always to warp a cliché.

  “This is disgusting,” said Reinhart. “He’s twenty-one years old. At that age I was in the Occupation of Berlin. If I ever tried hanging on my mother and blubbering about my troubles, she’d have punched me in the mouth.”

  “That’s where your insanity comes from, your mother. She’s a crazy old lady.” This was not complete nonsense, but had no relevance to the situation. “But not even she would have approached her child with a lethal instrument.”

  “Wrong!” crowed Reinhart. “Many a time when I annoyed her while she prepared meals she would throw the knife at me, usually a little paring knife, true, but more than once the big carver used by chefs. But come off this stuff about edged weapons. A scissors, a pair of library shears, and none too sharp at that.” He snickered. “That’s why the job is not so hot. He’s lucky I didn’t charge him. Barbers get two-fifty nowadays.”

  Gen picked up a glass of orange juice that Reinhart had just squeezed and had her son make a mouth and poured some in. Reinhart kept his back against the kitchen counter.

  Winona chose this moment to waddle into the kitchen, in the sort of charwoman outfit she wore to a school otherwise attended by go-go girls. Even Reinhart thought the skirt too long, though he sympathized with her intent to hide her fat limbs.

  “Hi,” she said in the glee aroused by an imminent meal. “Oh, I hope it’s waffles, I do hope it is. I have my heart set on maple syrup and lots of butter. I think I dreamed of waffles.”

  “Leave the room, Winona,” Genevieve said harshly.

  Winona had not yet seen anything untoward. She was looking for food, not people. Now, without an interest in the motive behind the command, she blurted out a great cry of desolation and her eyes streamed. She addressed the ceiling: “Without breakfast! Ohhhh-oooo-ahhhh.”

  This however brought Blaine briefly out of his act—which it was at least in part; his own eyes were quite dry.

  He snarled: “Get out, Fat-ass.”

  Reinhart showed him a fist. “I won’t tolerate that kind of talk to your sister.”

  This was when Genevieve picked up the breadknife, a serrated-blade instrument that would deliver a cut with deckle edges, a kind of saw, really.

  She threatened him in a quiet way that was definitely sinister. Her voice was so low that he had to lean towards her to hear it.

  “Make your move,” she said. “I’m just praying for the opportunity.”

  “Talk of legality,” Reinhart pointed out. “What you’re doing constitutes assault, I believe.”

  “Just put me in court, with my size alongside of yours,” Gen asserted, no doubt fashioning her combat style from those movies, already long outmoded, in which juvenile delinquents belonging to criminal gangs menaced solid citizens. What had become of leather jackets, motorcycles, and switchblades? Already stuffed into the garbage can of history.

  Squealing like the rabbit Reinhart shot imperfectly, twenty years before, and then lost his stomach for hunting, leaving the small game to the mutilation of unsentimental hawks and ferrets, Winona propelled her flesh from the kitchen. This bothered Reinhart most.

  He said: “How can you be so cruel?”

  “Hypocrisy won’t stand you in good stead any more,” Genevieve cried. “You introduced violence into this house, and now you can lie in it.”

  Blaine cackled. Were his hair still long he would have resembled a witch. As it was he recalled for his father an old animated character called Woody Woodpecker, the mention of which like so many other bits of lore, would mean nothing to this generation. Woody was always being blown up by dynamite or TNT and reassembling without hurt. How harmless the culture used to be.

  Blaine said: “Up against the wall!”

  “You little fraud,” said Reinhart. “I’d have some respect for you if you held the knife, and even more if you used it against a real enemy. But your game is to threaten only those who wish you well, only those who in affection have placed you in a position where you can be a threat, those who abolished child-labor, those who let their children choose their own careers and pay them enormous allowances, get them the best in medical care and warm clothing and—”

  Blaine said: “Why don’t you die?”

  “Excuse me,” said Reinhart. He really did not mind Gen’s knife-play that much. In twenty-odd years of marriage he had seen her fury a thousand times and more. In recent manifestations it had crested more quickly because the general level of her ill will was so high that only a flash flood could distinguish itself from the mean. By the same token it soon subsided, not having far to fall. At any moment she would return to the familiar state of cold contempt. Then, if he made a success in business, which he still intermittently expected to do, he could rely on her to be the feasible wife she had been long ago. Or so he told himself. At moments of extremity Reinhart could be very cavalier about time.

  He did not believe she would actually cut him, that is, or if she did, it would only be a nick. Perhaps if it bled sufficiently she might even be contrite. It was something he could hold over her in the future—now, ease off, you remember that time with the breadknife, etc.

  Blaine’s suggestio
n, however, was something else. A truism of Reinhart’s day held that sons were normally psychic murderers of their male parent on the one hand and mother-lovers on the other, reflecting a quaint Austro-Jewish theory that, however, had once been revolutionary. Reinhart used to catch himself in slips of the pen regarding his own father, of whom he could not consciously have been fonder. He could also recall having said, “Darn you, Daddy,” once at the age of eight when having been led to a drugstore for a malted milk he found it closed. Dad said: “Well, Carlo, I didn’t know.” And being already of a reflective nature, little Reinhart said: “OK, I’m sorry.” “No offense taken, Carlo,” answered Dad. Reinhart remembered this because he had never before heard that turn of phrase: where would you take a fence? When he repeated it to a schoolmate, he got punched on his vaccination.

  “Excuse me,” he said now to Blaine. “What I really can’t stand about you is something that unfortunately I can’t trim with a pair of shears. That is your outlandish rhetoric. You don’t know what dying is, and as far as I can see, you’ve scrupulously avoided any form of violence, even the contact sports. College rioters often howl their praises of Ché and Ho Chi Minh, professional killers, but snivel and whimper when the cops hit them with nightsticks—just as you used to do when some years back I tried to show you some of the jujitsu we learned in Army basic training. And I of course was only trying to teach you some self-defense. But even in just learning it you get hit once in a while and are dumped on your prat.”

  Reinhart shook his head. “Christ, Blaine, you are old enough to get a sense of reality. Not everything can go your way.”

  Much of this reasonable turn applied to his own needs. It is no joke to be told to die, even allowing for youth, passion, and the fashions in idiom by which a man could be termed a crypto-Nazi merely for shaving off his sideburns, a genocide because he deplores a mob, and a bully for questioning the credentials of folksinger-statesmen. Though it did occur to him that he might have thrown Blaine too hard occasionally. But the young have rubber bones. “Here’s another one,” Reinhart would say, and with left foot and right wrist quickly floor him. Indeed, Reinhart had never before been able properly to accomplish these judo maneuvers and certainly never tried them when involved in bar-fights as a soldier. And he had never been in combat. He suspected they were pretty useless except to beat up a son.