Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart was led to observe that it is lack of community which makes for peace. Most theorists have it ass-backwards.

  At last the dog, in the current offering, barked. Reinhart suspected the silence had been intentional, to bring about a certain dramatic effect. The device worked on Eunice, who grasping presumably at his left hand, which was plastered like an amoeba on the straining Dacron of his thigh, missed and instead found his member, bunched amidst a crotch-tangle of slippery wash-and-wear trousers and stiff white undershorts newly purchased. Squeezed it painfully. This intrusion was so unwarranted that he could not immediately assign it to his credence, and believed he had neglected to pluck out that last steel pin, concealed deep in the excess groin-stitching by Packer #2547, whose printed chit butterflied to the floor when, hopping on one leg, he donned the boxer-style garment with its continuous elastic waist.

  The stocky dark woman was pouring wine for someone off camera, and who damnably might remain so for a half an hour without an identity-establishment. The dog was back, now being kicked by the man with the eyepatch, and the subtitles were suddenly slanted in italics: Hell, of course, is not when you hungre, but—do you remember the Latvian song—

  A grim customer in balaclava helmet and goggles bulleted past on a one-man toboggan.

  Reinhart involuntarily laughed aloud, so heartily as soon to infect a few souls widely dispersed and then the mass of the audience, in full diapason from fluty nickering to sousaphone bellow. As it happened what touched Reinhart off was not the picture, which to him was not absurd but irrelevant, but a sudden reflection on this moment, which when joined to a quadrillion others would eventually add up to a destiny. Here he sat, at the end of a day which began with his being thrown out of his home; passed through a laboratory featuring a mad scientist, played by a reputed Swiss, whose ambition was to find a corpse to freeze; to a motion-picture theater in which a large, lush girl whom he scarcely knew interminably clutched his organ of generation.

  It was at this sequence that he had laughed, and when the audience joined him for the wrong reasons—if he set a precedent it was invariably unintentional—Eunice let him go.

  She proceeded to contribute to the jollity, in a baritone buffola from her deep chest, though her speaking voice was considerably higher. Then the blonde’s face appeared, but soon was partially obscured by the back of her head: the old mirror trick. Now raindrops bespattered close-up leaves, but a dry-faced, full-bearded ancient parted them with the rubber tip of his crutch. His nose-hairs were a rich growth. Why had that fad not caught on? Probably because you were nasally sparse-haired until too old to start a trend. Speaking of noses, the blonde at last spoke through hers. “One cannot possible have a motive for wanting to understand unless one is mad.” Or at least so went the subtitle.

  The blonde bun lay stolidly against her nape. Her pale eyes, out the other side, were fixed forever in the mirror, the camera ceased to crank, the picture was over.

  “What devastating experience,” groaned Eunice, leaving out the indefinite article, as if in mockery of the subtitles’ frailties. The lights came on, and Reinhart winced at her. You got only a coming attraction, consisting tonight, meanly, of illuminated stills, and then the feature, at two fucking seventy-five a head. These art-movie houses did not maintain the incessantly bright screen of the Yahoo pleasure palaces and admitted no patrons during the feature. Until Reinhart was old enough to vote he had never seen a motion picture from the beginning but arrived always in medias res, part of the amusement being in orienting yourself. It could be done in a quarter-hour; known actors played predictable roles, and only a half-dozen plots were then extant.

  “Do you think,” he asked, modernizing his perspective, “that the dog was an erotic symbol vis-à-vis the girl?”

  “I hope not,” answered Eunice, hipping her way out the row though with her face at him, “unless as a put-on, Freud being so thoroughly out.” She too was squinting with little grape-seed eyes.

  In the aisle they intermingled with the throng. The population had got much huskier than that of old, or Reinhart had shrunk. Films outside the common run used to be attended mainly by pale, attenuated men and neurasthenic women with tight-pulled back hair and anteater noses, everybody wearing functional eyeglasses. Within twenty square feet he now saw three men as large as himself, all better-tailored, and one of them was a Negro steering a sepia Venus into him from the left: she was some four feet of leg in white satin pants, the waistband of which gave way only to her tiny, perfect breasts webbed in fishnet, and he was a burnished god in paisley tunic adorned with bronze medallion and chain. Reinhart did not mind the new garb when hung on admirable frames. He had a romantic impulse to seize this pair and tell them they were beautiful, but supposed it would be taken for rank patronization. Instead he must take care that his groin did not brush those shiny high buttocks now just before him in the press.

  Eunice was against his right shoulder, imprisoning his arm throughout its length, the knuckles against an unresistant mass. The thought that it was her thigh did not ignite his senses. In truth, he did not know what he was doing in her company, but since he was here he would discharge his responsibility.

  He turned his head, taking a faceful of hair. Somehow she got a hand up from below and cleared it, then managed to slip the fingers between his thick chest and fat arm, in which he immediately erected some muscle—good triceps may get silted over in adipose tissue but they do not dissolve.

  “Don’t do that,” Eunice said sharply, people tried to look, the colored girl stopped and stiffened, and Reinhart slid right into her slippery groove. How adamant and polished. He sucked himself back.

  “Do what?” indignantly he demanded.

  “Make it hard,” said Eunice, grinning into his mouth. She was either indifferent to publicity or craved it.

  However, now that the reference sounded far worse, their neighbors lost interest and returned, perhaps jealously, to the sort of public privacy once cultivated only by heedless lovers. Everybody today had his own act; you used to see more voyeurism, for example, when women dressed modestly.

  “I detest strong men,” Eunice elucidated at last. “Violence appalls me, in any form, even the capability of it.”

  Against his better judgment Reinhart let his arm soften into a column of fat. “All right,” he said, “I don’t want to threaten you. But if we are mugged outside, don’t expect any help.”

  “You’re a groove,” Eunice said suddenly. “You had the courage to laugh. Many would have forgotten this is Casavini’s first comedy.”

  An Italian name though the dialogue had been in Swedish. It was news to Reinhart, but he held his tongue. Suddenly the solid block of crowd disintegrated nonsensically, like a traffic jam, leaving no reasonable speculation as to why the late clog, and they passed swiftly, almost at a run, through the evacuating cloaca of the lobby onto an asphalt plain of snarling engines. By the time they had reached their vehicle, three-quarters of the other cars were already a stream of white and red lights along the highway. Eunice drove, because it was her automobile. “Nice car,” Reinhart had said routinely when it was delivered by automation—weirdly came rolling off an elevator precisely opposite the painted line at which they had been directed to wait—in a reinforced-concrete garage around the corner from the Bloor Building. “What make is it?” “I don’t know,” Eunice had said. “It’s some Plymouth or Ford or Buick or something. Look on the glove-compartment door. He gave it to me for graduation.”

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  Reinhart now said, hand on driver’s door: “Let’s have the key.”

  “It’s open.” She hurled her pelvis against him. “That’s part of my thing. I don’t want to keep anybody out of anywhere.” When he held the door open she prodded him. “You first.” Same thing as in the theater. He didn’t get it. She explained: “That’s one of the old hangups, and I find it patronizing.”

  Reinhart said: “Well, I find it difficult to
slide under the steering wheel, if you want to know.” He patted his midsection, forsaking vanity to make a point.

  Eunice insinuated her hand under his, squealing: “You turn me on!” She palpitated his belt buckle, then plunged into the car. He plodded around the trunk. The other door was locked. He banged on the window as, obliviously, she started the engine. The handle was torn from his grasp when she backed out. Some sort of joke. She seemed infantile for a college graduate. She accelerated off and turned right, disappearing behind the theater, which was apparently an island surrounded by the parking lot. He turned to await her return. He was now alone on the blacktop, and the theater was already dark.

  Now he could no longer hear the engine. Had she stopped somewhere behind? The funny thing was, when he and Sweet got back from the laboratory, she had taken it as pre-established that he and she would spend the evening together. And Bob had given him fifty dollars: “Think of it as the inaugural festivities for your new job.” The nature of the job remained unspecified, but Reinhart assumed it would be in the area of promotion, really all the firm could do until the bodies began to come in. Then of course they would sell the freezing process and equipment. He could not believe the nonprofit angle would be permanent, Foundation or no. It was essential to the civilization to deal in money.

  Suddenly he saw what had been wrong so far: the offer of a free freeze for the first volunteer. Nobody would believe in a deal in which eternity was handed over gratis. They should not only charge, but name a staggering price utterly beyond the resources of the average man, else they would not be taken seriously. Sweet might have made his bundle in some ruthless fashion—was there any other?—but he had become an impractical visionary.

  An art theater in the country was only a recent phenomenon, owing to the rise in the suburban culture-level. Beyond the asphalt lay fields and woods, but there was a tract of medium-priced homes within a quarter mile and no doubt in the daylight one could see the beginning scars of what would soon be a new one encroaching on these meadows. Tonight’s moon was the size of a toenail-paring. The pole-top fluorescents had gone off with the marquee lights. Maybe she had been waylaid back there by a pack of young toughs and was being gang-shagged at this moment.

  Reinhart began to walk, feeling very chilly. He was over the hill when it came to violence. A man has a right to live in peace after forty. That’s what young cops are for. Why wasn’t this place patrolled? He continued to walk towards mutilation or death, or, if he failed to turn, straight towards the highway, where he might hitch a ride.

  In time of danger fantasies resolved by cynicism are only debilitating. Reinhart was breathless when he got to the other side and his feet were great barges transporting stone down a muddy river. The car was parked, nose out, against the theater wall. His eyes were now habituated to the darkness and he saw Eunice sitting casually at the wheel.

  She tooted the horn when he got close and cried out: “Going my way, stud?”

  Under his breath he groaned. It was needed, when an older man kept company with a young girl, that he set the style, else you got the humiliating farce portrayed in corny movies, the panting bald-head trying to jitterbug or get kid-jargon through his false teeth, straining his varicose veins on the tennis court opposite the twinkle-toes in the swinging pleated skirt with a glimpse of panty that makes his leathery old hound-dog tongue water.

  The fact was that Reinhart had always deplored horseplay in relationships with the other sex.

  “I thought you might have got in some trouble back here,” said he intelligibly though winded.

  “You have a thing about danger outdoors. You have a terrible image of society.”

  “No,” he lied, “I meant a flat tire or other breakdown.” He went to the passenger’s door again and, ending an annoying, even boring suspense, found it now unlocked.

  In he climbed and, ignoring her bare thighs in the dashboard lights, said: “Tell me what you know about Professor Streckfuss.”

  “I haven’t ever seen him. He never leaves the lab, and I never go there.”

  “Just as well,” said Reinhart. Her answering look was searching and sober. Then she started the engine and drove out at a conservative speed.

  Reinhart wondered whether he had offended her. He had perhaps forgotten how to talk to unattached girls. Flattery was surely always welcomed, but he would be hampered in its use in the absence of the standard motivation. He really had no wish to get to know her better. He had arrived at that time of life in which he could contemplate certain phenomena without brooding on their possible utility. This was one positive merit of middle age. He had not eaten since that queer chemical lunch at the lab, but he was not hungry now. For the moment he had no wants whatever. When he was younger he had called this state depression, because it had then been a sort of time-out between bouts of aspiration versus capacity. Now one sensed it was a state of morality which must resemble death. Even more valuable to the freezer program than a body which had clinically died of disease or accident, would be a well one.

  It had been an overlong day already, and life was more exhausting than ever if it could not even be defined. Eunice drove quietly. Reinhart stole an objective look at her ripe, naked haunches and remembered how much it had meant to him at one time to seduce a girl. To get her to the point. The entry had often been anticlimactic. It was the surrender that mattered, the acquiescence to a superior will. Actually, he had never had such a victory in the supreme sense. He had never conquered a virgin. Someone else had always preceded him, even with Genevieve though she had made an elaborate pretense in the opposite direction, and anyway he married her.

  No doubt he would die in that deprivation, but he did not care. Neither had he ever seen the Taj Mahal.

  “You want to talk about your marriage?” Eunice suddenly asked him, in, at least by contrast, a loud voice. She kept her eyes on the road and her legs were tense, as usual with woman drivers. If a rabbit started up on the shoulder, she would brake them through the windshield. Reinhart groped for the ends of his seat belt.

  She added: “Don’t mind me. I’m the bold type.” If not as a driver. She had fallen behind the bumper of a very slow car in the far-right lane and apparently settled in there.

  Strangely enough, Reinhart found he was not embarrassed by her inquiry. “All right,” he said. “I don’t see any harm in it, especially in view of the fact that I’ve been married for almost as many years as you have been alive. That is an experience you are supposed to get used to when you get older. I never have. I mean, knowing someone as an adult with the same consciousness you had at a time when they were still a baby.”

  Eunice told him sternly: “I don’t understand that at all, if you want to know.”

  “Let me explain if I can. The reason parents don’t like to admit their children have grown up is that they knew them as infants.”

  “That’s basic.”

  “Of course,” said Reinhart. “But it is usually thought that people love the idea of dependents. What I am getting at is something else. I have more or less the same consciousness I had at, say, twenty-one, or whenever it was I became an adult. Now I have a son that age.”

  “How does he dress?” asked Eunice.

  “There you are. I find that an odd question. I don’t understand the point of view back of it. If you mentioned your father or brother, I would ask, ‘What does he do?’”

  “I might be putting you on,” Eunice said seriously. “You always have to consider that.”

  “I always do, in fact,” lied Reinhart. He saw with satisfaction that the slow car ahead was blinking at an upcoming exist.

  “I don’t believe I think consciously of being conscious,” Eunice Stated. “That’s one of my hangups.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” said Reinhart. “You and Blaine use somewhat the same jargon, and my criticism of it is that it makes everything absolutely orderly. It’s all hooks and grooves and bags. In my day we didn’t sort things that much. A certain romance has bee
n lost, which Blaine tries to make up for with gaudy costume and social theories designed to shock. I sometimes suspect it is all theater. What worries me is when the play is over.”

  He found himself relying on her sympathy, perhaps as the result of as arrogant an assumption as that of the stranger on the next bar stool, who assumes for no reason at all that you too are a vegetarian, atheist, or whatever his own persuasion. However, Reinhart was never really offended by the expression of any point of view, so long as its speaker expected no action from him. Perhaps keen observers of humanity could read that message on his face.

  “What’s your wife like?” Eunice asked.

  “God Almighty,” said Reinhart. “I got married in 1946.” He was still searching with his hands for the seat belts. Now he discovered them wound up to the buckles on little reels. When extended they would not join; his girth was too large. “I wasn’t this fat when I got married, though I was never skinny. Before the war I used to work out with weights. Young fellows in those days tried to build themselves up. Most people admired athletes. But I was quite a reader too. I had this idea of being well-rounded. I suppose the Athens of the fifth century B.C. wouldn’t mean much to you, but it was a time when, allegedly, kings were philosophers and it was not rare to find a rather poetic sensibility in the body of a gymnast.” He stretched his legs out comfortably underneath the dashboard, felt his shoes paw padded wires. “No doubt greatly exaggerated, as these things always are, but the idea has nobility.”

  “You know my idea of what is obscene?” Eunice asked. “Not sex, but war.”

  “I am certainly familiar with that theory,” Reinhart answered, “and it sounds attractive. But I don’t think it could have been sold to some poor devil about to be cremated alive in Auschwitz. I don’t believe that growing old makes one wise, but you have survived quite a bit of history by the time you get there, and you remember so many things of which rigid opinions seem the most absurd.”