Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  “I don’t mean that, Daddy.” She giggled. “It’s kind of embarrassing, really. But at first he reminded me of you—you know how sometimes when you have worked terribly hard and all sorts of big business deals are on your mind, you look so sad? Well, so did he, standing there in the lobby last night, looking at the stills for the coming attractions. I waited about twenty minutes for the girls to come out of the ladies’, before I realized they had slipped out the back exit.”

  Reinhart sat there quietly while a great hairy beast slouched towards him.

  Winona said: “He saw me looking at my watch, and he looked at his, and he said: ‘Well, I guess we both have been stood up. We are the kind of people to whom other people do that, aren’t we?’ So terribly sad. I remembered what you told me once. I said, ‘I guess so, but you shouldn’t ever give up. Something really fabulous might happen at any time.’ ‘You give me hope,’ he said. ‘And that’s what a woman’s for, all in all.’ He had the nicest boyish voice, like yours, you know, Daddy, and was about the same age. He said, ‘I trust you won’t think me forward, miss, but if you don’t have anything better to do, I would call it a fabulous event right now if I could buy you a milk shake. Do you know Alfie’s, where they make ’em so thick a spoon will stand up?’”

  Winona was at pains to be accurate: “I think it was Alfie’s, but it might have been Ralphie’s. Anyhow, I never heard of either one and in fact I don’t really like the double-thick ones, which are almost solid ice cream and stick in the straw. But I could tell by looking at his sad face that he thought they were fabulous and I wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint him when he had already been ditched by whoever he was waiting for. So I said, ‘If you could wait a minute while I check the ladies’ lounge and see if my friends are there.’ But he said, ‘I have such a fear that if you leave me I will never see you again.’

  “Well, Daddy, I guess you have never had the experience, but when everybody else in the world makes you feel useless, and then suddenly somebody seems to require you for an important purpose. …”

  Reinhart nodded in his rigidity. Control, control must be imposed. Inevitable as this fantasy seemed, it could be rewritten: Nevertheless, I said I had to check on the ladies’ and as it turned out my friends were still there and when we came out he was gone.

  Winona responded to this silent direction, just as she had done on the sidewalk outside Dr. Wilhelm’s office.

  “But still I had to make sure my friends were not looking for me after all, to be fair, you know, and I went there, but they were gone, and I came back and said, ‘It would be a pleasure.’” She carried obedience only so far: had turned away from the doctor’s office but lost direction at the curb.

  “‘Is it close enough to walk there or should we get a bus?’ I asked him. ‘Little princess,’ he said, he said that, I’m not making it up, and he seemed so happy all of a sudden, he smiled when I came back, you should have seen how happy he was, Daddy, and he clasped me by the hand.”

  The beast had now reached Reinhart. He could feel the stinking heat of its breath.

  “He had a beautiful car, but we had a hard time finding it because everybody else was parked there for the second show, rank after rank, but it was fun looking for it, because he kept calling me nice things I never heard outside of movies and every time I giggled at them he would squeeze my hand, and when we found it he gave me the keys and said, ‘Would you like to drive, my treasure?’ ‘I have trouble operating a bicycle,’ I said. He said, ‘Nonsense, dearest! You just never have had the right instruction. Remember this: you can do anything you want to, if you tell yourself you can.’”

  Winona looked at her suspended leg. “He had your manner, Daddy. You know, the kind of confidence that won’t take no for an answer, like when the fuses kept blowing at home?”

  At last Reinhart had caught Blaine under the hair dryer, air-conditioner on full blast, and a hot iron propped on the dresser-top. Blaine ironed his hair in hot weather, else it developed a slight curl.

  “But what bothered me was that you never had suggested I learn to drive. He said, ‘Your Dad is too busy for that.’ ‘You know him?’ ‘I certainly do. He’s one of the people I admire most,’ he said. ‘I’ve even tried to model myself after him, but that’s not easy. He’s one great guy. Of course he’s told me a lot about you, how beautiful and smart you are, but I don’t mean any disrespect when I say that not even his extravagant statements did justice to you.’”

  “You got his name then,” Reinhart tried to say nonchalantly.

  “Sure,” said Winona. “It rhymed: Gordon Horton. Remember me to your Dad when you get home,’ he said. ‘Gordon Horton.’”

  There was a telephone on the bedside table, and a metropolitan-area book on a shelf below. Reinhart seized the latter and looked for this diabolically impossible name.

  “Yes,” he said, “old Army pal. Here he is, Howard J. Horton. Good old Howie.” He peered at his daughter through pinpoint eyes.

  “No,” said Winona, “Gordon, because he told me to call him Gordie, and he doesn’t live here but in Delaware, I think he said, which is why he hasn’t seen you for a while. I saw the license plate and it said ‘Delaware.’”

  “Happen to get the number?”

  “I’m hopeless at numbers, Daddy.”

  True. Winona had to look up their home phone when she was out.

  “Wait a minute, I think the Delaware plate was on the car ahead. I saw it when I put on the headlights. I think he said Iowa was where he lived now. I put on the lights when I was trying to start the motor and pulling the different knobs, but he told me where to put the key and how to move the lever to ‘Drive’ and what to do with your feet, and we moved! I tell you it was a thrill, Daddy. We moved out of the slot and across the aisle, real slow, and we almost banged the Delaware car, but Gordie put his foot across and braked just in time. And then we backed into the slot. And that was all there was to it. We never did go for the milk shake.”

  Winona’s grin was resplendent. The monster clutching Reinhart turned out to be one of those amusement-park illusions, 3-D fakery, luminescent paint.

  “That was all?” he cried triumphantly.

  “Absolutely,” said Winona. “I sure didn’t want to wreck his nice car, a nice man like that, and maybe you won’t believe it, but for once I wasn’t interested in treating my sweet tooth. So then he turned off the motor and the lights and said, ‘Let’s just sit here for a while and talk. I seldom get the chance to talk to a beautiful and intelligent girl. Girls have always made a fool of me. I give them everything they want and yet the more I do, the more contempt I get in return. I sometimes think I am under an evil curse.’ The poor man, he began to cry then, the way you did when Granpa died and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. ‘I have never been loved,’ he said, ‘never in my life. A lovely creature like you can’t understand that, but it is terrible to always want and never be wanted in return. You feel you don’t exist.’

  “I said I couldn’t understand that, big and handsome as he was, with a new car. ‘It’s something about me, I guess,’ he said. ‘Some sort of radiation that other people feel. It tells them that I mean well, that I am good, that they have nothing to fear. People don’t like you unless they fear you. The way to succeed is to be mean.’”

  “No, no, no,” Reinhart shouted, shutting his eyes as the beast returned gnashingly to life. “You told me that was all, Winona. After the little driving lesson, that was all. You said good-bye and walked to the bus stop.”

  “That was all of the driving,” she said. “But it wasn’t all of our friendship. I gave him my handkerchief. I carry two in this hot weather, one to wipe the sweat off my face. He buried his face in it and said, ‘What is this heavenly fragrance?’ ‘Only Fab with enzyme-active borax, I think,’ I said. Isn’t that the soap you use in the wash machine, Daddy?”

  “New blue Cheer,” said Reinhart. Precision could save your soul.

  “Then I was wrong.”

&nbs
p; “Well, not very. I might have used Fab once or twice, when there was a special on it. A penny here and a penny there, you know.” He had a desperate urge to keep this trivia going forever.

  “I guess it really doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, it does, Winona! It matters awfully.” She got a stricken look, and Reinhart shouted horribly: “No, it doesn’t! Go on.”

  “I only want to get it right, Daddy. About your friend.”

  The chimera was sniffing around Reinhart’s large body, seeking a vital part for its fangs.

  Winona said: “Well, nobody had been that nice to me in all my life. I mean, nobody but you of course. I knew he was just being kind. I’m not beautiful for gosh sakes, and I am anything but brilliant, that’s for sure. I am fat and I am stupid. I can’t get a date, and I flunked geometry and barely squeaked through social studies.”

  There is a kind of pain that can be exquisitely pleasurable, gratifying the thrill-seeker who through surfeit has become immune to simple amusements. But that was not the kind which Reinhart now experienced.

  “I know I can get by only if somebody shows me what they need,” Winona said. “Those girls need someone to ditch. If I wasn’t good for that, they wouldn’t ask me to come with them. They would get somebody else, and I would not have anyplace to go. You see, the way I have figured it out, I actually am popular.”

  Reinhart nodded. Winning and losing were relative states of being, perhaps only matters of definition.

  “So when he asked me, I said OK, if that’s what would make him happy.”

  Reinhart instinctively found a means of survival, like certain living things in a drought: they burrow.

  “You’re a good person, Winona,” he said as the cool, moist earthworks rose around him. “And the really good are—” As the surface grew more remote he might have said, since like all philosophy it did not matter now, “even more frightening than the really evil, for we cannot punish them.”

  But Winona said quickly: “No, I’m not, Daddy. I didn’t like it. It hurt. And I got to thinking—” Her face wrinkled, smoothed, blushed. “I got to hating—you, Daddy, you of all people. He was your friend, you see. You were both men. Oh, I was pretty rotten, and it’s not easy to confess this, but if you love someone you can hate him temporarily, can’t you, if in the end you come back to loving him? I mean, it would be bad only if it was permanent, wouldn’t it?”

  Winona distressfully awaited an answer. Damn her, he was just ready to pull his hole in after him.

  “Yes, dear.”

  She breathed heavily. “That’s a weight off my conscience. I try to do the right thing, but it isn’t always easy to tell what it is. Like today. I thought I ought to go and get an abortion, where Blaine sent Julie, because I heard him telling her in his room last week, but when I got there I couldn’t go in. Some voice inside just told me not to, told me I should have the baby and love it, not have it murdered before it was even born just because it would be painful. So it was thinking about that, that I got hit by the truck. And that brought on my period, anyway. So there’s no problem now.” She grinned and said again: “So everything’s just fine now.”

  Reinhart’s chair sagged somewhat on the right. Looking down, he saw he had bent the metal leg he had not been aware he was clutching. His bandages had unraveled. He still had the great strength of yore. Once he had killed a man with it, broken his back. He would never do it again. He would not locate this newfound friend and destroy him, because though it could be managed, it could not be rightly done without publicity. Stealthy poison would not serve, nor a silenced weapon. Sheer brutality was called for, flesh-tearing, bone-breaking, head-crushing, the making of a man into a heap of offal, and doing it so that the object would, till the end, feel the how and know the why.

  Revenge, pure and beautiful in its orgy. For Winona, who was quite happy now, had no interests to represent. Indeed she would be damaged when the news got out: you could not beat a man to death in seclusion nowadays; there were no private, soundproof places. Providing you could even find him. You could not ask Winona for identifying features of your friend, whose name you already possessed. So you killed him and revealed him, to her, as a statutory rapist, in submitting to whom she had not done the “right thing.” But then you also killed Winona.

  “It is, isn’t it, Daddy?” she asked. “Just let things take their course, and they will come out all right, like you have always said. Only, I wish you still lived at home.” Her sweet smile became reflective. “I guess you are still the only person I can talk to.”

  Reinhart caught sight again of the breech-clouted Christ, hanging on the plastic cross. Whether He, or he, had been fake or freak or real McCoy, winner or loser, was largely another matter of definition.

  “How would you like to live with me until you go off to the nunnery?” he asked. “In the Presidential suite of the Shade-Milton for a few days until we can find a nice little apartment?”

  “I wouldn’t get in your way, Daddy. If you had business to discuss I would go to my room.” Her fat cheeks swelled as her lower lip oozed out. It was Winona’s expression for brain-scouring thought. “You could even watch TV after I went to bed, and I wouldn’t complain next morning.”

  “Darling, that’s the best offer I have ever had.”

  He could also tell her some of the things he had never got around to, such as that a pregnancy does not necessarily develop overnight.

  “Carl!” Bob Sweet shouted at him as he entered the lab. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. We’ve—”

  “I’m looking for you, too,” said Reinhart. “The phone number here is unlisted, and I didn’t have it.”

  Sweet began to speak, but Reinhart stopped him. “I’ll get right to the point. The deal is off, Bob. It turns out that I am worth more alive than frozen.”

  “Carl—” Sweet was agitated, as Reinhart had expected.

  “It’s no use, Bob. I know about the sacks of gravel. If you told me they were cocoa beans, it figures you have allowed other people to assume the same thing. Like the bank that gives you loans on them. It might seem impossible that a professional financial institution would not carefully inspect the collateral, but then I remember a couple of years ago some guy in the salad-oil business filled his storage tanks with water and bilked half of Wall Street, including the First National City Bank of New York and the American Express Company. I guess all it takes is nerve.”

  “Carl, that doesn’t matter now,” Sweet snapped, in his urgent style that no longer stirred Reinhart.

  “Right. I am disaffiliating. I don’t want to be frozen, at least not for some years and not then unless you get somebody who seems more reliable than a Swiss-German fanatic. Even though he was in a concentration camp.”

  Bob seized Reinhart’s lapels, but the big man broke the hold with a jujitsu thing he had learned in the Army.

  “And, furthermore, there’s no such thing as a black belt in kung fu,” Reinhart said. “That was another of your alterations of truth. If I pushed you around in high school, I’m sorry. But, Jesus Christ, that was in 1939 or ’40. How long can you hold a grudge?”

  “Carl, Carl!”

  “No, Bob, I won’t listen to any more of your cunning. Also, I don’t intend to return what is left of the money after buying the Jag and a few other things, and I’m going to stay at the Shade-Milton on the company account until I can find another place to live. My daughter is going to join me there. I’ll have them open up the door to the bedroom next door where the Secret Service men slept when Eisenhower stayed there.”

  Now it was Reinhart who grabbed Sweet, pulling him up close and looking down as if he were a child. And like a child who finds himself being lectured, Bob hung his head between his shoulders.

  “Do you know,” Reinhart said, really oblivious to Sweet, “all this while I thought the big problems were my wife and son. Not so: nasty people are easily handled. I mean, it may not be easy to accept the fact that your wife of twenty-two years
is and has always been a bitch—not under the aspect of eternity, or anything like that, but simply vis-à-vis me, who am all I can speak for. And the reason she is has largely, I am certain, to do with my own character. To Harlan Flan she may very well be a yielding, receptive sort of woman.”

  Bob was struggling. Reinhart had him imprisoned, a big bandaged hand on each of Sweet’s slender arms.

  “And Blaine,” said Reinhart. “The way it has worked out is a total standoff: we each defy absolutely the other’s idea of what we should be. Something clean and perfect about that. We are such total enemies that if either of us did not exist, the other would have to invent him. We may be, in fact, figments of each other’s imagination as is. Everybody needs a red herring to throw pursuers off his trail.”

  Bob broke away from Reinhart’s right hand and threw an ineffectual left that grazed Reinhart’s temple. Reinhart knocked him to the lab floor with a blow to the solar plexus.

  While Sweet was doubled up, gasping, Reinhart bent over and continued, tightening the loose bandage.

  “So both of them, Gen and Blaine, are seen as taking their place as figures in the rich tapestry, as the fellow says. Life would not have been the same without them, but can be lived in their absence. Does that sound heartless?”

  Bob made grunting noises.

  “It is. It is virtually impossible to be absolutely generous to someone you love: the time will always come when their interest is served only at the cost of yours. If you acquiesce in it, they will have contempt for you. The old power play. The world is made up not of winners and losers, but of followers and leaders. The divine right of kings is a much more natural principle than that all men are equal.”

  Understandably enough, Sweet was still totally occupied with himself.

  “The really sinister person is the saint,” said Reinhart. “With whom every association insures your being further damned. If you think I pity Winona, you are wrong. She is utterly devoid of a sense of evil. I don’t know how she got that way. Gen and I are both masters of malice. She scares me. She makes me feel more inadequate than Blaine ever did. She will stumble through life, corrupting many a soul with her goodness, mine first of all. I expect eventually to burn in hell, so it would be copping out to begin it at this point, deal or no deal.” Reinhart laughed. “You see, already, because of her I am welshing on my word, my Dad’s idea of the worst sin a man could commit, but then, unlike me, he was a man of honor.”