Vital Parts (10 page)

Blaine said, while rising: “No, Mother supports us both, or all three counting Baby Whale.”

Reinhart was ready for this. “Then why beg off me?”

Blaine threw his mouth open. The beginning moustache looked like a dirty lip. “To bug you, man. To drive you out of your skull.”

Reinhart said: “It takes a load off my mind, anyway. Until I saw you over there with her, I always thought you were a dirty little faggot.”

Blaine inhaled, laughing. “To your generation that's the ultimate horror, isn't it?” He cocked a hand on his hip. “You're all uptight about that, and carry billyclubs and guns like extra cocks to demonstrate your virility. Well, maybe I am. Or perhaps I'm bisexed. The gross sexual distinctions are disappearing. Love is where you find it. Perhaps I was trying on Julie's clothes.” He performed a bump and grind with his snakelike trunk. “My idea of a groovy experience is to be ravished by the unshaven driver of an interstate truck, up on that shelf behind the seat where they sleep when the co-driver takes the wheel. Or to be buggered by the nightstick of a huge apelike cop, his bad breath in my ear—”

He neatly dodged his father's massive fist, which bruised itself on the doorjamb and brought down some plaster dust from overhead. Once again Reinhart had been sucessfully baited.

Actually he had been aware of Blaine's purpose throughout, had knowingly followed the script. In a strange way he believed he owed it to Blaine. It was the only form of love the boy would tolerate from him. And it had to be performed seriously. He must as a finale try genuinely to strike Blaine with a killing blow. Blaine would have detected any pulling of the punch or false aim. He respected only the true impulse of viciousness, and, underneath it all, Reinhart repected him for his adherence to the principle. Blaine played a ruthless game. He was a pacifist when asked to go to war, an advocate of violent demonstrations for Negroes and college students, a believer in free love for anyone under thirty and repression for those older; he had contempt for money and those who earned it but demanded to be given as much as he needed; he dressed and comported himself flagrantly so as to attract attention, yet getting it he derided and/or denounced his audience.

He was, in short, altogether human and absolutely normal. There was no mistaking his commitment to injustice, to incessant provocation, to maximum publicity, illogic, malice, attachment to his own crowd and frightened hatred of any other, his solipsism, his nightmares, his sadism, or his relationship to his father. You wouldn't find him tormenting a stranger. He loved his old dad.

And vice versa. And if Reinhart was being ironic when he made that reflection, he was neither more nor less so when, having waited an hour for Blaine to get to sleep, he stole into his son's room with a little penlight and found the pile of discarded clothing on a bedside chair. As it happened, Reinhart, despite his financial difficulties, always managed to maintain a little cache of loot which he kept between the pages of a
World Almanac
for the year 1953. Before leaving his study this night he withdraw a fin from it, leaving three dollar-notes.

The clothes stank of perspiration, as he had supposed. Oddly enough, the pants had no pockets. Blaine and his ilk liked snug hips. So Reinhart pushed the folded bill into a little kangaroo-niche in the vest. Blaine slept soundly, in the regular breathing of an impeccable soul. He always had. Reinhart remembered him well as a baby.

With no more illumination than the dime-sized spot of the pen-light and no finer instrument than a pair of Japanese-made desk shears, Reinhart cut his son's hair to within approximately two inches of the scalp. During the operation Blaine murmured occasionally, and when Reinhart gently lifted his head off the pillow and bent it forward to get at the back, the boy burbled like an infant, giving Reinhart an intimate feeling he had not had in years.

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 get 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.