Vital Parts (25 page)

Reinhart looked around for the pusher. He would have liked to ask him a few things. He had, however, no questions for Blaine, who in many earlier colloquies had explained that marijuana and the stronger hallucinogens were needed because his, Reinhart's, generation had mortified human consciousness. How could you talk to a boy whose vocabulary contained only collective nouns? There was more hope for the pusher, who was an outright criminal and so, presumably, his own man, out to make a buck and not change the quality of life. Yet he too was a repeater.

When Reinhart's eyes were adjusted to the darkness—the latrine had been bright—he saw Eunice's silhouette. She was not at Blaine's booth but at a nearby table. His panic had been practically for nought. He found his check and, catching the little old waitress, paid her off. He moved his bulk towards the Small Intestine. This exit however was blocked by those karate men, who were at the moment hammering down a longhaired youth with an exceedingly bad complexion.

Reinhart backed away from this and collided with Eunice.

She draped herself on his shoulder and said: “Let's split. Unless you wanna see an underground movie in the Pancreas. It's a gay gang-bang, I think, the same old crap. This place used to be a groove when it first opened but it's turned into the same old cop-out full of fake freaks. I wouldn't come here ever except for the food. That's good because the Mafia runs the kitchen and wops love to eat.”

“You don't mean gangsters are out there frying steaks?”

“That's neat!” She nickered. “What a scene, chalk-stripe suits, floppy white felt hats, tommy guns! You know who I dig? George Raft!”

But Reinhart had seen these pictures first time around, which was another thing entirely. It made him despondent to hear youngsters with a taste for the Thirties. They were out to take all and earn nothing. Past eras were recalled for their amusement, minus the pain and deprivation of those who survived them. You never ran into nostalgia for breadlines and apple-selling veterans. Reinhart could wax quite indignant on this subject, though he himself had always eaten his three square per diem. His father had somehow got along. He had always meant to ask him how, but had never done so while the man lived. Yet when Blaine ranted about the dreadful state of America now, Reinhart was wont to bring up the Depression.

They made a buffeting and buffeted exit at the opposite side of the room from the commotion, going out a door under a naked red fire bulb. In an alleyway of trashcans, Reinhart felt he had left something undone. That had been his son back there, buying marijuana in a manner that suggested extensive practice. He wondered at his own reluctance to come out of hiding and decided his motive had been simple shame. It was comforting to make admissions. He had rather been father to the pusher, who at least was working for a living.

This of course was a reflection of anguish, but, as women invariably will, Eunice chose that moment to say, squeezing his arm, which he still always forgot was fat until someone did that: “You know what I dig about rapping with you? You are always in an up mood.”

At the debouchment of the alley into the parking lot stood another karate man, eating a hero sandwich leaking oil and tomatoes. It suddenly occurred to Reinhart to check something Bob Sweet had told him on their first meeting at Gino's.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know about something called kung fu?”

A paper-thin slice of salami disappeared between the bouncer's lips. “Chinese martial art,” said he, sucking next a black olive from the sandwich, whirling it in his mouth, and ejecting the seed, all of this with no hands. Reinhart had not been able to eat much of his steak sandwich and this show made him ravenous.

“See,” he said, turning reluctantly away to Eunice. “I told you Bob did karate. He certainly had the name straight.” Eunice shrugged. This however was the sort of thing that Reinhart found important: small details but fitting into a mosaic, etc. “He said he got his black belt in kung fu.”

“Bullshit, man,” said the bouncer, who had heard. “There isn't no belt system in kung fu. Everybody wears a black
gi
. And what I don't like about it is you wear shoes too.”

On the way to the car Reinhart asked: “What's a
gi?
”

Eunice said: “Uniform. Bob's a pathological liar.”

She was probably just overwrought. It was interesting to Reinhart how this father and child abused each other to third persons. He himself, in contrast, would never calumniate Blaine to anyone outside the family. Of course Blaine probably besmirched his dad's name to anybody who would listen.

The idea of this depressed Reinhart all over again, and also made him aggressive when they reached the car. He opened the door and forced Eunice to get in in the normal, mannerly fashion. He closed the door on her and talked through the window.

She said, in affectionate threat, “I'll get you for that.”

“Look,” said he, “I'll just walk to the Y. It's just a couple blocks from here. Really.”

“I might as well drop you,” Eunice said. “It makes more sense.”

“I could use the fresh air and exercise.”

“You just don't like being with me, is that it?” She turned her big soft head away.

“I thought we went through something of this sort earlier,” said Reinhart. “Look, I'm an old guy, and after a day with a specialist in rejuvenation and an evening of youthful pleasures, I feel twice the age I was to begin with. And I don't even have a real home to go and recuperate in.”

And surely enough, Eunice said tragically: “I wish I didn't have a home.” She reached out and clutched his wrist. “I'm scared to go there. You don't know what Bob is like.”

Reinhart's scalp prickled. He put together her earlier cryptic comments with this current evidence of apprehension and got something ugly. When she had suggested that Sweet had a sexual interest in her, Reinhart had not yet known she was his daughter. But fashion had also changed as to interference in the internal affairs of others. When Reinhart was young all decent persons had wanted the U.S. to go to the aid of Western Europe; now it was precisely the same sort of people who demanded that America let Southeast Asia alone.

He grimaced. “I can't be policeman to all the world.” There was no getting away from the fact that the clichés of journalism were often useful for disposing of an uncomfortable subject.

Her voice broke as she said: “I don't have anybody to talk to.”

Try your clergyman or family doctor, Reinhart wanted to say, à la the popular psychologists. He had read that in, of course, Los Angeles there was a telephone number which could be dialed by distressed young victims of parental fascism. The sage at the other end of the wire gave them love, no doubt literally if they got within clutching distance. A good way to get young stuff.

But an unhappy girl is an altogether different entity when you confront her in reality, just as an actual starving beggar is something other than he appears when a mere digit on a list of miseries in far-off India.

Reinhart said: “I used to be the kind of guy who would get involved in the troubles of other people. But my help invariably succeeded only in getting them deeper. I don't even speak of my own burned fingers, which presumably shouldn't matter to the Good Samaritan. I really mean quite seriously that emotional problems are better left alone by my type of person. I no longer have faith in my own judgment. Time will do what it wants to anyway.”

She was plucking at his sleeve. A car started up nearby and roared past, as it were scorching his behind. It was possible that her movement had had no reference to saving his life. Still the idea occurred to him that she was perhaps not the typical young solipsist.

“I'll see you in the office tomorrow,” he said. “You know, the freezer program puts a whole new complexion on human troubles. If it works nothing is permanent any more. If we are trapped in a situation, it is but for a limited term. Think of that.” He would himself try to keep it in mind, which was not easy what with the habits of a lifetime.

“I never figured you for a cop-out,” Eunice said, deep within the darkness of the car. “I thought I could count on you.”

“The thing I can't swallow,” Reinhart said indignantly, “is being given all this responsibility. You feed and clothe a child and expose him to your principles. What the hell else are you supposed to do? I never expected my parents to be perfect. My dad, for example, never gave me any useful advice his life long, and my mother criticized me incessantly. They might not have been the kind of people I would have chosen as friends, and I always felt superior to them, yet I managed to love and respect them as parents. Why then must my own son be a Blaine? Because I have failed in business? But he hates business. And my wife. I tell you she stopped giving me any moral support whatever as soon as we were married.”

He stopped abruptly. “I'm sorry, Eunice. This is unforgivable of me. It's what happens in middle age. Another person's troubles only remind you of your own. When you get to really old age they please you by contrast. The old-timers at Senior City get a charge from the death of a colleague—another one gone and I am still here, that sort of thing.” He poked his face in the window. “Human beings are vile. That's the best advice I can give you. Like any other general rule it has as many exceptions as applications, but it is a useful position from which to start. Then you won't be disillusioned by swinishness on the one hand, while on the other you will be pleasantly surprised occasionally when decency appears unexpectedly.”

After a moment of quiet she ordered, in a low but intense voice: “Get in the car.”

He complied, with a hot face, cold limbs, and an absence of will. She drove through the downtown shopping district, now dark, to an even darker area, near the river, of depressed commercial buildings, seedy warehouses, and the like, the sort of neighborhood which is seemingly dangerous because deserted but actually quite safe for the same reason, criminals being the most gregarious of men.

What's this? Reinhart asked himself when they stopped adjacent to a steel-shuttered loading platform and several enormous trucks of the breed that look stupid when not in use and brutal when they are. But he followed her as she left the car and, opening a door in a tall, skinny building next to the warehouse, entered a feebly lighted hallway and stepped around the unconscious derelict sprawling there covered with whiskers and slime and an Army overcoat showing two stripes on the arm—in fact, Reinhart's own late rank.

At the base of the stair Eunice halted and said: “Some friends have a loft here.”

“OK,” said Reinhart, who felt liberated from something or other. They proceeded to climb many flights, a murky journey between sporadically illuminated landings. The bare backs of her thighs were just ahead of him under the abbreviated hem, massive columns so firm they gleamed in the twilight. Going up such a steep staircase as a boy he would have goosed a male predecessor and stooped to see a girl's pants or, better, the tops of a woman's silk stockings. He could remember as far back as when most were rolled. However, it was no joke to carry his weight ever upward.

At last through a haze of exhaustion he discerned that they were no longer mounting but moved along a level surface. Eunice opened a sagging door. He followed her into a room too dark to have identifiable dimensions. Nearby were bodies prone, supine, or hip propped, and many were intertwined with others. A couple of candles, erected in saucers, flickered over the scene. Everybody seemed to be smoking. Reinhart of course recognized the odor as that of marijuana smoke, which he had lately smelled, for the first time in his life, in the men's room at the Stomach, when the bouncers lighted up—though it was far from a new indulgence, and had been used by certain schoolmates of his years ago, or so it was alleged then, for there are always legendary wild men mixed among the hordes of routine clods, creative types who are drinking, fucking, dope-taking while the jerks are drearily grinding their noses.

A pleasant fragrance rather like that of a brushfield being burned. Reinhart had smoked various weeds as a kid exploring local meadows and woodlands: there had been one sort of tall reed which, intact, you could hurl as a spear or, cut into lengths, smoke. Inhaling marijuana, so said many leading authorities, you did far less damage to your system than came from boozing. Other spokesmen were opposed. But Reinhart felt the essential argument was as to ethics rather than health. Did not this effluvium wither the will to succeed as well as asphyxiate the moral values?

An answer was immediately forthcoming. Eunice leaned over and plucked the joint from one of the beards on the floor, who gave her no opposition, and then found an area where she herself could sprawl and did so. Reinhart joined her there with considerable difficulty. He would rather climb stairs than sit upon a floor. An erect body distributed its weight more effectively than one folded or heaped upon itself like a pillowcase full of wet laundry.

Her first drag was rather shallow, for all the atmosphere of the place: which is to say he had been prepared to see her ingest what was left of the butt in one great suck, the glow swooping towards her lips.

Chewing dramatically on the smoke, she handed the little twisted, wretched thing to Reinhart. He had given up cigarettes years before and in the years since puffed only on the occasional cigar presented by business acquaintances. The thought of inhaling had become repugnant to him. To fill the lungs with the fumes of burning vegetable matter, to inflame the delicate linings, to constrict the fine blood vessels, to condense black tar in his interior passages—but marijuana was not tobacco, and might indeed be less harmful. If so, what a joke.

So he took a moderate draft, inhaled cautiously, felt temporarily dizzy, and returned the butt to Eunice.

She leaned into him and said: “You can freak out here, do your own thing, with nobody on your back. I wish it was the whole world.”