Vital Parts (38 page)

This was ridiculous. One should never get into a colloquy with a degenerate. But he was finished peeing at last, and then the door opened and in came Gino. Reinhart had never thought he would be glad to see him, but he was.

Looking into Gino's pockmarks, Reinhart said: “You ought to clean out your restroom, Gino, or the vice squad will be on your neck.”

Upon that note the booth opened and a plain-faced individual emerged to shove a small leather folder at Reinhart. On one leaf was a badge and on the other, behind clear plastic, an identification card, depicting the bearer and characterizing him as a county detective.

“We're way ahead of you, pal,” said the dick, and went back to his stakeout inside the booth.

Gino was shaking his head. “You take the cake, my friend, for sheer gall. I don't care the little lady settled your bill in full. I would still cream you if you wasn't escorting her tuhday.”

Gen was gone when he returned to the table, and the waitress was smearing a wet gray rag across the Formica. He got out his wallet. The girl shook her head: “She picked it up.”

“Thanks for another wonderful eating experience,” Reinhart wasted his time in saying. For the girl heard it as straight, and said, with the outthrust lower lip of the woman speaking man-to-man: “Give people the best, and they'll come back.”

In a way Reinhart never expected to see Genevieve again in his life, but of course when he emerged from the front door onto the asphalt, there she was, waiting for him in the car. He reminded himself again as he had so many times throughout the years, that aggression will get you everywhere. He should have begun to insult her the day they were married. But though he knew this was sound practice, Reinhart was a pacifist in the depths of his stomach. There had never been a close correspondence between what he knew and what he felt. It was all very well to say Stand Up for Your Rights! But if you were talking to someone for whom lying down was instinctive, say an oppossum, you had your work cut out for you.

But he squared his shoulders now and strode around to the driver's door, opened it, and said: “Move over. I'm taking the wheel.”

Oddly enough she complied, and he breathed again. He moved the seat back as far as it would go. Gen looked smaller with all that space between her and the dashboard. He gunned across the blacktop, maneuvering easily among other vehicles, and at the entrance onto the highway played chicken with an oncoming panel truck, crept farther and farther into the lane until it slowed to allow him ingress, the driver waving in angry acquiescence.

“Genevieve,” Reinhart said, “I want to make two points. First, whatever you think, I have always been sympathetic to your plight. I know it hasn't been enough for you to be just a wife and mother, and it's useless to bring up the time of one's grandmaw when people were content to be housewives. You remember that feminist group you belonged to a couple of years back. Well, it may surprise you to know I read your literature thoroughly, and it was far from being altogether idiotic, though perhaps, for polemical purposes, the message was put in an exaggerated form. To get attention today you have to be outlandish.” The car was tooling along.

Reinhart gave her a quick glance. “‘Combination janitor, chauffeur, and whore,' as I remember, is how they characterized the American wife.”

This organization had been named
GIRLS
, an acronym in the fashion of the times: Get Into Resistance against Lackeydom Soon, was its strained referent. Like so many movements since the dawn of man, hardly had it designed the letterhead when factionalism reduced it to impotence. That near-Lesbians had been attracted to its banner, along with a host of women extremely unattractive in either person or manner, was to be expected, but the defection of one of its spinster officers into a peculiarly authoritarian marriage, in which her husband often manacled her to the bedposts and, in spurred boots and black cape, whipped her raw, was ruinous. Neighbors called the police, and the newspaper had made great sport with the affair.

“I thought it was great when you took up the theater,” Reinhart went on. “I would not have stood in your way had you wanted to turn professional.”

Actually, at the time, Reinhart had been quite jealous. He had himself shown a dramatic gift when, in high-school speech class, he portrayed an Irish peasant in
Spreading the News
, by Lady Gregory. However, when he auditioned for the Little Theater's production of
The Man Who Came to Dinner
(the part of Banjo, known to be modeled on Harpo Marx), director G. Lloyd Havermill disqualified him, and proceeded to cast Genevieve as the female lead. Reinhart was only human.

“Yet,” he went on now, motoring along the bland highway, “I was sympathetic when you quit the group entirely. As you know, I have never been a joiner, I have preferred to go it on my own. Of course, that's the tough way because you haven't got anybody else to blame.”

Gen was taking all this in. She had got something out of her system in the restaurant, so perhaps it had been worth doing. It was therapeutic to vent one's spleen: all authorities were agreed on that.

“But to any kind of sensitive spirit, the power plays and infighting that go on in groups are insupportable. One begins to wonder whether he hasn't better things to do.”

What had happened in the Little Theater was routine: a cabal had formed and outmaneuvered the Old Guard, of which Gen was a member. Perhaps because of this experience Gen had joined the Young Turks in
GIRLS
, only to have that organization collapse through bad publicity.

“If you remember,” Reinhart continued, “you went into a long depression after Blaine was born. I don't pretend to know what it's like to give life to a new person, but I am sure the strain is remarkable. I know I felt guilty about filling you with it.” A piece of inadvertent arrogance. “I mean, contributing my part.

“But then, if you recall, once Blaine was ready to go to kindergarten you believed you would miss having a baby to look after, so we had Winona.” Whom Gen had never quite liked, from the first. For one thing Winona had been much larger to deliver, after having been heavier to carry, than Blaine. Then for quite a while Winona's eyes failed to coagulate, as Reinhart thought of it: the irises floating like raw eggs. And she could not tolerate Gen's milk, and one of her feet was almost covered with a maroon blotch. These proved minor matters in the sequel, eyes OK and the stain had dwindled through the years, but Gen had probably not recovered from the initial shock. Talking of the poor devils who had two-headed babies and Mongoloids, etc., was to no avail. Blaine had been absolutely flawless and had slid out as smoothly as if he had been tenth-born, whereas Gen had labored with Winona for some ghastly length of time.

Some anxious maniac was overtaking them at high speed, weaving in and out of traffic. Probably stinko as well. That kind of prick was never arrested, yet Reinhart was once given a ticket for a broken taillight.

“Now that I think about it,” Reinhart said, “until you got the boutique job you had as many false starts as I did. It is not easy for one to find the proper role in modern civilization. In the old days everyone was assigned a position in life. You were born a serf and stayed one. It is difficult to deal with freedom. You take me, I was interested in so many things when young I couldn't decide on any.”

The madman's car had swung in behind Reinhart's bumper and stayed there. Reinhart didn't like it; you could never tell when a guy like that would let go again.

“My main purpose in asking you to lunch today got sidetracked by our interesting discussion of other matters. I've finally found it. The opportunity I've been looking for for years. I ran into an old high-school friend named Robert Sweet. He is a pretty fantastic individual, made a million in business and has now gone into scientific research. I don't know if you have ever heard of a thing called cryonics, the freezing of human beings immediately after death, but—there is a guy behind us who is blinking a red light.” Reinhart adjusted the rear-vision mirror. “He is some kind of nut. You should have seen how he was driving before, and now this red light. The cops should take a person like that off the highway, but you never see one when you want him.”

Gen now made her first statement since getting into the automobile. She looked out the back window. “That's an unmarked police car,” she said. “Pull over onto the shoulder.”

Reinhart braked slowly. Probably another broken taillight. Gen never took care of her car.

When the guy got out he was revealed in breeches and puttees, and put on the trooper's hat he had concealed for his imposture, stinking stunt.

He was a youngish fellow, with a face that could have passed anywhere. Through Reinhart's window he said: “Why didn't you stop as soon as I signaled?”

“I didn't know who you were,” Reinhart answered indignantly.

“Are you aware of the speed limit here?”

“Fifty, isn't it?”

“You're certainly right about that,” said the policeman. “I clocked you at fifty-two. That's two miles over the limit and therefore you were breaking the law.”

“Two miles? Is that serious, officer?”

“My personal interpretation doesn't count, sir.”

“Isn't that just the trouble?”

“Sir?” This man had no expression whatever. Reinhart found himself longing for the old-time brute of a traffic cop, sneering and abusing his power.

“With modern times,” Reinhart said. “We are people, not things.”

“May I have your license and registration, sir?”

Reinhart handed his license over, saying: “You don't agree? You see me as a number on a document, don't you?”

“Oh, shut your goddam mouth.” For a moment Reinhart was gratified to think he had pierced the officer's plastic hide, but the speech had been in soprano and came from behind his own back.

“Why,” asked the cop, “won't you give me your registration?”

“This is not my car.”

“Did you steal it?” the officer asked abstractedly, reading Reinhart's license.

“Yes!” Reinhart cried, before turning to ask Gen for the document.

“Keep your hands in sight and get out slowly,” said the cop, unbuttoning the flap of his holster.

When Reinhart had performed the first part of the charade, he was directed to spread-eagle himself on the side of the hood.

“This is carrying the joke too far,” he said. “My wife owns this vehicle and she has the registration.”

The policeman forced him against the hood and felt him all over, including between the legs, thus devaluing a childhood fantasy of Reinhart's to the effect that one could pack a rod in a kind of jockstrap and get away with it when frisked. The cop did not linger there. He was no deviate. Still, if he had been, one would have been at his mercy. Reinhart determined to write a letter of protest to his state senator.

“Can I get back in now?” he asked, with his cheek flattened against the veneer of road film. No answer, so Reinhart straightened up. Gen was giving the registration to the cop. Reinhart wondered how many cars had passed while he underwent his humiliation.

Having returned the papers, the officer said: “Let me give you a piece of advice, sir. You should not clown around in these matters.”

Reinhart nodded like a chastened schoolboy.

“You look like a respectable gentleman. You wouldn't want to get into a terrible accident and kill your nice wife. So you get where you're going a little bit later, so what?”

“No ticket,” Reinhart said when they were underway again. “But I had to listen to a lot of Dutch-uncle crap. Fortunately I know how to deal with those characters. It's fashionable now to hate cops the way Blaine does, but most of it is empty rhetoric, as usual, on the part of people who have had no experience with them. A cop is not necessarily a fascist. If you seem respectable to him he will treat you decently enough.”

“And if,” Gen said, “when he looks inside your registration he finds a folded ten-dollar bill, he won't give you a ticket.”

Reinhart's cheeks puckered. “Why couldn't you have got it out faster then? Letting me be put through that degradation.”

“Was it me who told him the car was stolen?”

“Shit,” said Reinhart.

“Up yours,” said Gen.

Reinhart checked himself. “I am going to astound you out of your skull, Genevieve. I am genuinely going to rise above this incident, which would have crippled me only a week ago.” He kept the speedometer needle at forty. “To resume, I have become associated with Bob Sweet's Cryon Foundation at a handsome figure. But perhaps more important than the money is the feeling that one is doing something valuable—in this case, believe it or not, developing a process that may result in eternal life for humankind.”

Other cars streamed past them, obviously at speeds in excess of fifty mph.

“Naturally, success is not guaranteed, but incredible results have already been achieved, enough so that one is not lunatic to hope, to dream—”

“What is your specific job?” asked Gen.

“I suppose you might describe it as public relations. Not all my duties have been spelled out. I have just been taken on.”

“It sounds like a quack thing to me.”

“I thought you were receptive to new ideas, Genevieve. You pick up all Blaine's callow theories, which are old as hell. When did you ever hear of the possibility of everlasting life, literally speaking? Can you grasp that?”

Gen sniffed at the windshield. “I'm not impressed.”

“What the hell would impress you, then?” But Gen was hopeless at science and technology. She had once stripped the gears of an electric can-opener.

“Look,” said he, “this age will be remembered not because boys wore shoulder-length hair, but rather because man went to the moon, and, perhaps, also conquered death. Blaine is anything but avant-garde. The real revolutionaries are those crew-cut guys alone up in space, while their loyal families wait on the ground, going to Sunday school and subscribing to the
Reader's Digest
.”