Vital Parts Read online

  “Your passion is money,” said Reinhart with an air of discovery.

  “If so,” Sweet said pleasantly, “it’s not its accumulation in cash. What I am trying to explain to you is that I don’t worship statistics. I hire accountants for that. Only losers think in numbers. There is no such thing.”

  “Then what is your secret?”

  Sweet said: “You know the old thing Morgan said when asked how much it costs to keep a yacht?”

  Reinhart of course was a walking chrestomathy. “‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford one.’”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  “That was the idea,” Sweet said. “Now one way to avoid that feeling is to abandon all desire in a positive fashion. A monk is not a failure.”

  “Unfortunately, I am not religious.”

  “Neither are many of them. That has nothing to do with it. We are talking about respective strategies. … Carl, you’re doing it again. You’re a hard case.” Sweet laughed and tapped the back of Reinhart’s hand with the steel rod of his finger.

  Over Sweet’s shoulder Reinhart was watching a young girl cross the street. She wore a sailor-striped jersey and no brassiere. The hem of her skirt reached scarcely below the delta, her hair to her shoulders and beyond; her eyes confident that traffic would part for her crossing, which of course it did very soon, defying Reinhart’s prayer that she would be run down. One face of Reinhart’s lech was murderous.

  Sweet pressed a switch that caused the window to lower itself silently. “Miss,” he called. “Over here, please.”

  Reinhart’s heart whirred like an outmoded air-conditioner. “Don’t, Bob, please don’t do anything embarrassing.” For he knew he would be blamed.

  Ignoring him, Sweet waited for the girl to arrive. When she did, and hung her moonface, draped in hair, at eye level, her chest receding, her breasts pendulous as cheeses in an Italian grocery, he said: “I’m lost. I’m looking for the local airfield.”

  She did something with her tongue. “That’s twenty miles away, across the river.” She ritualistically acknowledged the absurdity of it, with batwinged shoulders.

  “You’re not thinking,” Sweet said coldly. “Obviously I don’t want the commercial airport.” Her dark-rimmed eyes wandered through the interior, passing across Reinhart as though he were an empty seat. She looked about fifteen. “I fly my own airplane,” Sweet went on. “It’s at the private field. If your ears are pierced you should never go without earrings.”

  She touched her right lobe; both were in fact concealed by the amber fall of hair, so Reinhart assumed Sweet was faking.

  “What’s your name?” Sweet asked accusingly. Then in a sudden move he smiled in frank warmth. “No,” he said, “don’t tell me. I’ll try to guess it from some of the things about you. You have Susan hair, long and fine and full of light. But your face is definitely Debby: pussycat nose. Your eyes, well, very exotic, Spanish I would say, like a girl’s I knew once in Old Mexico, very Rosarita. …”

  She seemed interested. Of course Reinhart’s taste would inhibit him from trying anything of this sort. He had never been glib with girls even when he was young, except perhaps when writing letters, but to look into a face and tell it fantastic rubbish had never been his game. Surely a girl knew she was attractive. Why would it not suffice to make a simple statement of want? Reinhart stubbornly adhered to his principle, though in fact he was well aware of its practical deficiency. Even years ago, when it stood to reason he must have possessed certain minimal charms, he had not scored as well as many stunted, downright grotesque contemporaries. At college the beauty queens were often pinned to troglodytes, prematurely balding or greasy forelocked, emaciates or lards, peering through bull’s-eyes mounted above pimpled cheeks. Many big Army assmen had bad breath and body odor and the manners of mobsters.

  But all no doubt with golden tongues—and didn’t care where they put them, according to the envious. But Reinhart was not one meanly to libel the winners. Nobody began a relationship with a genital kiss. A flow of language must precede, which properly made its point by having no literal sense. But that too was wrong. In the service Reinhart had known monosyllabic brutes who said little more to pickups than, “Let’s knock one off,” and did.

  Useless to chew it all again, the same gall-flavored paraffin for thirty years. At his present age it was perverted to desire minor female persons and any attempt to feed such a hunger was criminal.

  He was brought from the reverie by a joyful intelligence that, ha-ha! the teen-ager was not buying Sweet’s line after all.

  She had smiled and smirked and, finally, winced. She backed off two steps.

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Sure I am,” Sweet brazenly admitted. “You make me nervous. You’re driving me crazy with your body. It’s the wildest thing I’ve seen in this crummy little town.”

  She shook her head as if to clear it. “God, the way you talk. Aren’t you kind of old for this?”

  “I’m seventy-four,” Sweet said. “It’s not against the law to worship beauty, is it? Listen, I am on my way to New York to do something about the conditions in the ghetto. We are the richest country in the world, yet permit some of our citizens to live like animals.” He seemed to speak with real passion. Reinhart was astounded, having taken Sweet as a ruthless capitalist. “Too many older people prefer to ignore this state of affairs. They grill their steaks and suck their martinis and complain about their kids. But if the kids aren’t the hope of this country, then there is no hope. I predict an explosion unless people like you and me do something.”

  The girl was frowning. She had come back to lean on the windowsill, her breasts on her forearm. Reinhart projected his mind’s eye into the street, became an imaginary sewer worker in a manhole, saw all of her delicious behind encased in the sheerest dove-skin.

  Sweet said: “You know the militant blacks are right. The kids are right. Something must be done, and now. What is your thinking on this crisis?”

  “Well,” she said, “I want to do anything I can to—”

  Sweet grasped her wrist, making a depression in the jersey between her knockers, his thumb against one, little finger crooked on the other. “Bless you. You carry with you the hope of our time. I’ll be back in two days to organize a youth rally in this area. I’ll need your help. We’ll have top acid-rock groups, strobe lights, electronic environments, posters, everybody with his own thing, and telling it like it is. The ball field, Monday. Come early. You’re a pussycat.” He smoothly opened his hand and massagingly encircled her left breast. “Now wish me good luck in New York.” He kissed her generous uncolored mouth and ran the window up.

  It was of note to Reinhart that she nodded through the glass and walked around the hood in apparent self-possession. He watched until she turned the corner and disappeared. She never looked back. Her stride was full-juiced, on sturdy tan thighs bare almost to the cheeks.

  Sweet said: “Do you know she put her tongue down my throat, the little twat? Well, there you are, Carl. You can knock that off if you want to represent yourself as my advance man for the rally. If that’s your taste. Though why it should be, I don’t know. Maybe you are attracted by the illegality of it.”

  Reinhart said: “You could be put in prison for what you did.”

  “No,” said Sweet. “You could.”

  Reinhart had not recognized the girl, but might well know her name. No doubt the offspring of some other old schoolfellow, one who had stayed locally like himself to spawn a family, and was held in contempt by the adolescent members, felt obsolete and out of it, feared Negroes, and was driven to impotent madness by rock music and the threat of a youth takeover.

  “What gets me,” said Reinhart, “is that you really sounded sincere.”

  “Oh, I might have been, except about wanting to screw her. I told you there was money in Negroes. There’s more in youth. I know a man who made a half-million last year in posters, buttons,
psychedelic clock faces, and the rest of the garbage they buy. Being a father you must be aware that their allowances are more than a salaried man earned all week when we were kids.”

  “Yes indeed,” Reinhart said fervently, touching reality’s base for once. “But Bob, forgive me for the question. Don’t you have to be pretty callous to play it your way?”

  “Callous,” Sweet repeated quickly. Yet he did not seem offended. “No, far from it. Nor hypocritical. If I were colored, I would be militant. If I were young, I wouldn’t trust anybody over thirty. I would scream when my own ox was gored, or even pretend it was when it was not. I would get mine. I am what I am, and expect others to be the same.”

  “You’re a Claude Humbold with class,” said Reinhart. “He’s the real-estate man I worked for years ago, except his ideas were ahead of their time. For example he predicted that meadow and woods would be a perfect location for a supermarket, but nobody bit in his day. He’s been in California for years.”

  Sweet was not interested in former personalities. He impatiently reminded Reinhart of the waiting airplane. “I have lingered here,” he said, “for this sentimental motive. I have thrown you a few ideas in retailing because you seem to be a local sort of man who might feasibly operate on that level. But you haven’t been eager to field them.”

  “Maybe I’ve tried it,” said Reinhart. “Maybe I went into television too late in the early days, a few months before the market was saturated for black-and-white and color had not yet been developed. Maybe I tried other things on the eve of various recessions, which I couldn’t weather because of lack of capital. Maybe I had—”

  Sweet shook his head. “Let’s drop all profitless precedents. What do you have right now?”

  “The last thing I tried,” said Reinhart, “was a gas station on old state route 215. That whole thing is now bypassed by the superhighway. I didn’t get a dozen customers in a week.”

  Up front the old chauffeur looked asleep. Reinhart suddenly wished him dead, in which event Sweet would have to consider him, Reinhart, for the job. He was now reluctant to leave his powerful ex-schoolmate.

  “Look, Bob, if you are serious about helping me, maybe you have a place in your organization.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Sweet told him. “I function essentially alone, except for lawyers and accountants. I don’t have a plant to my name or even much of an office force. I have to work quickly, often, and in a certain secrecy.” He removed his sunglasses and nibbled on a temple piece, his shrewd dark surveillance on Reinhart’s beseeching gray-blue eyes. “What I had in mind was, frankly, a loan.”

  “No,” Reinhart avowed, “I never borrow money from an individual.” He didn’t count his mother as such. His sincerity made him breathless for a moment and he stopped to pant. “All I ask is to be allowed to earn an honest living.”

  Sweet threw back his head all at once and poured a glance down over his forceful chin. Reinhart was larger than he but sitting in a crumpled fashion.

  “OK,” Sweet said. “Give me a call when I get back.” He wrote a number on a serrated quarter-leaf from a pocket secretary bound in glistening lizard. He gave it to Reinhart with one hand and clasped him with the other. “Two days should wrap it up.”

  “You won’t regret this, Bob.” Reinhart dared not say more, on pain of offending Sweet and disgusting himself, on reflection, with maudlin whining. He left the car but, unlike the teen-ager, remained at the curb, big hands in twisted pockets, sweating again in the sudden heat and inner expectation.

  The exquisite automobile diminished down Main Street and flowed left at the light into the superhighway access road, disappearing behind the concrete wall, already fissured, of the ramp.

  Bentley, eh. Reinhart was vaguely troubled by the two-tone effect. Was it not a bit vulgar? His would be monochrome, all silver-gray.

  The teen-ager returned. “Hi there,” said Reinhart.

  “Hi,” she answered heedlessly and crossed the street.

  Reinhart did not have an office in the old business district, being temporarily at liberty, but Genevieve worked there as manager of a dress shop. He did not want her to see him at large. The best place to go was, ironically, home: empty, quiet, cool, and dark on a merciless day in July. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art so lovely and so temperate.” Imagine saying that to a modern adolescent and of a hot afternoon in Ohio.

  At home Reinhart showered, took a long nap, and then prepared dinner for hardworking Gen and the rest of the family: baked pork butt, if the truth be known, with string beans. Bien sûr, he was no Carème, but he did more than warm tinfoil platters of frozen food. He toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant and killing Gino’s business. Gen was tired and surly at dinner, his daughter stuffed herself idiotically, and his son did not come home.

  All this had preceded Reinhart’s evening visit to the bathroom, ostensibly to take another shower, for the kitchen was not air-conditioned nor equipped with an automatic dishwasher, and he was again self-soaked.

  He now rose from his seat on the closed toilet, ritualistically tripping the flush lever. It was one of those habitual series of movements which in forty years had become integrated into the life process.

  Reinhart’s safe, so to speak, was at the bottom of the laundry hamper, a pink, iridescent, woven product of a company called Pearlwick. The treasure secreted therein was a pair of Japanese 7 x 35 binoculars. Up to the shoulder in soiled underwear, he groped for them, brought them up through fathoms of clinging garments, freed the right eyepiece from a persistent bra-strap, then stood these Siamese twins on the always convenient toilet cover.

  For once the ballcock did not stick and the flush ended in the all’s-well gasp followed by a plink and a distant gurgle, signaling that it was OK to run water elsewhere without prejudice, and he opened the cold-water tap in the bathtub, full-throat, leaving the disengaged plug where it was.

  Just as he had not authentically used the toilet, neither would he employ the tub except as another auditory red herring. Reinhart’s true purpose in occupying this room at this time was to watch his neighbors’ daughter undress in the house next door. The girl was not quite seventeen years of age, by record, but she was built like twice that, and in any primitive tribe would have been a multi-mother long since. At least twice in recent months Reinhart had caught her visually in brassiere and bikini briefs, and once she had obviously been on the point of unhooking the former when a burst of ill wind had clatteringly reminded her of the open Venetian blind—through which Reinhart had watched a composite figure of many horizontal divisions—and with a single, indolent twitch of the wrist she blacked him out.

  Reinhart had known the girl since she was a newborn piece of protoplasm, virtually hairless over her cute little testy red piglet face, pink prehensile feet clutching the air. After all, that had been less than seventeen years ago. “She looks like Eisenhower,” her dad observed in a mock-rueful way, he and Reinhart being for Stevenson. Then several regimes flashed by in speeded-up newsreels, and this kid burgeoned from spindly child to succulent woman like one of those collapsed life rafts which at the pull of a cord inflate before your eyes to plump maturity. So much for the passing of years after you reach thirty.

  Patience is essential for the sniper, the burglar, the Peeping Tom, but its exercise often caused Reinhart to anticipate failure as a means of killing time. Imagining success might turn out to be a mockery, whereas if you counted on losing you lost nothing further if proved right and were happy if erroneous. The economy of the emotions could never be allowed to go laissez-faire.

  He would probably never see Sweet again. Surely the phone number was bogus. Or he would, with his gift for self-damage, lose it. Gen would burn up the note, or tear it into confetti and flush it away. If he reached him, Sweet, like the rich dipsomaniac in City Lights, who took Charlie Chaplin home every night but threw him out every morning, would disclaim all acquaintance.

  More immediately, as he crouched at the slit of
window, binoculars resting on the sooty sill, surveying the empty rectangle of yellow light next door, he expected to see nothing of the girl, perhaps not even her clothed figure—this sometimes happened; she didn’t get to bed on time, and he eventually had to honor family protests and void the bathroom—and yet be caught in the fruitless act by wife or son or random policeman.

  Having laid waste to the future, he would next begin a count of past injustices. Time hangs heavy on the voyeur waiting at his post. Reinhart was on the verge of reliving in spirit the ugly encounter with Gino when he recognized that the girl next door had not only materialized but had, bending and shifting from one leg to the other, whisked off her underpants and now stood, squarely in the frame of the window, shaking them at him and smiling shamelessly.

  2

  To think, Reinhart thought, that this young girl, the daughter of respectability and hard work and enlightened attitudes—both her parents were college graduates—that this young minx had turned whore. In moral outrage he lowered the glasses.

  The Swedes, he had read, had evolved a theory that would encourage the natural complements to get together legally: voyeurs and exhibitionists, fags and friends, the yins and yangs of sexual peculiarities, thus satisfying one another and no longer troubling the routine society of bulls and cows who mate in bovine orthodoxy. But what of the weirdo who had once importuned Reinhart, years ago, in a public street and with a young woman on his arm—Reinhart, that is; the queer was alone but well dressed. This fellow’s urge was obviously for scandal, not flesh. But why did Reinhart think of inversion while watching the body of a luscious object of heterosexual craving?