Vital Parts Page 7

  “Oh, pigshit,” said Blaine in weary impatience. He suddenly slid down along the doorframe and sat on the floor. He was very limber, his sole physical gift.

  Again Reinhart rose above the situation, managing even to smile. His face felt much cooler already. “All right.” He decided against wryly tossing up his hands, a movement Blaine might interpret as aggressive. “One day you’ll be where I am and I’ll be dead.” Or perhaps only frozen, but that must at the moment remain his secret. “What I want to say now is when I was in Berlin, I was just twenty-one years old.”

  “Only yesterday,” Blaine said pseudo-pleasantly, his knees at an angle and his face, with hat, between them.

  “It seems like it. … I had a German girl. … She was sixteen.” He went on quickly: “She was a sort of little whore. It was her idea, really.”

  With a smearing movement Blaine pushed his hatbrim back from ear to ear. In the better light Reinhart believed he saw the origins of a new moustache on the long white upper lip, and approved; it would diminish the girlish effect of the hair. He should have had a quiet, reasonable, nostalgic little talk like this long since. He sensed the beginnings of a new relationship with Blaine.

  “What was her idea?” Blaine asked, already less nasty. He seemed truly puzzled, wrinkling his parsnip nose. “Why ‘really’?”

  Reinhart was shy. He had not talked directly of sex to Blaine since the boy was ten and he had given him the lecture Gen had suggested on returning from a PTA roundtable discussion. “Well sir,” Reinhart had said then, to this towheaded tyke, who also had a button nose, “babies don’t actually just appear in the hospital, Blainey. It starts before that when—” “Yeah,” little Blaine interrupted in his soprano, “when the father inserts his penis in the mother’s vagina and ejaculates seminal fluid containing thousands of tiny sperm,” and so on. It had been rather amusing, at that.

  Reinhart now searched his vocabulary for an up-to-date idiom. “Making out” was one he had read in magazine think-pieces on the young, but it sounded awfully hokey, like the “sleeping with” of his era. In Hollywood, he knew on the authority of the biographer of a tragic movie queen, they said “ball.” “I balled her, baby,” an actor told his agent, or vice versa.

  “I mean,” Reinhart said, grinning nervously, “we had relations.”

  Blaine tilted his hatbrim down again, and clasping his legs under the knees, rocked back and forth, hooting. “So you fucked her, man. What does that prove?”

  “Why, you dirty little—” Reinhart caught himself. In all justice the offending term had been continually upon his lips when he was a soldier. Of course he would never have spoken it to his own dad. But he had heard the colonel, a man older than his father, employ it habitually. What’s in a word?

  “You’re not making it easy on me,” he said.

  “If you do it,” Blaine stated, “you can call it by its right name. Your generation is only delicate about terms.”

  This was not the time to defend hypocrisy, which Reinhart happened to believe was far from deplorable. With it the Victorians had made the family an impregnable institution while managing also to have lots of jollies in private, so well concealed that only in recent years had the academic busybodies sniffed them out. Somewhere near the summit of values Reinhart put privacy, and he had learned through crude experience as well as refined ratiocination that almost the only way to get it was to be hypocritical.

  Still he retained his temper, but he said to Blaine: “You know, my only real difference with you, if we subtract the exterior things like hairstyle and clothes—I wore a zoot suit with fourteen-inch pegged cuffs and a hat with a rolled brim, my first year in college, and a duck’s-ass haircut—my essential argument is that you are completely within the mainstream of conformity.”

  “Yeah,” Blaine said, “I know that trick too. When the other side has shown up your values as immoral, cruel, and false, you then project your sins onto them. You can’t beat the Vietcong, so you claim they have committed all your crimes.”

  “No, my dear Blaine, I do not mean that,” Reinhart said levelly. “I don’t refer to the superficialities of politics or the sociological shit you take as divine sanction for refusing to exist authentically. I accept and confirm your criticisms of the status quo, which is rife with injustice and bad taste. If you read history with both eyes you will know that has always been so. Greeks of the Golden Age kept slaves and many of the most eminent statesmen and philosophers reserved their highest passion for other males. In the Elizabethan era, those who had what today would be the highest-priced theater seats, stood eating, drinking, and fist-fighting during the performance of Shakespeare’s noblest tragedies. In the street outside, dung, urine, and garbage were knee-high, which is why you will find in Romeo and Juliet the first fight between young men of the Montagues and Capulets is over who must walk in the crap.”

  Blaine joined his long white fingers around his calves. “We’re really not interested in the past. You can have it. You can cuddle it, feel it up, go down on it, and pretend you and it love each other. You deserve one another. We’re not just going to let you kill the future. If you try, we will kill you.”

  “‘We,’” said Reinhart. “The hyena speaking of his pack. Never for God’s sake foul your mouth with ‘I.’ The irony of my position is that ‘you’ plural is the same word as ‘you’ singular. I am presumably part of the mass ‘you’ for purposes of denunciation, yet I have seldom shared in the advantages. I belong to the ‘you’ past thirty and therefore physically beyond the prime, tending as a class to graying, weak eyesight, disintegrating gums, discoloration of skin, excessive weight, and shortness of breath. But I have never had the money and power which compensate for those failings. I don’t own a swimming pool in which you can float around and get tan and then dry off and revile me for conspicuous consumption. I have never lectured you on the positive virtues of Puritan morality, the American flag, the Presbyterian faith, the Republican party, the sanctity of mothers, the middle class, or the white race.”

  “Straw men of your generation,” Blaine said “We never considered them seriously. Our enemy is liberal, agnostic, rationalistic, moral relativists, ‘men of goodwill,’ ‘common decency,’ ‘humanitarianism,’ and all those frauds.”

  There you had it, a recognizable quotation from Mein Kampf. It would, however, be uncritical to take Blaine as Hitlerian.

  Reinhart therefore nonabusively pointed to a similar position taken, with horrible consequences, by the German Communists, of whom he had learned only after serving in Occupation Berlin and returning to college. “Like you they believed the society was rotten from the ground up. Of course it was, and is, and will always be.” Part of Reinhart’s rationale was anarchistic. “They encouraged the Nazis to pull it down, intending themselves to take over when all lay in ruins. But they were themselves soon wrecked. The rule of life seems to be that people are always ruined by the fulfillment rather than the denial of their hopes.” In the light of this principle, Reinhart could feel better about himself.

  “Communists,” said Blaine, “are part of your world and your era. They are at worst morally disgusting and at best awful bores. And they are always old men.”

  “I thought you worshiped Ché Guevara?”

  “I told you before that once the Cuban revolution had been achieved and institutionalized, he left the country. What better evidence that he was not a Communist in your sense, a bureaucratic bully, but rather the eternal revolutionary. Don’t talk to me about Robespierre and the Terror and the inevitable appearance of a Napoleon or Stalin or the change in a Castro. That’s your style of politics, getting back to normalcy and a serene life in the suburbs. The real revolution never ends. You ask what we would substitute for your structures. You can’t dig that our thinking is not structural. We don’t want another Congress where those old fuckers sit around and jerk each other off.”

  Reinhart could not help it. With the best will in the world he nevertheless found that kind of
talk erected his short hairs.

  “I’ll say this for you, Blaine,” he said soberly. “You are a very successful provoker, to be which it takes fantastic effrontery combined with a contempt for the literal meaning of words. In short, the politician’s demagogic gift. That, conjoined with your adman’s sense of publicity, makes you a classic American from the central tradition: a superconspicuous, loudmouthed vulgarian whose exhibitionism is yet strangely impersonal. You proclaim nothing for your self, and everything for your crowd. Or maybe it would be accurate to say your crowd is your self. That principle was enunciated on the founding of this country, in Franklin’s pun to the effect that unless we hang together, we will hang separately.”

  Blaine was moving his head, and hat, from side to side in a regular movement like that of the escapement in a watch.

  “Also,” Reinhart went on, “your mystique is precisely the same as that of the American businessman, who initiates new enterprises on the profits of the old, reinvests his dividends, never takes his winnings and goes home, but rather assumes more obligations, greater risks, in an ever-increasing momentum, with ever-expanding expectations. The flux is all. … I have never been able to manage that myself, as you know.”

  “Yes, Father,” Blaine said, still ticking off the seconds which if continued would in the aggregate be a life.

  “My own criticism of Franklin,” Reinhart pointed out, “is that we will all hang separately anyway, in the end. Thus I find all social thinking limited, ultimately false if you like. ‘There are many unpleasant ways to die and you are far more likely to have an unpleasant form of death than an easy and painless one.’ I read that once years ago and have never been able to forget it.”

  Blaine winced, threw his hands out behind him, over the threshold, and leaned on them, shoulders squeezing his neck.

  “Well,” he said, “you can’t use that excuse any more. They can freeze people now at the moment of death, cold-store them for years like steaks, and thaw them out in some future time when a cure has been perfected for what ailed them.”

  So he would even take that away from Reinhart, “that” being not only the process, which Reinhart romantically assumed was his alone though broadcast on national TV, much as other madmen get a crush on an actress and are devastated by the information that she is married, but also what Blaine was quite right in calling his excuse.

  “How,” he cried indignantly, “do you know about that?”

  Blaine made a passionless murmur. He said: “I voluntarily exposed myself to the preceding abuse of my intelligence. You ought to wonder why. I did not come here merely to backstroke in the vat of tepid piss wherein you habitually float while deliberating philosophically. I need some money, and I ask you to give it to me.”

  “I won’t give you a penny until you answer my simple question. Is that thing about freezing the dead general knowledge?” It could be. Reinhart’s fund of same was only sporadically replenished nowadays. His usual television fare was old movies. He frequently missed the daily encyclopedia of catastrophes, more and more humanly remote, which had replaced the old newspaper of the man-bites-dog era of journalism. And his dentist’s magazines were so ancient as to show features on the hula-hoop craze.

  “The Jack Alp Show,” Blaine stated. “Tonight. It just went off, if you have to know. You were probably watching Andy Hardy. ‘Gee, Dad, all I wanted was a little hug but she blew me, and it was great! Wow! Wooed!’ ‘We had better have a man-to-man talk, son.’” Blaine said the latter in a deep, artificial voice that sounded nothing like the late Lewis Stone’s in the sentimental yet, for all that, virile role of the just Judge. Though it came to Reinhart that he himself and his pals, a quarter-century before, had derided those pictures in much the same idiom, except that today’s oral images were then anal for some reason not easily isolated. The difference was that none of those guys, including himself, had ever yet had a piece. Thus their mockery had a harmless, infantile purity to it, and the ugliness was funny.

  Reinhart suspected this interview would end with his throwing Blaine through a closed window, which even in his present condition he could do with the left hand, but first he had to reach another conclusion.

  “Were you watching television next door?”

  “Yes I was.”

  “You were also walking around naked in Julie’s room.”

  “Right again.” Blaine’s grin would have been radiant had his teeth been clean.

  “You admit it?”

  “I admit anything,” said Blaine. “Whatever you can dream up, I’ve done it.” He stared for a while at his father. “And so have you.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Reinhart. “What in the world.”

  “The German teen-ager, dig? And what, twenty years later, are you doing looking into Julie’s window?”

  He had the goods on Reinhart, as Reinhart somehow suspected all along he would. The irresponsible have a permanent one-up on those who feel obligations. Even when he himself was young, Reinhart belonged to the latter company. It was true that the little Kraut had in effect seduced him; she had been more or less a tart, definitely a shameless liar, and no doubt the offspring of Nazis. Still, by one definition he had been a man and she a schoolgirl. He would have been a criminal almost anywere in the United States. On the other hand, she had been nine-tenths full grown, whereas many outright children sold themselves to GIs, especially in Italy. Julie, next door, was already bigger than her mother in breast and hip, and all he did was look at her.

  “My conscience is clean,” Reinhart said. “But more importantly, it is I who support you. With all your talk about revolution you understand nothing about power. Frankly, I don’t have to justify myself to you. That is the realistic truth. You are a parasite.”

  Blaine came to his feet in an impressive, fluid movement, almost balletic, without the use of hands. Of course he did not weigh much. Still, in the old weightlifting days Reinhart could not have done that without a visible effort and the audible expelling of breath by which the athlete increases his power. Everything came easy to Blaine, at least everything he tried. The rest he apparently let alone. He was a brilliant student yet was seldom found with book in hand. He seemed effeminate, but the girls took to him, called him on the phone, whistled at him in the street. Until tonight Reinhart had told himself these were expressions of the fond, proprietary amusement which females of his own age showed towards the nonthreatening antics of mincing Southern celebrities and awkward puppy dogs.

  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 perf
ormed 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.