Vital Parts (16 page)

Eunice deliberately sized Reinhart up.

Sweet said: “This healthy brute.”

She frowned and gathered in her gums, as in that device of mimicking the toothless, then released the lip-compression with a pop! “Umm.” A glorious, carnivorous show of teeth. “I happen,” said she, grinning, “to be free this evening.”

Reinhart's eyebrows virtually met his cheekbones. He squinted out between.

“That will be all,” Sweet said to Eunice, who replied: “OK, Bob.” She turned, dropped a pencil on the floor, bent to fetch it with straight legs, and Reinhart saw the cheeks of her behind again. She breezed out.

Sweet threw his head back and pantomimed a howl of mirth. When the door was shut he leaned forward and said: “Hell, why not.”

“I just want a piece of the business, Bob. I can put in five grand. That may not be much by your lights, but it does serve to show you I am not a beggar. Now I would be obliged to you if you would take me seriously. If you aren't interested, then throw me out.”

“Come on, Carl, loosen up.”

“You've changed since the other day, you know. Do you realize that? Is it a result of the credit check? I thought I had confessed to you already. Did you think I would kid you about my record? It's hopeless, I admit that freely.”

“Even boastfully,” said Sweet, shaking his head.

“I never have been a liar. I
am
proud of that. And I haven't been cruel. I don't think anybody could make that charge.” Except Blaine, but father-son relations were private and, whatever, normal. “Nor am I dishonest.”

“What strange things to brag about,” said Sweet. “Do you really think that list contains anything to attract me? Even if it were true. Aren't you lying by implication right now? If precedents have any meaning—and you apparently believe they do—you will make a mess of any enterprise. Is it not dishonest then to offer yourself to me? Is it, in fact, not cruel? Because that is what you are doing.” Bob smiled. “‘Take me though I'm worthless.' That is supposed to seem like candor, and I am supposed to conclude from it that you might be valuable for your honesty.”

“No,” said Reinhart. “I see how it looks, but what I meant was that I was straight in my business dealings, to the best of my ability. I never knowingly cheated anyone.”

“But your creditors were forced to take a forty percent loss. Why would they care whether it was
kowingly!
These words are meaningless, Carl. And I wouldn't mind exploding another fixed idea of yours: that you are a
good guy
.”

Reinhart shook his head violently. “I never made that claim.”

“It is implicit, once again, in your whole style. Even when you concede your judgment was bad, you mean instead your luck. Perhaps in some grand way, you put the blame on fate—it is bad luck your judgment is bad. How does that sound?”

“No,” said Reinhart. “I'm not so childish as to believe in luck. I know a man makes his own. One can trace back to certain turnings in his life, which if not taken—or others which if taken, etcetera. For example, my marriage. I knew Genevieve was a snob when I married her. She got that from her father. I hated his guts on sight, and vice versa. And, farther back, my mother was never proud of me. I guess she loved me in her own way, but even when I got home from the Army she wouldn't listen to my stories but told me about the service experiences of the neighbor guys. She always acted—well, I know it sounds crazy, but,
jealous
of me. However, since my dad died she has changed. For one thing she has become, sporadically, a paranoiac. Well, she's an old lady—”

“You're running off at the mouth, Carl, and confirming what I said.”

Reinhart had sat down again in the leather chair, where he did not feel so big and exposed. Sweet now rose and wandered slowly about in his handsome suit of gray nailhead worsted and supple black oxfords.

“Let me tell you this, Carl. As long as material success escapes you, you regard it as an end. Women go along with this: getting the ones you want, controlling those you have, and so on. I'm not sneering at materialism, by any means. There are values in it. Art, for example, is certainly materialistic in itself and as to what it depicts. Had I lived a century ago I might have had a great house, full of rich, dusky oils and luxurious bronzes, stained glass illuminating the stairwells, and so on. This is not the time for that sort of thing. You see magazine photos of the apartments of public relations men: whitewashed walls, floor-to-ceiling paper posters, extruded-plastic trash to sit on. Like our reception room here, which incidentally was decorated by Eunice.”

“Your clothes are certainly fine,” said Reinhart.

Sweet nipped an inch of lapel between thumb and forefinger. “Forty dollars in Kowloon.”

“What,” asked wide-referenced Reinhart, “were you doing in Hong Kong?”

“Business or pleasure?” Sweet rhetorically demanded. “Neither, really. You know the old joke, Do you want to go around the world? No, I want to go someplace else. In Europe one year I took a tour of the world's tiniest countries, of which the largest was Luxembourg. San Marino is the smallest. It has, if I am not mistaken, a Communist majority in its government, yet women have had the franchise there only since 1964.”

Reinhart's right leg had got bored at his crossed-ankle position and gone to sleep. The day was when hearing a progression of apparent nonsequiturs he would immediately label the speaker a halfwit or rascal, but he had trudged into an age of nonlinear expression. He once had seen on the
Alp Show
a man pull a concertina to pieces while a girl in a bikini and space helmet bullwhipped a dummy and a greasy, squatting youth plucked at a one-stringed instrument imported from Asia. These persons professed academic connections with the fine-arts department of a major Eastern university.

“In short,” said Sweet, perching his butt on the edge of the desk nearest Reinhart, “nothing makes any sense to me any more but the preservation of life. And if you think this is because I am unusually charitable, you are wrong, though I have placed my fortune at the disposal of this project. I was serious when I said I would freeze the first man at no cost to him. Yet I suspect that underneath it all you still think this is something of a racket.” He thrust his arm at Reinhart. “No, I know you do. And why not? Nobody believes in God any more, but neither is there an ultimate faith in science. I'll tell you about myself. I used to fear Death. Now my feeling is a vicious hatred. I resent the hold it has over people as a fixed idea. But if you look at history you will find no idea has survived: the divine right of kings, the feudal code, slavery. And the earth was flat as a pancake until Columbus proved it otherwise.”

Reinhart grinned. “You have to admit that Death is a hard nut to crack.”

“I wonder,” Sweet said in the tone of a man who does not.

“What I don't know,” Reinhart admitted, “is just how you got into this, Bob. But as I look back on my intellectual history, I find that I relate to theories and ideas on the basis of the man who exemplifies them. Perhaps this is not the best way, but personality, in its widest sense, not charm or fluency alone, is what convinces me in the beginning.”

“It is amazing, then, that you were so eloquent on the phone. Undoubtedly you feel the rightness about this endeavor, and that is important.”

“What I sense, I think,” said Reinhart, “is your basic selfishness. You do not want to die.”

Sweet cocked his head. The definite margins between the grayness of his sideburns and the dark hair of the temples made Reinhart wonder whether he dyed one or the other, whether the brown or the gray was false. With this speculation he compensated for his admission of faith, which had been honest enough, but all men are competitive. Reinhart admired Sweet because the latter had done what he would have liked to do in life. He also hated him for it, in a healthy way.

Sweet said: “I want you to meet our scientific director. Have you got a minute?” He buzzed Eunice and told her to call his car. Then to Reinhart: “Are you serious about breaking up with your wife?”

“Why would I lie about that? It hardly puts me in a favorable light.” Reinhart realized, when he saw Sweet depress the intercom key, that Eunice might have heard. “You seem to be throwing me at her, or vice versa, for some reason.”

Sweet said levelly: “She's a nymphomaniac, Carl.”

Reinhart's scalp crawled from nape to eyebrows. “Jesus, I'm embarrassed by my embarrassment. Mind you, I'm no prude, but I really haven't cheated on Gen all these years.”

He didn't count of course his occasional visits to Gloria since Genevieve had preferred to sleep alone, because that was a business arrangement. Then there had been some friend of Gen's in the little-theater group, once back in '55 or '56, a neurasthenic, serpentine divorcee. A few kisses and fondling of neighbors' wives when drunk at parties and waiting in upstairs halls for the bathroom to empty.

A few other bits and pieces, and some forgotten totally no doubt, the point being that Reinhart had not fallen in love with anybody, something he had done frequently when unmarried, usually, in early youth, with girls of whom he had never gained carnal knowledge. Unlike many persons he never waxed nostalgic about bachelorhood. His lust for teen-agers nowadays was a romantic illusion, mixed with spite.

“You talk like some women's magazine article,” Sweet said derisively. “‘Cheating.' A man has needs.”

“This really embarrasses me, Bob.” Why, in the Army Reinhart had been wont to talk of pussy for hours. But he had been young then, and it did not matter.

Sweet shrugged and went out into the reception room, where Eunice was plucking away at a typewriter, by no means competently. As far as Reinhart could see, she was the only employee at Cryon.

“We're going out to see Streckfuss,” Sweet told her.

“Sure, Bob.” She did not look up, being in the act of striking, with a long pale nail, an elusive key. She got the wrong one, tried again, saying, “Shhhh-ugar.” Reinhart had not heard that in years. He wondered whether girls still said “funny-haha or funny-peculiar?” Her robust thighs were bare under the spindly typing table.

Reinhart was hoping she would not look at him, yet he could not forbear from watching her closely to see if she would. Sweet had probably just been baiting him.

“Come along, Carl,” Sweet said, holding the door open.

Eunice glanced up indifferently at him. “You can pick me up here when you come back.”

Reinhart followed Sweet into the corridor.

While they waited for the elevator, Sweet gave Reinhart an elbow to the ribs. “You're well padded, old fellow.”

“I want to put one thing straight,” Reinhart said in heat and fear. “I intend to return to Genevieve. I'm not going to let any woman throw me out of my own home. But I have to go back as a winner. Am I in, Bob?”

“We'll shake on it,” Sweet said negligently, stepping into the cab, which was still quivering from its abrupt stop. It self-adjusted to Reinhart's excess weight.

“As soon as we're in the car, I'll write out a check,” Reinhart said. He felt good. Yes, he would take Eunice out to dinner and bang her afterwards if that is what she wanted. “Thanks, Bob. I really mean it, and I swear to you that you won't regret your decision.”

Sweet shook hands very quickly. “I can't offer you a piece of the business because we are a nonprofit organization, as you well know. Which would you prefer, a grant of money, which is to say, a lump sum such as we give to scientists for research projects, or a regular salary? Actually, the latter would still be a grant but one paid in installments like regular wages. This is, so far as has been determined, nontaxable. It has not been challenged yet. I think we might manage a grant, say, of fifteen thousand. That would seem reasonable at this time. After all, we are just getting under way. But perhaps before agreeing to any terms you would want to talk to Streckfuss.”

Reinhart was giddy from the altitude of high numbers. Of course, it was little enough to a man like Sweet, so he tried to simulate professionality. “Perhaps I should,” he was saying as the elevator touched bottom. “Who is he?”

“A genius,” Sweet said.

The Bentley waited at the curb directly in front of the Bloor Building, in a no-parking, no-waiting, taxi-stand, bus-stop, fire-zone crosswalk adorned with prohibitory stripes and signs and a traffic policeman who sycophantically saluted Sweet. Allison, the old chauffeur, woke up as the car settled under Reinhart's weight.

“Streckfuss, I take it,” said Reinhart, “is at the scientific end of things.”

“I brought him over a year or so ago, and have given him the facilities he needs.”

“That's a German name, isn't it?”

“Swiss,” Sweet said. “French-speaking, but he can get along in English.”

Reinhart bent his neck in admiration. “You speak French, too. I used to get along in German, but have forgotten it all.”

“I clowned around with Linguaphone records before I went over there, but you pick up a lot when living in a country. There's really no other way to learn a language.”

“You lived in Europe?”

“It was a special type of living, I supposed. I spent some time at Streckfuss' sanatorium.”

“Is that right? Not tuberculosis, as in
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann?”

Sweet snapped his jaw, disposing of the question. No man who worked his way up from pimples to a Bentley did it on books.

“No, not TB,” he said. “Time was my malady. Streckfuss is an authority on rejuvenation.”

So that was Bob's secret. Monkey-gland injections, Ponce de Sweet. Though it had worked—Sweet was certainly dynamic and his visible skin was taut, his trunk was slender, his eyes clear—still there was something degrading in a reluctance to accept ordinary chronology. Sweet managed it no doubt as well as could be, displaying not a hint of second-childishness. Shopworn Reinhart himself was more callow. Perhaps his very disappointment was sophomoric. But he had been at least abstractly invigorated by what he had taken as Sweet's natural maintenance of power. The self-made man now turned out to be partly synthetic.