Vital Parts (41 page)

“Do me,” she said. “Do me and do me again.”

Reinhart had one whale of a postcoital depression, a despair the profundity of which made further serious deliberation on suicide impossible—because the urge to destroy oneself is entertained practicably only about halfway down the pit; any farther along and there is no will left with which to accomplish it.

Eunice said into his ear: “My generation never knew a time before the Bomb.” She took her head off his shoulder and turned it into the loose bolster against the wall, talking into nubby tweed over foam rubber.

She said: “Most of Bob's money is in numbered accounts in Swiss banks.”

Reinhart gratefully took a purchase on this reality. “You wouldn't know,” he asked, “when I am supposed to get my first paycheck? And shouldn't we get dressed in case somebody walks in? … My wife is getting married to a guy who is fifteen years younger than she, her boss, in fact. The strange thing is that though I am forty-four I have a feeling I have not got started in life.”

Eunice turned back and lightly bit the end of his nose. He noticed that he suddenly found her ingratiating. She was the only female he had ever known, except the daughter of his loins, who did not make him feel inadequate. He pinched her earlobe affectionately.

“Which reminds me,” she said. “I'm going to get that pierced. Is it lunchtime yet? There are some Gypsies in an empty store down on Third Street.” She hurled herself off the couch and walked naked to the window. “Hey, the bulls are shooting back from the roof of Ecumenical.” She put her fingers on her hips and did a bump and grind at them. She turned around, blinding Reinhart with sheer nudity in sunshine.

She said: “Everybody married I know is a freak. You know, that scene, porno-Polaroid shots, ‘strapping young couple, interested in discipline, would like to meet persons of like interests, of both sexes.'”

“I have always believed the incidence of that sort of thing was exaggerated,” said Reinhart. “But then, I have lived a sheltered life for years.” It was not an easy admission. Indeed, had they not recently been joined, Reinhart would not have possessed the courage with which to make it. Confessing to a twenty-two-year-old girl that her life was more exciting than his—he who when young had made a vow he would always live an adventure and never get trapped in the mire of the commonplace.

“I used to belong to a sex club,” Eunice said. “There was a girl there who made it with a chimp.” She sat down on the couch, giving Reinhart a profile of collapsed left breast. “Or tried to, I guess it was. He never got one up.” Her elaborate coiffure was already gone, after twenty-four hours, and the abundant hair now was divided by a straight part and fell simply. She had, in that position, extremely slender arms, almost concave in the biceps, but big, round, polished shoulder-caps.

She said: “You know what? I don't feel anything at the time.”

Reinhart's will wasn't getting any stronger. He knew he should get up and wash, but the moist, vulnerable feeling in his midsection happened to be babyishly in answer to his need of the moment.

Eunice said: “But I do later on. Like vodka. You take a drink of vodka and you don't taste anything. But later on your stomach glows.”

At last Reinhart said: “I guess you're talking about sex. I always thought of it as private. I guess that's a hangup of my generation.” She had him talking that way now. Well, why not if he was laying her? It was the least he could do.

He sat up from the waist, his legs still stretched behind her, and finger-walked along the trough of her spine.

“Why,” she asked her navel, “are you so kind to me?”

“I like you,” Reinhart said sincerely. “There is something awfully nice about you. You are friendly. That may not sound like great praise on the face of it, but the fact is that the world seems hostile to me nowadays. I don't meet many people I like.”

“I know what you mean. Everybody has always hated me. I see people staring at me in the street and saying to themselves: ‘I detest that bitch.'” Eunice wore a queer grin.

“Well, you don't want to get paranoid,” Reinhart said. She had the smoothest back he had ever touched. He could not for example find her shoulder blades. “Probably if you were able to know what they were really thinking it would not be about you at all.” Nevertheless he had also had this feeling many times.

“No, no,” Eunice insisted. “Because they say things. They address me rudely. Some old woman in carpet slippers shuffled past me yesterday, muttering “You stupid cunt.'”

“A crank, undoubtedly. They're everywhere these days. People driven mad by the pressures of life, talking to themselves.”

“Are you just saying that to make me feel good?”

“Certainly not!” he lied. He put his arms around her waist and leaned his old head against her young back. “You got everything going for you. If you think you've got problems now, wait till you're older.”

“No, I won't,” Eunice cried desperately. “I'm going to kill myself on the last day of my twenty-ninth year.”

“What kind of talk is that? How dare you say that to me, when I am forty-four already, and especially in view of my just having come down from the roof, where as I told you I was thinking seriously of jumping off. Instead I was distracted. So will you be, in your day.”

She struggled from his embrace, saying: “Why? Lots of people knock themselves off all the time. It's not so hard to do. You don't have to do anything violent. You can just swallow a handful of pills.”

“That's the loser's way,” Reinhart said scornfully.

“But I
am
a loser!” She pushed him down and began to punch his chest, and not altogether in fun, either: she was a strong girl. “And I don't want to win, and I don't want your sympathy, and I'm going to punish you for your arrogance.” She proceeded to act on her statement and Reinhart was the victim of a savage pummeling, which up to a certain point was stimulating, but as her fists worked up towards his face he became apprehensive. He immobilized her with overlapping limbs.

There was a confused mass of hair and squashed features against his face. She said into his cheekbone: “What do you have to complain about?”

So that was it: jealousy. She saw him as a competitor in ill fortune. Perhaps it would help if he specified his.

“My wife is leaving me after twenty-two years of marriage,” he said. “I have never been a raving success at business, and it has been years since we got along well. But is that any excuse? I am a guy with a strong sense of home and family, far stronger in fact than my instinct for a profession. Do you think that makes me effeminate? Maybe. But I don't have a home now. Do you know how that makes me feel? And the funny thing is that at last, in this association with Bob, I have a successful connection.”

“You wanna bet?” Eunice asked, flushing him with her warm, wet breath. “I regard it as only a matter of time before Bob is indicted.”

“No, Eunice,” Reinhart said. “I am only too familiar with the fashion nowadays of children accusing their parents of weird and exotic crimes.”

“It doesn't seem funny to you that you haven't been given any duties?”

“I've thought about it,” Reinhart answered smugly. “But I can't be hurt. I don't have anything further to lose. That's one big advantage. I gather that in part anyway this project is a sort of tax dodge, but what isn't? And Streckfuss really is doing things, freezing monkeys, dissecting goats. I saw him do the latter, and ruined a suit in the bargain.”

“See, that's why I don't ever want to be old,” Eunice said. “Cynicism terrifies me.” She shuddered against him.

“That's a meaningless word,” Reinhart said. “And one of my son's favorites, as you might expect. Look, life is various and complex. The state of Israel owes its existence to Hitler. Paradoxical, eh?”

“I think you oversimplify.”

“Like all women you have a way of steering away from the subject. My point is, suppose what you imply about Bob is true, and by the way I assume that any successful businessman is something of a crook by a certain rigid definition if not often by a loose one.”

“And you condone this.”

“I? What the hell difference does it make what
my
position is?” Reinhart asked. “I'm not Secretary of Commerce. I've been through all this, Eunice, believe me. Once when I was young, and again with Blaine.” But perhaps never with more unreality than while clasping a naked girl on top of him.

“Do you know something?” Eunice said. “I don't believe in love. I mean on the personal level. I mean I believe in it among groups and in international relations and that scene, you know, but not between individuals. In fact, I don't believe in the validity of individuals, which just means exploitation of the weaker by the stronger.”

Reinhart could not resist asking sardonically: “You wouldn't expect it to be the other way around?”

“Why do you make fun of me?” She whimpered. “I'm doing the best I can.”

Reinhart was both exasperated and gratified. He liked being thought cruel by a great big beautiful girl he had mistreated in no way, but he was puzzled as to his next move, which would undoubtedly be interpreted by her with no reference to his actual motives. Even a girl to whom you were making love was
somebody else
, and you were
other people
to her. Absolutely uncorrupted communication was never possible, especially with a woman. They are quite different from us, Reinhart thought. For twenty-two years Genevieve had no idea of what was going through his mind at a given moment. She would rise and switch off the TV in the middle of a program with which he was fascinated. “I saw your pained expression,” she would say knowingly. Or invite for dinner people he despised. “Frankly I can't stand them, but they are your friends.” He had always assumed this was sheer bitchiness, but now he entertained the suspicion that Gen, too, was doing the best she could.

And Maw, in her day, as well. “I bet you missed my pineapple upside-down cake,” she said after he came home from the Army, and levered out an enormous wedge comprising two disks of quondam fruit now burned thin and black as miniature phonograph records. Whereas he had always uniquely detested that breed of pastry.

He had a terrible thought that all women were doing their best most of the time, and whatever the results could not be faulted as to motive—if you could talk of motives when it came to women; “pretexts” was probably a better term. They do not proceed according to the principles of plane geometry, as one becomes aware when he strolls behind one in the street. A woman cannot walk in a straight line, a peculiarity that becomes crucial when you try to get past her on a crowded sidewalk.

Women had always been Reinhart's nightmare, not in the homosexual sense of maternal castratress—Maw had certainly never suffocated him with excessive warmth—but despite strenuous efforts he could never understand what they wanted, and accepted the deficiency as his own.

“Well, I'll tell you,” he said now. “That's certainly good enough for me.”

“What is?” Eunice was peering suspiciously into his face at a range of a quarter-inch.

“Your best.”

“Oh.” Her head sank.

Hell, once again he had said the wrong thing. He might have been big with women had he been born mute.

“Don't you think we should get up?” he asked anyway.

“Why?”

“It's probably noon by now. What a strange morning I've put in. I have made the same reflection on many recent days. I suppose unusual experiences if frequent enough can come to seem routine. For example, we are being very cool about the mad sniper on the roof. People are being shot down, and what do we care?” Reinhart took one hand away from her sacroiliac and snapped his fingers.

It was a mistake. She broke free from his remaining arm and began to beat him up again. And, even though under a rain of blows, he managed to see that a man had entered the room. This person was armed with an Instamatic camera, with a so-called flash-cube that clicked around for every shot until all four sides were exhausted. Reinhart used to have such a Kodak, but forgot it for ten seconds in a superhighway men's room and it was gone forever.

The man departed with as little warning as he had come.

“Obviously a detective in the employ of my wife,” Reinhart said.

The spasmodic flashes had subdued Eunice. She snuggled up and asked: “What's she uptight about?”

“I guess there's no point in getting dressed now,” Reinhart said.

Then another man, small and very fair, came in and spoke in an odd accent. “Where could I find Doctor Streckfuss?”

Eunice raised her head off Reinhart's chest. “Sorry,” said she, “but we are not permitted to give infomation about our personnel. Company policy.”

The man shrugged and retired.

“Bob told me to say that,” Eunice said. “He is manic about invasions of privacy, wiretaps, and all that shit.” She arose and swiftly put on her pants.

“Why would anyone be looking for Streckfuss?” Reinhart asked. “That's suspicious, isn't it? You don't suppose he could be a war criminal?”

“I hate war,” Eunice said automatically. Her little skirt was actually culottes.

“The Israelis are still looking for Martin Bormann, I understand.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You don't have any idea who he is, do you?”

“No.”

“I mean Bormann, not Streckfuss.”

“I don't know a fucking thing,” said Eunice. “I don't even know what I did last night. I was on speed, probably.”

Reinhart continued to ride for a few more stations on his train of thought. “If you have seen pictures of Israel, you know that many Jews are blond.”

“I don't know,” Eunice said, perfoming the necessary contortions to hook up her blouse. “Jews are out, I think. Blacks may not last much longer, either. I am beginning to turn off from the ethnic bag. Do you dig soul food? It's all fried.”