Vital Parts (54 page)

Munsing said: “Memories of wagons often appear in childhood reminiscences. It is significant that they are always colored red.”

“Just as in real life,” said Reinhart.

“I thought as much,” Munsing said sagely. “Yes, I thought I recognized you as the red-wagon type. Give my receptionist a call in the morning. We'll fit you in somehow.” He poured out some more tablets. “These will get you through the night. Try to remember your dreams. Keep a notepad at bedside and jot them down as soon as you wake up in the morning.”

“I haven't had more than a half dozen bad dreams in forty-four years. The rest have all been simple wish-fulfillment: laying a movie star, inheriting a million dollars, or outgunning the Ringo Kid.”

“You repress the horrors, then,” said Munsing, in eager arrogance. “We'll bring them back in no time.” He was thrusting the tablets at Reinhart.

“No thanks,” Reinhart said. “If I got away once, I don't need a replay. I am not here to discuss my unconscious, such as it is. When I was young I toyed with the idea of going into psychiatry because it seemed to be a guaranteed way of getting one-up on other human beings without running the danger of being proved wrong. You can't ever prove anything one way or the other in your racket. For all I know you're right about Alvis—”

“Certainly I am,” Munsing said. “Had he not directed his aggression outward he might have committed some self-damage, and his victims, one must not forget, were employees of the Consolidated Electrical Company, a so-called public utility which is in reality a monopolistic tentacle of the Establishment octopus. Alvis may have been misguided in his choice of means, overromantic, impulsive, a bit of a grandstander, but in his own way he is a revolutionary. It all begins in the hearts of individual men, you know, with the question: ‘Do I really want to be no more than a tiny transistor in one big IBM machine?'”

“I was crapping you before,” said Reinhart, “with the stuff about Eunice. I couldn't care less what she is or what your responsibility, because if I did, I would have to question my own association with her. Whatever, I suspect she will live out her life without any major disasters. Most people do, even nowadays with the hydrogen bomb, snipers, assassins, mobs, crime in the streets, the everlasting war, etc., because on the other hand the bubonic plague is a distant memory as well as most of the other diseases which used to keep the death rate up. In fact, as you know, the life-expectancy rate is at an all-time high, and the long-range problem is overpopulation. Ecologically—the word is, I think—there aren't enough wars and lethal maladies. People in the depressed areas of the world keep on fucking madly without contraception and, understandably, do not realize their obligation to compensate by holding their quaint old annual famines. Now there is even a scheme afoot to freeze a corpse at the moment of clinical death and preserve it for eventual reviving.”

“Bob Sweet's Cryon Foundation, you mean?”

Reinhart had forgotten that Eunice worked for the firm.

“Bob is a former patient of mine,” Munsing went on. “You should have seen him when I first got hold of him. He was totally impotent for one. He was just like Jean Harlow's husband.”

Reinhart was of course interested to hear this, but he was also indignant. “I understood that you were not supposed to talk about your patients.”

Munsing lifted an arm in Gloria's linen suit. “Another of the misconceptions regarding psychiatry. What would I otherwise have to talk about over cocktails and din-din? My work is my life. Does not a lawyer, a salesman, a plumber discuss the events of his day? I play golf with a priest and we deride our respective patients and confessees for eighteen holes. You'd go crazy if you didn't, in our game. It isn't easy to listen to that garbage day after day. Patients are the dregs of humanity. If I had my way, I'd treat them with a machine gun.”

Munsing gulped more of the pills that had laid Gloria low but seemed to have no effect on him.

Reinhart said: “About this deal: I work for Cryon, and we are ready to perform a major experiment. Are you an M.D.?”

“That's a laugh,” Munsing said, crossing his legs again and swinging a high-heeled shoe. He had small feet for his height and Gloria conveniently had large ones. “I am barely able to peel the protective paper off a Band-Aid. I could not tell one end of a stethoscope from the other, let alone perform an abortion. But let me put you onto the man Eunice uses, Charlie Wilhelm. He's in the book: Northdale, I think.”

“Could you sign a death certificate?”

“Frankly, I don't know,” said Munsing. “I burnt my AMA card at that last convention. Symbolically, that is: what I actually touched a match to was a Charge-a-Plate for Eisenstein's department store. It was celluloid and stunk. But it got me on TV, if you remember.”

“You don't mean, after I've gone through all this, that you're useless to me?” Reinhart asked in disgust.

“I put you onto Wilhelm,” said Munsing self-righteously. “If you are a cop you can go and bust him. I can also put the finger on Chuck Makelovenotwar.” Pronounced as a last name, it sounded rather Hawaiian. “You can call off your toilet stakeouts. He's a patient of mine, a professional football player. You've seen his beefy face on television, endorsing a shave cream. Actually his obsessive-compulsive urge to scribble on the walls above urinals is not homosexually motivated. He hates fags, as it happens. Writes that invitation and if it is accepted, by the subsequent entry of a penciled phone number, he calls the subject, sets up a date, and beats the daylights out of him. He claims to have so persuaded a number of inverts to go straight. No, Chuck's problem is that he wants to compete with me, thinks of himself as a therapist. That is a symptom of—”

“If I were a policeman, I would have arrested myself long ago,” said Reinhart. “Wilhelm, you say, in Northdale?”

“Say I referred you.” Munsing began to hum a tune.

“OK, I'm splitting,” said Reinhart. “Proceed with your treatment.”

“Gloria has made real progress. She now has been brought up to an acceptance of herself as a human being, if of the wrong sex. She will cross over by degrees, little details but each of massive importance: the exchange of her necktie for a string of pearls, say. That alone might take a month.”

“Then I don't have time.”

“You'd be surprised that such simple truths as you and I would never question are precisely what the sick reject.”

In the doorway Reinhart paused to ask: “Such as?”

“Being,” said Munsing. “Existence.” In a strong baritone he began to voice the lyrics of the song he had been humming: “Baby, won't you light my fire? …”

Reinhart had been serious enough when telling Munsing that he was not concerned about Eunice's upbringing or the lack thereof. Look at what he himself had made of Blaine. Having sentenced himself to death—which was the only practical interpretation of what he had done—rising above life, he was gradually jettisoning the ballast of moral judgment. He had been burdened with it, made lead-footed, hunchbacked, his life long.

It would have been typical of his former self to brood on Munsing's daughter, symbol of a social malaise, symptom of the
maladie du temps
, etc., and forget about his own very real, very fat girl named Winona. Eunice after all survived efficiently as long as she kept out of fast cars. She was liberated from what Reinhart believed must be the fundamental fear of women: rape.

Winona was embarrassed by movie love-scenes. Only last year she had reported to Reinhart that a pack of “mad dogs” had chased her from the back yard. He looked out and saw a gang of mongrels howling after a bitch in heat. She might have believed that mammals renewed their race by the wafting of pollen, did he not know that one of those Mr. Penis-Mrs. Vagina courses in sex instruction were incorporated into the high-school curriculum.

Though he had long since cashed in the war bonds he had bought on the Army payroll plan, Reinhart had hung onto his service life insurance. When he got married in 1946 he replaced Maw with Gen as beneficiary.

As an employee of Switched-On Boutiques, Inc., Gen had a full insurance package, and Blaine was heir to its benefits. “If anything happens to me,” she had told Reinhart, “he will take care of you.” Followed by her malignant snort and: “In a pig's ass.”

The point was that Blaine was taken care of, and it would be ludicrous to leave anything to Maw, with her bundle. To approach the situation negatively, this left Winona.

Winona. What would become of her? The trouble with Winona was that she was pitiful. Unfortunately, Winona was a bore. Alas, being tormented by Blaine had been interesting. Even a Jew would sooner pick up
Mein Kampf
than the memoirs of Cal Coolidge, a good man. As a child Winona would smile when playfellows took her toys away. Her plight was serious. To make Winona the beneficiary of his GI insurance would be easy enough. To arrange the payoff required only a licensed physician to certify that the pulse reading of the insured was nil. Ergo, Winona received ten thousand dollars, the widowed Gen could marry immediately, and if Blaine ran afoul of the law he had so far evaded, the judge would take into account the suicide of his father that sent him off the rails.

Nor would it scotch the plans of Sweet & Streckfuss, that firm of organic stockbrokers. If he were willing to call it death, Bob and Hans would be under no pressure to bring him back according to an arbitrary schedule. Could take their time, Bob drumming up new corpses. “Look, he tried it. Why not you? You are dying anyway.” Nobody wanted to be first, strangely enough. The national audience had soon forgotten Sweet's appearance on the
Alp Show
. No more requests for information were coming in. Not even eternal life stuck long on the magic slate of the popular mind.

Winona with ten thousand dollars. A heartwarming thought, unless one went into the details of how she might spend it: a stack of pizzas high as the Bloor Building, spaghetti Westerns every night. Why didn't they make more films like
Born Free?
Winona had seen that five times. She should buy some pet too husky to kill with love. Funny about Winona, she even liked serpents. Had once mothered a garter snake she found in the yard. The constricting snakes made good house pets, he had read, were notoriously placid and sometimes even dimly affectionate. He might do worse than suggest Winona's acquisition of a python. Worn around her neck, it would protect her from the slithering, poison-fanged people who prowled the world.

He was seated at a rosewood writing desk in his suite at the Shade-Milton Hotel. The sheet of stationery that lay before him was covered for its top third with a letterhead extolling the merits of the hotel chain. You would not choose such foolscap for your farewell note.

Reinhart picked up the phone, an instrument of ruthlessly modern design he had seen in one or two movies. It resembled an erected penis.

“Look,” he said, “at a hundred twenty-five a day I should get a piece of clean writing paper without your ad-crap at the top.”

The answer was obsequious, and soon a flunky-buzz was heard at the door, which Reinhart was enjoying the luxury of keeping unlocked, his lifelong fear of burglary now well out of mind.

A bellboy entered, carrying a ream of high-rag bond: so said the box. Reinhart tendered him a piece of currency without looking at the denomination. The lackey's face told him it was exorbitant.

“I suppose you're too young to have heard of ‘Calling Philip Morris,'” Reinhart said. “They used to hire midgets for your job and make them wear pillbox caps. I wonder what became of all the midgets?”

“Yeah,” said the young man, with an insinuating smile. “You wouldn't be lonely, would you?”

“No,” said Reinhart. “I don't want to bugger you or have you get me a call girl, whichever you are offering.”

The bellboy was not offended, as Reinhart knew he would not indeed be. You could figure people pretty well when you stopped competing with them.

Reinhart began to write with his ballpoint pen. “Dear Winona …” He had not written anything in ages, his Army pals having fallen out of communication long ago. Last year Jimmy Marsala's widow had sent him a Merry Xmas card, telling of Jimmy's death at the end of a long illness ten months before. Wild old, good old Jim: you guinea bastard, why didn't you tell me you were sick? I'll look you up in hell and kick your ass. Jimmy had gone from the service into the Mafia. Reinhart kept watching for him to turn up before the Government hearings, but he was probably not that big. “Our eldest daughter Teresa is now a sister,” his wife had scribbled. Only gangsters still had normal families.

Dead Jimmy. There had been a great life in him, and three ineluctable principles: A friend could do no wrong. Anybody not a friend was an enemy. An enemy was to be destroyed.

“Dear Winona …” Reinhart used to be a great letter-writer, especially to girls. Kid them along, that's what they liked, and then swoop in for the kill: “But seriously, sometimes I think I'll die of longing for you.”

An officer in his outfit who censored mail had told him one of his letters, to a girl named Dianne Cooley, was the funniest thing he had ever read: laughed out loud. Reinhart remembered that that one was all-solemn, as it happened. Dianne was considering a reconciliation with her husband, another soldier also on European duty, so this could not take place until after the war. Dianne loved to ruminate on such hypothetical fodder. Reinhart had known Dianne for a year before he left the States. He was in love
with
her without ever having made love
to
her. A familiar situation of his youth, when he repeatedly lost his heart to girls he never knew in the flesh and went to bed with tramps.

“Dear Winona …” Once in composing a note to his father he had suffered a slip of the pen, writing “Dead Dad” for “Dear,” which, in his then naïve orientation, had caused him some agony. Blaine, the playboy of the Western world, had candidly, guiltlessly, returned the favor twenty years later: “Why don't you die?”