Vital Parts (7 page)

Winona rubbed her nose. She said: “Just as you begin to like something, you find it is not what you thought it was.”

Reinhart stretched his left arm along the top of the sofa, “Yes, dear,” said he. “You begin to discover that at your age. And some people never get beyond it.” Meaning himself, for one. But the great thing about having a sympathetic child was that by projecting oneself into him or her one could look at universal difficulties in an equilibrium between intimacy and distance. For example, Winona could be considered as himself as a pudgy female of sixteen. At the same time, she was not he but an independent entity. He did not actually bleed if she were wounded, but of course he would willingly have taken any blows directed at her.

On the other hand he could understand why people might want to abuse her: with very little effort they could elicit an expression of pain, succeeding which they naturally found her presence an unbearable reminder of the meanness they had hoped to discharge and forget about. This kept Winona in a state of imbalance. Those companions who tormented and then escaped from her today would welcome her back tomorrow for another episode of the same.

A human condition to which she no doubt referred in her latest comment on the failure of reality and appearance to jibe. This was no new observation.

“Did your friends give you the slip again?” Reinhart asked gently.

“You guessed it.” However, Winona had by now returned to her usual phlegmatic state, which was the mask of pride. On her own initiative she complained only of seeing her principles mocked in the area of false animation, like movies, or gross materiality, like cheeseburgers and pizza. Until baited she would never mention her living contemporaries.

“You want to talk about it?” asked Reinhart.

She shrugged, which meant that her father felt the shifting of some seventy-five pounds of her upper body.

“It might help,” he said. Or simply recall unpleasantness: one never really knows the soul of another, even one's own offspring. Perhaps in bringing up the subject he was merely joining Winona's persecutors.

She dropped her wet head on his shoulder. “When I came out of the ladies' room they were gone.”

Reinhart threw his own legs out upon the carpet to match Winona's position, and looking at his sockless shoes, he said: “They've done that before, haven't they?”

“They
always
do it.”

She had her tiresome side. Reinhart raised his voice. “Well, hell, Winona, then you should be prepared. Those who can't remember history are condemned to repeat it. Are you the only one who goes to the bathroom after the picture? You better train yourself to hold it.”

She pulled away and said indignantly: “I always get a Coke from the machine on the way in, or a black cherry except that's usually empty I don't know why, because nobody much likes it but me. Beth has Seven-Up and Carol drinks Tab, and sometimes Dodie won't have anything, but generally they all drink as much as I do and really we all go to the ladies' afterward but they take the booths first and I have to wait and—”

“OK,” said Reinhart. Somehow Winona had, in a day when other teen-aged girls had the sophistication of courtesans in the Age of Pericles, got herself into a crowd of creeps with nothing better to do postcinematically than practice toilet one-upmanship. But something good came of this in a selfish way: when he thought of Winona and her crowd he could never remember his lust for teen-agers.

“OK,” he repeated. “You have a problem. The first thing to do is to identify it. Once that is done you can set about solving it. One, you don't have to give up your soft drink. Two, the john must be visited. Three, you don't want to get involved in a vulgar race for a booth, which would be undignified in a young lady.” Also, with her bulk she couldn't run fast; he left that unsaid.

She writhed against his arm. “Ummm. Daddy, this is embarrassing.”

“Not to me, Winona,” he said quickly. “I see it as an exercise in tactics. Remember how you always beat me at checkers?” Because he let her. “You distract me by sacrificing one of your pieces, thus getting me into a position where you can jump three of mine. Now what I suggest is that before the picture is over, you get up and go to the toilet.”

“What's that got to do with checkers?”

“I didn't mean literally. I meant a similar use of the unexpected.”

“And miss part of the picture?” Winona wailed.

“Think of it this way,” said Reinhart. “You're giving up one thing to get a better.”

“You don't know
them
. No matter when it was they would say it was the best part.”

Winona had managed to carry losing to a rarefied height of proficiency that Reinhart himself seldom could attain.

“What does it matter what they say?”

“Then why,” howled Winona, “have them as friends?” She began to weep again, he saw from the southeast corner of his eye, looking down her cheeks which were also still running with sweat.

“A good question, dear. Friends who are not friendly are not worth much.” Reinhart thought bitterly of various inert if not treacherous types for whom he had once entertained affection: few enough, actually, but he was attempting a vicarious projection into his daughter's frame of life. “You are lucky to have discovered that this early. We all die alone, Winona, though we are accompanied when we come into the world. Living is a process of developing independence.”

“Easy for you to say,” Winona said, settling against him like a bag of sand. “You are big and strong and popular and successful.”

There were resplendent joys in having a daughter. At that moment Reinhart shook off the mortal coil: he had spent only half his years, in this era of improved medicine. He could still be anything he wanted, as at twenty. He could even realize Winona's fantastic opinion of him.

But why bother when, for no reason except that he had helped to conceive her, he already wore the crown? Reinhart loved this chubby child who, defying her epoch, refused to mature. He loved her for that, of course, and for her troubles, and for her resemblance to him, and because he had known her all her life, and because she loved him. But several of these same motives, or others of equal substance, also informed his feeling towards Blaine, and Gen too for that matter. He had enough cause to loathe his wife and son, perhaps, but he loved them. The difference was that Winona uniquely refused to confirm his self-hatred.

She deserved to hear him say: “Well, it hasn't always been easy. Daddy has had his knocks like everybody else.” She made some comfortable puppy-sound. “The main thing is not to quit, dear, not to lose your hope. Something wonderful may happen at any time, and you should be ready for it.” His arm was going to sleep at its broken-wing angle. For years he had worshiped the god of benevolent chance, who had repaid him in such bad fortune that the ringing of a telephone was often a knell and he could not bear to open his mail immediately.

But now he cleaned off his ancient faith for presentation to his daughter, as one might take from the attic an old Flexible Flyer sled with which one had once broken his collarbone, apply new varnish, and pass it on to a young heir. Blaine, who had from the age of twelve onwards an invincible sense of self-possession, had never given him an opportunity to do that.

Subtly disengaging his sleeping arm, Reinhart noticed that Winona was also snoozing. So secure did she feel with her old dad. Her best features were a flawless skin that, though perspiring, did not show a pore, and long, fine lashes, now stuck to her moist lower lids by the sandman. “Does he really come and sprinkle your eyes, Daddy?” Not so many years ago she still asked that, and not before her first menses would she tolerate a Christmas Eve at which Reinhart did not steal in in a Santa suit (into which the last few times there had been no room for both his natural gut and a pillow) and laugh Ho-ho-ho while stuffing her capacious stocking.

She awakened, though, as he levered himself up, freeing the couch of two hundred and sixty-five pounds—he had about a hundred on her when it came to weight—and asked, in terrified suspicion: “Where are you going, Poppy?” She had always called him that at bedtime.

No longer could he seriously consider going next door and accosting Blaine and the girl. By making him feel superior, Winona also invariably weakened his moral resolve. Were he what she thought he was, he should have a lackey do his dirty work. Failing that, forget about it. Anyway, by now Blaine had surely emptied himself, impregnating the girl, and would run off scot-free while her father shot Reinhart: in the head, quickly, was his prayer.

“I thought I might have a little snack,” Reinhart said, lumbering towards the kitchen, soon followed by her amble, and the two of them with greedy efficiency transferred many comestibles from the refrigerator to Formica tabletop and proceeded to wade in. Winona polished off a quart of homogenized milk and two and a half peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches while Reinhart cooked for each of them a one-eyed man, an egg fried into a hole in a slice of white bread. He washed his down with two sixteen-ounce cans of beer.

Winona loyally stuck by him while he washed the skillet, going to sleep again at the table, with a milk-moustache. Looking at her sweet, guileless face, Reinhart remembered how in earlier years she would trot to meet him at the door when he came home, and he would pick her up high and swing her around and require at that moment no further justification for life. He wished he could still carry her to bed. As it stood she was burden enough merely to steer down the hall. A large rag-doll buffoon lay on her pillow. “G'night, Poppy,” she murmured as he kissed her forehead. “I love you.”

“Likewise, dear,” said Reinhart. “Now remember to take off your dress and put your pajamas on before hitting the sack.” More than once she had lazily slept all night in her street clothes.

“Promise me,” she muttered, but firmly, “you won't watch TV now.” Another of her peculiarities, a form of paranoia or merely jealousy: she was troubled by the reception of television into a house where she lay sleeping. At breakfast he did not dare talk of postbed-time viewing to Winona, though one of his joys was to watch late-night showings of ancient movies, made in the time when he was young, and then tell the plots to somebody. Winona was the only member of the household who would tolerate the paraphrasing of a screenplay—but not one from a picture transmitted after she was in bed.

So he lied, bade her good night for the fourth or fifth time—they had an old game the winner of which said it last—and repaired straightaway to the den or study or office, originally termed in the prospectus as a “utility or service room,” a walk-in closet somewhere between the kitchen and the furnace room in this cellarless house. Reinhart used it as his business HQ. A scarred filing cabinet held the records of several enterprises that had run into the sand, beginning with the real-estate firm he had taken over when the former owner, Claude Humbold, had emigrated to Encino, California. Claude claimed he couldn't stay in the black if prudish types occupied town hall, his specialty being the elasticization of zoning laws, vending gracious old buildings in prime residential areas to builders who promptly broke them up with a huge iron ball and erected motels, char-broil steak restaurants, and drive-in movies.

While the set warmed up—a tiny six-inch Sony on which he still owed many payments; it sat on Claude's old desk, which had had to be disassembled and re-erected to get it in the room—Reinhart swung back in the swivel chair and perused the schedule. Alas, he had seen the two movies: Joan Crawford, playing a female impersonator married to a softy named Craig, and one of those Hercules films starring a cast of weightlifters who reminded him unpleasantly of his own fiberless lard.

The screen developed a picture of several gnomes sitting on doll furniture. They were less grotesque but more grainy when he leaned over the desk and put his eyes against the glass. One man, seated behind a desk, was conversing with people arranged along a sofa, a young woman bare from the waist down though with her legs crossed so nothing could be seen but haunches, a recognizable actor who played villains, and nearest to the host, an individual in heavy-rimmed glasses and sideburns with a touch of gray: Reinhart's host at lunch, Bob Sweet.

The host said: “Bob, may I call you Bob? We want to hear more of this incredible process of yours after Jody's song.”

Jody rose from the couch and turned out to be wearing a short skirt which now fell just past her groin. She gave a serviceable rendition of a Broadway show tune, which Reinhart listened to intermittently, dying to get on to Sweet.

At last, after three endless commercials, the host resumed.

“Now, Bob, what is this about freezing dead men? Are you putting me on?”

3

“No, Mr. Alp,” said Bob Sweet, “this is no joke. Cryonics is a serious science.”

“Now have I got it right?” asked Alp, joining his brushy eyebrows. “I didn't have time for more than a glance backstage at the notes taken by a member of my staff, and he was probably drunk as usual.” Alp smirked, and the audience guffawed as a single entity.

“Simply,” Sweet said, “it is this: if a body is frozen within a certain time after what is known as clinical death—the cessation of heartbeats and brainwaves—but before any cellular degeneration sets in, it can be maintained in that state of suspended animation interminably.”

The camera pulled back to show the returned Jody's naked thighs. Alp pointed at them and wisecracked: “Even a body like that?”

Sweet said soberly: “Any body.”

Alp's face grew disingenuously bland. “Well, that's your theory anyhoo. Why? Explain it to the folks.”

“Excuse me?”

“To freeze,” said Alp, between puffs of a cigarette, “a human body. The purpose of it. I gather it's not for weirdo kicks but a contribution of a serious nature.”