Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Because he understood instantaneously that he wanted only to look and in secret. He did not want her to know that he knew. And that cast of mind of course was deviate.

  So he froze. He might have died from a sudden heart attack while trying to close the window against a chill draft which had threatened his old bones. But how explain the binoculars still clutched in his rigid hand? Satellite tracking. Practice for viewing a moonshot. … The simple fact was that no excuse would be credible. This truth made him free, and he raised the glasses again.

  He now discerned that nothing was expected of him, he was still in safe hiding, the girl indeed smiled towards him but not at him, seeing nothing but the usual solipsist image of her own youth, vigor, and beauty, mirrored in the blankness of everybody else.

  She pitched her pants offstage, a movement which caused her firm parts to tremble hardly at all. Reinhart’s own trunk had been more tremulous when he tossed his socks aside. In all primary and secondary respects she was full grown, yet not a centimeter, a milligram beyond. She robustly straddled the apex of ripeness. By comparison even the early twenties were already the road to rot.

  Reinhart thought his heart might break, but he felt no desire whatever. There was nothing this girl could have done for him but what she was doing, and of that she could not be told, not only by reason of law, social humiliation, and other ugly, essentially irrelevant possibilities, but because self-consciousness would corrupt this glorious and unreflective bestiality. A young girl who thought she knew something was unbearable. She was at her best in a silent movie, and teenlike she was moving though standing still. Life is short, but Reinhart’s glasses were long enough even to characterize the dimpled navel in her golden belly. It was mauve. A dot of mole marked her left collarbone, which was no doubt usually revealed in her garb for the summertime streets, yet was the sort of thing that Reinhart saw in nudity, for he was no priapic ape with wet lips and pumping hand.

  He did not dwell on the forbidden trio, the funny face of two sore eyes and Vandyke beard so often mocked by lavatory cartoonists. Rather he examined the little shadows of her nostrils, the cupids who grinned in her knees, the extraordinary hips which were at once full and flat, round but self-contained, robust yet in communication of nerve and muscle with even remote extremities, the blunt, dancing fingers, say, which had lately hurled away the wisp of undergarment and now seemed to be talking in the fluency of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet.

  Versatile Time had scarcely moved a second in reality while Reinhart’s inner clock, deranged, had sped on: the panties were still aloft but beyond his frame. She watched them descend on bed or dresser or floor, to her left. Then looked right, at the interior of what he saw outside as the obscure corner of the house with the darker perpendicular of the drainpipe and a black clump of something at the point where it entered the ground. This latter phenomenon stirred now and proved itself, through sinister undulations against the pale siding, as a stalking cat, and was dismissed from consideration.

  The glasses climbed the wall. Another reason for running cold water into the tub was that no steam developed to befog the binoculars: one of the petty but real problems of the Peeping Tom. Sometimes the heat of the July face was enough to do it. Reinhart was a massive sweater, and kept handy a square of what the commercials termed “bathrom tissue” should the lenses need swabbing. He used it now to wipe his under-eyes.

  The figment of his surveillance was moving her plump lips, and teen-agers weren’t much for gum any more. Also her vision seemed more or less directed now, still into the corner, which, he quickly estimated, was large enough to hold a bed. A chum was staying over. They talked of boys, records, clothes, rot. They brazenly undressed in front of one another, having been reared to find nudity no shame. A bare-boob scene was now de rigueur in commercial movies, and Reinhart had caught a flash of pubic hair in some mannered treatment of contemporary London. Worse, bare dongs adorned the Broadway stage, according to the newsweekly to which he trial-subscribed.

  A mild enough manifestation of the change in mores, when a staggering percentage of California high-school girls were pregnant. Yet Reinhart sniffed with a blue nose, by chance smelling the chemical bouquet of the Jonny Mop pads used to clean the johnny bowl. His attitudes had been fixed in another era, a lovely time of hypocrisy when it was a triumph to overwhelm the modesty of which a female was the natural exemplar. For young girls to assume the locker-room insouciance of jockstrap-doffing, crotch-scratching, nail-inspecting athletes would always to him seem heretical.

  He had been made that way by wise elders masked as idiots and/or charlatans, the delightful irony of his own youth having been that one defied the established morality with the sense that he would inevitably grow up to impose it someday on another generation. If there were satisfactions in aging, paramount among them surely was restraining the young who came after. Except for the human beings who perished in childhood, this policy was as fair as life would allow and a gain over the practice of lions, say, who shoved the superannuated away from the kill and the mangy old beast, once Lord of the Jungle, chewed his yellow gums for a while and died.

  Simba Reinhart shook his mane, then spat out in his hand the three-tusked bridge for which he still owed his dentist, another old schoolfellow, who owned two Cadillacs and recently had sacked his old wife for a new one met at a convention in Atlantic City, no doubt by means of a five-spot slipped to the bellboy. Reinhart knew a hooker when he saw one, or thought he did, until last week, in the city, when hustled, while buying a newspaper, by a nondescript woman attached, by a braided-leather leash, to a panting spaniel. “Would you like to come home with me and help me wash my cocker?” she asked. Of course, she could have been merely one of the cranks who, along with able-bodied panhandlers, self-righteous freaks, and winos, were taking over downtown.

  As painful as were the thoughts inspired by the girl’s bare body, when she with a jolly lope suddenly left his frame of vision, Reinhart was at once desolated and had his first intimations of sexual desire, typically anachronistic. He also noticed the dental bridge in his palm, and wondered how it got there. He forced it back into the break in the upper-right fence, and felt an exquisite pressure-pain, as if pumpkin seeds had been hammered through the interstices of his remaining natural teeth.

  The end of the show. He was not one to linger till the scrubwomen slopped in and turned up the gum-encrusted seats. He had seen what he had come in quest of so many times, and knew the strange feeling which accompanies complete achievement of any kind: the loss of a future. The unseen roommate had probably undressed while he sat head in hands reviewing his day. Yet another ten seconds would not hurt. He had no prospects but TV. The light was still on across the way. Perhaps the guest had perched her little rump on the bed-edge to unroll her knee-high stockings, the ghosts of the teenyboppers’ wintertime boots—little Prussian martinets that they were—and lifted roseate haunches to free the weave from roughened heel and hooking toe, and before his count was done, would appear in the frame to rip off the rest of what she wore, skimpy ribbons at bosom and vee, and flex her pelt at him in turn. She might be the other kind, not the stocky, full, fruity species of the neighbor’s daughter, but the tall, attenuated, languid teeny, pubesced but lemon-breasted, boyish-hipped, lean in flank, with long, pointed feet and tawny hair, tendrils of which curled into the hollow of her prominent clavicles. Slim, if you like, but deeper in the side view and with buttocks like twin mandolins.

  Reinhart, who would gulp any wine and swallow any food he could manage to chew, was a connoisseur in these matters. Ten seconds came and went without incident, and true to the vow he left his post. For a moment the crick in his sacroiliac made him walk like a goose. As with most bathroom windows the sill was four feet above the floor; he had had to prop himself on the wrists of the hands holding the binoculars.

  The tub was now three-quarters full of cold water. He turned off the faucet, and with the noise gone, heard the querulous end of a speech from the hall outsi
de.

  “… consideration for others.” He recognized it as his wife’s, and supplied the missing words You haven’t any. That she had been talking for some time he might assume. She was attracted to obscuring conditions of sound.

  He immediately pulled the plug and as the water left the tub—drop by drop, owing to some obstruction in the drain—he shouted back: “One minute!”

  The unjust feature of this situation was that another complete bathroom divided the children’s bedrooms in the northwards projection of the house, a facility that was seldom used even by those for whom it had been provided and never by anyone in an emergency. As a very young child, Reinhart’s daughter, inclined towards car-sickness, excess weeping, and odd phobias, had professed to be upset by certain irregularities in the enamel of that tub, which indeed was a factory “second” supplied at a favorable price by the scab plumber who did the work. “It has pimples that scratch my bottom!” was the anguished assertion of Reinhart’s secondborn. His son of course stated no reasons whatever for the boycott; even as a little blackguard of eight or ten he was motivated by an undifferentiated malignancy towards his dad. To get him to eat a certain food Reinhart had only to pretend a personal dislike for it, else the child would have died of malnutrition.

  At puberty the boy had made a devastating change, taking up Reinhart’s precise tastes and corrupting them subtly. He would watch certain of his father’s television favorites with the sound turned off, if he commanded the set. If eating deep-fried chicken, the lad would peel off and discard the golden crust. He might also borrow a necktie of Reinhart’s and knot it strangely, so that it would never again hang true. At sixteen, when he got his driver’s license, he began to do mysterious damage to the car, some of which the keenest mechanic could not identify and correct: at the least, maddening birdlike squeaks which no tightening or greasing would eradicate; at worst, inexplicable seizures in the differential, abrasions down to metal of new brake bands, and so on. Yet not only did he drive circumspectly when under his father’s surveillance, which was to be expected—Reinhart himself had so performed as a youth, but once away from Dad gunned and braked the guts out of the ’38 Chevvy—but one time when Blaine could not possibly have known he was being watched, Reinhart emerged from a highwayside café to which he had been lifted by an acquaintance, to see his son tool past at a speed less than the limit and slow to a conservative stop at the nearby crossroads.

  No doubt the trouble had begun two weeks after Blaine’s conception when Genevieve on the first day of her missing period insisted that if it was to be a boy he must be named for her father, one of the few unmitigated scoundrels Reinhart had ever known, perhaps the only, surely the worst.

  Reinhart now withdrew from behind the toilet a plumber’s suction cup, the kind that, less the stick, was used in the old days of real musicianship to mute a trumpet—the time of Goodman, Basie, the Dorseys, long before the current long-locked, costumed, electronic-toned androgynes had begun the voyage down the Fallopian tubes—and plunged it into the tub water with an enormous gobble of air fleeing hyperhydration. With four or five thrusts he caused the drain to disgorge, as he suspected, an octopus of hair, the origin of which was obvious. Gen and his daughter were dark. Reinhart’s own gray-blond locks were regularly clipped short at the barbershop. Blaine was very fair, in fact of so light a hue that nature furnished it only to albinos, of which company he was not a member. This pale mess was a hank from his coiffure, which was not only bleached but shoulder-length.

  Very like, indeed, the lovely mane of the houseguest of the girl next door, who as luck would have it was standing in the window, her graceful back to Reinhart, when he picked up the glasses for a valedictory focus before returning the instrument to its bed of laundry. Magically enough, she confirmed his fanciful projection, exceeded it, really, because no imagination is so vivid as the actuality of young flesh: the damask of the supple skin, the pearly summit of her upthrust hip on which rested the upended tulip of her right hand as asymmetrically she stood beneath her shower of gold, slender arm akimbo, innocent of sinew or distension. Quite tall she was and of a glorious grace even in stasis. When she moved, with a subtle rearrangement of her globèd bottom and soft lavender shadows below, bisected by light’s wanton yellow finger, pointing up between the slim thighs, when her hair shimmered, her slender shoulders rose and fell in some transitory teeny mirth, Reinhart discarded all control and exhorted the Devil to make her turn. It was little enough in exchange for a soul, even Reinhart’s, which was something of a retread.

  But the Devil replied, Wait a while, she is so beautiful—Verweile doch, sie ist so schön, in his native tongue—and anyway, hell, like any other public housing facility, had a long and hopeless waiting list; you would probably die before you made it. But Reinhart persisted, offering in support his forty-four years as sinner, and reluctantly an invisible but massive diabolic hand reached up from the cellar of the house next door and turned the girl as if she were a figurine. And transformed her sex as well, so that at 180 degrees she proved to be his son.

  “You have hounded that boy since he was born,” said Genevieve, to whom time had dealt a better hand than to Reinhart, though true enough she was his junior by several years. Short and apparently threatening to turn plump in her early twenties, she had instead acquired several inches of height—which may have been an optical illusion—and lost ten pounds of her youthful weight by the end of the first decade of their marriage. Now, twenty-two anniversaries after the fact, Gen was sharp-featured, spare-figured, and leather-skinned, to put it one way, but handsome, svelte, and flawlessly tanned, to put it the other. Which was to say she had made much the same progress as Reinhart had in the order of familial resemblance; both of them had begun as run-offs of their respective mothers (Reinhart’s being muscular) and moved in middle life to favor their fathers.

  Gen sat in the corner of the couch, in her usual cloud of smoke. Yet semiannual X-rays showed her lungs were clean, whereas Reinhart’s chest often ached though he had given up cigarettes years since.

  From his chair Reinhart said: “Look here, this is not the subject for argument, Genevieve. What I am talking about is law. That girl is underage, and Blaine was twenty-one last February.” A cold bleak day, the yard spotted with clumps of dirty snow, a bucketful of which Reinhart had gathered to chill an eight-dollar bottle of champagne to salute the new manhood, but Blaine did not come home until the next morning, having had his own party with hyena friends who raved on hashish and amplified music, obscenely mutilated an effigy of the President of the United States, then buggered one another till dawn (for all Reinhart knew).

  Until tonight he had never seen a jot of evidence that the boy was not queer. He still found it hard to believe that a girl would accept the sexual attentions of a male whose hair was not only longer than hers but finer, whose body was softer, and whose wardrobe at least as gaudy.

  But the legal question was serious. Reinhart in his time had been a frequent law-bender but never a candid breaker of ordinances however unjust. When he himself had enjoyed the favors of an underaged girl it had been in the context of Occupation Berlin, where codes were as yet unformulated.

  Gen spat smoke at him. “All right, Mr. Cop,” she said through the blue stream. “Get your billyclub and pound the child’s head to a bloody jelly, like the pigs did to the youngsters at Columbia who were appealing for a better life. The human body is a beautiful thing, only we have made it filthy with our stinking hypocrisy.”

  “Genevieve, please don’t widen the scope of this discussion. I don’t want to get enmired in social theories while my son is naked and in the room of the girl next door with her parents away on vacation. She is a minor person.”

  “Well, he isn’t,” said Gen. “Therefore you have no responsibility for him.”

  “Aw, Gen, Gen.”

  “I am sure,” said Genevieve, as always imperfectly crushing the cigarette butt in the ashtray so that it would smolder and stink for some time to com
e, “I am sure there is some reasonable explanation if he is there at all, which frankly I don’t place any credentials in.” She had her own way with idiom. “Blaine told me definitely when he left he was heading for the Heliotrope Thing.”

  This discothèque occupied the disused movie house in which Reinhart had spent every Sunday afternoon as a boy, watching never-resolved serials and main features in which the cowboy did not kiss a girl, did not even, in the earliest years, sing songs. Later Reinhart had owned a piece of this theater, served as manager, helped to close its doors forever.

  “Will you at least then,” he asked his wife now, “go and look? Why should I tell such a vile lie?”

  “Because you hate Blaine,” Genevieve said flatly. “You hate all young people. Youth is hated in this country. Their idols are always shot. No, I will not go and peep through the window like a dirty perver. I am going to bed now, as I have a job to get up and go to every morning, and if I did not, we would be on relief.”

  Gen had developed the stride of a horsewoman or anyway the type used by a bygone generation of film actresses with square shoulders and jodhpured legs, a little black fox-hunting derby atop their heads and married to a man who wore a houndstooth jacket and hairline moustache. Gen’s locks had got darker through the years—though Reinhart had never actually caught her dyeing them—and were pulled back into a flat doughnut at the nape. The tension served to keep her face smooth as a drumskin. She cultivated a timeless look that defied estimates of age and was relative to her companions: often she made the nearby young seem callow and those whose years matched her own, elder. And from Blaine, perhaps partly for her own uses though she doted on him, she had picked up the lie that America persecuted its youth, the country in which a teen-ager’s allowance might well exceed the wages paid a European for laboring all week, not to mention the income of adult Africans and the child prostitutes of Hong Kong.

  However she in no way played fast with the truth when she spoke of her job. Indeed she had one, and without it the Reinharts, at least for the moment, might have been a statistic on the roster of snouts in the public trough. Because of the reversal of roles signified by this state of affairs, Reinhart could not be too harsh with her. Breadwinner Gen deserved to come home to serenity and a hot meal, slippers, and pipe if she wanted them. Until he got going again in business he must speak softly.