They were now in one of those secondary business districts, halfway into downtown, of closed shops which yet kept their signs alight.
“Take the next right,” Reinhart said. “I’m staying at the YMCA.”
He did not mind her knowing that now; not with what he knew about her. He would dine alone in the Y cafeteria, if still open, or catch a hamburger special at a nearby greasy spoon attended by a garrulous counterman. Why Sweet and his daughter abused each other psychopathically was none of his affair. He intended to stick to business from now on.
He saw a drunken derelict, the emaciated, Christ-bearded, skull-eyed sort whose stride was a rhythmic fall inhibited at the last possible moment by the quick thrust of a toe, from which he then proceeded to plunge again, ad infinitum. Now there was a man they could freeze for the price of a pint of muscatel. He wondered whether Sweet had thought of that. Or maniacs, in institutions, whose responsible kin would release them legally, in compassion or convenience. Persons on the point of suicide. How could you reach them? Set up a phone number to call, like the Alcoholics Anonymous hot line.
Eunice took a sharp left, into a narrow alleyway. Her underlip was still outthrust. Behind the thick façade of buildings the passage entered a rectangular parking lot full of cars, some in motion, some at rest, and more of the former than the latter.
She stopped the automobile in an arbitrary situation and abandoned it briskly as if it were about to burst into flame. Reinhart followed suit, stamping his feet to restore lubrication to his joints, which stiffened up on long rides like those of a much older individual. The familiar stifling heat came up from the lot to strike his face, like the handle of a rake on whose tines you have stepped. Illumination was provided by many bare bulbs surrounding and also intermingling with the painted letters on a sign over a flight of concrete steps descending to a subterranean doorway. THE GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM said the sign and the doorway was modeled in an uncomfortably evocative form, the jamb rounded, the door itself consisting of two leaves meeting in a center cleft and radiating painted stress or pursing lines of a compressed sphincter. Unless one was physician, deviate, or contortionist he rarely saw a rectum, yet knew how it looked even in a giant representation constructed of alien materials.
Having entered, they were in a colonic passage lined with rippling pink plastic. Reinhart paid seven-fifty in entrance fees to a barbarously coiffed girl behind a grilled window let into this wall. There was nothing hokey or stylish about the way they collected money or the iron bars. A large noncommittal fellow, wearing a judo outfit, pressed a little rubber stamp onto the backs of their left hands. Reinhart saw a vague, fleeting impression fading into the fat on his, but no ink.
“You didn’t get me,” he said, but the man amiably ignored him.
Eunice said: “It’s ultraviolet,” and placed her hand beneath a bullet-lamp jutting from the wall. The date appeared magically on her flesh in greenish-yellow glow.
“What’s he, the bouncer?” Reinhart whispered as they proceeded.
“Yes,” she answered. “I just hate this place, but it happens to be where it’s at.”
“What?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. Suddenly they were among many heads of hair, most of them below Reinhart’s chin so that he seemed to be wading neck-deep in a streamful of swimming beaver. Luckily Eunice was tall enough to be seen. Reinhart was afraid to enjoy his frottage with small round bodies on pain of identifying them as boys’. The one currently under his nose smelled like pizza. He could not tell whether it particularly was coming or going, or the crowd in general, for that matter. But the pressure was soft and undemanding, and though some sounds were strident he could identify no malignancy.
He made way with his hands, feeling such surfaces as leather, real and fake, and sheepskin. He saw few faces and no eyes. And what he took as heads might have been sometimes beards and moustaches or even feathers, pelts.
At last he reached the end of the Large Intestine and the entrance to a large, amorphous room where Eunice stood gazing at the crowd which filled it in intermittent flashes of light alternating with a more startling blackout that wiped everyone from view.
He said to Eunice, who was there and gone by turns—it was queer to address a person under such conditions—“You have pulled a fast one. I’m no discothèque swinger.”
“Neither am I,” she said fervently. “I go around in a dream since the assassinations. This country’s going to explode, and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it. If you go peepee, buy me a joint, willya?”
“Huh?”
“There is always somebody selling sticks of pot in the men’s toilet,” she explained, her white face disappearing in mid-sentence.
“That would make a swell impression on Bob,” said Reinhart. “Take his daughter out and feed her marijuana. Come on, Eunice.” He laughed hopefully. “This is a big act of yours; isn’t it? I’ve seen you at the desk. You’re a sensible working girl. This is all clothes and talk. I could match it with now-forgotten stunts of my own era: drinking at college dances, driving the old man’s car sixty miles an hour while standing outside on the running board—they had a hand throttle then that you could pull out and leave there, a pretty murderous practice, you’d reach in through the window and steer. There were guys who would get crazy drunk and play Russian roulette with three chambers filled.”
“We can’t even get a decent gun-control law,” Eunice wailed.
“I suppose a registered gun can’t kill anybody,” Reinhart asked ironically. What a pointless discussion. He should leave her there and return to his monastic bed at the Y.
“I’m hungry suddenly,” she said.
“Can you eat here?”
“Not here, in the Cecum. The restaurant part is called the Stomach.”
“Cute,” said Reinhart because he thought he should.
“I hate it,” said Eunice. “I detest cleverness in words, I would love a restaurant called Restaurant. I used to have a puppy and called him Dog.”
Yet you don’t say Daddy, Reinhart was about to point out, but she was in motion again. He called out: “Don’t go too fast or I’ll lose you in the periods of darkness, which seem to be getting longer.”
Still no music. What were these people doing? She took his hand. Then colored lights began to stream from the ceiling and flow down the walls, accompanied by an electronic drone. The floor, where Reinhart could see it, looked metallic. The human-tissuelike walls began to undulate. A dais made itself slowly known with back-lighting. On it were four lumpy silhouettes, one of which developed four limbs in a spotlight and screamed, in a spray of spittle: “Suck my nose! Eat my snot! Lick my armpits, and I will tell you, I will tell you, oh babeh will I tell you, love ain’t what, love ain’t what you thought, it ain’t what you thought when you puked your scum and burned our hearts, it ain’t what—”
Reinhart poked his nose into Eunice’s ear—neither was her hair precisely fragrant: what became of the dab of perfume at the temples which had been traditional among womankind?—and said: “I can see why they don’t serve meals in here.”
“Don’t mind that,” she shouted back. “Those lyrics refer to pot and LSD and napalm, and not what they actually say.”
“Why?” he cried. “Why don’t they just say it then?”
“Because they’re cop-outs, that’s why,” screamed Eunice. “The Chancres have a big recording contract. They are Establishment now. Fuck them. Let’s go and feed.”
Reinhart’s assumption proved incorrect: the Chancres’ ranting was piped into the Stomach, regardless of its references, which continued to be nauseating, but after a time only by formal definition. The rhythm, the persistent drum-thud and electrical moan soon anesthetized the lyrics and they sleepwalked through the infinite repetitions. The Stomach was a more standard roomful of booths and tables and lighted now and again with bare bulbs mounted on a wall of fake brick. There were also candles placed on reversed coffee cups, a cunning idea, though it would have m
ade better sense, Reinhart believed, to put them in the bowl of the cups to catch more wax.
Eunice had led him through a queue of passive persons to an empty booth. She had inherited Bob’s authoritative manner in public. Another fellow wearing a Japanese fighting suit appeared and said pleasantly to Reinhart: “You can’t have this. People have waited in line.”
Eunice said to him, with calm ferocity: “Eat me, man.”
He walked away, rubbing his chin with the exaggerated knobbed knuckles of his right fist. He was only about five feet six or seven and slightly built. They must rely on the psychological effect of their gear, thought Reinhart. Bouncers used to be his own size or larger and with fearsome countenances. But karate got publicity everywhere these days because of its exotic cries and spectacles. Reinhart had watched a midget break a brick with his fingers on TV, emitting a hiss of low density. “But isn’t it essentially aggressive?” asked the MC, with socially concerned eyebrows. “Certainly not,” said the dwarf. “If I can do it, a woman can do it.”
There was everywhere a tendency to ask irrelevant questions, matched by a determination to answer different ones equally ungermane. Reinhart studied the menu. Things were getting back to normal. There were catsup blobs and a shred of meat stuck to the card, and printed on it were the designations of seven kinds of solid steak as well as chopped, sliced, cubed, shredded, and pounded versions of the same, in addition to the specialty of the house: Stomach Steak.
A fifteen-year-old girl stood at Reinhart’s elbow, naked from the waist down. He was scared to look directly at her.
Eunice ordered: “Stomach Steak sandwich on white, French fries, large Coke.”
Now Reinhart looked at the waitress and saw she was at least thirty-five years old but small and with long black hair. She wore a black turtleneck sweater, armless, and a bikini bottom. She had flat breasts, slender hips, and pouches under her eyes.
She said: “And you, baby?”
“Join me in a drink?” Reinhart asked Eunice.
“We don’t sell hard stuff,” said the waitress. “Don’t put me on.”
Eunice added that her steak must be very well done, and Reinhart played a game of asking for rare gastronomic creations like Swiss on rye, scrambled eggs, vegetable soup, and so on, until the waitress was fed up and took her leave. “OK,” he shouted at her twitching little bottom, “chopped steak.”
“You do a pretty fair put-on yourself,” Eunice noted with a certain admiration.
“Necessity,” he admitted candidly. One thing could be said for Eunice: she elicited from him no falsity in the service of pride. “Between my teeth and my stomach there’s not much I can eat with impunity. … So you’re Bob’s daughter,” he found himself saying in defiance. “I can’t get over that.”
“I wish I could.” Eunice squeezed the plastic container of mustard, shaped like a tube of house-caulking, stercoraceously encrusted at the nozzle. The one for catsup was a big red replica of a tomato, smeared with maroon. Reinhart flicked away some spilled sugar and put his forearms down. He hadn’t got rid of it all and felt a sandy grating.
“I guess your complaint is that he doesn’t understand you,” he said. “Same old story. Nothing new today except that everybody’s more vocal. I wonder if that’s a gain? I’m pretty tired of propaganda from any side. I wonder if life really should not be hopeless as a condition of normalcy.” He wondered if that was really what he meant.
“Bob got custody of me. My mother lives in Hungary. She ran away with a defector during the Cold War—actually, by the old definition, a traitor. He was a rocket engineer.” Eunice looked bored. “Bob is a fascist. He is connected with the military-industrial complex. The CIA subsidizes the Cryon Foundation.”
“I thought they pulled out of that sort of thing.”
“Well, they would subsidize it if they were still doing it. Hey, I forgot to order potato chips.”
“No, you didn’t,” Reinhart said. “Oh no, that was French fries.”
“I want them both.”
How infantile she was.
She screamed and pounded on the table, and in fear he said: “OK, OK.”
She asked: “Do you think I’m putting you on?”
Reinhart had a burst of inspiration. “Only when you cry,” he said.
She was staring into his eyes. “I dig you,” she said.
This embarrassed him, of course. What he actually wanted was not to be here at all, to twist a magic ring and wake up somewhere else. Reinhart took no position on the question of Shakespeare’s identity, but he did hold with the theory that fatso Hamlet spoke literally in wishing his too solid flesh would resolve itself into a dew.
Eunice still stared admiringly or perhaps merely nearsightedly at him. She apparently expected something. He turned his head away and pawed the ground in a shit-kicking maneuver. And then it was he saw his son.
Blaine was moving amid a unisex group settling into a booth across the room. The light was poor but Reinhart would know him anywhere now with that plucked head. With the naked neck he resembled a baby vulture. Reinhart blew out his and Eunice’s candle. “Fire upsets me,” he said. “With its mindless consumption. Out, I say, out, brief candle.”
“You’re out of sight,” Eunice said with unwitting sense. The young-bodied waitress with the old face swooped in and slid their dishes to them: two Stomach Steak sandwiches on dead-white, gummy-textured bread. French fries. Two large Cokes. Eunice squeezed a flood of catsup over every available surface. Reinhart salted down his meat and, taking a bite, identified it as more or less uniform cartilage. Eunice was chomping away, her eyes crossing with every bite.
Reinhart stole a look at Blaine from behind the decorative flange that made the booth round-shouldered. As bad luck would have it, his son sat on the outside of the party and persons had suddenly ceased to walk between them. Fate had arranged a clear field of vision. Blaine might glance across at any moment. The nearest wall bulbs were close enough to illuminate Reinhart but too far away to extinguish unobtrusively. Reinhart was within his rights to be here and with a female friend. Blaine’s mother after all had thrown him out of the house. Yet no father likes a son to catch him with a strange woman. Something deeper in this than loyalty to wife and mother, bearing emotional similarity perhaps to one’s distaste to be seen in the nude by his offspring. When Blaine was ten or twelve years younger he used to burst in on Reinhart in the bathtub and grin inscrutably.
The other reason Reinhart had for now wishing to avoid him was more generous: this was Blaine’s kind of place and his father did not wish to infringe upon his privacy in it. In truth he did not want to know Blaine out of the house. They were not the kind of people who, had they not been related, would have been friends. This had been true in all of Reinhart’s familial arrangements since birth.
When Reinhart next saw Eunice’s plate only a smear of red marked where her food had been.
She followed his eyes and said: “That’s the way I am. I might not eat again for twenty-four hours.” Swallowed the rest of her Coke in a rush of chipped ice.
Reinhart pushed his plate away. “Turns out I am off my feed,” he said. “Let’s get the check and blow.”
Growing more self-congratulatory than ever, she shook all of her hair and stared arrogantly around the room. At least the type of woman who was overfond of her own vivacity had not vanished.
If Reinhart had correctly sized up that little waitress he would never see her again without a heroic search. By nature he was suited for the kind of restaurant depicted in the old drawing-room comedies he admired, the obsequiously attendant maître d’hôtel in the dinner jacket, et al., but had lived his life in hashhouses with indifferent if not insolent help. Even now with Sweet’s fifty clams in the kitty and backed up by Maw’s five grand on deposit. He could have dined at L’Etable de Cochons, where local debutantes were always being feted. Well, next time.
Thinking which he realized that all in all, and in a weird way, he was enjoying the com
pany of Eunice. Bob had no doubt trusted him to keep her out of trouble, while the nympho talk was designed to maintain his interest. Sooner or later Reinhart found that sense still reigned, back of puzzling façades. People were basically the same as ever. They just said more today.
Eunice cried: “Hey, I see somebody I know.” She slid from the booth and started across towards Blaine, of course, and Reinhart’s fat was in the fire.
So came he to hide in the toilet, having got there in a wounded animal progress which however seemed to attract no attention from the crowd of young persons oblivious to all but their own costumes. But two of those karate-clad attendants were inside the men’s room, and he abruptly straightened up.
“It was the roundhouse kick,” one was saying. “Perfect focus. Then a shuto to the neck, quick turn and—”
“Did they allow contact?” asked the other.
“Not to the face, but none of the lower belts had any control and were slaughtering one another.”
“How’d the trophies look?”
“Cheap. It was a crappy tournament. But the demonstrations were good. You know Hojiwara?”
“The sensei at the Midtown Y?”
“He blocked arrows shot at him. Then broke five boards with a nukite. That shook up Kim, you know, the Korean who has his own dojo? He was sitting there sneering. He can break eight boards with a shuto or empi or five with his head, but when Hojiwara went through them with his fingertips Kim like to shit.”
Reinhart, standing at a stall, loosened his belt with the other hand. He had either got fatter, while eating virtually nothing all day, or was bloated with emptiness. It had been years since he was able to see his member in that stance. He still thought of the Japs as enemies in the late war. Funny how their hand-to-hand techniques were now popular. The old movies always showed a little treacherous slant-eyed judo man being eventually defeated by the honest one-two of the brawny American boxer with the Irish face.
Vital Parts Page 18
