Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart straightened his shoulders. “Genevieve, the language is not friendly to you. I haven’t a clue to what you are trying to say. The sole reason I am here right now is to investigate a vile story, a vicious canard, allegedly circulated about me by none other than our own son. It exceeds the imagination for utter evil. We seem to have raised a Doctor Goebbels.”

  Genevieve was manifestly so unmoved by what Reinhart thought a telling statement as to suggest she was in the dark. Well then, the situation could be worse, being shared only by Blaine, Maw, and himself. In fact, it was not then serious, but merely a device by which Blaine had bilked Maw of some more money to spend on narcotics and the disintegration of society.

  He smiled. “I may be exaggerating. Hell, he’s still just a kid. At his age I was goofing around Berlin, drinking medical alcohol and chasing fräuleins. Plenty of things from then wouldn’t pass muster.”

  With amazement he accepted a brown-stained mustard pot handed him by Gen, who said, oblivious to his commentary: “The problem is of course what you could provide. You don’t own anything. You don’t earn anything. But if you have some money stashed away I mean to find it.” She took a drink of iced tea and her teeth clicked against the glass. The lemon round was still hooked onto the rim. Reinhart was never guilty of that kind of oversight: yet he was supposed to be the slob. At home she was wont to yawn without covering her mouth, especially when listening to a theory on which he waxed passionate.

  “Genevieve, do you really suppose me the kind of person who would hold out on you?”

  “Don’t get me started on the list,” she said, emptying into the tea two more of the little packets in which Gino’s sugar was dispensed. The table was littered with torn paper and cellophane from the Rye-Krisps. Reinhart hated to eat out of a wastebasket.

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars to tell me one instance,” he cried, carelessly.

  Gen said: “I knew you had secret funds. I always knew it, you bastard, for all your poor-mouthing. Many a time I have worn threadbare clothes so you could sneak over to see that whore.”

  Reinhart’s tongue grew large as a cucumber. He poured coffee on it, but there was no room, and the liquid ran out at both corners of his mouth. He napkinned thoroughly. She was faking, of course. When Reinhart went to see Gloria he took the precautions of an atom spy, circled the block twice to isolate shadowers, knelt in front of the apartment house as if to tie a shoelace, and still half-crabbed, darted inside. If he passed another tenant in her hallway, he kept going as though on official business for the gas and electric company and doubled back.

  So much for that. The moral implications were much more outrageous. He had not begun to visit Gloria until after Gen had got her job, which date also marked the latter’s exclusion of him from her bed. That he had spent on lust what she required for life’s necessities was a vicious lie. He was impeccable on this score.

  “Don’t try to impress me with your filthy talk,” he said. “I’m clean as Sir Galahad.”

  Gen masticated a shrimp. She looked at one of his eyes and said, switching midway to the other: “Gloria, apartment Nine-C, the Stuart Arms, 386 Winddolph Avenue, phone Hardwood 5-8305.”

  Reinhart experienced a strange revelation of his own character. He might have broken down had she got it all wrong, or in any essential part. He could not have withstood a false accusation. Genuine tourist Reinhart, arrested in an Iron Curtain land on a charge of espionage, would need little torture to confess, but Reinhart the secret agent would die mute. He was unmanned not by the triumph of justice but rather by its failure.

  He was now as cool as had been his Spanish omelette on delivery. “You are protesting too much,” he said, quoting a line he had never really understood, but if he didn’t she would hardly, she was really a vulgar, mindless bitch and always had been, he could never share books or ideas with her, he had knocked her up and married her and let himself in for twenty-two years of boredom when it had not been agony.

  “I know you’re from a long line of aristocratic drunks and dead-beats,” he said, “but I’ll tell you this: I think you have bad taste.” Gen regarded her own taste as authoritative, and aspersions on that of another person were her maximum in obloquy. At Nuremberg she would have charged Goering with bad taste, dropping all other counts, and hanged him. So Reinhart now awaited a feocious counterattack.

  It never came. Instead Gen recited a bill of particulars: “Visits on May twenty-seventh, June eighteenth, June twentieth, July third, usually during the middle of the afternoon, though once in early evening.” She turned her fork around and with the end of the shaft pretended to compute the gross expenditure on the bare Masonite between Gino’s paper lunch mats, which were imprinted with a map of the shopping center. “At twenty-five per bang, that’s not a tidy sum.” She was hopeless with colloquial usage. Indeed it was a very tidy sum, and Reinhart himself wondered where he had got the money.

  Of course he always managed, by skillful shopping, taking advantage of today’s specials at supermarkets, buying in bulk, etc., to save a few dollars from the food money Gen gave him each week. But even so, even so. Oh yes, that’s right, he had pawned his grandfather’s gold watch in May, skunk that he was, and spent the proceeds on purchased cooze. Also a silver-backed set of military brushes left him by Dad. Sometimes he was rotten to the core. However, the net from these amounted to seven dollars fifty cents. Maw had tipped him on several occasions and laid fifty dollars on him for his birthday, but the latter postdated the specified events in Gen’s charges, and with Gloria it had been cash on the barrelhead.

  Reinhart shook his finger at her. “You’ve been sold a bill of goods, Genevieve, by some unscrupulous private detective. That’s a racket, didn’t you know? He takes your money and makes up a report out of the whole cloth. I’m surprised you would be so naÏve. You’re scarcely a young girl any more.”

  At last he had stung her. She said: “I’ll outlive you, you bastard.”

  It was then he remembered from whence he had got the bulk of the money spent on Gloria’s professional services: he had stolen it from a secret cache maintained by Genevieve in an old pointy-toed shoe in the rear of the closet floor.

  Happy in that memory, he said: “Of course we could sit here all day and be bitchy, but where would it get us? Or we could act like mature persons who have shared quite a bit of life together, good times and bad. I am certainly willing to admit that I am not perfect.” He was grinning over the theft, from which he had got away scot-free. Apparently she never counted the lode, which represented a holdout of her own from the commonweal: a roll of twenties mainly, filling the shoe like a fat set of toes.

  “What gets me,” said Gen, “is, for all your sneers about my lack of formal education, look at where yours got you. And then I think back a long, long way—you have had half my life—and realize I never respected you, never. Not once, not from the first. Sorry for you is what I have felt from the beginning, and now disgust.” She waved a fork-held lettuce shard at him. “But nobody can say I did not observe my side of the bargain. I’m a lawyer’s daughter. Show me a contract and I will live up to it. That’s my nature.”

  Reinhart loathed the way she ate lettuce and soft-boiled eggs and dangled a shoe at the end of her big toe when she talked on the phone and cleared her throat while perusing the newspaper, nonchalantly ignoring the major stories, and opened a magazine from the rear and riffled through it forwards, stopping at ads, clearing her throat again, and pitching it aside, never putting it merely down, when finished. He especially hated the way she drove a car or it drove her, and her Sunday housecoat, her trimming off with surgical precision the thinnest strip of fat from boiled ham, her application of mayonnaise rather than mustard to cheese, her gnawing of an apple in the style of a man.

  There were many other cavils, and laid end to end the lot added up to a list it was niggardly to draw. Reinhart did not believe the old saw about the little things in marriage. That was the stuff for Maggie and Jiggs jo
kes. It was the big things that had ruined his—insofar as he would admit it had been ruined. Gen had never liked him at all. He preferred that theory to hers about not respecting him. What did respect have to do between husband and wife? He had heard of a college professor who married an ex-whore who turned out to be fabulous as cook, mother, mate. There were many criminals with loyal wives, so loyal indeed that, if the stories were true, they would screw prison guards to further escape schemes.

  If you really liked somebody you would put up with a great deal, and if you loved them you would accept anything, even a situation in which you held nothing in common except home and children and life. Reinhart believed this implicitly though when spelled out it might seem nonsensical, but so did everything else: why for example live at all when you were sure to die?

  “Half my goddam life!” Gen repeated, dropping fork and lettuce onto the plate. “Only my childhood was my own. You got everything else, mister, and you have soiled it all. But do you know what? For all the reasons I have to hate your guts, I still only feel sorry for you. Sorry, for Christ’s sake! How do you like them apples?”

  Reinhart toyed with his omelette and, on the wagon today, drank some water which managed, in a glass full of ice, to taste musty.

  “I’m going to startle you, Gen,” he said at last. “I’m going to admit you are right in many respects. But look here: I have never run off with another woman. And, two, I have never done anything with malice. Let me explain that point—”

  For no reason whatever Genevieve chose that juncture at which to blow up. “Why, you pompous son of a bitch! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m not a prostitute.”

  “You’re no lady, either,” Reinhart retorted, but somewhat quizzically. Gen had never had a sense of discourse as an exchange, but to attack him on his magnanimous admission was either shameful or insane. “Will you listen?” he cried. “I’m not arguing. And why the prostitute reference? You’ve got whores on the brain today—”

  “Actually,” Gen said, calm again, “I shouldn’t make too much of that if I were you. You’ll never break me, don’t you realize that? You never have in all these years of hell.” She took some iced tea in her mouth, and the lemon disk slipped off and fell with a plop. Reinhart picked it up, nasty wet thing, and put it into the ashtray amidst Gen’s three cigarette ends, which stuck to it. Gen swallowed audibly: another trick he had always hated; and her lips quivered in aftertaste. “You’d be surprised how cool I was.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Reinhart, almost without thinking. “You see, I’ve been to bed with you.”

  Gen lighted a new cigarette and filled the air with a great blue exhalation. Then she laughed coarsely. “Naturally I knew about your spyglasses for months. But I never made the connection. I really instinctively think the best of my fellowman. I suppose I am still a child in that way. I actually thought you were using them for birdwatching. You always used to be yapping in your sickening, sentimental way about how the same wrens return every year to that birdhouse in the elm tree which you made in manual-training class in 1937.” She extinguished her cigarette in a mayonnaise-laden lettuce leaf and lighted another.

  Reinhart gathered from the evidence of the long butt that she was genuinely exercised now: usually she smoked them down to the filter, and had never coughed in her life. This flouting of currently fashionable medical lore never failed to impress him. Gen was quite brave or desperate or indifferent, perhaps all three at once, for that everyone is a combination goes without saying. Of course, the first was easy for her because she had no imagination. Genevieve was the starkest realist he had ever known, and surely at the bottom of her contempt for him was his easy recourse to fantasy. In the early days of their marriage he had been wont to say: “I’ll take you to Europe, darling, when we get a buck ahead, and we will picnic on bread, cheese, and wine on the banks of the Seine.” To which she would respond: “But meanwhile the sewer has backed up through the basement drain.”

  Reinhart took some more water onto his palate, warmed it, and identified the subtle ethers of chlorine. So Gen was privy to his Peeping Tom act, but only on circumstantial evidence. Funny she herself had provided him with at least an arguable motive: the wren house could be seen from the bathroom—if you removed the screen, hung yourself halfway out the window, and had the jointed neck of a marionette. But it was not like his wife to be generous in any regard. If she opened the door of the cell, it was to shoot him as he attempted escape. You learn these things in years of cohabitation.

  “Go on,” he said with tented fingers over his nose, a saturnine eye on either side. “Go on, I’m enjoying this.”

  “I am only too familiar with your fascination with the bodies of other people,” Gen said, “which is why I for one cannot undress in your presence. Though married you always made me feel”—she giggled, though not with good feeling—“filthy. Frankly, when I go to the john I always bolt the door and stuff Kleenex in the keyhole. I can’t get over this idea that you are watching, waiting, might bust in on some pretext.”

  It was true that Gen had always been weird about bathrooms: for example, invariably holding it all evening when they were out someplace, even at a private house. Often she insisted on leaving a party early only because she had to get home to take a leak. Winona had picked up a phase of this peculiarity, perhaps: vide her difficulties in movie restrooms. Too bad that inheritance has such an easy job with the uncomfortable traits.

  “The girl,” Gen went on, “is young enough to be your daughter, but then you were a dirty old man at twenty-two.” She violently waved her cigarette. Of course for some time they had been attracting persons at nearby tables. In a moment Reinhart decided he would do something, rout these kibitzers with a direct stare, or laugh encouragement at Genevieve and say: “You’ve certainly got your lines down pat. The play will be a smash.” In years past she had dabbled in the local Little Theater.

  “I couldn’t care less,” she added. “Oh, there were times long ago when I was quite embarrassed to be in the company of a sex fiend, but then I decided to consider the source or else I would go crazy like the Southern lady that Marlon Brando raped in the picture, always seating me in a restaurant so you’d get a good view under the next table that was occupied by any female at all from Campfire Girl to somebody’s grandma and finding excuses to take Blaine to the skating rink when he hated to skate so you could see behinds under those short skirts and I guess even you are aware there was something fishy in me refusing to go to any beach with you.” She dropped her cigarette and let it sizzle. “I knew I could drown while you were watching crotches.”

  What an ugly rhyme. However, Bob Sweet had also accused Reinhart of undue ogling, and he would have had no ulterior motive. Or would he? Perhaps you could never say that of anybody. Whatever, the girl on the other side of the first table to their northeast was wearing panty hose and not the gartered stockings he had first taken them for.

  “That must have been a thrilling sight for her,” said Gen. “But with your enormous belly hanging down, how did you expect her to see it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When I was twelve,” Gen said, “a paperhanger working in our house showed me his business. You know what? I laughed out loud, I really did. I guess you would think I was scarred for life, huh? That’s all you know.”

  He might have known that she, his original enemy, would come up with something far worse than young Blaine could ever manage. Experience tells in these matters, and sex. By a sleight of hand, voyeurism, of which he was guilty, had been transformed into exhibitionism, which he had not practiced since the incident with Emma Wisely at age five. If naked in Genevieve’s presence, taken by surprise, he would at least cup a palm. He was funny that way. But she was right as to effective tactics: this was far worse than Maw’s version. It was pride-making to receive an accusation of potency. A man of his years and girth topping a beautiful sixteen-year-old. Millionaires and movie producers did it as a routine, and measured their for
ce in the envy of lesser breeds. Whereas he could still remember, from decades ago, the scandal in his neighborhood when the director of the Methodist choir allegedly stood stark in a window and flapped his genitals at a passing schoolgirl. Of weaker stuff than the young Genevieve, she screamed like a peacock all the way to the police station and though the charges were later dropped the man was ruined, leaving town with his family. Years hence classmates of Reinhart would still point at the house and say: “That’s where old Sinclair used to show his whang to Bettysue English.” Who, as chance would have it, was for a time Reinhart’s high-school girl friend in a fleshless, jokey arrangement. She was still around town, now older, like Reinhart, than old Sinclair in his moment of truth.

  “Let me get this straight,” Reinhart said. “You are accusing me of exposing myself to the girl next door?”

  Gen made a surly gesture.

  “It so happens, my dear Genevieve, that the bathroom window is four feet above the floor. To show myself there below the midpoint of my chest would require remarkable acrobatics or a stepladder.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me you would cover your tracks,” Gen replied. “But I should warn you that you have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions; anything you say may be used against you in a court of law; you have a right to consult an attorney—”

  “You’d be laughed out of any court in the land,” said Reinhart, giving her tit for tat in pretentious dramatization, though he had not had her histrionic experience. In the Little Theater Gen had distinguished herself in several roles: the Hildy Johnson part in The Front Page, originally written for a man but played by Rosalind Russell in the well-known old movie, now accessible on TV (perhaps the source of Gen’s square-shouldered stride); and one of the major female characterizations in a shortened version of Twelfth Night prepared by the group’s director, a vivacious smalltown swish, this reported by the local weekly as: “Genevieve Raven (Mrs. Carl O. Reinhart) plays the viola.”