Thus both roles remembered now by Reinhart, though there had been others, were transvestite. You could see where Blaine got his implicit encouragement to cross sides in styles of dress—in addition, that is, to the current cultural trend.
He was suddenly amazed to see Gen snap her fingers, precisely as he had done the other day while drunk, at the same waitress, and order another glass of iced tea. Her tumbler was instantly replenished from a clinking pitcher. Far from taking offense, the waitress said: “Sure, honey.” The cunts were in a conspiracy to take over the country. Reinhart sensed his paranoia might be better described as simple misogyny.
“Now,” said Genevieve, pouring more sugar from more little envelopes and making more litter, “it is common knowledge that the kind of man who recourses to whores is basically a homosexual. Added to that, this exposing … I’ve done some thinking lately, Carl, no doubt long overdue … I can remember certain things now. Does the subject of costume parties ring a bell?”
Ten or fifteen years before, they had belonged to a set that went in for that sort of amusement, a horror to Reinhart. When heavy, you are restricted to comic impostures, figures from opera buffo, the singing cowboy’s grotesque sidekick, big fat pirate, obese chef, et al., and once Gen had insisted they go in together (assembling themselves in the bushes outside) as an elephant, of which she was the slender forequarters and mask with dangling trunk, and he the mammoth thorax and rump.
Nonetheless the reminiscence brought back the ghost of happier times, when Blaine was a child. Reinhart seized upon it, perhaps more to distract himself than Genevieve.
“Do you remember?” he asked, “that occasion on which I went as Hermann Goering? And Blainey asked in his piping voice: ‘Who’s Hermann Goering?’” Too late he recalled that neither had Gen known, though she had lived through the appropriate era. She had no general knowledge at all, though she was anything but stupid. He had never divined that cast of her character.
“Frankly, what sticks in my mind,” said Gen, “is the time Randy Hines came dressed like Shirley Temple, and you were fascinated with him.”
Hines, in real life a matter-of-fact sort of guy, something in sales, and a golf bore, had thoroughly depilated his calves for the role. His feet were positively tiny in the Mary Janes, and he showed exquisite legs, at least as far as the knee, where his razor-patience had run out. Hairy locker-room thighs traveled on to the short skirt and ruffled panties revealed when he pirouetted. “Fascinated” was imprecise for Reinhart’s reaction. He marveled at Hines’s bravado in essaying the little tap dance and the falsetto rendition of “The Good Ship Lollypop.” He would not have guessed he had it in him.
“No, Gen, no. That won’t work,” he said now.
“You don’t think I thought you would admit it?” she asked. “It’s a pity, though, you wasted all that time on call girls and exposing yourself, etcetera, when I can see right through you. It also indicates the basic lack of trust on your part of our marriage. If I hate you for anything, it’s that. If in the beginning you would have come to me and made a clean breast of it, we might have had a different story. ‘Genevieve, I prefer men. That’s the way I’m made, I’m afraid. I am willing to get therapy.’”
Gen broke off her imaginary dialogue to light still another cigarette. The amount of rubbish she could create in the course of a simple luncheon was remarkable, and of course that waitress never emptied the ashtray. Reinhart could not stand it any more, and asked the people at the table nearest his right hand if, since they were not using their receptacle, he might borrow it. A business type said OK, it was his funeral, giving Reinhart the bitter thought that while he had given up smoking years ago, he might well contract lung cancer from breathing the air near Gen.
He must ask his doctor about it, as well as the unconscionable length of time it took him to pee nowadays: the old prostate could not last forever. A cholesterol count might also be a good idea. He refused to let Gen’s latest knife penetrate the skin.
‘“Go on,” he urged her. “Tell me more about my passion for Randy Hines.”
“Of course, as we all know,” Gen went on, “psychotherapy doesn’t usually work with homosexuals, but in your case it would at least help you to accept yourself, and not to do ridiculous degrading things to demonstrate the virility you have not got.”
She leaned against the back of her seat. With his mind’s eye Reinhart cut off her hair and saw her father’s face. He was willing to admit that over the years it was he, and not Gen, who had changed. She had really never been anything but his harshest critic, becoming tolerant, though seldom tender, at times when he admitted the justice of her position, which was at best negative and at worst in no feasible relationship with actuality, as now. She had never for example given him psychic support in his business ventures. She—
Gen broke into his thoughts, right on target. “Like your crazy get-rich-quick schemes, your grand-ose dreams that any fool could see were—uh, dreams.”
“Then why didn’t you?” asked Reinhart prosaically, after this verse.
“Don’t kid yourself, I wouldn’t let you suck me in. I would have rather cut out my tongue than cast aspersions on your sacred delusions. You hate women bad enough to begin with, and I never would fall into a position where you could accuse me of castrating you. I always detected your game. You couldn’t blame any of your flops on me. But what I hadn’t counted on was that you would still build up this hatred no matter what I did. Why? Simply because I was the nearest female. How dumb I was. But then you got me when I was a virgin—”
“No matter how violently we have ever quarreled, Genevieve, I have never challenged that goddam lie of yours,” Reinhart cried. Of course their neighbors had heard everything she said, and when Reinhart turned and glared they brazenly grinned into his chops. So he would now take equal time. But halfway through his first sentence, peripheral vision told him they had risen and were leaving the table. Come back here, you rotten bastards!
“I know you have some sort of need to maintain that fiction, and I respected it in the worst moments. But why should I suppress it any more, with the kind of crap you’re trying to pull on me now? Blaine got the idea from you that I will take infinite punishment and never fight back. Well, I cut off his lousy hair. And to you I say: I remember very clearly the first time I had you, in the back seat of my dad’s car, parked in Cherry Wood, to which you in fact had directed me, whereas I thought I was taking you home. And I want to tell you something, Miss Phony Virgin: it was like falling into a well.”
He would not let her ruin his big line this time. He hastily withdrew from the table and repaired to the familiar men’s room, where while he waited for a stall, a nearby booth opened and a whisper issued from it: “Psst, I’m Chuck.” Reinhart nodded and turned away. “Chuck, you know! Make love not war,” persisted the importuner. A urinal was free, and Reinhart took it. He tried to finish as quickly as the man on his right but for various reasons failed. All at once he was quite alone in the room, except for the pervert in the booth, who was hissing again. The thing is, Reinhart reasoned in terror, if I beat him up it will only seem as if I am the kind of latent who mistreats overt ones.
God, this was taking forever. He must go to the doctor tomorrow and have the gland palpated, though it was a miserable experience. “Finger wave” was the Army word for it. There was also some sort of scope they ran up through your tool, in serious cases.
“Keep quiet in there!” he ordered the faggot. “I am armed and will kill you.”
“Goody! How thrilling,” said the fag. “Wouldn’t you like to beat me savagely to begin?”
This was ridiculous. One should never get into a colloquy with a degenerate. But he was finished peeing at last, and then the door opened and in came Gino. Reinhart had never thought he would be glad to see him, but he was.
Looking into Gino’s pockmarks, Reinhart said: “You ought to clean out your restroom, Gino, or the vice squad will be on your neck.”
Upon
that note the booth opened and a plain-faced individual emerged to shove a small leather folder at Reinhart. On one leaf was a badge and on the other, behind clear plastic, an identification card, depicting the bearer and characterizing him as a county detective.
“We’re way ahead of you, pal,” said the dick, and went back to his stakeout inside the booth.
Gino was shaking his head. “You take the cake, my friend, for sheer gall. I don’t care the little lady settled your bill in full. I would still cream you if you wasn’t escorting her tuhday.”
Gen was gone when he returned to the table, and the waitress was smearing a wet gray rag across the Formica. He got out his wallet. The girl shook her head: “She picked it up.”
“Thanks for another wonderful eating experience,” Reinhart wasted his time in saying. For the girl heard it as straight, and said, with the outthrust lower lip of the woman speaking man-to-man: “Give people the best, and they’ll come back.”
In a way Reinhart never expected to see Genevieve again in his life, but of course when he emerged from the front door onto the asphalt, there she was, waiting for him in the car. He reminded himself again as he had so many times throughout the years, that aggression will get you everywhere. He should have begun to insult her the day they were married. But though he knew this was sound practice, Reinhart was a pacifist in the depths of his stomach. There had never been a close correspondence between what he knew and what he felt. It was all very well to say Stand Up for Your Rights! But if you were talking to someone for whom lying down was instinctive, say an oppossum, you had your work cut out for you.
But he squared his shoulders now and strode around to the driver’s door, opened it, and said: “Move over. I’m taking the wheel.”
Oddly enough she complied, and he breathed again. He moved the seat back as far as it would go. Gen looked smaller with all that space between her and the dashboard. He gunned across the blacktop, maneuvering easily among other vehicles, and at the entrance onto the highway played chicken with an oncoming panel truck, crept farther and farther into the lane until it slowed to allow him ingress, the driver waving in angry acquiescence.
“Genevieve,” Reinhart said, “I want to make two points. First, whatever you think, I have always been sympathetic to your plight. I know it hasn’t been enough for you to be just a wife and mother, and it’s useless to bring up the time of one’s grandmaw when people were content to be housewives. You remember that feminist group you belonged to a couple of years back. Well, it may surprise you to know I read your literature thoroughly, and it was far from being altogether idiotic, though perhaps, for polemical purposes, the message was put in an exaggerated form. To get attention today you have to be outlandish.” The car was tooling along.
Reinhart gave her a quick glance. “‘Combination janitor, chauffeur, and whore,’ as I remember, is how they characterized the American wife.”
This organization had been named GIRLS, an acronym in the fashion of the times: Get Into Resistance against Lackeydom Soon, was its strained referent. Like so many movements since the dawn of man, hardly had it designed the letterhead when factionalism reduced it to impotence. That near-Lesbians had been attracted to its banner, along with a host of women extremely unattractive in either person or manner, was to be expected, but the defection of one of its spinster officers into a peculiarly authoritarian marriage, in which her husband often manacled her to the bedposts and, in spurred boots and black cape, whipped her raw, was ruinous. Neighbors called the police, and the newspaper had made great sport with the affair.
“I thought it was great when you took up the theater,” Reinhart went on. “I would not have stood in your way had you wanted to turn professional.”
Actually, at the time, Reinhart had been quite jealous. He had himself shown a dramatic gift when, in high-school speech class, he portrayed an Irish peasant in Spreading the News, by Lady Gregory. However, when he auditioned for the Little Theater’s production of The Man Who Came to Dinner (the part of Banjo, known to be modeled on Harpo Marx), director G. Lloyd Havermill disqualified him, and proceeded to cast Genevieve as the female lead. Reinhart was only human.
“Yet,” he went on now, motoring along the bland highway, “I was sympathetic when you quit the group entirely. As you know, I have never been a joiner, I have preferred to go it on my own. Of course, that’s the tough way because you haven’t got anybody else to blame.”
Gen was taking all this in. She had got something out of her system in the restaurant, so perhaps it had been worth doing. It was therapeutic to vent one’s spleen: all authorities were agreed on that.
“But to any kind of sensitive spirit, the power plays and infighting that go on in groups are insupportable. One begins to wonder whether he hasn’t better things to do.”
What had happened in the Little Theater was routine: a cabal had formed and outmaneuvered the Old Guard, of which Gen was a member. Perhaps because of this experience Gen had joined the Young Turks in GIRLS, only to have that organization collapse through bad publicity.
“If you remember,” Reinhart continued, “you went into a long depression after Blaine was born. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to give life to a new person, but I am sure the strain is remarkable. I know I felt guilty about filling you with it.” A piece of inadvertent arrogance. “I mean, contributing my part.
“But then, if you recall, once Blaine was ready to go to kindergarten you believed you would miss having a baby to look after, so we had Winona.” Whom Gen had never quite liked, from the first. For one thing Winona had been much larger to deliver, after having been heavier to carry, than Blaine. Then for quite a while Winona’s eyes failed to coagulate, as Reinhart thought of it: the irises floating like raw eggs. And she could not tolerate Gen’s milk, and one of her feet was almost covered with a maroon blotch. These proved minor matters in the sequel, eyes OK and the stain had dwindled through the years, but Gen had probably not recovered from the initial shock. Talking of the poor devils who had two-headed babies and Mongoloids, etc., was to no avail. Blaine had been absolutely flawless and had slid out as smoothly as if he had been tenth-born, whereas Gen had labored with Winona for some ghastly length of time.
Some anxious maniac was overtaking them at high speed, weaving in and out of traffic. Probably stinko as well. That kind of prick was never arrested, yet Reinhart was once given a ticket for a broken taillight.
“Now that I think about it,” Reinhart said, “until you got the boutique job you had as many false starts as I did. It is not easy for one to find the proper role in modern civilization. In the old days everyone was assigned a position in life. You were born a serf and stayed one. It is difficult to deal with freedom. You take me, I was interested in so many things when young I couldn’t decide on any.”
The madman’s car had swung in behind Reinhart’s bumper and stayed there. Reinhart didn’t like it; you could never tell when a guy like that would let go again.
“My main purpose in asking you to lunch today got sidetracked by our interesting discussion of other matters. I’ve finally found it. The opportunity I’ve been looking for for years. I ran into an old high-school friend named Robert Sweet. He is a pretty fantastic individual, made a million in business and has now gone into scientific research. I don’t know if you have ever heard of a thing called cryonics, the freezing of human beings immediately after death, but—there is a guy behind us who is blinking a red light.” Reinhart adjusted the rear-vision mirror. “He is some kind of nut. You should have seen how he was driving before, and now this red light. The cops should take a person like that off the highway, but you never see one when you want him.”
Gen now made her first statement since getting into the automobile. She looked out the back window. “That’s an unmarked police car,” she said. “Pull over onto the shoulder.”
Reinhart braked slowly. Probably another broken taillight. Gen never took care of her car.
When the guy got out he was rev
ealed in breeches and puttees, and put on the trooper’s hat he had concealed for his imposture, stinking stunt.
He was a youngish fellow, with a face that could have passed anywhere. Through Reinhart’s window he said: “Why didn’t you stop as soon as I signaled?”
“I didn’t know who you were,” Reinhart answered indignantly.
“Are you aware of the speed limit here?”
“Fifty, isn’t it?”
“You’re certainly right about that,” said the policeman. “I clocked you at fifty-two. That’s two miles over the limit and therefore you were breaking the law.”
“Two miles? Is that serious, officer?”
“My personal interpretation doesn’t count, sir.”
“Isn’t that just the trouble?”
“Sir?” This man had no expression whatever. Reinhart found himself longing for the old-time brute of a traffic cop, sneering and abusing his power.
“With modern times,” Reinhart said. “We are people, not things.”
“May I have your license and registration, sir?”
Reinhart handed his license over, saying: “You don’t agree? You see me as a number on a document, don’t you?”
“Oh, shut your goddam mouth.” For a moment Reinhart was gratified to think he had pierced the officer’s plastic hide, but the speech had been in soprano and came from behind his own back.
“Why,” asked the cop, “won’t you give me your registration?”
“This is not my car.”
“Did you steal it?” the officer asked abstractedly, reading Reinhart’s license.
“Yes!” Reinhart cried, before turning to ask Gen for the document.
“Keep your hands in sight and get out slowly,” said the cop, unbuttoning the flap of his holster.
When Reinhart had performed the first part of the charade, he was directed to spread-eagle himself on the side of the hood.
“This is carrying the joke too far,” he said. “My wife owns this vehicle and she has the registration.”
Vital Parts Page 29
