“No, I won’t,” Eunice cried desperately. “I’m going to kill myself on the last day of my twenty-ninth year.”
“What kind of talk is that? How dare you say that to me, when I am forty-four already, and especially in view of my just having come down from the roof, where as I told you I was thinking seriously of jumping off. Instead I was distracted. So will you be, in your day.”
She struggled from his embrace, saying: “Why? Lots of people knock themselves off all the time. It’s not so hard to do. You don’t have to do anything violent. You can just swallow a handful of pills.”
“That’s the loser’s way,” Reinhart said scornfully.
“But I am a loser!” She pushed him down and began to punch his chest, and not altogether in fun, either: she was a strong girl. “And I don’t want to win, and I don’t want your sympathy, and I’m going to punish you for your arrogance.” She proceeded to act on her statement and Reinhart was the victim of a savage pummeling, which up to a certain point was stimulating, but as her fists worked up towards his face he became apprehensive. He immobilized her with overlapping limbs.
There was a confused mass of hair and squashed features against his face. She said into his cheekbone: “What do you have to complain about?”
So that was it: jealousy. She saw him as a competitor in ill fortune. Perhaps it would help if he specified his.
“My wife is leaving me after twenty-two years of marriage,” he said. “I have never been a raving success at business, and it has been years since we got along well. But is that any excuse? I am a guy with a strong sense of home and family, far stronger in fact than my instinct for a profession. Do you think that makes me effeminate? Maybe. But I don’t have a home now. Do you know how that makes me feel? And the funny thing is that at last, in this association with Bob, I have a successful connection.”
“You wanna bet?” Eunice asked, flushing him with her warm, wet breath. “I regard it as only a matter of time before Bob is indicted.”
“No, Eunice,” Reinhart said. “I am only too familiar with the fashion nowadays of children accusing their parents of weird and exotic crimes.”
“It doesn’t seem funny to you that you haven’t been given any duties?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Reinhart answered smugly. “But I can’t be hurt. I don’t have anything further to lose. That’s one big advantage. I gather that in part anyway this project is a sort of tax dodge, but what isn’t? And Streckfuss really is doing things, freezing monkeys, dissecting goats. I saw him do the latter, and ruined a suit in the bargain.”
“See, that’s why I don’t ever want to be old,” Eunice said. “Cynicism terrifies me.” She shuddered against him.
“That’s a meaningless word,” Reinhart said. “And one of my son’s favorites, as you might expect. Look, life is various and complex. The state of Israel owes its existence to Hitler. Paradoxical, eh?”
“I think you oversimplify.”
“Like all women you have a way of steering away from the subject. My point is, suppose what you imply about Bob is true, and by the way I assume that any successful businessman is something of a crook by a certain rigid definition if not often by a loose one.”
“And you condone this.”
“I? What the hell difference does it make what my position is?” Reinhart asked. “I’m not Secretary of Commerce. I’ve been through all this, Eunice, believe me. Once when I was young, and again with Blaine.” But perhaps never with more unreality than while clasping a naked girl on top of him.
“Do you know something?” Eunice said. “I don’t believe in love. I mean on the personal level. I mean I believe in it among groups and in international relations and that scene, you know, but not between individuals. In fact, I don’t believe in the validity of individuals, which just means exploitation of the weaker by the stronger.”
Reinhart could not resist asking sardonically: “You wouldn’t expect it to be the other way around?”
“Why do you make fun of me?” She whimpered. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Reinhart was both exasperated and gratified. He liked being thought cruel by a great big beautiful girl he had mistreated in no way, but he was puzzled as to his next move, which would undoubtedly be interpreted by her with no reference to his actual motives. Even a girl to whom you were making love was somebody else, and you were other people to her. Absolutely uncorrupted communication was never possible, especially with a woman. They are quite different from us, Reinhart thought. For twenty-two years Genevieve had no idea of what was going through his mind at a given moment. She would rise and switch off the TV in the middle of a program with which he was fascinated. “I saw your pained expression,” she would say knowingly. Or invite for dinner people he despised. “Frankly I can’t stand them, but they are your friends.” He had always assumed this was sheer bitchiness, but now he entertained the suspicion that Gen, too, was doing the best she could.
And Maw, in her day, as well. “I bet you missed my pineapple upside-down cake,” she said after he came home from the Army, and levered out an enormous wedge comprising two disks of quondam fruit now burned thin and black as miniature phonograph records. Whereas he had always uniquely detested that breed of pastry.
He had a terrible thought that all women were doing their best most of the time, and whatever the results could not be faulted as to motive—if you could talk of motives when it came to women; “pretexts” was probably a better term. They do not proceed according to the principles of plane geometry, as one becomes aware when he strolls behind one in the street. A woman cannot walk in a straight line, a peculiarity that becomes crucial when you try to get past her on a crowded sidewalk.
Women had always been Reinhart’s nightmare, not in the homosexual sense of maternal castratress—Maw had certainly never suffocated him with excessive warmth—but despite strenuous efforts he could never understand what they wanted, and accepted the deficiency as his own.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said now. “That’s certainly good enough for me.”
“What is?” Eunice was peering suspiciously into his face at a range of a quarter-inch.
“Your best.”
“Oh.” Her head sank.
Hell, once again he had said the wrong thing. He might have been big with women had he been born mute.
“Don’t you think we should get up?” he asked anyway.
“Why?”
“It’s probably noon by now. What a strange morning I’ve put in. I have made the same reflection on many recent days. I suppose unusual experiences if frequent enough can come to seem routine. For example, we are being very cool about the mad sniper on the roof. People are being shot down, and what do we care?” Reinhart took one hand away from her sacroiliac and snapped his fingers.
It was a mistake. She broke free from his remaining arm and began to beat him up again. And, even though under a rain of blows, he managed to see that a man had entered the room. This person was armed with an Instamatic camera, with a so-called flash-cube that clicked around for every shot until all four sides were exhausted. Reinhart used to have such a Kodak, but forgot it for ten seconds in a superhighway men’s room and it was gone forever.
The man departed with as little warning as he had come.
“Obviously a detective in the employ of my wife,” Reinhart said.
The spasmodic flashes had subdued Eunice. She snuggled up and asked: “What’s she uptight about?”
“I guess there’s no point in getting dressed now,” Reinhart said.
Then another man, small and very fair, came in and spoke in an odd accent. “Where could I find Doctor Streckfuss?”
Eunice raised her head off Reinhart’s chest. “Sorry,” said she, “but we are not permitted to give infomation about our personnel. Company policy.”
The man shrugged and retired.
“Bob told me to say that,” Eunice said. “He is manic about invasions of privacy, wiretaps, and all that shit
.” She arose and swiftly put on her pants.
“Why would anyone be looking for Streckfuss?” Reinhart asked. “That’s suspicious, isn’t it? You don’t suppose he could be a war criminal?”
“I hate war,” Eunice said automatically. Her little skirt was actually culottes.
“The Israelis are still looking for Martin Bormann, I understand.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You don’t have any idea who he is, do you?”
“No.”
“I mean Bormann, not Streckfuss.”
“I don’t know a fucking thing,” said Eunice. “I don’t even know what I did last night. I was on speed, probably.”
Reinhart continued to ride for a few more stations on his train of thought. “If you have seen pictures of Israel, you know that many Jews are blond.”
“I don’t know,” Eunice said, perfoming the necessary contortions to hook up her blouse. “Jews are out, I think. Blacks may not last much longer, either. I am beginning to turn off from the ethnic bag. Do you dig soul food? It’s all fried.”
“Nazi doctors performed all kinds of experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.”
“So did the doctor at the camp I went to as a kid,” said Eunice. “He balled me. He wasn’t a real medical doctor, but a shrink, a psychosexual existentialist with bulging eyes and a funny smell like mustard. I think he was queer for my T-shirt—you know, with Camp Fuckaduck written across the boobs.”
“I can’t get over the idea that Streckfuss looks familiar to me.” Reinhart was tying his shoes.
“He wanted to marry me,” Eunice said. “But an oppressive society would have persecuted us. I was fourteen and he was fifty-eight.”
“Please, Eunice,” said Reinhart. “This is serious.”
She giggled. “You just don’t dig, do you? I have always had this thing for old men. I can’t make it with anybody else. And you’re fat besides! You are too much! I want to marry you and live in a little house in the suburbs and go to church and PTA meetings and make the kids costumes for the Halloween parade.” She was crying now.
Reinhart was still distracted. “All right, all right. But I should have stopped that guy and got his story. I have thought Streckfuss a sinister character ever since I laid eyes on him. The trouble with science is that it’s amoral.”
“That is positively brilliant, and I love you,” said Eunice.
14
After having lain low under an ineffectual barrage by the police, the sniper had released the jammed elevator, descended to the lobby, bought a packet of cheese crackers at the newsstand, and surrendered himself. His name was Lloyd Alvis, and he gave his profession as Protestant ministerial student. The police allowed him to eat his crackers and pose for TV news shots.
The totals would not be in for several days, but 6 persons had positively been killed, with 2 others it was touch-and-go, and although the early report that 16 individuals had been wounded was an approximation owing to the difficulty of taking an accurate count while the firefight was in progress and hinging on whether those lightly flecked with cuts from broken glass should be included in the same tally with those struck by lead slugs in vital organs, not to go into the question of relative states of impairment, the media of public information nevertheless could aver that in terms of casualties this was the second highest toll-taking by a rifleman shooting from the observation tower of an edifice. It was of course the worst disaster in which the Bloor Building, the 47th tallest in the continental USA, had ever figured, the second worst having taken place in 1951 when a pair of middle-aged lovers leaped off hand-in-hand, after the man’s old mother had once again refused him permission to wed.
A psychiatrist from the staff of the local med school assessed Alvis, on the basis of what he had read about him in the earliest dispatches, as a latent homosexual with whipping fantasies, probably impotent, and suffering from penis-inferiority and constipation. “To Alvis the Bloor Building represented a gigantic phallus, of which the observation deck was the glans and the discharge of his rifle an ejaculation.”
Reinhart could remember the day, not long ago, when you could not have got away with using even such medical terminology in a newspaper. For example, twenty years before, when a Marine on furlough had beaten to death a traveling salesman in a downtown hotel room, only knowledgeable ex-servicemen (and practicing deviates) could have grasped from the mealy-mouthed reportage any clue to the motive.
Because he had known none of the victims nor the perpetrator, and because the buildings in Alvis’ sights had not, after all, contained the home office of the Ecumenical Insurance Company, his dad’s old firm, but rather the Consolidated Electrical, Reinhart saw the importance of the incident as consisting in his failure to recognize Alvis as a sniper and take measures to inhibit the man. Thus he coldbloodedly interpreted this public catastrophe in a personal way: he had passed up a chance to become a hero.
He was watching the TV newscast on a color set in the lounge at the Y. From time to time he peeped through an eye-corner at a thin, attenuated person who sat next him on the institutional sofa and gasped at things on the screen. Oddly enough, they were the only two viewers. The other residents apparently had better fish to fry.
At last Reinhart said: “You know, I was up on that roof. I saw that guy. I spoke to him.”
This person wore a thin mesh shirt of canary yellow. He re-crossed his legs the other way and looked towards the tip of Reinhart’s nose. “You must have been benumbed with dread.”
“Actually, I didn’t even recognize what he was doing.”
“I can understand that,” said the individual, who could have been any age across a range of twenty years. “He looks positively harmless.” He whipped his legs around again. “You never know, do you? We live in such a sick society. I was in the movies the other night when a huge, gross man sat down beside me and with no preliminary demanded that I do a filthy thing to him. The film was Dr. Dolittle.”
“I haven’t seen it yet,” said Reinhart.
“What amazes me is the assumption other people have that one exists for their pleasure. An utter stranger.” He put his chin against his chest. “Small wonder that poor things like Alvis run amok. And now they’ll try him for murder and strap that frail, white little body in the electric chair.”
“Of course he’s quite mad,” said Reinhart. “I agree with you there.”
“I abhor violence,” the man moaned. “This incident will make me sick for days. Oh why, why do these things happen?” He had shy young eyes in an old face, and his dun-colored hair was combed down across his forehead at a slant. “I really must go before they show lovely little Oriental boys being barbecued with napalm.”
But he made no move to leave. Instead he extended both soft calfskin loafers and shivered them. “He forcibly took my hand and pressed it between his heaving thighs,” he said. “I threatened to scream for the usher, but you don’t see ushers any more. A movie theater seems to be entirely automatic nowadays, like an elevator.”
He was apparently a nonfaggot sissy. There were such, Reinhart knew, often sires to large families.
“What a rotten experience,” said Reinhart, glad to get his mind off his own problems for a while, though he found it hard to put himself into these shoes.
“It was hideous, I assure you. And my grief served to make him more ardent. Perhaps poor Alvis had to undergo this sort of thing.”
It was interesting to Reinhart that a good many people interpreted the world’s phenomena in a fashion peculiar to themselves.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It might have been pure chance.”
“Which experience?” asked the man. “Mine or Alvis’s?”
“Everybody’s.”
The man looked around the room. No one else was near them. He said: “Let’s go up to my room and have a pillow fight.”
Reinhart shook his head judiciously.
“Strip and sting each other with towels.”
Reinhart
said, very calmly: “You’re the second deviate, though of a different type, that I have met today. Would you mind telling me why?”
“I’m not queer!” the man replied. “I admit to being immature, but what can you expect in this sort of world? Who wants to grow up? I shall continue to look at life like a child, never losing my sense of wonder.”
“Wait a minute,” said Reinhart. “I’m not criticizing you. Please answer my question. Do I look like the sort of fellow who would play snap-the-towel with another man? Or do I look like the type who would want to do whatever you can do with a preadolescent schoolgirl?”
“Does Alvis look like a killer?”
Reinhart paused for a moment, then asked: “You’re not by any chance putting me on? You’re not another disguised cop?”
“I know a state trooper,” said the man, “who is as gay as they come.”
“Why don’t people like you get hold of yourselves?” asked Reinhart. “Aren’t you just being self-indulgent?”
“You spoke to me first,” the man said snippishly, rose, and left the room.
Two of the public telephones in the lobby did not function. On the third Reinhart dialed his former home. Winona answered, of all people. It was strange, suddenly to enter her special frame of reference, stepping out of a fantastic reality into, so to speak, a realistic fantasy.
“Hi, Darry,” said she through a mouthful of something. “Hold on. This pizza is dripping. … Hi!”
“I bet you put it down on some polished surface, dear,” Reinhart said with more nostalgia than reproval. When she came to his attention, he missed her badly.
“There’s an anchovy on the phone!” She giggled and a smashing noise ensued. “There, it’s off. What can I do for you?”
“How are you, darling? Are you being treated well?”
“Oh, sure. Though something puzzles me. Why don’t you eat here any more, Daddy?”
“I don’t sleep there, either, Winona. I don’t live there at all, in fact.”
“Is there some reason for that? You’re not mad at me, are you, Poppy? I thought you had all you wanted of that cake. A great big piece was missing, and I thought you had eaten it. Can you possibly forgive me?” She began to weep.
Vital Parts Page 32
