“Married, with three children, and she is as saucy as ever,” said Splendor. “In a few weeks we’ll all get together for dinner. I miss real food. The Professor’s chemical potions are not exactly tournedos Rossini. Grace, I think Carlo would like a look-around.”
Reinhart was suddenly desperate. “No, I really don’t have time today. Another time. We’ll have a good time.” He was stuck on the word. Hastily he shook hands with Splendor and then again with Grace, and fled to the door.
“Don’t stay away twenty years again,” Splendor said.
“I won’t,” Reinhart lied, and went out.
The Black Assassins’ car was parked next to his outside, and Captain Storm was just getting out. Night had now settled in, and Reinhart could not be sure of Storm’s expression, with the young man’s back to the street lamp.
“Hi,” Reinhart said.
“Do I know you?”
Reinhart had forgotten his wig and new shape. He identified himself.
Storm said: “That is hardly thrilling information.”
“Look here,” said Reinhart. “You got no quarrel with me. I am merely being civil. Why don’t you come off this shit?”
“Of course you are. Civility is white, and so are you. But I am black, as you can see, or perhaps you cannot: it is after dark. I happen to believe that it is degrading and evil to pretend to be what you are not.”
“Then how do you greet one another?”
“It’s no concern of yours, whatever,” Storm said. “Am I in violation of some city ordinance? Is there a law requiring all citizens to say ‘Hi’ on passing in the night?”
Reinhart stood quietly.
“Is it illegal to walk around with a black face after the darkness has fallen?” Storm went on.
“Aren’t you being childish?”
“I am obsessed by legality,” said Storm. “I never break the law. I won’t even step off the curb, downtown, until the green ‘Walk’ sign is fully lighted. And when I buy a pillow I wouldn’t think of ripping off that cloth tag that says it is against the law to remove it. I never put turpentine in an old whiskey bottle because, as is embossed on the base, it must not be reused on pain of violating the law.”
Reinhart said: “Oh, those things don’t apply—”
“You’re never going to get me on anything,” said Storm. “I am a conformist. I comply, man! I pay cash for everything, and the draft board has the cardiogram, made by a member of the AMA in good standing, on which my heart murmur is registered. I am a lecturer in black studies at the municipal university, and deductions from my salary are duly made according to income-tax and social-security regulations, health plan, insurance, and all of it.”
“OK,” said Reinhart.
“You will look all your life to find a better citizen than I,” said Storm. “And now, unless you can cite authority for obstructing the public sidewalk, I will pass across it and go into a private house on a personal mission.”
“Vaya con Dios,” Reinhart said and stepped aside. He had at last got a clue to Captain Storm, née Raymond Mainwaring, and if he still found it difficult to like him, he saw no reason why he should. He did not dislike him and he did not fear him and he did not pity him. Which should be enough for anybody, especially nowadays.
In those movies about doomed men there is never enough time. Yet by late afternoon of the first day Reinhart had satisfied all his true appetites by encapsulating them in the E-Type Jag, taking them down the highway at a hundred and forty mph, and abandoning the wreck. And by mid-evening had disposed of such obligations as could be said to apply to a man whom nobody wanted, by visiting Splendor and finding him prosperous and, probably, in the process of recovery. If a Negro could, while pretending to be shiftless and perhaps even mentally defective, outwit Claude Humbold and amass a tidy fortune in real estate, he could no doubt whip cancer. With the help of an unlikely Swiss-German-Jew who chopped up goats and froze monkeys, financed by a man whose money was tied up in cocoa beans which were actually gravel.
Reinhart found himself nostalgic for routine realism, a rarity perhaps no longer available anywhere. Nowadays Midwestern Protestants orbited the moon. Negro militants in foreign uniforms lectured at universities. Girls who smoked marijuana and fucked at the drop of a hat were frightened by fast driving. A cautious old man lent his car to a total stranger upon receiving evidence of the latter’s recklessness.
Women were the traditional repository of good sense, representatives of the mundane commonplace: you had to be to carry and deliver new life, and in between bleed every month for years. Thus their universal complaint was constipation, and they were natural masochists. So went the theory. It had to be twisted out of recognition to fit Maw and Gen, neither of whom he intended to check with before entering the freezer.
He could of course go to a bar, take a stool, and leer around at the unattached females, who, if they had not changed since he had given up that practice decades ago, were either professionals or those dreary amateur specimens who drank too much, threw up in the car, and passed out when you got to the destination. They also invariably smelled sweaty. Pros were preferable, drinking unspiked Seven-Up and being obsessive about cleanliness. But Reinhart did not want a piece: he now knew none of the anxiety to dissipate which had been his sole need for seeking sex in recent years. If your pencil will soon be frozen there is little reason to worry about its supply of lead.
He wanted to talk to some stark realist, the implications of whose statements did not apply to him in a personal way. Gloria came to mind. If for twenty-five dollars Gloria would hire out one or a series of her apertures for as long as it took a client to empty himself, surely for a hundred she would converse for an hour.
Reinhart found an outdoor telephone and called her.
Gloria gave her languorous hello.
“Biggie here,” said Reinhart.
“Oh, hi, Big. Did you get over your summer cold?” The little personal detail as usual was wrong.
“Actually, my name is Carlo Reinhart.”
“I don’t want to know it!” Gloria howled and hung up.
Reinhart spent another dime.
“Sorry about that,” he said when she came back on. “It’s just that I’m on a fearless-truth kick. I forgot it would work both ways. Look, Gloria, I want to come over, and, this will blow your mind—”
“Well, that’s a new one,” she said. “I thought I knew them all.”
“What I want to do is just talk a while. Now don’t hang up! You can name your price.”
“I don’t know, Big. I’ve never been much for the freaky stuff. I got another client who might come over in a little while and if he don’t I promised my sister I would baby-sit for her so she and her old man can see Planet of the Apes.”
“How’s a hundred sound, Gloria? For whatever conversation we can get in between the customers who make you work hard for twenty-five bucks a throw?”
“I don’t stand for dirty talk. You know that, Biggie.”
“I promise to honor all your scruples and niceties.”
“You got to leave when he buzzes.”
“Agreed.”
Reaching Gloria’s house, he parked Harper’s car before a fireplug and went upstairs.
Gloria generally walked around in a pink peignor over black lace underwear, but tonight she wore a linen suit rather like Gen’s at the lunch, though Gloria’s was oyster white and sported two brooches, one a frog with protuberant eyes of garnet, the other a cluster of golden grapes.
“C’mon,” she said as soon as Reinhart had stepped in from the hall, and led him into the bedroom.
Gloria turned her lacquered bouffant. She also wore earrings, which he noticed now as she pulled them off. She put her practiced hands at the top of his zipper.
“A quick Frenchy OK?” she asked, running the tab down the track-teeth. “Damn if I want to get dressed again.”
Reinhart pushed away and closed himself. “I wasn’t kidding about wanting to talk.”
She narrowed her burnt-hole eyes. “Biggie, don’t think you can shake me down. I pay plenty for protection. You just get in touch with a certain captain at Ninth Precinct. The last one who tried that was a crooked lawyer, and he never got the sweat off my ass.”
“Blaine Raven, right?” He saw he had hit the mark. Gloria glared fiercely for a moment, and then twin channels of water coursed over her pancake makeup. She fell onto the bed and wept.
“Come on,” he said in rough tenderness.
She wailed: “How much more do they want? My rent is past due, and I got dentist bills in the thousands. My kid is in Girl Scout camp, and that costs money, but I can’t let her go to public swimming pools full of child-molesters, can I?”
“I’m not a detective” said Reinhart.
“Your teeth go bad in the life,” Gloria said, weeping. “It dissolves the enamel. I had to have them all capped, and that cost three thousand dollars.”
“If your daughter is a Scout,” Reinhart said, “I wouldn’t let her go on their trips to the Bloor Tower.”
She patted her eyes with a Kleenex from the handy bedside box, next to which lay a neat rubber circlet of condom. She blew her nose. “You’re telling the truth?”
“I’m no cop, for Christ sake.”
“Why are you wearing a disguise, Biggie?”
“I decided to get with it, wear mod clothes and have fashionable hair. We only live once, you know.”
“You look a little old-fashioned. You know what I go for? Sharkskin suits, Italian cut. Now you’ve got something.”
“Those went out some years ago, I believe,” said Reinhart. “This gear is part of the revolution that has taken place in style, in living. We are no longer chained to the shibboleths of the past, worshiping false idols, tolerating the money-changers in the temple—” He was now doing what he had come for, to talk more or less irresponsibly to someone to whom it would not matter.
“And the sex revolution,” he went on. “We are emerging from the Dark Ages of hypocritical hangups and cynicism. Sex-repression is another of the techniques by which we have maintained the subservience of women, the kids, and the blacks. Now the orgasm is available to everybody, and we are telling it like it is.”
Gloria dabbed her cheeks with the Kleenex, being very careful, but still defacing the outmoded makeup. She was as out of it as, at the other end of the spectrum, Winona. Gloria still wore smeary lipstick and had to blot it off before she went to work, and kept handy a supply of Trojans. Eunice would not have known what a rubber was.
She said: “Yeah, I don’t know what the world is coming to. The filthy paperbooks they sell in drugstores now. The other day I bought me a love story to read and when I brought it home it turned out to be about a young widow who was getting it from a big stud nigger, a dykey practical nurse, and even her pet Dalmation. I tell you it was the most disgusting thing I ever looked at, Big. I tore it into little pieces and flushed it down the john. The Commies are spreading that stuff over the country to break down our spirit.”
Reinhart remembered from bits and pieces of Gloria’s past statements that she was to the right of the late William Howard Taft.
“And the jigs,” she said. “The more they get, the more they want. You know I won’t open the door for anybody but a regular client. You can’t always tell by the voice. Somebody’ll call on the phone and say, Gloria, I’m so-and-so’s friend who gave me your number. Well, I look through the peephole in the door when they knock. And more than once I have seen a great big coon face black as the ace of spades.” She grimaced. “I’m clean, Biggie. I have a thing about dirt and germs, you know? And then if you read the Bible you will find God never intended the races to mix. That would end up with everybody being muddy-looking. Democracy is all well and good in moderation, but some religion never hurt anybody.”
She rose and crouched to look in the triptych mirror of her pink-skirted vanity table.
“Oh, damn!” she said. “My face has to be done all over.” She sat down on the matching stool, the legs of which were also concealed with baby-pink pleats.
Reinhart took a seat on the bed. “How do you feel about legalizing prostitution, Gloria? Isn’t it a rotten thing that a girl can be harassed for practicing an age-old trade for which there is always a need?”
“I’m against it,” said she, scrubbing orange-colored muck into her streaked cheeks. “It represents a breakdown in morality, Big, as I see it. And it’s hard enough to come out even nowadays, what with all the freebies on the streets. Of course that’s what the Commies want. No, Biggie, the old world has turned a long time and while it isn’t perfect by a long shot, you can’t give it back to the animals.”
“You are pretty well satisfied with the status quo, then?”
“I could use a few more hundred-dollar tricks,” she said. “You know, I’m in the life only till my little girl gets through college. Then I’m going to get married and settle down in the country someplace.”
“How old is she now?”
“Eleven. Here.” Gloria took a snapshot from a series stuck into the mirror frame, and handed it back over her shoulder.
Reinhart saw the image of a little blurry-faced girl in a white frock.
“She was seven there. That’s my favorite. She’s a dead ringer for me at that age.”
Reinhart made a favorable response and returned the photo. He took Gloria for about thirty-five. She might very well realize her plan, which seemed a strange one in view of the fact that she would marry only after her daughter grew up. However, that was one way to avoid the mess of family. Maybe whores did have wisdom in certain matters.
“I have heard that a prostitute gets many proposals of marriage,” Reinhart said.
“Biggie, you wouldn’t believe it. Hardly a week goes by.” Though her original layer of lipstick had not been affected by the tears, she was at work with the little gold tube, kissing at her reflection. “I could have my pick, lawyers, professors, well-to-do businessmen, and doctors with every specialty under the sun. That’s who you will have to leave for, any minute: a psychiatrist. You might just pay up so there won’t be any delay.”
But the old guilt that used to make him hasty with his wallet no longer was efficacious. On former visits he put the folded bills into Gloria’s hand before loosening his belt buckle. Often this transfer would have been enough for him, and the subsequent ejaculation was anticlimactic.
“A psychiatrist. Is that right?”
Gloria stood up, modestly tugging at her girdle through the skirt.
“An analyst,” said she. “Mine, to be exact.”
It figured now that, as Eunice had said, Freud was out, Gloria would be in psychoanalysis. Twenty years earlier she would have been a Catholic.
“I always thought of you as the soul of normality,” said Reinhart, “as those things go. You must not have much trouble with sex repression.”
“Nothing to do with sex,” said Gloria with a certain defiance. “It’s money. I got a funny attitude towards money. I lose it. I don’t even spend it. I drop it everyplace. I get up in my sleep and burn ten-dollar bills without waking up. I shred money in the Dispose-All. I send clothes to the cleaner’s full of money, and tuck it into the coffee grounds and eggshells in the garbage and put it in the incinerator. Which reminds me, I think you said a hundred just for talking, isn’t that right, Biggie? That’s what made me suspicious, because time and again in the past you tried to jew me down from twenty-five for turning a trick. You got it, haven’t you, baby?”
She sat down heavily next to him and again groped at his fly. “Lay back, sweetie, and Gloria will make you happy. We got time. You are always quick.”
Reinhart stood up. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I reached a turning point recently—”
“Hell,” she said. “It happens to the best of them, Big. That’s what friends are for. Trust little Gloria. I’ll get you up.”
“No,” Reinhart said. “That all seems superficial no
w. I had a girl of twenty-two who would give me all I wanted. But man does not live by pussy alone, with all respect to your career. I’m making a big change, Gloria, preparing myself for a long journey.”
“Don’t do it, Big. Don’t turn fag. Take my word for it, it’s only worse trouble.” Gloria shook her lacquered head. “They’re always fighting like cats, scratching and clawing, and bitchier than any woman, and when they get old they commit suicide.”
A raucous buzzer sounded.
“Oh Jesus, there he is,” she said in consternation. She ran out through the living room to the entryway intercom. She was answered by an electronic splutter, and pressed the button.
Infected by her nervousness, Reinhart had come along behind. “I’m gone,” he said, pressing a sheaf of one hundred dollars into her hand of many rings.
Its delivery put her in a new mood. “You’re all right, Biggie. I had you all wrong. Listen, sometimes peeping will help your problem, watching somebody else’s troubles. Because they all have them, everybody who comes here.” She grinned in a mixture of generosity and pride he had never seen her show before.
“Biggie, if you want to watch, go over behind that Chinese screen in the corner and slide the picture aside and you’ll be looking through the back of a two-way mirror into the bedroom. I’ll take him right in. When you have seen enough, tiptoe and let yourself out quietlike.” She lightly squeezed his testicles. “For free, on the house, and don’t say Gloria never gave you nothing.”
Why not? He repaired behind the tripartite barrier, which he had noticed the first time he had ever visited Gloria, then fearing it contained her partner in the old badger game, who when he was stripped and defenseless would burst into the bedroom and, claiming to be her husband, demand a payoff.
He now wondered whether on some or all of his engagements it had instead concealed a voyeur, and if so, whether the man had been amused by a performance he had himself invariably found depressing.
With such speculations and sitting on a worn red hassock segmented with white piping, he listened patiently to the routine sounds of arrival, which did not include speech, and when the soft flat footfalls, making a sort of Morse with the sharp reports of Gloria’s high-fashion heels of a decade past, reached the bedroom, he stood up and quietly lifted from its hook the Kodachrome enlargement of Old Faithful in hourly eruption: a bit gross but perhaps inspiriting to the impotent peeper for whom this nook was styled.
Vital Parts Page 40
