Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  If one had expected a neatly crafted spyhole, with mitered moldings he would have been dejected at the sordid reality: the opening seemed to have been rammed through with the end of a baseball bat, jagged plaster margins and broken lath within. And the glass on the other side was a bit filmy, far from the crystal-clear scene available to FBI agents in movie and TV stakeouts.

  Still, it sufficed. The client was a tall, comely man, haired in much the fashion of Reinhart’s wig, bronze-tanned, with robust shoulders, yet narrow hips and sleek behind. The fitted shirt swooped into his waistband without a ripple in the telltale region. He balanced on one foot while taking the cordovan loafer off the other, and did not visibly trim to meet the subtle challenges of shifting gravity-centers. Reinhart could never do this even as a slip of a boy.

  When the guy was down to his shorts Reinhart had had quite enough. He had no motive in the world for watching a sexual junction, which, it struck him suddenly, was the most banal of human exchanges, confined as it was necessarily to one ending, no matter what the elaboration in getting there: the meat-and-potatoes truth which had kept him from ever being a pervert.

  He lifted Old Faithful. He had never been to any of Our National Parks. Perhaps a trip to Yellowstone might not be the worst way to fill his remaining time among the quick and warm. Geysers and bears: they had been there before man arrived to lose children and discard paper plates. For every prospect pleases, and only man is vile, and the Bloor Tower guard went on to exemplify the verse.

  The only trouble was that, for good or ill, people were all that interested Reinhart. Vile they might well be, but it happens that vileness is fascinating—to a degree, of course. For example, he said to himself now, you will never find a transvestite bear.

  Gloria’s client was in the process of putting on her brassiere: slack cups but straining backband. Her girdle was a better fit, and when he had got into her linen suit his height modernized, minimized, the skirt a good five inches. The little frog’s garnet eyes winked redly on the jacket.

  Reinhart dropped Old Faithful, but it neither broke nor made much noise on the wall-to-wall. Gloria was in the client’s shirt. Owing to the breadth of his chest her own depth could cope. She did a bad job on the knot of the foulard tie. The olive-green jacket was too long in the sleeves, and of course the trouser cuffs gave her funny big paddlefeet. All in all, he did better by her clothes than she with his. He was a tall, svelte lady of the type who often occupy executive positions in the communications media, while she resembled a stocky United Parcels driver dressed for Parents Night at the public school.

  Never too fine, Gloria’s features were coarsened in the context of this garb, her head a sort of blunt instrument. His lineaments were already softened in contour, and when, with a graceful ballet turn he had gained the vanity table, sunk upon the stool, and applied, with swan-hand, the false eyelashes, Reinhart stared, through the back of the mirror, at the face of Eunice Munsing.

  For a moment Reinhart believed it was indeed she, at some extremity of imposture, a double transsex hoax. But, having been made privy to her body on two occasions—though, true enough, once in the dark and once while Alvis, overhead, was wreaking wholesale mayhem: a cunning arrangement of foam rubber was not out of the question, then or now—his entertainment of the outlandish supposition was short-lived. He was quite a literal fellow, even in a life contemporaneous with which other people had invented the atomic bomb and might even abolish death.

  Gloria shuffled over and embraced her client from behind, her ardent hands on his imaginary breasts. He threw back his head to take her male mouthings, his dangle earrings two little plumb bobs maintaining true perpendicular. He had a mild case of five-o’clock shadow.

  Reinhart quietly replaced Old Faithful, heel-and-toed silently across the living room, and let himself out. Then turned, banged on the door, shouted, “Police!” and projected himself within.

  In the bedroom Gloria had a briar pipe halfway to her lips from the jacket pocket where she had found it.

  She said, with no astonishment: “I finally get a big spender, and he turns out to be a cop. That’s the story of my life. Gloria the born loser.”

  “Gloria,” said Reinhart, “you will oblige me by canning the self-pity. I’m not after you. Sit down and have a quiet pipeful.” He turned to the client, who sat looking bitchy, hand on hip. “Are you Dr. Barker Munsing, with offices in the Bloor Building, and father of a young woman named Eunice?”

  “Officer,” replied the man, incongruously not in falsetto but in a virile baritone, “I could have your badge for this intrusion on a private session of therapy. You must know that patient-doctor relations are sacrosanct, unless the police state has at last come to be instituted.” He crossed his legs, matted hair under the nylon. “But for my part I am aware of the pressures you must be under these days, yourselves as a class upwardly mobile, threatened by the ferment in the inner cities, in the colleges. You find yourself reviled for doing your duty. You’re Irish, are you not? Once yourself a member of a despised minority, you—”

  “Knock off the crap, you weirdo,” Reinhart cried. “Are you or are you not Eunice’s father?”

  “She is a free personality,” Dr. Munsing smugly replied, toying with an earring. “She is the biological issue of her mother and me, but if you seek to establish some oppressive relationship thereby, some owner-chattel implication, an image of me in spurred boots as a totalitarian colossus astride—”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Reinhart. “I’m making an arrest.”

  18

  Gloria began to cry. Munsing shook his head, the earrings swinging. “It is I,” he said, “who could have you jailed. But I am a healer, not an enforcer. You are sick. For God’s sake, man, accept that, admit it, and you will have taken the first giant step.”

  Reinhart grimaced. “Look who’s wearing the woman’s clothes.”

  “Have you seen yourself?” Munsing rose from the stool and gestured at the mirror. “Sit down here, take a good look, and then ask yourself if your costume is appropriate to a man of your age. Is it not rather a disguise, a mask behind which to conceal yourself from a world you find increasingly hostile, increasingly remote, one you never made but which resulted from your failures to eliminate war, poverty, and hatred? You feel guilt, you fear the revenge of the youth who have shaken off the bonds in which you confined them.” Munsing gave him a keen stare of professional sympathy. “But you have no place to hide.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Reinhart. “But we’re not going to talk about me. People have been doing that all my life, and seldom helpfully. … Here you are, dressed like a girl. And Eunice is wandering around someplace, taking drugs and practicing nymphomania.”

  Munsing said sharply, to Gloria: “In the lower left pocket of my jacket you will find a vial of tablets. Give it to me, and fetch a glass of water.” To Reinhart, while she was groping: “A mild sedative.” Back to Gloria: “And if you have an empty paper bag in the kitchen.” Again to Reinhart, Munsing’s head moving as if it were seated at net-end at a tennis match: “You must breathe into it. You are in danger of hyperventilating.”

  When she brought the bag Reinhart blew it up and popped it with his palm. Munsing narrowed his eyes, still in the false lashes, and swallowed two tablets himself. He closed his eyes while he gulped water. Then he shook himself and resumed energetically.

  “God knows what you might do in your present condition. Violence is never the answer.”

  “On the contrary,” said Reinhart. “I can’t think of an instance in recorded history when it hasn’t worked. But I don’t intend to employ it now, if that’s your worry, and I don’t know why it should be anyway, when you are as big as I and in a lot better shape.”

  Munsing took this as flattery. His muscular trunk strained within Gloria’s jacket as he rather sneeringly said: “Thank you. But the paranoid fear of being assaulted in the streets had been inseminated into a naïve populace by those at the top
of the power structure, for obvious reasons. People naturally love one another unless their minds are poisoned. The true purpose of the space program is to abolish the orgasm, to cow the individual into impotence. How can he match the great, roaring, flaming ejaculation of the Saturn rocket?”

  “Which comes out of the wrong end,” said Reinhart.

  “Going to the moon is a classic homosexual fantasy,” Munsing said. “Men without women, in a barren landscape, an anti-paradise where nothing flowers.”

  Going on the errand for water had soothed Gloria. Briar in the corner of her mouth, she said: “Hey, Doc, whaduhyuh think of me inna spacesuit?”

  Munsing poured out at least a half dozen tablets and handed them to her, along with what was left of the water. “Take these at once.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Reinhart confessed, “is what you two were going to do when rudely interrupted. When you got down to the nitty-gritty, what then? Or did you bring along those artificial organs Eunice told me about? I read once that that’s what Jean Harlow’s husband had, a rubber dildo, but it didn’t work and she went out and picked up truckdrivers in all-night cafés to fill her void. Women are receptacles. Nature decided that, and not the military-industrial complex.”

  Munsing peered at him. “Truckdrivers. … Interesting how that example springs to your mind: brawny, coarse, sweating manipulators of mighty engines. As this taste grows it becomes more sophisticated, until finally the astronaut is your love object, clean, hairless, aseptic, he does not drive but is driven through the heavens, leaving women behind at a speed of twenty-five thousand miles per hour, the invert’s dream of glory.”

  Gloria said woozily: “I feel funny.” Her enervate lips let the pipe bounce on the chenille bedspread.

  Reinhart sat down alongside her. He said to Munsing: “I’m going to wait until you have run out of bullshit, and then I’m going to propose a deal.”

  Munsing’s tan face blanched, as if exuding a white powder. He seized the water glass from Gloria’s failing hand and swallowed several more pills.

  He sank onto the vanity stool and said, with no confidence: “Blackmail, is it? I have nothing to hide.”

  Gloria keeled over backwards.

  Reinhart said: “You seem to have done a pretty good job with your dong.”

  Munsing made a desperate try: “Do you have the authority to question my therapeutic techniques? Prostitution is a serious symptom.”

  “I thought it was a thing-in-itself.”

  Munsing groaned in cavernous melancholy. “You are wrong if you think Eunice was ever neglected. No doors were ever closed to her, including those of our bedroom and toilet. She was often present when my wife and I had relations, and never put a question that was not answered or demonstrated. That sex should be discreet and that privacy is a good are fascist lies inculcated in children by generations of fools and/or scoundrels.” He brightened suddenly. “In fact she used to climb in with us. I suppose that shocks you. The capacity to be shocked is a symptom—”

  “Do you know something, Munsing?” Reinhart asked. “If you took wing and flew out the window I wouldn’t bat an eye. I walked right past that sniper on the Bloor Tower and said ‘Hi’ to him, then went downstairs and screwed a girl.” Reinhart never spoke a lady’s name in low places.

  “Lloyd Alvis was a patient of mine,” Munsing said proudly. “In the municipal clinic. You know, we are often criticized for our fees, but it is not generally known how much time we donate to public facilities. He is a disturbed personality. I wrote a paper on him, in fact. I like to think it was instrumental in bringing about the self-regulation of the horror-comic industry.”

  Reinhart considered the implications. “So when you took away his comic books he got himself a gun.”

  “You oversimplify,” Munsing said. “Always the tendency of the layman. It is healthier to possess a real gun of one’s own than to relate to violence passively, symbolically, in fantasy. Alvis has made astonishing progress. When he first came to me, he interpreted my welcoming handshake as an aggressive gesture, fell to all fours, and whined like an obsequious dog. On top of the Bloor Building he at least coped, if in a minimal way.”

  Munsing had regained his rhythm now. He was a quick-change artist in more ways than one. “Gloria,” he continued, “is on an identity-quest. At puberty she was faced with this overwhelming question: ‘My body tells me I am a woman, but my self cannot accept that. What am I really?’ Reality-doubts are rife at adolescence, and then a curious experience she had at age thirteen reinforced the confusion. She was molested by a younger boy, much smaller than she, a lad of ten. Of course this may have been a fantasy. The important thing is that she believes it. It seems they were coasting down a hill on a red wagon and ran into a tree. Pretending to be checking on whether she had been hurt, he pulled her panties down and said: ‘Gee, you’re hurt bad. Your peepee has been knocked off and you are bleeding!’ It was of course her first menses, for which her mother, an ignorant woman, a maniacal puritan in fact, had not prepared her.”

  Reinhart glanced sideways at Gloria. She was out cold. He leaned over and loosened the knot of her tie, opened the top button of Munsing’s shirt.

  Munsing said: “Memories of wagons often appear in childhood reminiscences. It is significant that they are always colored red.”

  “Just as in real life,” said Reinhart.

  “I thought as much,” Munsing said sagely. “Yes, I thought I recognized you as the red-wagon type. Give my receptionist a call in the morning. We’ll fit you in somehow.” He poured out some more tablets. “These will get you through the night. Try to remember your dreams. Keep a notepad at bedside and jot them down as soon as you wake up in the morning.”

  “I haven’t had more than a half dozen bad dreams in forty-four years. The rest have all been simple wish-fulfillment: laying a movie star, inheriting a million dollars, or outgunning the Ringo Kid.”

  “You repress the horrors, then,” said Munsing, in eager arrogance. “We’ll bring them back in no time.” He was thrusting the tablets at Reinhart.

  “No thanks,” Reinhart said. “If I got away once, I don’t need a replay. I am not here to discuss my unconscious, such as it is. When I was young I toyed with the idea of going into psychiatry because it seemed to be a guaranteed way of getting one-up on other human beings without running the danger of being proved wrong. You can’t ever prove anything one way or the other in your racket. For all I know you’re right about Alvis—”

  “Certainly I am,” Munsing said. “Had he not directed his aggression outward he might have committed some self-damage, and his victims, one must not forget, were employees of the Consolidated Electrical Company, a so-called public utility which is in reality a monopolistic tentacle of the Establishment octopus. Alvis may have been misguided in his choice of means, overromantic, impulsive, a bit of a grandstander, but in his own way he is a revolutionary. It all begins in the hearts of individual men, you know, with the question: ‘Do I really want to be no more than a tiny transistor in one big IBM machine?’”

  “I was crapping you before,” said Reinhart, “with the stuff about Eunice. I couldn’t care less what she is or what your responsibility, because if I did, I would have to question my own association with her. Whatever, I suspect she will live out her life without any major disasters. Most people do, even nowadays with the hydrogen bomb, snipers, assassins, mobs, crime in the streets, the everlasting war, etc., because on the other hand the bubonic plague is a distant memory as well as most of the other diseases which used to keep the death rate up. In fact, as you know, the life-expectancy rate is at an all-time high, and the long-range problem is overpopulation. Ecologically—the word is, I think—there aren’t enough wars and lethal maladies. People in the depressed areas of the world keep on fucking madly without contraception and, understandably, do not realize their obligation to compensate by holding their quaint old annual famines. Now there is even a scheme afoot to freeze a corpse at the moment
of clinical death and preserve it for eventual reviving.”

  “Bob Sweet’s Cryon Foundation, you mean?”

  Reinhart had forgotten that Eunice worked for the firm.

  “Bob is a former patient of mine,” Munsing went on. “You should have seen him when I first got hold of him. He was totally impotent for one. He was just like Jean Harlow’s husband.”

  Reinhart was of course interested to hear this, but he was also indignant. “I understood that you were not supposed to talk about your patients.”

  Munsing lifted an arm in Gloria’s linen suit. “Another of the misconceptions regarding psychiatry. What would I otherwise have to talk about over cocktails and din-din? My work is my life. Does not a lawyer, a salesman, a plumber discuss the events of his day? I play golf with a priest and we deride our respective patients and confessees for eighteen holes. You’d go crazy if you didn’t, in our game. It isn’t easy to listen to that garbage day after day. Patients are the dregs of humanity. If I had my way, I’d treat them with a machine gun.”

  Munsing gulped more of the pills that had laid Gloria low but seemed to have no effect on him.

  Reinhart said: “About this deal: I work for Cryon, and we are ready to perform a major experiment. Are you an M.D.?”

  “That’s a laugh,” Munsing said, crossing his legs again and swinging a high-heeled shoe. He had small feet for his height and Gloria conveniently had large ones. “I am barely able to peel the protective paper off a Band-Aid. I could not tell one end of a stethoscope from the other, let alone perform an abortion. But let me put you onto the man Eunice uses, Charlie Wilhelm. He’s in the book: Northdale, I think.”

  “Could you sign a death certificate?”