Vital Parts (12 page)

He stepped into a telephone booth. The bell rang ten times at the other end before a sleepy but cigarette-harsh contralto answered.

Reinhart said nervously: “Hi, Gloria. This is your old pal Biggie.” Hookers preferred that a customer did not use his right name. Theirs was a stern code comprising many such details, hence Reinhart's unease. Nothing was more unsettling than to be taken to task by a harlot for a failure of protocol. For example, Gloria was not to be phoned before high noon on weekdays and four
P.M
. on the sabbath, and never at all on national holidays.

She made a kind of
mmmpppfff
sound. “Jesus, I was dreaming. What time is it? What year is it?”

“Thursday. Have I called at an inconvenient time?”

“Happy Thursday,” she said. “Who'd you say you were?”

“Biggie, you know.” It had been convenient to take the name off his bathrobe.

“Oh yeah. I haven't seen you for a while. Have I?”

Surely it was an honest question. A tart with a keen memory would probably go mad. As it happened, Gloria was right this time, but she always asked the same question, once even when, having missed an initialed tie clasp, he phoned her ten minutes after leaving. He later discovered he had not worn it that day. This incident was from the era when he believed whores, because their work was illegal, were perforce criminals who would swipe your possessions. He was to learn that Gloria, the soul of honesty who kept a lost-and-found bureau drawer full of forgotten watches, articles of clothing—odd socks!—and assorted male jewelry, much of which she would have been within her right to dispose of, after thirty days, by auction, like a public checkroom, Gloria was frequently cheated by her customers and always by the cops. Clients sometimes paid her in queer money or bills folded in a trick way so as to seem double in value, ransacked her purse when she went to wash, had made off with a gold bracelet, a silver religious medal, many an earring, and underwear thefts were routine. Cops threatened to arrest her unless she provided a freebie, and occasionally did so anyway after zipping up their flies.

“I was thinking of coming over,” said Reinhart. “If you are not engaged.”

“If it's noon I'm already late for the hairdresser,” Gloria said in her normal tone now, which was one of happy expectation. She was wont even to complain in that voice, which Reinhart had learned to identify as a feature of her professional role, like her now old-fashioned bouffant which the beauty shop would reinforce. It felt like a helmet. Her body felt like an inflated dummy. Copulating with her lacked the intimacy of one's own hand. Making the appointment was the sexy thing, being invariably suspenseful. Perhaps Gloria understood that. Once you cornered her she would do anything for a fee, but until then she would be more coy than any virgin.

Reinhart's need for bought sex being always a rare flower that died within an hour or two after bloom, he was often frustrated by Gloria's shenanigans. Screw your pedicure, your cat's shots, your drycleaner's pickup, your mother's (!) visit, he would think, though never aloud. Must I make a date with you as if for the junior prom? But he would, he usually had to. You could not buy Gloria on the moment. But Reinhart often could not perform in a sequel utterly lacking in romance. Worse, Gloria was extremely sensitive to any failure of what she regarded as her art. If it went unrequited, she grew more vigorous. Masochists, he supposed, must have found her competent, but her energy to him was but spadework that buried his desire ever deeper. “Play hard to get, will you, Biggie?” “Maybe I'm turning queer.” But enough of this bantering exchange, gutter-rolling in shame, and he might indeed finally acquire the adequacy of sheer humiliation, which like any other profound feeling has its curious strength. Carlo Reinhart, bare, supine, and in the bed of a common drab: Sir, you are an unmitigated scoundrel, a total cad. Signed, your Amour-Propre.

“Gloria, we're old friends, are we not?”

“You know it, Big. I think about yours a lot.”

She aspirated dramatically, as she did, on some sort of schedule, during the act. Before he had got used to this bit of stage business Reinhart had believed, in alarm, that she suffered from a respiratory disorder, TB, say, against which there was no practical contraceptive. “Ooo, baby …” her voice soaked into the wire.

“Look, what I was wondering was—well, I'm stuck and can't get to the bank before closing time. Would you take a check?”

He swore he could smell the cheekful of cigarette smoke she belched at the mouthpiece, but it was surely some stale leaving of the last booth-user. Gloria said: “Would that be wise, Biggie? Your name is probably printed on your checks, right? I wouldn't want that responsibility, doll.”

“Oh, I trust you.”

“It isn't
me
, Big. It's if I get busted and they print your name in the paper. It's when the canceled check comes through and your old lady sees the endorsement.”

Pretty farfetched. He divined that Gloria's real objection was much more serious. She wanted no document that confirmed his existence as a person. She dealt solely in human parts, never whole entities. She sold her snatch but not her soul, and she wanted no communion with his. It was, if you thought about it, the only means by which a whore could manage. Freud in his day could not bear the eyes of patients; hence began the practice of recumbent sufferer, analyst sitting behind, listening calmly to accounts that exceeded even Gloria's adventures, being noncommercial. Any fool knew the consequences of love were far worse than those of money. Which in fact was why Reinhart had for some time found it less troublesome to drain himself into Gloria than to claim his legal rights from Genevieve.

“In view of your inconvenience,” he said, “I could of course be more generous.”

“What is your usual present?” sweetly asked Gloria, who was euphemistic about all phases of her operation. Plain-talking Blaine would have believed her a mealy-mouthed Nice Nelly.

Reinhart cleared the lump in his throat. “Twenty-five,” he said, and all by himself he colored. In the code of his young manhood anybody who paid was a sorry specimen. He remembered that whenever it came to figures. What punks believe is ever confounded by experience, which in time turns brave men into cowards, satyrs into eunuchs, sons into fathers, and even transforms Juliet into her withered, blathering Nurse.

“What were you thinking of upping it to, Big?”

“Well, say another ten.” She grunted speculatively, and Reinhart bared his breast. “The only detail is, Gloria, if you would accept a predated check. I mean, hang onto it a few days and then march right down to the bank and get cold cash, good as gold …”

She murmured: “Biggie, Biggie, Big—” and suddenly changed into the dial tone.

What could you expect from a rotten hooker?

WHO RAN
, the sampler said,

TO HELP ME WHEN I FELL
,

AND WOULD SOME PRETTY STORY TELL
,

OR KISS THE PLACE TO MAKE IT WELL?

MY MOTHER
.

Oddly enough, Maw, like Gen, had gotten more sinewy over the years. In her case this was especially strange considering the high-carbohydrate diet on which she subsisted. His gift box of candy was already half gone to empty brown-paper cups, of which he was personally responsible for only three or four. He and she, in matching chairs of Swedish modern, flanked a legged square of teak which held the candy box as well as a plastic rose in a green glass vase, and an ashtray holding a morsel of discarded chewing gum rolled into a perfect gray pea. The sampler was not embroidered old-style but rather simulated on or in Lucite and hung on a peach-colored wall above an orange sofa upon a blue rug. The sun illuminated all of this, as well as the putting green just outside the glass doors and the bent bald heads or baseball caps thereupon. In the other direction one could see spry oldsters swatting Ping-Pong balls across nets in the rec room.

This was the West Lounge of Senior City, a colony for the superannuated but modern as a motel. Maw lived there and swore by it.

In fact, at the moment she was repeating her favorite notion that had Dad survived to accompany her, he would not now be underground.

“No, siree,” she said. “The man would not have expired. Grass cut by the help, and if your drains clog the house plumber comes with his suction cup. Maintenance drove your dad up the wall. I saw the light when he was gone. Gave our junk to the Goodwill and sold the old homestead to one of Them. Imagine our old home full of howling Africans.”

“I don't know,” Reinhart said. “I haven't been by there in ages.”

“Well, don't you go,” said Maw, “unless you want to be picking banjo strings out of your head.” To her, Negroes were still song-and-dance men, yet strangely malignant on that score alone. Reinhart would not seek to set her straight at this time when his purpose was to shake her down for some money. He was interested to reflect that while vis-à-vis Blaine he as it were wore a swastika, when with Maw he tended to fly the hammer-and-sickle. Yet Maw and Blaine were on good terms.

“How's my grandson?” Maw asked, biting into a caramel, right through the cellophane.

“That's in part what I wanted to talk to you about,” Reinhart said dolefully.

A spry old chap wearing a flowered shirt and chartreuse trousers doffed his sporty straw at them as he made for the glass doors.

“Lively old devil,” said Maw. “He'll be dead in a year.”

“Blaine, I'm afraid,” Reinhart began, “is—”

“He stole ten dollars off me at supper last night.”

“Blaine?”

“That Mr. Rumford, going there.” She leered at the carpet. “This place is full of criminals.” She seized Reinhart's wrist. “He'll give you the eye and say things to turn your head, but will lift your roll.” She protruded her tongue at the old man's back.

Reinhart said. “You should report him, Maw.”

“To who, Carlo? To who? You see, that's the problem. They hang together. He gives them a kickback in the front office. They are in cahoots with him and vice versa. This is a terrible place, a nest of thieves. It's awful of you to keep your old mom here.”

“Thought you said it was just great,” Reinhart lightly noted. Maw had little but paranoia to occupy her these days.

“Now don't you put words in my mouth, Carlo. If you was the loving son you pretend to be you would defend your old mother instead of letting a lot of old coots give her the business.”

At last Reinhart pointed out that she should not eat the transparent covering on the caramel. He had intended to let this matter go; it was probably harmless stuff and Maw had excellent false teeth, of much better quality than his own bridge.

Maw was in fact loaded, Dad having been an insurance man who was his own best client, and she had also made a bundle on the sale of the house, in addition to which an eccentric cousin of hers had been found three weeks dead amid stacks of newspapers dating from 1911 and every peanut-butter jar he had emptied in fifty years. His will though had been legally up to the minute, and left forty-five thousand dollars to Maw, whom he had not seen since February 27, 1923, at which time she however had a kind word for his devoted collie. The source of his money remained mysterious. After watching a certain TV program Maw had more or less decided it had been blackmail.

In a quite graceful action Maw now spat out both plates and picked cellophane fragments from the interstices. “It doesn't surprise me one iota, Carlo,” she said with some slurring. “There have been many attempts at poisoning.” She clapped the teeth back in. “I often give a bit of my lunch to that parrot in the dining room and he will say a filthy word. That bird will die one day from arsenic meant for me.” She hurled herself from the chair, adroitly as a gymnast. “Which reminds me of teatime, though you can just as well take coffee. You are welcome to come along and fill your fat gut.”

Maw made off in an athletic lope which Reinhart was hard put to match. The bright corridor was crowded with oldsters dressed in pastel colors. Maw steered ruthlessly through them, crying more than once, “Watch your wallet, Carlo!” But far from taking offense, the throng made noises that would suggest her popularity, friendly cackles and wheezes and some still booming voices as well. “Hi, bud,” said one pink old, hale old, glabrous head to Reinhart. “When did you check in? Glad to have you aboard. Pinochle's my game.” He threw out a hand.

Reinhart tried to make a joke of it, as he had when a small kid in his neighborhood asked Gen where her father was, meaning him, but the man soon dropped his hand and, turning to an eighty-year-old, blue-haired demimondaine tripping alongside, said in a blaring sotto voce: “Getting older all the time, ain't they?” To which she replied, inclining the ear without the hearing aid: “Yes, it will be fall soon and there's another year down the commode.”

Maw seemed not to have noted this exchange, but when they were seated at the little table in the dining room, under one of the Muzac grilles emitting Broadway show tunes, she said: “Most of those women are prostitutes, among who she is the worst, and that dirty old man is her pimp.”

“Getting back to Blaine, Maw—”

“I'll say this, Carlo, he's more of a man than you ever was. I'm going to give you a check for him, because if I know you you keep that boy on a short leash financially. You always were stingy as a boy. I used to say to your dad, ‘The hinges on that one's purse have gone to rust.' A person would give you a penny and you'd bank it. You have a nice bundle by now, eh?” She made a knowing grimace and punched his arm with a fist of granite. “Pulling down six percent per annum, though the kids dress in rags.”

A young brown girl appeared, saying, “Well, what will it be today, Molly?” She was dressed as a waitress and her manner was derisive-maternal, indeed rather like Maw's towards Reinhart of years since.