Vital Parts (23 page)

“Are you married?” Reinhart asked, already shaking his head. “I didn't know that. I don't like it. Really, Eunice, I just thought of this little excursion as a friendly thing between colleagues. I didn't pay any attention to what Bob said, believe me. I intend to go back to my wife when permitted. I'm too tired to begin anything new, especially dodging a husband.”

Eunice laughed shrilly, almost whinnying, and turned a corner with flailing arms. “I live at home.”

“Doesn't everybody?” In fact, he himself did not at the moment.

“I'm not married. Did he tell you I was? What a hangup he has.”

“No,” said Reinhart. Sweet was using him in some way, then. He had urged Reinhart to take her out. Perhaps it was not perverse, though. Maybe he was tired of her and trying to arrange her disposal in a manner that could be seen as humane. Mistresses, Reinhart had heard, were often tougher to change than wives, because legality did not enter the picture.

“Now I get it,” Eunice said. “He thought you would be harmless.”

True enough, but of course it hurt. Reinhart said, without conviction: “I'm old enough not to have to prove I am a man. That is a great relief, though it may indicate a lack of ambition. Whenever I begin to think otherwise, I feel my stomach rolling over my belt and my feet ache from carrying all this weight around. Have you heard that thing about inside every fat man is a skinny fellow trying to get out? Not correct in my case. My skeleton is glad to hide.” Yet for the first time he had begun to feel a twinge of real desire for her. It was, for a change, born out of pity rather than envy.

“Tell me,” she said, “about my father when he was young. You said you went to school with him.”

Kooky as she was, she could have been joking in a cryptic way. Reinhart had a lifelong horror of being caught flatfooted by some unusual piece of information and then being jeered at when he gave it credence. The thing to do, as in most inchoate situations, was to rely on the Oriental mask of inscrutability.

So he explained in a style so literal as almost to be pussyfooting. “I just ran into him by accident last week, hadn't seen him in years. We weren't close in school, but I certainly never beat him up as he claims. He is thinking of some of the other guys.”

“Oh, that's great!” cried Eunice. “That's fabulous. Tell me all about it. Was he hurt? Did he cry?”

8

When Reinhart had definitely established the fact that Eunice was Sweet's daughter he refused, on principle, to engage in further conversation pertaining to or reflecting on that relationship. She grew sullen and at last began to drive on the verge of recklessness, though not with what could be called youthful zest and still not rapidly. Her style was more like that of an oldster at the wheel, whose distance gauges had seen better days. She almost sideswiped a parked car or two, and taking one corner scraped both left inside and right outside curbs, using all of the available roadway, and it was not a one-way street.

They were now in one of those secondary business districts, halfway into downtown, of closed shops which yet kept their signs alight.

“Take the next right,” Reinhart said. “I'm staying at the YMCA.”

He did not mind her knowing that now; not with what he knew about her. He would dine alone in the Y cafeteria, if still open, or catch a hamburger special at a nearby greasy spoon attended by a garrulous counterman. Why Sweet and his daughter abused each other psychopathically was none of his affair. He intended to stick to business from now on.

He saw a drunken derelict, the emaciated, Christ-bearded, skull-eyed sort whose stride was a rhythmic fall inhibited at the last possible moment by the quick thrust of a toe, from which he then proceeded to plunge again, ad infinitum. Now there was a man they could freeze for the price of a pint of muscatel. He wondered whether Sweet had thought of that. Or maniacs, in institutions, whose responsible kin would release them legally, in compassion or convenience. Persons on the point of suicide. How could you reach them? Set up a phone number to call, like the Alcoholics Anonymous hot line.

Eunice took a sharp left, into a narrow alleyway. Her underlip was still outthrust. Behind the thick façade of buildings the passage entered a rectangular parking lot full of cars, some in motion, some at rest, and more of the former than the latter.

She stopped the automobile in an arbitrary situation and abandoned it briskly as if it were about to burst into flame. Reinhart followed suit, stamping his feet to restore lubrication to his joints, which stiffened up on long rides like those of a much older individual. The familiar stifling heat came up from the lot to strike his face, like the handle of a rake on whose tines you have stepped. Illumination was provided by many bare bulbs surrounding and also intermingling with the painted letters on a sign over a flight of concrete steps descending to a subterranean doorway.
THE GASTROINTESTINAL SYSTEM
said the sign and the doorway was modeled in an uncomfortably evocative form, the jamb rounded, the door itself consisting of two leaves meeting in a center cleft and radiating painted stress or pursing lines of a compressed sphincter. Unless one was physician, deviate, or contortionist he rarely saw a rectum, yet knew how it looked even in a giant representation constructed of alien materials.

Having entered, they were in a colonic passage lined with rippling pink plastic. Reinhart paid seven-fifty in entrance fees to a barbarously coiffed girl behind a grilled window let into this wall. There was nothing hokey or stylish about the way they collected money or the iron bars. A large noncommittal fellow, wearing a judo outfit, pressed a little rubber stamp onto the backs of their left hands. Reinhart saw a vague, fleeting impression fading into the fat on his, but no ink.

“You didn't get me,” he said, but the man amiably ignored him.

Eunice said: “It's ultraviolet,” and placed her hand beneath a bullet-lamp jutting from the wall. The date appeared magically on her flesh in greenish-yellow glow.

“What's he, the bouncer?” Reinhart whispered as they proceeded.

“Yes,” she answered. “I just hate this place, but it happens to be where it's at.”

“What?”

“I wish I knew,” she said. Suddenly they were among many heads of hair, most of them below Reinhart's chin so that he seemed to be wading neck-deep in a streamful of swimming beaver. Luckily Eunice was tall enough to be seen. Reinhart was afraid to enjoy his frottage with small round bodies on pain of identifying them as boys'. The one currently under his nose smelled like pizza. He could not tell whether it particularly was coming or going, or the crowd in general, for that matter. But the pressure was soft and undemanding, and though some sounds were strident he could identify no malignancy.

He made way with his hands, feeling such surfaces as leather, real and fake, and sheepskin. He saw few faces and no eyes. And what he took as heads might have been sometimes beards and moustaches or even feathers, pelts.

At last he reached the end of the Large Intestine and the entrance to a large, amorphous room where Eunice stood gazing at the crowd which filled it in intermittent flashes of light alternating with a more startling blackout that wiped everyone from view.

He said to Eunice, who was there and gone by turns—it was queer to address a person under such conditions—“You have pulled a fast one. I'm no discothèque swinger.”

“Neither am I,” she said fervently. “I go around in a dream since the assassinations. This country's going to explode, and nobody's doing a damn thing about it. If you go peepee, buy me a joint, willya?”

“Huh?”

“There is always somebody selling sticks of pot in the men's toilet,” she explained, her white face disappearing in mid-sentence.

“That would make a swell impression on Bob,” said Reinhart. “Take his daughter out and feed her marijuana. Come on, Eunice.” He laughed hopefully. “This is a big act of yours; isn't it? I've seen you at the desk. You're a sensible working girl. This is all clothes and talk. I could match it with now-forgotten stunts of my own era: drinking at college dances, driving the old man's car sixty miles an hour while standing outside on the running board—they had a hand throttle then that you could pull out and leave there, a pretty murderous practice, you'd reach in through the window and steer. There were guys who would get crazy drunk and play Russian roulette with three chambers filled.”

“We can't even get a decent gun-control law,” Eunice wailed.

“I suppose a registered gun can't kill anybody,” Reinhart asked ironically. What a pointless discussion. He should leave her there and return to his monastic bed at the Y.

“I'm hungry suddenly,” she said.

“Can you eat here?”

“Not here, in the Cecum. The restaurant part is called the Stomach.”

“Cute,” said Reinhart because he thought he should.

“I hate it,” said Eunice. “I detest cleverness in words, I would love a restaurant called Restaurant. I used to have a puppy and called him Dog.”

Yet you don't say Daddy, Reinhart was about to point out, but she was in motion again. He called out: “Don't go too fast or I'll lose you in the periods of darkness, which seem to be getting longer.”

Still no music. What were these people doing? She took his hand. Then colored lights began to stream from the ceiling and flow down the walls, accompanied by an electronic drone. The floor, where Reinhart could see it, looked metallic. The human-tissuelike walls began to undulate. A dais made itself slowly known with back-lighting. On it were four lumpy silhouettes, one of which developed four limbs in a spotlight and screamed, in a spray of spittle: “Suck my nose! Eat my snot! Lick my armpits, and I will tell you, I will tell you, oh babeh will I tell you, love ain't what, love ain't what you thought, it ain't what you thought when you puked your scum and burned our hearts, it ain't what—”

Reinhart poked his nose into Eunice's ear—neither was her hair precisely fragrant: what became of the dab of perfume at the temples which had been traditional among womankind?—and said: “I can see why they don't serve meals in here.”

“Don't mind that,” she shouted back. “Those lyrics refer to pot and LSD and napalm, and not what they actually say.”

“Why?” he cried. “Why don't they just say it then?”

“Because they're cop-outs, that's why,” screamed Eunice. “The Chancres have a big recording contract. They are Establishment now. Fuck them. Let's go and feed.”

Reinhart's assumption proved incorrect: the Chancres' ranting was piped into the Stomach, regardless of its references, which continued to be nauseating, but after a time only by formal definition. The rhythm, the persistent drum-thud and electrical moan soon anesthetized the lyrics and they sleepwalked through the infinite repetitions. The Stomach was a more standard roomful of booths and tables and lighted now and again with bare bulbs mounted on a wall of fake brick. There were also candles placed on reversed coffee cups, a cunning idea, though it would have made better sense, Reinhart believed, to put them in the bowl of the cups to catch more wax.

Eunice had led him through a queue of passive persons to an empty booth. She had inherited Bob's authoritative manner in public. Another fellow wearing a Japanese fighting suit appeared and said pleasantly to Reinhart: “You can't have this. People have waited in line.”

Eunice said to him, with calm ferocity: “Eat me, man.”

He walked away, rubbing his chin with the exaggerated knobbed knuckles of his right fist. He was only about five feet six or seven and slightly built. They must rely on the psychological effect of their gear, thought Reinhart. Bouncers used to be his own size or larger and with fearsome countenances. But karate got publicity everywhere these days because of its exotic cries and spectacles. Reinhart had watched a midget break a brick with his fingers on TV, emitting a hiss of low density. “But isn't it essentially
aggressive?
” asked the MC, with socially concerned eyebrows. “Certainly not,” said the dwarf. “If I can do it, a woman can do it.”

There was everywhere a tendency to ask irrelevant questions, matched by a determination to answer different ones equally ungermane. Reinhart studied the menu. Things were getting back to normal. There were catsup blobs and a shred of meat stuck to the card, and printed on it were the designations of seven kinds of solid steak as well as chopped, sliced, cubed, shredded, and pounded versions of the same, in addition to the specialty of the house: Stomach Steak.

A fifteen-year-old girl stood at Reinhart's elbow, naked from the waist down. He was scared to look directly at her.

Eunice ordered: “Stomach Steak sandwich on white, French fries, large Coke.”

Now Reinhart looked at the waitress and saw she was at least thirty-five years old but small and with long black hair. She wore a black turtleneck sweater, armless, and a bikini bottom. She had flat breasts, slender hips, and pouches under her eyes.

She said: “And you, baby?”

“Join me in a drink?” Reinhart asked Eunice.

“We don't sell hard stuff,” said the waitress. “Don't put me on.”

Eunice added that her steak must be
very
well done, and Reinhart played a game of asking for rare gastronomic creations like Swiss on rye, scrambled eggs, vegetable soup, and so on, until the waitress was fed up and took her leave. “OK,” he shouted at her twitching little bottom, “chopped steak.”

“You do a pretty fair put-on yourself,” Eunice noted with a certain admiration.

“Necessity,” he admitted candidly. One thing could be said for Eunice: she elicited from him no falsity in the service of pride. “Between my teeth and my stomach there's not much I can eat with impunity. … So you're Bob's daughter,” he found himself saying in defiance. “I can't get over that.”