Vital Parts (37 page)

Reinhart took some more water onto his palate, warmed it, and identified the subtle ethers of chlorine. So Gen was privy to his Peeping Tom act, but only on circumstantial evidence. Funny she herself had provided him with at least an arguable motive: the wren house could be seen from the bathroom—if you removed the screen, hung yourself halfway out the window, and had the jointed neck of a marionette. But it was not like his wife to be generous in any regard. If she opened the door of the cell, it was to shoot him as he attempted escape. You learn these things in years of cohabitation.

“Go on,” he said with tented fingers over his nose, a saturnine eye on either side. “Go on, I'm enjoying this.”

“I am only too familiar with your fascination with the bodies of other people,” Gen said, “which is why I for one cannot undress in your presence. Though married you always made me feel”—she giggled, though not with good feeling—“
filthy
. Frankly, when I go to the john I always bolt the door and stuff Kleenex in the keyhole. I can't get over this idea that you are watching, waiting, might bust in on some pretext.”

It was true that Gen had always been weird about bathrooms: for example, invariably holding it all evening when they were out someplace, even at a private house. Often she insisted on leaving a party early only because she had to get home to take a leak. Winona had picked up a phase of this peculiarity, perhaps:
vide
her difficulties in movie restrooms. Too bad that inheritance has such an easy job with the uncomfortable traits.

“The girl,” Gen went on, “is young enough to be your daughter, but then you were a dirty old man at twenty-two.” She violently waved her cigarette. Of course for some time they had been attracting persons at nearby tables. In a moment Reinhart decided he would do something, rout these kibitzers with a direct stare, or laugh encouragement at Genevieve and say: “You've certainly got your lines down pat. The play will be a smash.” In years past she had dabbled in the local Little Theater.

“I couldn't care less,” she added. “Oh, there were times long ago when I was quite embarrassed to be in the company of a sex fiend, but then I decided to consider the source or else I would go crazy like the Southern lady that Marlon Brando raped in the picture, always seating me in a restaurant so you'd get a good view under the next table that was occupied by any female at all from Campfire Girl to somebody's grandma and finding excuses to take Blaine to the skating rink when he hated to skate so you could see behinds under those short skirts and I guess even you are aware there was something fishy in me refusing to go to any beach with you.” She dropped her cigarette and let it sizzle. “I knew I could drown while you were watching crotches.”

What an ugly rhyme. However, Bob Sweet had also accused Reinhart of undue ogling, and he would have had no ulterior motive. Or would he? Perhaps you could never say that of anybody. Whatever, the girl on the other side of the first table to their northeast was wearing panty hose and not the gartered stockings he had first taken them for.

“That must have been a thrilling sight for her,” said Gen. “But with your enormous belly hanging down, how did you expect her to see it?”

“Pardon?”

“When I was twelve,” Gen said, “a paperhanger working in our house showed me his business. You know what? I laughed out loud, I really did. I guess you would think I was scarred for life, huh? That's all you know.”

He might have known that she, his original enemy, would come up with something far worse than young Blaine could ever manage. Experience tells in these matters, and sex. By a sleight of hand, voyeurism, of which he was guilty, had been transformed into exhibitionism, which he had not practiced since the incident with Emma Wisely at age five. If naked in Genevieve's presence, taken by surprise, he would at least cup a palm. He was funny that way. But she was right as to effective tactics: this was far worse than Maw's version. It was pride-making to receive an accusation of potency. A man of his years and girth topping a beautiful sixteen-year-old. Millionaires and movie producers did it as a routine, and measured their force in the envy of lesser breeds. Whereas he could still remember, from decades ago, the scandal in his neighborhood when the director of the Methodist choir allegedly stood stark in a window and flapped his genitals at a passing schoolgirl. Of weaker stuff than the young Genevieve, she screamed like a peacock all the way to the police station and though the charges were later dropped the man was ruined, leaving town with his family. Years hence classmates of Reinhart would still point at the house and say: “That's where old Sinclair used to show his whang to Bettysue English.” Who, as chance would have it, was for a time Reinhart's high-school girl friend in a fleshless, jokey arrangement. She was still around town, now older, like Reinhart, than old Sinclair in his moment of truth.

“Let me get this straight,” Reinhart said. “You are accusing me of exposing myself to the girl next door?”

Gen made a surly gesture.

“It so happens, my dear Genevieve, that the bathroom window is four feet above the floor. To show myself there below the midpoint of my chest would require remarkable acrobatics or a stepladder.”

“It doesn't surprise me you would cover your tracks,” Gen replied. “But I should warn you that you have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions; anything you say may be used against you in a court of law; you have a right to consult an attorney—”

“You'd be laughed out of any court in the land,” said Reinhart, giving her tit for tat in pretentious dramatization, though he had not had her histrionic experience. In the Little Theater Gen had distinguished herself in several roles: the Hildy Johnson part in
The Front Page
, originally written for a man but played by Rosalind Russell in the well-known old movie, now accessible on TV (perhaps the source of Gen's square-shouldered stride); and one of the major female characterizations in a shortened version of
Twelfth Night
prepared by the group's director, a vivacious smalltown swish, this reported by the local weekly as: “Genevieve Raven (Mrs. Carl O. Reinhart) plays the viola.”

Thus both roles remembered now by Reinhart, though there had been others, were transvestite. You could see where Blaine got his implicit encouragement to cross sides in styles of dress—in addition, that is, to the current cultural trend.

He was suddenly amazed to see Gen snap her fingers, precisely as he had done the other day while drunk, at the same waitress, and order another glass of iced tea. Her tumbler was instantly replenished from a clinking pitcher. Far from taking offense, the waitress said: “Sure, honey.” The cunts were in a conspiracy to take over the country. Reinhart sensed his paranoia might be better described as simple misogyny.

“Now,” said Genevieve, pouring more sugar from more little envelopes and making more litter, “it is common knowledge that the kind of man who recourses to whores is basically a homosexual. Added to that, this exposing … I've done some thinking lately, Carl, no doubt long overdue … I can remember certain things now. Does the subject of costume parties ring a bell?”

Ten or fifteen years before, they had belonged to a set that went in for that sort of amusement, a horror to Reinhart. When heavy, you are restricted to comic impostures, figures from opera buffo, the singing cowboy's grotesque sidekick, big fat pirate, obese chef, et al., and once Gen had insisted they go in together (assembling themselves in the bushes outside) as an elephant, of which she was the slender forequarters and mask with dangling trunk, and he the mammoth thorax and rump.

Nonetheless the reminiscence brought back the ghost of happier times, when Blaine was a child. Reinhart seized upon it, perhaps more to distract himself than Genevieve.

“Do you remember?” he asked, “that occasion on which I went as Hermann Goering? And Blainey asked in his piping voice: ‘Who's Hermann Goering?'” Too late he recalled that neither had Gen known, though she had lived through the appropriate era. She had no general knowledge at all, though she was anything but stupid. He had never divined that cast of her character.

“Frankly, what sticks in my mind,” said Gen, “is the time Randy Hines came dressed like Shirley Temple, and you were fascinated with him.”

Hines, in real life a matter-of-fact sort of guy, something in sales, and a golf bore, had thoroughly depilated his calves for the role. His feet were positively tiny in the Mary Janes, and he showed exquisite legs, at least as far as the knee, where his razor-patience had run out. Hairy locker-room thighs traveled on to the short skirt and ruffled panties revealed when he pirouetted. “Fascinated” was imprecise for Reinhart's reaction. He marveled at Hines's bravado in essaying the little tap dance and the falsetto rendition of “The Good Ship Lollypop.” He would not have guessed he had it in him.

“No, Gen, no. That won't work,” he said now.

“You don't think I thought you would admit it?” she asked. “It's a pity, though, you wasted all that time on call girls and exposing yourself, etcetera, when I can see right through you. It also indicates the basic lack of trust on your part of our marriage. If I hate you for anything, it's that. If in the beginning you would have come to me and made a clean breast of it, we might have had a different story. ‘Genevieve, I prefer men. That's the way I'm made, I'm afraid. I am willing to get therapy.'”

Gen broke off her imaginary dialogue to light still another cigarette. The amount of rubbish she could create in the course of a simple luncheon was remarkable, and of course that waitress never emptied the ashtray. Reinhart could not stand it any more, and asked the people at the table nearest his right hand if, since they were not using their receptacle, he might borrow it. A business type said OK, it was his funeral, giving Reinhart the bitter thought that while he had given up smoking years ago, he might well contract lung cancer from breathing the air near Gen.

He must ask his doctor about it, as well as the unconscionable length of time it took him to pee nowadays: the old prostate could not last forever. A cholesterol count might also be a good idea. He refused to let Gen's latest knife penetrate the skin.

‘“Go on,” he urged her. “Tell me more about my passion for Randy Hines.”

“Of course, as we all know,” Gen went on, “psychotherapy doesn't usually work with homosexuals, but in your case it would at least help you to accept yourself, and not to do ridiculous degrading things to demonstrate the virility you have not got.”

She leaned against the back of her seat. With his mind's eye Reinhart cut off her hair and saw her father's face. He was willing to admit that over the years it was he, and not Gen, who had changed. She had really never been anything but his harshest critic, becoming tolerant, though seldom tender, at times when he admitted the justice of her position, which was at best negative and at worst in no feasible relationship with actuality, as now. She had never for example given him psychic support in his business ventures. She—

Gen broke into his thoughts, right on target. “Like your crazy get-rich-quick schemes, your grand-ose dreams that any fool could see were—uh, dreams.”

“Then why didn't you?” asked Reinhart prosaically, after this verse.

“Don't kid yourself, I wouldn't let you suck me in. I would have rather cut out my tongue than cast aspersions on your sacred delusions. You hate women bad enough to begin with, and I never would fall into a position where you could accuse me of castrating you. I always detected your game. You couldn't blame any of your flops on me. But what I hadn't counted on was that you would still build up this hatred no matter what I did. Why? Simply because I was the nearest female. How dumb I was. But then you got me when I was a virgin—”

“No matter how violently we have ever quarreled, Genevieve, I have never challenged that goddam lie of yours,” Reinhart cried. Of course their neighbors had heard everything she said, and when Reinhart turned and glared they brazenly grinned into his chops. So he would now take equal time. But halfway through his first sentence, peripheral vision told him they had risen and were leaving the table. Come back here, you rotten bastards!

“I know you have some sort of need to maintain that fiction, and I respected it in the worst moments. But why should I suppress it any more, with the kind of crap you're trying to pull on me now? Blaine got the idea from you that I will take infinite punishment and never fight back. Well, I cut off his lousy hair. And to you I say: I remember very clearly the first time I had you, in the back seat of my dad's car, parked in Cherry Wood, to which you in fact had directed me, whereas I thought I was taking you home. And I want to tell you something, Miss Phony Virgin: it was like falling into a well.”

He would not let her ruin his big line this time. He hastily withdrew from the table and repaired to the familiar men's room, where while he waited for a stall, a nearby booth opened and a whisper issued from it: “Psst, I'm Chuck.” Reinhart nodded and turned away. “
Chuck
, you know!
Make love not war
,” persisted the importuner. A urinal was free, and Reinhart took it. He tried to finish as quickly as the man on his right but for various reasons failed. All at once he was quite alone in the room, except for the pervert in the booth, who was hissing again. The thing is, Reinhart reasoned in terror, if I beat him up it will only seem as if I am the kind of latent who mistreats overt ones.

God, this was taking forever. He must go to the doctor tomorrow and have the gland palpated, though it was a miserable experience. “Finger wave” was the Army word for it. There was also some sort of scope they ran up through your tool, in serious cases.

“Keep quiet in there!” he ordered the faggot. “I am armed and will kill you.”

“Goody! How thrilling,” said the fag. “Wouldn't you like to beat me savagely to begin?”