Vital Parts by Thomas Berger Page A

“Really.”
    â€œMay I wait?” He sat down in a half acorn upholstered in lemon Naugahyde and mounted on cat’s-cradles of chromium wire. Ordinarily he would have lingered for the invitation, but he now suddenly felt adrift on a wave of impuissance. The scene at breakfast had been frightful: Blaine with his ravaged head, looking like a wet bird, Genevieve’s swordplay with the breadknife, Winona’s howls. Pretty strong stuff.
    â€œMr. Sweet’s in New York for the Jack Alp Show ” said the girl. “I don’t know when to expect him.”
    â€œYes, I saw it.”
    â€œI gather the presentation piqued your curiosity as to what was entailed,” she said in an unreal pronunciation, or perhaps Reinhart heard her faultily as he found himself staring up her generous naked haunches all the way to the bare crotch, which, unless he had gone blind or mad, was smooth as one as a youngster imagined a girl’s to be, without orifice or beard.
    â€œSir,” she suddenly cried with impatience posing as compassion, “aren’t you well? Can I get you a glass of water?”
    Reinhart made a croaking sound which the girl took as assent and she rose and strode through a plastic-rosewood door to some inner sanctum. She was tall and hefty. The minimal skirt, of a stubborn stuff which remembered the crumpling it had undergone from the seat of the chair, stayed halfway up her posterior. A crackless behind showed Reinhart that what he had taken as nudity was pantyhose in the color of Caucasian flesh.
    The same garment on a Negro female would not have misled him, though no doubt he might have been accused of racism on some other pretext—he had already picked up a magazine and, leafing urgently past an article written by an eighteen-year-old philosopher, entitled “Why Do You Hate Us?,” had come up another, labeled “Here’s Why We Hate You,” by a writer identified as “a black” or perhaps it was “A. Black,” written without capitals to be pretentious. Further along were the cartoons, peopled by “hippies,” speaking in such terms as “turn on,” “freak out,” etc. Prepositions were in fashion. Up with this I shall not put, Reinhart said Churchillianly to himself, dropping the periodical onto its fellows on a coffee table of leaden, solid slate. His dentist’s old mags were full of “beatniks” and other vanished phenomena.
    The big girl returned with a measure of water in a disposable cup made of hardened, dead-white foam which had no weight when emptied, for Reinhart though not thirsty drained it considerately.
    She said, hanging her breasts over him, “My father gets those attacks.” Girls her age, anywhere from twenty-five to forty-three, often pretended he was old enough to have sired them.
    â€œThank you,” Reinhart answered curtly. “As it happened I lunched with Mr. Sweet yesterday and rode partway to the airport with him. We are old pals from high school.”
    â€œIs that right? Well.”
    Reinhart decided to be avuncular, having nothing else going for him. “And don’t say you thought he was a lot younger. I’m not yet a candidate for your freezer.” Now he could see her big nipples, the pinkish swirls in the multicolored dress being transparent.
    She shrugged, reclaimed the weightless cup, and, having let it fall, which took ever so long, into a wastebasket of woven strips of Philippine mahogany, sat down again at the desk. Now, with his informed sight, Reinhart noticed that her crotch sagged slightly. He had known a very large nurse when in the Army. Today she must be most of the distance towards fifty, having been a few, then meaningless, years older than he. Nowadays he lusted only for teen-agers, but if this receptionist threw herself at him he would catch her. Time enough for that, though, when Sweet hired him.
    â€œI suppose we will be colleagues