Vital Parts by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

cocker?” she asked. Of course, she could have been merely one of the cranks who, along with able-bodied panhandlers, self-righteous freaks, and winos, were taking over downtown.
    As painful as were the thoughts inspired by the girl’s bare body, when she with a jolly lope suddenly left his frame of vision, Reinhart was at once desolated and had his first intimations of sexual desire, typically anachronistic. He also noticed the dental bridge in his palm, and wondered how it got there. He forced it back into the break in the upper-right fence, and felt an exquisite pressure-pain, as if pumpkin seeds had been hammered through the interstices of his remaining natural teeth.
    The end of the show. He was not one to linger till the scrubwomen slopped in and turned up the gum-encrusted seats. He had seen what he had come in quest of so many times, and knew the strange feeling which accompanies complete achievement of any kind: the loss of a future. The unseen roommate had probably undressed while he sat head in hands reviewing his day. Yet another ten seconds would not hurt. He had no prospects but TV. The light was still on across the way. Perhaps the guest had perched her little rump on the bed-edge to unroll her knee-high stockings, the ghosts of the teenyboppers’ wintertime boots—little Prussian martinets that they were—and lifted roseate haunches to free the weave from roughened heel and hooking toe, and before his count was done, would appear in the frame to rip off the rest of what she wore, skimpy ribbons at bosom and vee, and flex her pelt at him in turn. She might be the other kind, not the stocky, full, fruity species of the neighbor’s daughter, but the tall, attenuated, languid teeny, pubesced but lemon-breasted, boyish-hipped, lean in flank, with long, pointed feet and tawny hair, tendrils of which curled into the hollow of her prominent clavicles. Slim, if you like, but deeper in the side view and with buttocks like twin mandolins.
    Reinhart, who would gulp any wine and swallow any food he could manage to chew, was a connoisseur in these matters. Ten seconds came and went without incident, and true to the vow he left his post. For a moment the crick in his sacroiliac made him walk like a goose. As with most bathroom windows the sill was four feet above the floor; he had had to prop himself on the wrists of the hands holding the binoculars.
    The tub was now three-quarters full of cold water. He turned off the faucet, and with the noise gone, heard the querulous end of a speech from the hall outside.
    â€œâ€¦ consideration for others.” He recognized it as his wife’s, and supplied the missing words You haven’t any . That she had been talking for some time he might assume. She was attracted to obscuring conditions of sound.
    He immediately pulled the plug and as the water left the tub—drop by drop, owing to some obstruction in the drain—he shouted back: “One minute!”
    The unjust feature of this situation was that another complete bathroom divided the children’s bedrooms in the northwards projection of the house, a facility that was seldom used even by those for whom it had been provided and never by anyone in an emergency. As a very young child, Reinhart’s daughter, inclined towards car-sickness, excess weeping, and odd phobias, had professed to be upset by certain irregularities in the enamel of that tub, which indeed was a factory “second” supplied at a favorable price by the scab plumber who did the work. “It has pimples that scratch my bottom!” was the anguished assertion of Reinhart’s secondborn. His son of course stated no reasons whatever for the boycott; even as a little blackguard of eight or ten he was motivated by an undifferentiated malignancy towards his dad. To get him to eat a certain food Reinhart had only to pretend a personal dislike for it, else the child would have died of malnutrition.
    At puberty the