Vital Parts by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

boy had made a devastating change, taking up Reinhart’s precise tastes and corrupting them subtly. He would watch certain of his father’s television favorites with the sound turned off, if he commanded the set. If eating deep-fried chicken, the lad would peel off and discard the golden crust. He might also borrow a necktie of Reinhart’s and knot it strangely, so that it would never again hang true. At sixteen, when he got his driver’s license, he began to do mysterious damage to the car, some of which the keenest mechanic could not identify and correct: at the least, maddening birdlike squeaks which no tightening or greasing would eradicate; at worst, inexplicable seizures in the differential, abrasions down to metal of new brake bands, and so on. Yet not only did he drive circumspectly when under his father’s surveillance, which was to be expected—Reinhart himself had so performed as a youth, but once away from Dad gunned and braked the guts out of the ’38 Chevvy—but one time when Blaine could not possibly have known he was being watched, Reinhart emerged from a highwayside café to which he had been lifted by an acquaintance, to see his son tool past at a speed less than the limit and slow to a conservative stop at the nearby crossroads.
    No doubt the trouble had begun two weeks after Blaine’s conception when Genevieve on the first day of her missing period insisted that if it was to be a boy he must be named for her father, one of the few unmitigated scoundrels Reinhart had ever known, perhaps the only, surely the worst.
    Reinhart now withdrew from behind the toilet a plumber’s suction cup, the kind that, less the stick, was used in the old days of real musicianship to mute a trumpet—the time of Goodman, Basie, the Dorseys, long before the current long-locked, costumed, electronic-toned androgynes had begun the voyage down the Fallopian tubes—and plunged it into the tub water with an enormous gobble of air fleeing hyperhydration. With four or five thrusts he caused the drain to disgorge, as he suspected, an octopus of hair, the origin of which was obvious. Gen and his daughter were dark. Reinhart’s own gray-blond locks were regularly clipped short at the barbershop. Blaine was very fair, in fact of so light a hue that nature furnished it only to albinos, of which company he was not a member. This pale mess was a hank from his coiffure, which was not only bleached but shoulder-length.
    Very like, indeed, the lovely mane of the houseguest of the girl next door, who as luck would have it was standing in the window, her graceful back to Reinhart, when he picked up the glasses for a valedictory focus before returning the instrument to its bed of laundry. Magically enough, she confirmed his fanciful projection, exceeded it, really, because no imagination is so vivid as the actuality of young flesh: the damask of the supple skin, the pearly summit of her upthrust hip on which rested the upended tulip of her right hand as asymmetrically she stood beneath her shower of gold, slender arm akimbo, innocent of sinew or distension. Quite tall she was and of a glorious grace even in stasis. When she moved, with a subtle rearrangement of her globèd bottom and soft lavender shadows below, bisected by light’s wanton yellow finger, pointing up between the slim thighs, when her hair shimmered, her slender shoulders rose and fell in some transitory teeny mirth, Reinhart discarded all control and exhorted the Devil to make her turn. It was little enough in exchange for a soul, even Reinhart’s, which was something of a retread.
    But the Devil replied, Wait a while, she is so beautiful— Verweile doch, sie ist so schön , in his native tongue—and anyway, hell, like any other public housing facility, had a long and hopeless waiting list; you would probably die before you made it. But Reinhart persisted, offering in support his forty-four years as sinner, and