Vital Parts by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

reluctantly an invisible but massive diabolic hand reached up from the cellar of the house next door and turned the girl as if she were a figurine. And transformed her sex as well, so that at 180 degrees she proved to be his son.
    â€œYou have hounded that boy since he was born,” said Genevieve, to whom time had dealt a better hand than to Reinhart, though true enough she was his junior by several years. Short and apparently threatening to turn plump in her early twenties, she had instead acquired several inches of height—which may have been an optical illusion—and lost ten pounds of her youthful weight by the end of the first decade of their marriage. Now, twenty-two anniversaries after the fact, Gen was sharp-featured, spare-figured, and leather-skinned, to put it one way, but handsome, svelte, and flawlessly tanned, to put it the other. Which was to say she had made much the same progress as Reinhart had in the order of familial resemblance; both of them had begun as run-offs of their respective mothers (Reinhart’s being muscular) and moved in middle life to favor their fathers.
    Gen sat in the corner of the couch, in her usual cloud of smoke. Yet semiannual X-rays showed her lungs were clean, whereas Reinhart’s chest often ached though he had given up cigarettes years since.
    From his chair Reinhart said: “Look here, this is not the subject for argument, Genevieve. What I am talking about is law. That girl is underage, and Blaine was twenty-one last February.” A cold bleak day, the yard spotted with clumps of dirty snow, a bucketful of which Reinhart had gathered to chill an eight-dollar bottle of champagne to salute the new manhood, but Blaine did not come home until the next morning, having had his own party with hyena friends who raved on hashish and amplified music, obscenely mutilated an effigy of the President of the United States, then buggered one another till dawn (for all Reinhart knew).
    Until tonight he had never seen a jot of evidence that the boy was not queer. He still found it hard to believe that a girl would accept the sexual attentions of a male whose hair was not only longer than hers but finer, whose body was softer, and whose wardrobe at least as gaudy.
    But the legal question was serious. Reinhart in his time had been a frequent law-bender but never a candid breaker of ordinances however unjust. When he himself had enjoyed the favors of an underaged girl it had been in the context of Occupation Berlin, where codes were as yet unformulated.
    Gen spat smoke at him. “All right, Mr. Cop,” she said through the blue stream. “Get your billyclub and pound the child’s head to a bloody jelly, like the pigs did to the youngsters at Columbia who were appealing for a better life. The human body is a beautiful thing, only we have made it filthy with our stinking hypocrisy.”
    â€œGenevieve, please don’t widen the scope of this discussion. I don’t want to get enmired in social theories while my son is naked and in the room of the girl next door with her parents away on vacation. She is a minor person.”
    â€œWell, he isn’t,” said Gen. “Therefore you have no responsibility for him.”
    â€œAw, Gen, Gen.”
    â€œI am sure,” said Genevieve, as always imperfectly crushing the cigarette butt in the ashtray so that it would smolder and stink for some time to come, “I am sure there is some reasonable explanation if he is there at all, which frankly I don’t place any credentials in.” She had her own way with idiom. “Blaine told me definitely when he left he was heading for the Heliotrope Thing.”
    This discothèque occupied the disused movie house in which Reinhart had spent every Sunday afternoon as a boy, watching never-resolved serials and main features in which the cowboy did not kiss a girl, did not even, in the earliest years, sing songs. Later Reinhart had owned a piece of this