Vital Parts (3 page)

“Bentley,” Sweet answered curtly while stiff-arming Reinhart's attempt to open the door for him. The reason for this appeared when the uniformed chauffeur, an elderly man who was none too spry, came anxiously around the trunk to furnish the service.

In the air-cooled back seat Sweet explained: “You can't get a young man or Negro to drive for you nowadays. And just as well. Allison is too old to run around in the car while I'm away, and he doesn't try to drag at lights.”

His buttocks deep in luxury, smelling the bouquet of glove leather, Reinhart sought to compensate for the instinctive slavishness with which he had grasped the door handle. “Yes,” said he, “you can't get any kind of personal service these days. Everybody thinks he's too good for it—any kind of punk or moron.”

“That's all right,” Sweet said forcefully. “I don't knock it when I think it's the same state of affairs in which I have prospered. You have to be elastic. You can't get a kid to cut your lawn, so you buy a power mower and do the job yourself. OK, take that one step further: you retail mowers in a seller's market. Everybody needs one.”

“I see,” said Reinhart.

“Just one example,” said Sweet. There was a glass partition between them and the chauffeur, and below that a polished walnut panel with several discreet little doors, one of which Sweet opened to reveal a telephone. Within a thrice he was talking with New York: “Charlie said his aunt is sick and can't go to Rome, but there's always the Pyramids or even Grand Teton National Park, but cigars are available.” Or something on that order. Reinhart gathered it was a sort of code by which Sweet ordered the buying and selling of securities, or perhaps communicated with industrial spies. He was big, oh was he big.

When Sweet hung up he said to Reinhart: “Where can I drop you, Carl? Your office is in the old business district? Hey, you remember Molly Kruger's candy store? She can't still be there.”

“Dead long since,” Reinhart said. He found that Sweet, who had left town to make a fortune, was basically much more nostalgic about the landmarks of the old days than he himself. That was a curious difference between them. He yearned for his bygone personal powers; Sweet for architecture and landscape.

“You can let me out on the corner of Allen, if you remember it, then keep straight on to the superhighway entrance, which feeds right out of Main.”

“Right by the American Legion home,” said Sweet.

“That's gone, too, I'm afraid. The First National built there. A drive-in bank. I don't think they can handle you if you show up on foot.”

Sweet grimaced sadly and stared through his closed window. “Well, at least this area hasn't changed much.” Dark-skinned persons were going about their business on the sidewalks in front of discount jewelries and television shops of the old kind. “The West Side still all colored?” He turned to Reinhart. “There's a new market, Carl. Especially in consumer goods. Always was good, but getting better. The Negro is a bigger per capita spender than the white man.”

“In the mood they're in these days, they don't want white enterprise.”

“Nonsense. Don't be taken in by windy propaganda and PR baloney. Money is money, is colorless and sexless and doesn't give a damn for age. Shrewd men are making a bundle from the so-called youth revolution. But others are doing even better in the geriatric area.”

Reinhart nodded. “Yes, my mother lives in Senior City and they shake her down for plenty.”

“But the real revolution,” said Sweet, “has been, and continues to be, in science. You wouldn't believe some of the things that are possible.” Suddenly he was studying Reinhart in a stock-taking manner, as if—how preposterous; Reinhart should not have drunk so much at lunch nor insulted the waitress nor played high-and-mighty with Gino—as if he were a surgeon, no, a mortician estimating how large the coffin need be. But by this stage in his life Reinhart was accustomed to the perversity of his imagination, in which the truly sinister seldom appeared as such, whereas benevolence or even indifference evoked suspicion.

“Do you have extensive interests in technology?” Reinhart asked, because he knew that was one place where the loot was.

Sweet's inspection had reached his scalp. “I see you still swear by the crew cut.”

Now Reinhart was gratified, because it was a personal observation and Sweet had not made many. “I'd feel like a phony if I changed after all these years. The way I see it—”

Sweet cut him off. “Excuse me, Carl, but we'll be there in a few minutes. Forgive me if I go straight to the heart of the matter. I used to hate you when we were kids, I'll admit. You were big and I was small. You used to push me around.”

Reinhart protested. “No, Bob, never. I tell you that was—”

“No, no.” Sweet shook his head. “It's over and done.
Time never returns
. The only reality is now. And you've convinced yourself that you are on your way out.”

“You don't know the half of it.”

Sweet's hand was impatient. “I can guess. You know, for one thing, you could still look pretty formidable if you stood up straight. You haven't lost a hair and you don't need glasses. A little dental work and you'd be set. Then put on a clean shirt and have your suit pressed. That wash-and-wear material really does need an iron, whatever the ads say. Don't believe what you read in print: that's for the mob. There are those who say and those who listen. Be sure you're never among the latter. Don't believe the current crap to the effect that the punks are aristocrats because of their youth alone and that the middle-aged are senile. That's the old shell game. There are the same sixty minutes in every hour for everybody. Don't take the ‘generation gap' seriously unless you can make money from it. Suckers come in all ages.”

He rapped on the partition and the silver-haired driver eased the car into the curb. “We're here,” Sweet said to Reinhart, who in desperation tried to scramble out. No good to hear gung-ho talk from a man who had made it. The Sunday supplements always printed inspirational messages from statesmen, industrial giants, and show-biz celebrities. But if you thought about it, as Reinhart had, it stood to reason that successful personages had no motive to raise the level of nonentities. These statements were mere boasts, their purpose to maintain rather than alter a status quo in which the subject continued to amass money and glory and force while the object, a fat unshaven Reinhart, dunking his pastry in Sunday coffee, hopelessly read empty slogans.

Sweet seized his forearm with a Japanese-trained weapon-hand. “One moment. Call me sentimental—”

“Jesus,” said Reinhart, “you're hurting me.” That was a girl's line; but true.

Sweet loosened him slightly but did not let go. “You depress me,” he said. “You're part of my past, after all. And we have reversed positions in thirty years. Look,” he cried urgently, “is your pride too weak to let me help you?”

It was. Reinhart pulled away. “I'm doing all right in my own small way. It might not mean much to you, up top, but I have a nice little business, a home, and a fine family.”

“You are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Sweet said without expression. “And your kids are at the age where they are giving you hell. And your wife—”

“Please,” Reinhart warned, “I'll have to hit you if you insult my wife.” Then of course he quickly fashioned a flabby grin at the thought of his defenseless honor. “And you might kill me with a karate chop.”

But Sweet was not amused. “While we waited for the car you were staring like a sex maniac at teen-aged girls.”

Now there was no shame left to hide, and Reinhart ceased to strain against Sweet's grasp. “How about my coming along with you to New York?” he asked obsequiously. “Have you got a driver there? I work cheap.”

“Don't dodge the issue with fake humility,” said Sweet, releasing him. “And if there's anything my ego doesn't need, it's an old schoolmate working for me as a flunky. I don't mean that at all. … But why teen-agers? You are in the grip of some sort of fantasy, Carl. They are terrible pieces of tail. They are hard-fleshed and selfish and dry. They are—”

“Please,” said Reinhart, who was discomfited by smutty talk.

Sweet said: “There is no more useless a thing on which to squander yourself than sex. Even drinking is better, because at least it can be pursued alone.”

“What do you think a lech is for me, if not alone?” Reinhart did not say this in self-pity; he was striving for precise nomenclature. Sweet had begun to seem like some wizard or genie, especially since concealing his eyes behind the sunglasses. Were Reinhart to imagine a god, Sweet would certainly have been a feasible candidate for the role, a man of his own age and background, but apparently omnipotent and all-knowing. Reinhart was proprietary about his deities, like those Mexicans who locate the Virgin in Guadalupe. He could not remember ogling young girls at the shopping center, though long familiar with his disincarnate preoccupation with female teenagers, which by now must have become subliminal, contaminating him secretly while his unsuspecting consciousness grappled with surface reality.

“I meant with dignity,” said Sweet. “Of all the crazes sex is worst because it is dependent on other human beings, and if it gets bad enough, it can't be satisfied even with them. In the end it becomes completely inhuman. For Christ sake, what is it, finally, but the swelling of tissues? I wager to say you do not have any particular girl in mind, but rather the whole breed—in fact, preferring the total stranger, the anonymous pair of knockers and round behind bobbing through the park.”

“Expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Reinhart remembered.

“Why shame?” cried Sweet. “I take it you don't molest children. If they're big enough, they're old enough. The shame is that you are not getting any. The shame of the rich is felt only by the poor. Shame in oneself is an excuse for failure. When applied to others it is merely a form of envy.”

Reinhart said wistfully “I suppose you get all the teenagers you want?”

Sweet's reply was harsh. “Age is the last thing I consider in a woman. Quite rightly, they all lie about it anyway. I have yet to get an erection from figures on a birth certificate. But if I have a choice, I steer away from the inexperienced. I haven't time to train a girl.”

“Well, that's just it,” said Reinhart urgently. “They all fuck like rabbits nowadays.”

“Bullshit. Don't you believe it. I warn you, don't take your sense of reality from the communications media or your will will be paralyzed and your head stuffed with trash that is utterly arbitrary. There is the actual and there is the representation. They have almost nothing in common, except insofar as people begin to act according to what they hear, but they can almost never pull it off properly. Most teen-agers are still sitting alone fingering themselves.”

“Your passion is money,” said Reinhart with an air of discovery.

“If so,” Sweet said pleasantly, “it's not its accumulation in cash. What I am trying to explain to you is that I don't worship statistics. I hire accountants for that. Only losers think in numbers. There is no such thing.”

“Then what is your secret?”

Sweet said: “You know the old thing Morgan said when asked how much it costs to keep a yacht?”

Reinhart of course was a walking chrestomathy. “‘If you have to ask, you can't afford one.'”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Like shit.”

“That was the idea,” Sweet said. “Now one way to avoid that feeling is to abandon all desire in a positive fashion. A monk is not a failure.”

“Unfortunately, I am not religious.”

“Neither are many of them. That has nothing to do with it. We are talking about respective strategies. … Carl, you're doing it again. You're a hard case.” Sweet laughed and tapped the back of Reinhart's hand with the steel rod of his finger.

Over Sweet's shoulder Reinhart was watching a young girl cross the street. She wore a sailor-striped jersey and no brassiere. The hem of her skirt reached scarcely below the delta, her hair to her shoulders and beyond; her eyes confident that traffic would part for her crossing, which of course it did very soon, defying Reinhart's prayer that she would be run down. One face of Reinhart's lech was murderous.

Sweet pressed a switch that caused the window to lower itself silently. “Miss,” he called. “Over here, please.”

Reinhart's heart whirred like an outmoded air-conditioner. “Don't, Bob, please don't do anything embarrassing.” For he knew he would be blamed.

Ignoring him, Sweet waited for the girl to arrive. When she did, and hung her moonface, draped in hair, at eye level, her chest receding, her breasts pendulous as cheeses in an Italian grocery, he said: “I'm lost. I'm looking for the local airfield.”

She did something with her tongue. “That's twenty miles away, across the river.” She ritualistically acknowledged the absurdity of it, with batwinged shoulders.

“You're not thinking,” Sweet said coldly. “Obviously I don't want the commercial airport.” Her dark-rimmed eyes wandered through the interior, passing across Reinhart as though he were an empty seat. She looked about fifteen. “I fly my own airplane,” Sweet went on. “It's at the private field. If your ears are pierced you should never go without earrings.”

She touched her right lobe; both were in fact concealed by the amber fall of hair, so Reinhart assumed Sweet was faking.

“What's your name?” Sweet asked accusingly. Then in a sudden move he smiled in frank warmth. “No,” he said, “don't tell me. I'll try to guess it from some of the things about you. You have Susan hair, long and fine and full of light. But your face is definitely Debby: pussycat nose. Your eyes, well, very exotic, Spanish I would say, like a girl's I knew once in Old Mexico, very Rosarita. …”