Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  “To hell with you, Dr. Goodykuntz!” Splendor yelled, and slammed his eyelids shut. Whether he meant the real or the fake was not clear.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Reinhart told Capek when they were in the corridor. “That guy can rot in jail so far as I care. Being somewhat gutless myself, I can’t stand anybody else who’s worse.” He didn’t know why Capek brought out this candor in him.

  They stopped at the desk and the patrolman, his belt toys tinkling, leaned over to throw his crusts in the wastebasket, which being full of resilient, crumpled paper, bounced them out again. Capek made a testy noise and crawled into the knee slot of the desk after his fugitive garbage, vanishing for a moment. So Reinhart addressed his concluding remarks to the surly gallery of wanted rogues on the wall above.

  “You see,” he complained, “I’m interested only in success.” As the criminals stared back unfeeling, out of the moment of truth in which the prison camera had trapped them, he realized that they were not.

  Chapter 9

  Untypically, Reinhart stuck to his resolve; he trafficked no more in Splendor’s problems, and even read with satisfaction in the suburban weekly that his friend had drawn four months’ imprisonment in the county jail. But he was never mean; he returned the turban to the costumer, and when his last mustering-out check came from the government, he cashed it and mailed an envelope full of greenbacks, registered under a false name, to the Mainwaring home on Mohawk Street. After all, his encouragement had caused Splendor to quit the job at Laidlaw’s Body Shop & Towing and hence lose the family source of income.

  Because of this quixotic act, Reinhart was penniless by April Fools’ Day, for neither had he earned another cent from real estate.

  “You ninny,” was what Genevieve Raven said to him that morning. “It hasn’t rained for a week, Claude’s gone out every day, leaving you here, and why?”

  “Why?” echoed Reinhart, who had begun to react erotically to her needling and had recently dreamed she was flogging him with a silk stocking stuffed with discarded lingerie.

  He had just run out and got them coffee. She drank hers with a nervous little flinch that both annoyed and intrigued him, and between sips put the wooden spoon into the paper cups and agitated the liquid counterclockwise.

  “Because,” she said, “it’s as clear as mud.” Meaning, rather, as glass, ice, cellophane, spring water, etc.: Genevieve either misunderstood clichés or purposely violated them, he couldn’t figure which. Thus she used “funny as a crutch” for something that really was comical. “Do you realize you haven’t got one cent out of him in a month? Your sixty-five for selling the Tenderloin was held back for the clothes you bought on his account at Gents’ Walk, the cost of which was actually fifty-two fifty, because he always gets a ten to fifteen knockdown there, and as I doubt if you know, that’s a very cheap price. If you scratch the sole of those shoes with a penknife, you will find they are largely paper. It’s crazy to me that a boy your age doesn’t take more pride in his apparel.”

  “How come I don’t remember you from high school?” asked Reinhart, who was sitting on the blunt fins of the radiator that ran below the front window.

  “Mmm,” Genevieve murmured, “so he’s rude too…. Why, that’s simple: I never went to your dopey place full of factory workers. We used to live in the Heights, and I went to Heights H.S. and took academic, and could have gone to college but wouldn’t for the world because Daddy refused to consider any of the nearby universities with their disgustingly low standards. Insisted on Smith, Bryn Mawr, et al., but I didn’t dare run away from certain responsibilities here.”

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, sympathetically. “You had to stay and help support—”

  Genevieve rose from the swivel chair with such fury that the pencil flew from her bob. “How dare you take such liberties? Daddy could buy and sell you and your whole family and never miss the small change it took for the transaction.”

  “Excuse me,” said Reinhart, who had vacantly got out his knife and scratched his soles, which looked like leather but it was hard to tell for sure. “I was admiring you. You’re certainly quick to take offense, but I suppose that’s natural in a girl who is so pretty and charming and bright.” He watched with scientific interest while her sharp little breasts quivered, her little butt twitched, and her cheeks blushed. She dashed off to the john.

  Reinhart had suddenly got the idea that he could seduce her, which made him too grow hot of skin. He threw some water on his face from the gurgling cooler, and dried himself with an olive-drab handkerchief.

  When Genevieve reappeared—certainly not with a background of flushing water; she used the restroom only for make-up and tears and never acknowledged its coarser conveniences; and with his typical consideration Reinhart managed at least twice a day to leave the office so she could take an unembarrassed pee, but doubted if she did; her modesty indeed aroused him—when Genevieve marched, like a little circus pony, back to her desk, Reinhart asked: “what should I do about Claude, then?” He made haste to conceal his GI handkerchief, as to which she had frequently attacked him (but why throw away a perfectly good square of cloth just because it wasn’t white?).

  “Honestly!” said she. “You’re just pitiful without a woman to tell you what to do.” She deposited her round bottom, tweed-covered at present, into the buttock-shaped depressions in her revolvable seat. “You go to Claude and demand to be put on a salary, that’s what.”

  “Sure will take a lot of guts, considering I never do any work.”

  “Oh my golly! You’re about as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.” Profligate with office supplies, she broke a new pencil before his eyes—he was leaning towards her across the desk—and squinted hers like a child. “Don’t you get the point of business, at all? It’s obligations … anybody ever tell you you had a funny face?”

  In delighted horror, he saw her slender fingers reaching for his nose and got a pronounced erection, to conceal which he strode rapidly into Claude’s office and shook a fist at the rubber plant.

  “Not like that!” Genevieve called. “Use a little sutt-let-ty once, will you? Like: ‘Reason will show that …’; ‘I have determined, Claude’; ‘Look here, Claude, fair is fair …’ Once he guarantees to pay you a salary, then he’ll have to give you work, see?”

  Reinhart drifted back relaxing. “He might just show me the door, and then what would I have?”

  A host of tiny lines advanced from Genevieve’s temples to the comers of her bright eyes; when she played mock-sweet she looked middle-aged. She was unattractive in this aspect, and knew it, as women always know everything about themselves—which is seldom, au fond, a real gain though tactically advantageous, for what they know is that one day they will lose their looks, while a man’s self-knowledge is limited to the harmless certainty that he will die. A vast difference, vas deferens, and it made Reinhart ache to introduce himself into Genevieve’s quick little body, for her own good.

  “Carlo Reinhart!” she said sarcastically. “You dear boy! How did you ever escape getting strangled in your cradle? I never knew a person before who didn’t have an aim in life, and it’s so exciting.”

  For some reason he was suddenly stung, and answered: “Yeah? It so happens that I just like to live, enjoying every moment as it comes along, if possible, and making the best of the bad ones. I don’t care about money or politics or religion or science, but just men and women, and then only the ones I know. I’ll never lose any sleep over how many Hindus die of scurvy this year. You know why? Because it’s not my fault they aren’t getting enough oranges. I’m particularly uninterested in the Negro problem.”

  “Well who is?” asked Genevieve. “You bring up such dumb things a person would think you didn’t have any bats in the belfry.” She began testily to ring the bell on her typewriter carriage again and again.

  “Ha!” said Reinhart. “If you only knew.” His psychiatric experience gave him a secret advantage over everybody.

  At that moment Claude sw
ept in from the street, bulled Reinhart aside, and without apology plunged into his office, shutting the door.

  “Go get him,” whispered Genevieve, who wore a vest of fake leopard skin and bared her teeth apropos of it.

  Reinhart was astonished at her ferocity over somebody else’s concerns. How had he ever come to float between the Scylla of business and the Charybdis of woman? Now for the millionth time he had to go and earn his manhood.

  He tiptoed to Claude’s door and drummed upon it with the soft balls of his fingers, looked back at Genevieve, saw her tigrish snarl, desperately turned the knob, and strode in across the beige broad-loom that felt like walking on meringue.

  “Bud,” Claude said to him before he reached the long blond desk, “bud, bud, buddy-bud, bud-bud, buddley, budget. Too bad, bud, but the budget beckons. How’s that for a slogan? Get what profit you can from it, bud, because I’m canning you, retroactive fourteen days. Check with G. Raven to see if you still owe us anything on them clothes. If not, goodbye and don’t forget your hat.”

  “I don’t wear one,” Reinhart admitted happily.

  “I know,” said the boss, tracing his little mustache with an incredibly slender finger, considering it issued from a puffy palm. “I know, bud. You ain’t worked out in none of a hundred ways, though I done all I could…. Bud! You’re dreaming!”

  A just charge, for at the moment Reinhart was gazing out the window upon the growing spring, in which he would wander free. A teen-aged maple, all knock-knees and buds, was waving at him from the edge of the gravel lot behind the office.

  “Now, bud, I’ll tell you what I’d do in your place,” Claude went on when Reinhart reluctantly turned back to him. “Kindly listeny-vous. Recall that slogan I put to you”—he threw his wrist in his face and consulted an enormous chronometer showing the date, the phases of the moon, the tides from Block Island to Cape Hatteras, and perhaps the time of day as well—“twenty-nine seconds ago…. Kindly repeat what I said twenty-nine seconds ago.”

  “Bud, buddley-bud …” Reinhart began.

  “No need for the overture!”

  “‘Too bad, bud, but the budget beckons,’” said Reinhart.

  Claude bounced up and pressed his assistant’s hand. “You see how easy it is when you try? Bud, I know I could make a man of you if I had time. You got the stuff, but you fight it. You say Yes, but you think No. Straighten out your thinking, bud. One morning lately I caught a fishy look around your gills that may have been the work of the Kings. Live clean, boy, and you’ll be a clean liver and have one. Laugh to show you get it, brother! Good, that’s more than enough. Stop it, bud! Sounds like you’re choking on a fishbone. Now if I was you and canned—though I never was, see, and why? Because I never worked for anybody else! Haha…. Bud! Knock off that laughing! … I would take that slogan down to Bauer Dairy Products in the city and peddle it to them for a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Reinhart frowned in puzzlement and repeated the slogan to himself.

  Claude read his lips and hooted derision. “Not just the way it was handed to you, bud. Make it your own, like: ‘Buy Bauer Butter, Betty, and Bake Better Batter.’ ‘Bark for Bauer, Bowser!’“

  “Billy Bones, Bridge Builder,” said Reinhart, brightly, “Begs for Bauer Butter.”

  Claude shook his round head. Today he wore a mocha-brown sports jacket and a polka-dot clip-on bowtie, fastened nonsymmetrically. “That’s narrative, bud, and won’t do.”

  “For Houses and Homes, Holler for Humbold!” Reinhart said.

  Claude squinted at him suspiciously and began to pace to and fro in spring oxfords of brown calf and tan suede. His soles were Swiss-cheese crepe, and the skirt of his jacket had three slits though its waist closed with only one button.

  “Golly, you sure like to fool, don’t you, bud? I believe you could stand there all day and gas in this vein. Tell me am I right?”

  Reinhart nodded. He was genuinely sorry he hadn’t worked out in real estate, without for a moment understanding why he had not. He felt as alien in America as he had in Europe, and it was silly to suppose he would make a hit in Asia even if he got a chance to go there: he had heard that the Japanese, for example, fertilized their vegetables with human excrement.

  Humbold sat down again, plucked up a pen, and ran it under his nose, as if it had a bouquet. Then he pounded his desk blotter with two fists carrying three rings.

  “Durn it, bud, you don’t feel no real humility before God Almighty. That takes the form of sarcasm and lack of drive. I’d say you were an atheist, didn’t I know your daddy and mom had sent you to Sunny School. But why don’t we ever see you at the Masons? What are you doing for your fellow man? ‘For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He writes not that you won or lost but how you played the game.’“

  In one of his desk drawers Claude found a wallet-sized card on which were printed the same sentiments, and on the other side a blurb for Humbold Realty. “Carry this at all times in your billfold, bud.” He skimmed it across the desktop to Reinhart, and sank both arms into the drawer. Shortly a heap of souvenirs rose before him high as his second chin: a 1946 calendar, mechanical pencil, plastic wallet, tin cigar-holder, lighter the size of a lipstick; a vial of Alphonse de Paris cologne, two pocket notebooks, a key chain with toy-Scottie charm, a Chinese back-scratcher, a combination nail file and corkscrew, a flashlight no larger than a cigarette; a cigarette big as a cigar, in a glass tube; a cigar big as a banana, in a kind of coffin of redwood; a miniature cedar barrel marked BOOTLEG ROOT BEER; and a rubber dog who lifted pneumatic ears when his tail was manipulated. Somewhere on each of these was the legend “See Humbold Realty.”

  Claude shoved the lot at Reinhart. “Take ‘em and blow, bud.” His eyes suddenly welled with tears, and he honked into a handkerchief that matched his tie. “Durn it, bud, there is a helplessness about you that gets me here.” He indicated his sternum. “I just can’t shove you out in the street, you’ll be run down like a rabbit.”

  Anticipating his being rehired, Reinhart grew desperate: “No, I won’t, Claude. My God, I was all through Europe in the war.”

  “Yes, but this is serious, bud. That’s what you just can’t get through your coconut. This is bidniss, not them silly games like plugging Fachists, or Commonists, whatever them Heinies was at the time, not to mention the goofy Japs, who had a good thing going in novelties and should of stuck to it instead of grabbing the Philistine Islands where there ain’t been a loose dollar since little David licked them with a peashooter, according to the Good Book. What’s your opinion of Paul, bud?”

  “Paul who?” Reinhart asked, his visions of liberty fading, his hand groping for the giant cigarette-under-glass.

  “Why, Paul the Epistle. Turns out he was a Jew who made tents. You would know that if you was a Mason, along with various other shenanigans. Ever think of improving the old mind? History ain’t the bunk, bud. Some of the finest bidnissmen ever lived were named the Phony Sheeans. Sounds micky, don’t it? … I can’t give you no more straight salary than twenty a week, and don’t try to bleed me for better. But I’ll pay you in green from the petty cash without writing your name on a payroll, so you can also draw another twenty in unemployment insurance and nobody the wiser. Now what happens is Vetsville is full of ex-servicemen who want to do bidniss with one of their own kind.”

  Claude rose, came to Reinhart, and began to stuff his protégé’s pockets with souvenirs. “Take ‘em, boy. But don’t let me catch you using the smokables.” He snatched the great cigarette from Reinhart’s hand. “Now as manager of Veterans’ Division, Humbold Realty, you will need wheels. What happens is the Caddy dealer, who owes me a favor, throws away his waiting list to furnish yours truly with a new four-door. Wait’ll you see it, bud! Wop Red, white sidewalls, Futuramic, and the radio’s got three speakers, one in the trunk so’s you can have music while you change a tire. Bud, come here, I want you to try on this desk for size.”

  He led Reinhart to his own swivel
chair and forced him into it.

  “How you feel in the catbird seat, boy? Spin it! … You know how it is with cars these days. I have to give that dealer enough to send his punk kid through college, and he’d sooner cut his throat than let you off without a trade-in. But I fought him, bud. No sirreee, I held onto my old Gigantic for my pal. No, fellow, don’t offer me eight hundred clams! That car goes to Bud!”

  “All right, Claude. What will it cost me?” Reinhart asked skeptically.

  Claude squeezed Reinhart’s shoulder. “Bud, during the gas rationing I never used that heap but to run my sainted mother to the Methodist covered-dish suppers. She used to sit there holding, God bless her, a casserole of cheese fondue, saying [he went into falsetto]: ‘Claudy, you’re goin’ fifteen m.p.h.! I won’t have it!’ So I’d back-throttle to ten.”

  “I just hope,” said Reinhart, “that my promotion doesn’t mean I’ll have to pay you a salary.” Claude’s chair was not that thrilling, considering that it would have to be given back when he agreed to buy the car. Nor was Reinhart exactly elated over his new post. He had begun to suspect that nine-tenths of every job however grand was humdrum. Not even Claude made sales every day; even Churchill exuded more sweat than blood and tears; and Michelangelo, he read in a popular weekly, had lain on his back four years to paint the Sistine ceiling. The problem was to survive that nine-tenths of banal drudgery. This was another color of horse from what he had described to the Negro audience as the dreariness they should love. What he had meant then was misery and what he said platitudinous: nobody need be told that unpleasantness was interesting: hence that audience were criminals and his parents were hypochondriacs.

  He emerged from his reflections to hear, rather than feel, Claude’s index finger tapping on his crown.

  “Oh bud!” the boss was calling. “Come back, bud. Face the music.” His initialed belt buckle was at the level of Reinhart’s eye: a great C, with a little H inside, giving priority, American style, to the Christian name, to private enterprise and rugged individualism.