Reinhart's Women

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart could see the little set, through the open door of the shack where the attendant sat between arrivals and departures. Debbie was back on the screen. It was hard to believe he had just left her company. He realized that he had never got around to washing off his make-up.

  “I knew you right away,” said the attendant. “That’s what TV gives you: a high recognition potential.” He went, with a jouncing stride that defied his limp, to fetch the car.

  Reinhart suddenly understood that as a celebrity he would be expected to tip generously.

  CHAPTER 14

  REINHART WANTED TO WATCH the Six O’Clock News, though he would have to disturb Helen Clayton to reach the set: she was lying heavily against him. Which was by no means unpleasant, but he believed he owed it to the memory of Jack Buxton to see the actor’s videobituary.

  When he was younger he would have probably succeeded both in missing the news and offending his partner. But for every year past fifty, perhaps in compensation for the weakening of the physical powers, one has more emotional self-reliance.

  “Helen,” he said, patting her bare shoulder, “I want to turn on the TV.”

  She groaned. “That’s flattering.” But she grinned then and rolled away.

  Reaching from the bed, Reinhart found his boxer shorts amidst the clothing on a nearby chair, and he got into them while in the act of leaving the horizontal position. He was still deft at that trick, though he was practicing it for the first time in a while. He did not like to climb from bed with a woman and walk across the room, displaying his bare behind to her: it was his foible.

  “No,” he said to Helen, “I just want to see what they have to say about Jack Buxton’s death.”

  “Jack Buxton died?” she asked, with what appeared to be deep feeling.

  “You remember him?”

  “I was wild about him as a kid.”

  “He was older than that,” said Reinhart. “His era was during and even before the War.”

  “He was still plenty big, late Forties, early Fifties. Hey, you just trying to find out my age?”

  Reinhart snorted and said: “I trust Al’s TV set works.”

  They had finally made it to Al’s Motel. Reinhart had told her about his television appearance but had said nothing about Buxton’s death: the two experiences had nothing in common, were actually at odds.

  The picture came on, big, beautiful, and in vibrant color. Actually the set looked brand new. But the plumbing seemed to date from the pre-Buxton age: the toilet had an incessant hiss, and the rusty stall shower was surely Navy surplus (perhaps ex-dreadnought, conflict of 1917-18).

  The news was already under way. The story from the early-morning report had since reached what probably would be its conclusion: the man who had manacled himself to the lamppost at a downtown intersection had been freed by a young boy who owned a similar set of toy handcuffs and thus was privy to the secret of their springing. The episode was revealed to have had no ideological reference: two friends had bet on the outcome of a basketball game; he who lost must so exhibit himself.

  “Honestly,” Helen said from bed, holding the sheet up across half her large bosom, “some people are so childish.”

  Reinhart felt a draft on his bare back. He returned to bed and pulled his part of the sheet up. It was quite warm under there, no doubt because of the heat exuded by Helen’s substantial body.

  “Here.” Helen handed him a motel tumbler that clinked with ice.

  He smelled carefully at its brim to determine whether it was the one with plain soda. Helen had brought along the Chivas purchased the day before. She had mixed her own with Sprite.

  On the screen at the moment was the two-man team that held down the desk on the news: one of them a lively fop and the other a kindly, folksy sort.

  It was the former who said: “And now for today’s Short Takes. Bread: local bakery drivers on strike. Lead: it’s in the paint that flakes off public-school walls, says PTA leader. Fed: -up, says Oak Hills bus driver, who lets off passengers, then sends vehicle into the river. Dead: former Hollywood great Jack Buxton, at the age of seventy-two.” Without prelude a commercial began to unfold.

  “Jesus,” Reinhart said, swallowing Scotch-and-soda, “that’s all?”

  “I guess he wasn’t that big any more,” said Helen.

  Affectionate soul, she had moved over to touch him again with the entire length of her body, and he could not remember when whiskey had tasted so delicious. Reinhart had an unalloyed sense of well-being. He was alive and Buxton was dead. Well, he was guiltless, had done what he could to save the actor’s life. Still, it made a man wonder.

  “Honey,” Helen said, stirring. “Put down the drink.”

  “I’d better turn off the TV.” He would have got out of bed had she permitted.

  “Why? Let ’em watch!” She had a laugh that he was always pleased to hear. She also had a capacity that could not be believed, considering that she also had a husband and a regular lover.

  “Today’s Feature Close-Up,” said the less dapper of the two newsmen on the screen, “by Field Reporter Molly Moffitt.”

  “That noise really does distract me,” Reinhart said. “I better switch it off.” He started to get up. He had to feel whether he was still wearing his underpants.

  A beautiful young black woman came onto the television screen. Behind her was a familiar-looking farmhouse, beyond which stood a recognizable barn.

  “We’re here at Paradise Farm,” said the young woman into her little club of a microphone. “What’s Paradise Farm? That’s what we asked its founder and spiritual leader, Brother Valentine.”

  Raymond Mainwaring appeared in close-up. “Paradise Farm is first of all an idea,” said he. “On the surface it might be perceived as an experiment in communal living, and to be sure, it is that, but—”

  “Carl,” Helen said.

  “Excuse me, Helen, I know that fellow.”

  “You know everybody on the news tonight.” She spoke with some annoyance.

  Raymond had continued: “...combining in one effort all the various needs: clean living, nourishing food, brotherhood, security, and a relationship with the Higher Power, whatever you choose to call Him or It: God, Allah, the Great Spirit, or the vision of pantheism.”

  “Could God be a woman?” asked Molly Moffitt, in close-up. She had a flawless face, the color of coffee heavily creamed.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Brother Valentine.

  “And how would you describe your own posture?” Molly asked, in her accentless voice. “Are you priest, preacher, rabbi, monk—?”

  “I’m but a servant,” said Raymond. “I’m the least of the least.”

  Molly interrupted him by merely moving the mike to her own lips. She seemed never for an instant to forget that she possessed that power. “You’re not saying you’re an Uncle Tom?”

  Raymond scowled at her. “I don’t dignify such terms by even acknowledging that they exist. I’ve got important things to do, missions to carry out...” He was getting the wind up, in a quiet, intense way.

  “Carl,” said Helen to Reinhart’s back: he was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Raymond was continuing: “...better to do than talk about pigment!”

  Molly Moffitt was absolutely unfazed by his passion. She said: “But were you not a militant in the Sixties? A leader of a group called the Black Assassins? Did you not advocate the use of force and violence against the white power-structure? Did you not come pretty close to asking for a racial war?”

  Raymond closed his eyes as the microphone came back to him. “All memory of the past was expunged as of that moment at which I was reborn: ten twenty-seven A.M., on April third, nineteen seventy-five.”

  Molly Moffitt reclaimed the mike. “But just what is it you do here, Brother Valentine? Is this really a farm? I mean, do you grow things? Do you raise livestock?”

  Raymond nodded gravely. “Indeed it is a farm, and we are farmers. We are dairymen too, and
carpenters, painters, roofers, whatever we need to be. We shall, with God’s help, be self-sustaining.

  “Utopian, is that it?” asked Molly. “What kind of people are here?” She addressed this question to the television audience. “What manner of person seeks this refuge? Let’s go inside the house.”

  The scene changed. Reinhart saw the empty ground-floor rooms he had himself walked through ten days before.

  An unseen Molly demanded: “Why is there no furniture here? Is that because of some religious belief?”

  The camera came around in front of Raymond for his answer: “At the moment we do not possess any furniture for these rooms. We’re rich only in faith.”

  Behind Reinhart, Helen groaned. “Come on, Carl, that’s one of those stupid documentaries. What do you want to watch that for?”

  “I told you, I know that guy. In fact, I visited that farm recently.”

  “Looks like one of those cults,” said Helen. “I don’t know what a man like you would want with that kind of thing.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said he. “My son was curious and—”

  Molly, Raymond, and the camera now reached the big old farmhouse kitchen, where it looked as if the same people seen by Reinhart were still in place along the counters or at the table.

  Helen said to Reinhart’s spine: “Your friend is pretty stuck on himself, isn’t he? That’s no criticism, but...”

  “He’s stuck on something,” said Reinhart. “I’m not sure what. He interests me. I knew his father, who was a great idealist and would have liked Jack Buxton’s films, for example.”

  The camera had followed Molly and Raymond out the back door. They proceeded towards the barn.

  “What are the criteria for acceptance here?” Molly was asking, and before Brother Valentine could answer she amplified her question: “I guess what I’m trying to do is find out what makes this community tick in an overall way. In other words, have you collected together for a religious purpose, primarily, or is it ecology, or are you, Brother Valentine, AKA Captain Storm, AKA Raymond Mainwaring still, underneath it all, a political animal?”

  Molly stopped at the door of the barn. “Or,” she asked blandly, “or are you, as some have charged, in it just for the bucks?” She looked into the camera. “A provocative question, a provocative man! Brother Valentine, the spokesman for the communal project called Paradise Farm. Watch tomorrow evening for his answer to this question and for the conclusion of our report. This is Molly Moffitt for the Channel Five news team.”

  The picture switched back to the pair at the desk in the studio.

  “She’s part white, don’t you think?” asked Helen.

  Reinhart said: “Um. I suspect from her remarks that Paradise Farm has been the subject of a muckraking investigation of the kind that has become fashionable in recent years. Probably one of the newspapers, with nothing better to do. Poor Raymond. Though of course for all I know he is a crook.” He realized he was talking to himself. He extinguished the TV set and went to do his best to answer Helen’s remarkable need, unprecedented in his memory. She really deserved a stripling, not a graybeard.

  When they had concluded their commerce, she abruptly hopped from bed, plunged in and out of the quaint rusty cubicle that stood for a shower, toweled, dressed, and picked up her purse from the rickety table near the door.

  Reinhart was both relieved and slightly hurt to have witnessed the foregoing sequence. “You’re on your way now, I take it?”

  “Got to,” said Helen. “It’s almost suppertime.”

  “Gee, past it! You’d better have a good excuse.”

  “Don’t have to go far,” said she, putting the bottle of Scotch into the pocket of her trench coat, where it bulged conspicuously. “Everything’s O.K.” She went to the door. “So I’ll call you, Carl, huh?”

  “I’m certainly glad you did today,” Reinhart said, stretching down to his toes. He still lay supine in bed, under the sheet. “Your call came at just the right time. I was feeling a letdown after my TV appearance. It’s really an odd experience: there you are, before thousands of people one moment, and the next you’re all alone. I thought I did a pretty fair job, if I do say so myself, and Debbie and the studio people seemed to also, but then you go home to complete silence.” But once again he was thinking of himself. “Thanks, Helen, you’re really a nice person... Say, don’t I get a good-bye kiss?”

  Helen kissed him and while so doing ran her hand down his body. It did not escape his notice that until only recently her performance would have been seen as infringing on the masculine, whereas his own... After she left, he rose and before the mirror performed various body-builder’s poses: face overlooking distended biceps, forearm, wrist, and hand in the swan’s-neck formation; then the full-front wedge, with prominent deltoids; then the hands joined at the crotch, trapezius muscles sloping between shoulder and neck. By God, he still was far from being a wreck. In high school and the early time in college, pre-Army, Reinhart had religiously used the products of the York Barbell Co., York, Pa., and for several years his principal heroes had been not of the tribe of Jack Buxton, but rather the extraordinarily swollen men depicted in the York weight-lifting magazine, Strength and Health, fellows who had to turn sideways to penetrate the standard doorway. His fifty-four-year-old body had not altogether forgotten this period of its history, and one already had had, after all, a few years in which to practice stoicism with regard to the relentless degeneration in muscle tone. And Helen had commended him as lover. No doubt she was merely being polite, but what the hell, it was anyhow nice to hear.

  He unflexed as he felt the first suspicions of a crick-in-the-neck. The fact was that no middle-aged body, not even one well maintained, could do better than just get by. There were laws that could not be abrogated by state of mind.

  Checking out formally at Al’s was not done. One merely walked away, leaving the key in the door. Nor had Reinhart himself checked in. Helen had performed that task for him. That she was obviously a habitué of the motel did not bother him any more than, presumably, it bothered Al, if indeed there was one. Helen was a fine figure of a woman: he was not required to assess her beyond that point.

  After taking an inordinately lengthy shower for such wretched facilities—indeed, the hot water ran out before long, and finally even the cold dwindled to a staccato drip—Reinhart drove home in Winona’s Cougar, which had been his all day, and which in fact would be his so long as she stayed with Grace, who had an extra vehicle. It occurred to her father that it had been Blaine, really, who managed things in such a fashion that Winona had finally been obliged to move in with her lover, an action which until now she had been reluctant either to take or to forget about.

  Where was Blaine? And what of Mercer and the boys? How long could they continue to live at the apartment—by which question Reinhart actually meant: how long could he stand it? Because, by all appearances, they were coping very well. ... Yet he had been on TV for almost ten minutes that morning, and later on Helen Clayton, his junior by a dozen or fifteen years, had praised his performance in bed!

  Therefore it was in a hearty, Elizabethan mood that he drove home, and with ebullience that he opened the apartment door to join his grandfamily, whom he had by no means neglected to go and roll in lust with a doxy. Far from it! He had that afternoon roasted a lovely plump chicken, with butter and thyme in its cavity and bastings on the quarter-hours, and made a potato salad with a vinaigrette of olive oil and shallots. Remembering his own childhood, he believed that what had pleased him most when eating elsewhere than at his own home had not merely been the dessert as simple sweet course, but rather as an entertaining, even surprising event, e.g., when the ice cream was dosed for once not with Hershey’s chocolate syrup but with jam made from greengage plums or pulverized hard candy, or the Jell-O came to the table as turned out of a ring mold, the central well filled with high-peaked whipped cream and surmounted by a maraschino cherry. (These events had never taken place at his own home: his mother
disapproved of such caprices.)

  Therefore he had applied thought to the dessert he would leave for the boys and of course for Mercer too, if applicable. It must be something that, like the chicken, could be eaten cold to advantage. He decided upon a splendid dacquoise, in which layers of meringue alternated with a filling compounded of butter, sugar, and almond extract, and the whole structure was eventually shrouded in sweetened whipped cream and dusted with powdered almonds. There was no mammal who could turn away from such a confection until it had been devoured: one could stand on that truth.

  He prepared as well a platter of choice crudités: bright cherry tomatoes, sticks of jade pepper, serene cucumber, stanch celery, and romaine allowed to stay in the long whole leaf. (As a boy he had hated salads made from iceberg lettuce, a gnarled and ugly plant that seemed to be made solely for packaging. And what fun it would have been to choose the raw elements and eat them from the fingers.)

  All these lovely things he had left in the fridge, wrapped and in fact identified by Scotch-taped label, and on the kitchen counter lay a prominent notice addressed to whom it concerned among his guests (for either of the boys might be treated as being at least as responsible as their mother): the menu was printed in capitals, for the convenience of those who could read at all, big or small, in the order in which the dishes should be attacked, which was optional, but it was required that each of them know that the chef left his best wishes for a good appetite and, it went without saying, his affection.

  Now nobody was home when he got there, and when he went into the kitchen and saw that aside from the filthy coffee cup on the counter, three cigarette butts in its saucer, there were no dirty dishes in evidence, he understood, before opening the refrigerator, that his guests had not touched the supper he had provided, for not only was Mercer incapable of washing a plate, she could not manage even to scrape one, still less insert it into the dishwasher below this very counter.