Reinhart's Women

by Thomas Berger

  After some endearments he hung up. He had used the phone more in the current week than in the previous twelvemonth. No doubt the practice would continue if he went into show biz. He must cultivate the quick, sure style of Billy Burchenal....

  Who, an hour later, turned out to be a tall thin man of indeterminate age: i.e., his tight, curly hair was very light gray, yet his face, with a synthetic-looking orangey tan (but which must have been real, for why would a producer wear make-up?), looked hardly more than thirty-five. He wore a tieless blue shirt with epaulets and sat behind a desk that was strangely, but for two telephones, bare. The blue walls of his office, however, were crowded with certificates: awards apparently; citations of merit for public service, and the like.

  “Hope you don’t mind ruining your Saturday morning,” Burchenal said. “I come in then to get a little work done without being interrupted by that.” He pointed at the nearer phone. “Brainwork, I mean. I’ve been sitting here now trying to come up with a name for your spot, a catchy name for Debbie and Shep to say. You’d be surprised at how effective a name can be. We’ve always called it the Cook Spot, but that’s when it was the guest chefs. We need something to call attention to your unique contribution.”

  He had neither shaken Reinhart’s hand nor asked him to sit down. Burchenal himself was standing behind his desk.

  Reinhart said: “You know my real first name is not Carl, but Carlo.”

  “For God’s sake,” said Burchenal. “That’s perfect: Chef Carlo Cooks. What a perfect name! It’s foreign, but you’re all-American in looks. You won’t scare anybody. That’s what the viewers loved about you the other day—show you the letters if my secretary were here—you made it clear, and you made it look easy. They thank you for that. They know it isn’t really easy, but they are grateful to you for letting them lie to themselves. This can be a big first step for you, Carlo. There’s a tremendous turnover here. Faces change week by week. Most of them go on to bigger things. We’re monitored incessantly by the big networks. Despite what you might hear, the youngsters are a drug on the market. An older personality, who is furthermore a new face, can attract! There’s no doubt about it.”

  Burchenal’s style in person was notably different from his speedy, bare-details manner on the phone. Suddenly he made a humorless smile and flattened both hands on the desk top. “Now what we can pay, with a restricted budget of the kind we have, is—we don’t get prime-time commercial money, obviously, and the craft unions are ferocious. I mean, Carlo, you have to revise downward any idea of getting rich that early in the morning.” He ran a finger under his nose and looked sternly at Reinhart, this time meeting his eyes, though actually looking through them. “We can pay fifty per spot, and we’ll give you a spot every day unless exceptional circumstances arise: you know, like the Pope coming to town and we get him exclusively, or something.”

  Reinhart grunted.

  Burchenal said: “I talked to Greenwood this morning. I’m afraid nowadays you can’t get away with the kind of blatant promotion she would like, for example using a lot of things that are boldly labeled with trade names, and if the spot becomes a permanent feature, you’ll have to sever your official connection with Epicon: we can leave that in the gray area to begin with. We’ll see how things go.”

  “Then I’ll be only trying out at first?”

  Burchenal showed his palms. “That’s true of everybody, including me. No, I’m with you, Carlo, all the way, but think of life: nobody lives forever. That’s also true, in condensed form, of television. I think you’ve got tremendous potential, but I have to be careful. We’ll try you for a couple of weeks to start, O.K.?” Now and only now did he sit down.

  “My daughter told me to get an agent before I agreed to anything,” said Reinhart. He half expected Burchenal to be offended by this statement, and added, apologetically: “She’s a professional model.”

  But the producer nodded in agreement. “That’s essential. You also will have to join AFTRA.”

  “The performers’ union? Gosh.”

  Burchenal stood up again and leaned across the desk to offer a handshake. “I hope to see your man on Monday then. But can I assume meanwhile that we have a deal in spirit?”

  Reinhart shook with him.

  The producer said: “I’ve got a personal motive in all this: the lady I live with could use a few cooking lessons. Jesus! She can burn water.”

  “Then take a turn at the stove yourself,” said Reinhart. “You’d probably amaze yourself. It’s a thrill when something turns out well.”

  Burchenal squinted at him. “Cooking as therapy?”

  “I don’t care much for the term. Having the natural need and the ability to make something doesn’t have to be justified. Of all the things that have been said to be exclusively human—thinking, which can’t be proved one way or the other; use of tools, but doesn’t a simple-minded chicken make a tool of the gravel he takes into his crop?; laughing, but people who have owned pets for many years swear their furry friends can grin at those who can see—of all the activities of human beings, there is one thing that they alone, in all the world, do, and that is: cook the food they eat.”

  Burchenal said: “Carlo, you’re a philosopher.”

  “Naw,” said Reinhart. “I’m better than that! I’m a cook.”

  Burchenal repeated that he wanted to see Reinhart’s agent on Monday and predicted that Chef Carlo Cooks would begin a week later.

  When Reinhart got back to the apartment house, he stopped off in the lobby to collect the mail, if any. The box yielded a utility bill and a circular announcing the opening of still another supermarket in yet another local shopping mall. In the past he had been wont to study the latter sort of announcement for bargains in short ribs, pork shoulder, Florida grapefruit, etc., and would tear out the redeemable coupons, with an eye to saving a few pennies for Winona—though if she caught him at this practice, she would fondly denounce him for it.

  Dammit, he would miss his daughter, with whom he had lived for all her twenty-five years on earth!

  He boarded the elevator. As the doors closed he lowered the hand which held the mail, and a blue envelope slipped from a fold in the supermarket circular which had concealed it and fell to the floor of the car. It was addressed to him and its stamp had been cancelled yesterday. But by now the elevator had reached the fourth floor. He went into the apartment, threw the bill and the circular on the telephone table, and, strolling through the living room to the window that looked down on the river, opened the blue envelope with his thumbnail.

  Dear Mr. Reinhart [he read],

  First, can you forgive me for not having the courage to make this apology either in person or on the telephone? Notice that I am apologizing for even the manner of my apology, which is a compounding of my habitual style, which is boring even to me, and what must it be to anyone else? I am an utter and contemptible fraud. I am not the daughter of the owner of this house. I work at a dreary job of no distinction, and otherwise I read a lot. I hardly ever drink anything containing alcohol. Therefore it would not be strange that several glasses of beer would make me obnoxious. But what is humiliating to remember is that at the time of my prevarication I had had nothing whatever to drink. I don’t know how to atone for my conduct this afternoon except by promising to avoid you in future. I am not being false when I say you are the finest man I have ever known and that I shall remain in your debt.

  Yours respectfully,

  EDITH MULHOUSE

  This was written in black ink on the blue paper, in a fastidious, yet graceful hand.

  Reinhart refolded the letter and put it on the coffee table. He went to his liquor cabinet. Champagne was the drink of celebration, but he had none at hand. Looking through the bottles, he came upon the good bourbon he had bought for Grace, which had gone untouched that day, only two weeks before, when she had come for brunch. Could anything be more appropriate for him to drink now than two fingers of Jim Beam? Did he not owe all his success to his
daughter’s lover? He brought a tumbler and some ice from the kitchen.

  During Reinhart’s lifetime the world had changed so thoroughly that were a Rip Van Winkle to have awakened after a sleep of any twenty years he would be able to make use of none of the experiences, convictions, or even faculties in his possession at the moment he shut his eyes.

  While sipping the bourbon, slumped on the couch, shoes off and stockinged feet propped on the coffee table, he began to get hungry, this time for a very particular and celestially simple menu: red meat, yellow sauce, golden potatoes, green vegetable, red wine. The best way to get this right was to make it oneself: top round of beef, sauce béarnaise, julienne potatoes, undercooked green beans, and as big a Burgundy as you had the money to buy. A chunk or hunk of meat, to be sliced thin and served in overlapping strips napped with sauce, and not an individual steak to be attacked whole. But maybe rather Bordelaise sauce? But that would require shallots, if you could find them, and a marrow bone, and he had forgotten whether he still had on hand, in the frozen state, a supply of the jellified essence of beef stock called demi-glacé, which he liked to use in the brown sauces. The green beans should be left whole except for the tips and plunged into as large a volume of boiling water as could be managed, taken out when still crunchy...

  He picked up Edie’s letter and reread it. Naw: he remembered her in the supermarket. He had better go shopping alone.

  CHAPTER 19

  NEXT MORNING REINHART FELT an urge to acknowledge with gratitude that rise in his fortunes that could not be narrowly ascribed to Grace Greenwood, that part which was divine or at any rate not rational—for example, Buxton’s collapse could not have been foreseen—and not belonging to a sensible faith which offered graven images for this purpose, e.g., a Golden Calf, he turned towards the humanitarian effort.

  Unless crops could be sown and brought to harvest in a fortnight, it was unlikely that Brother Valentine’s flock at Paradise Farm had any more to eat now than when Reinhart and Blaine had made their visit.

  Reinhart now got out the strip of brown paper from his wallet and dialed the out-of-town number.

  “Center Café!”

  “Marge? Carl Reinhart—I had your chili the day before yesterday?”

  “My God,” shouted Marge. “I never thought I’d really hear from you.”

  “Here I am. I’m going to be on morning TV starting in a week.”

  “I’ll sure be watching, if you tell me when and where.”

  “Sure,” said Reinhart, “and I’m proceeding with the idea about marketing the chili. But what I’m calling about at the moment is, do you suppose you could make up several gallons of the chili by say eleven this morning? Along with an appropriate amount of the pinto beans and rice?”

  “It’s already simmering,” said Marge. “Boy, you must really like that stuff.”

  “Oh, the order will be take-out. I guess I’d better organize some big containers. I doubt that you keep any gallon-size on hand, do you?”

  “I’ll have my husband pick up some at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the mall.”

  “The police chief?”

  “He’ll run them over in the cruiser, so don’t you bother.”

  In the basement garage Reinhart saw Edie’s yellow Gremlin in her slot across the way. As it happened, last night he had cooked and eaten his celebratory dinner alone. He had phoned her several times throughout the early evening, but there was no answer. He had an impulse now to slip a friendly note under her windshield wiper, but decided against doing so lest the look of the folded paper, as she approached the car, give her a fright. Complaint? Obscene letter?

  When Reinhart arrived in Brockville the main street was somewhat busier than it had been on his earlier visit. Persons were coming and going at the delicatessen, and only one parking space offered itself in front of the Center Café. Four vehicles were at the curb in that block, two of them pickup trucks. Sunday was an active time out here.

  Inside the restaurant were six or eight male customers, most of them at the counter, though two heavy-set middle-aged men in suits and ties were having a solemn and what might even be seen as a conspiratorial discussion in the remotest of the booths: a romantic interpretation might present this as skulduggery-hatching by two provincial politicians.

  Marge was serving a hot sandwich to a muscular young fellow across the back of whose chino shirt some trade name was embroidered in red.

  “Looks good,” said Reinhart. “Is that roast pork in its own gravy?”

  Marge colored slightly when she saw him. “I got your order all ready to go. All’s I have to do is fill the buckets with the chili, which I’ve kept hot on the stove in back, and I got the rice and beans too.”

  “I thought you might not be open on Sunday,” said Reinhart. “But I see you have quite a good business.”

  “Oh, sure,” Marge replied, wiping her hands on a wet cloth she found beneath the counter. “You’d be surprised how many people work on Sunday. I don’t get much of the Sunday-dinner family trade that my folks used to have though. Families now head mostly for the fast-food places.”

  “But I was thinking about you doing everything here yourself. You’re open seven days?”

  “Close early on Mondays, though,” said Marge. “I guess I’m crazy, but it’s been a tradition to keep the Center Café open. Maybe that’s gonna change soon, though.”

  “Hey, Marge,” said the recent recipient of the hot sandwich, “when do I get my mashed potatoes and applesauce?”

  “Lenny, you’re too heavy as it is,” said Marge, shrugging an apology to Reinhart. She seized a little bowl and, using a spring-levered ice-cream scoop, filled it with potatoes and then dampened them with more of the gravy, which by its light-brown color suggested it was the real stuff, from an actual pork roast and not a can.

  He saw the roast itself, or one of them, on the steam table. “That’s fresh ham, isn’t it?” he asked Marge.

  She was filling another small bowl with what would certainly seem to be, from its spicy fragrance and coarse texture, homemade applesauce. “These bums needn’t think they’re getting loin for these prices.”

  Lenny, tucking into his sandwich with a fork, smirked at this jibe. A name was embroidered over his left pocket: interestingly enough, it was not “Lenny,” but rather “Bill.”

  Reinhart said: “They’re lucky. Loin doesn’t have nearly as much flavor.” He followed Marge, on her beckon, through the swinging doors into the large old kitchen: a very clean and even spacious place. A bony man of indeterminate age, aproned and with sleeves rolled high, was washing dishes at some sinks on the far wall. Nearer was an enormous stove in black metal trimmed in shining steel—with none of the white porcelain of home appliances: this was the real thing.

  “French chefs call their stove a ‘piano,’” said Reinhart. “It must be a thrill to play a tune on that one.”

  “A lot of folks would think it’s plain hard work,” said Marge, “but I enjoy feeding people.” She seemed a bit melancholy.

  “I see you have some help anyway with the dishwashing.”

  Marge lumped her tongue on one side of her mouth. “We could use a machine. Bob does a good job, though.” She paid the compliment in a loud voice. Then, with Bob’s back still turned, she pantomimed to Reinhart the lifting of a bottle and the gulping at its throat.

  Two capacious steel stockpots sat on the stove top. Marge took one of the candy-striped Kentucky Fried Chicken tubs from a stack on a vintage butcher’s block (with side-slots for an assortment of black-handled, gray-bladed knives in all sizes and a surface that remembered a history of the cleaving of bloody meat: things like this were poetry to Reinhart).

  “I’ll fill the buckets now, if you are in a hurry to get going. Or would you want to try the fresh-ham special first?” Again he saw her color slightly. She was still a bit shy with the big-city big shot she believed him to be.

  Someone out at the counter was shouting for her: “Hey, Marge!”

&
nbsp; “To hell with them,” said she.

  “Get out there and take care of your people,” said Reinhart. “I can do this. And I really would like to eat here, but I think I’d better get this chili to where I’m taking it, or they won’t have it in time for lunch.”

  By the time he had ladled three buckets full she was back.

  She flipped her thumb at the swinging doors. “My husband’s back there right now, in the booth, talking with a gentleman who wants to buy this place.”

  Reinhart put down his ladle. He felt as though personally wounded. “You don’t mean it. Not the Center Café?” It was perhaps an absurd excess of emotion with regard to an obscure eatery he had never seen until the day before yesterday. But it was already precious to him.

  “Fact is,” said Marge, “I’ve been losing money for some years. If I raise the prices too much I’ll lose the customers I’ve got. But my costs have more than doubled over the past ten years. I’m not getting any younger. Let’s face it, the place has only sentimental value for me.”

  “‘Only?’” Reinhart asked indignantly. “What’s worth more?”

  “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I will miss the old joint.” Marge wiped her hands on a damp cloth and yelled in the direction of the dishwasher: “Hey, Bob! I can use some glasses.”

  He turned, showing a nose like a berry, and said: “Sure, Marge.” He began to find tumblers in the soapy liquid before him and rinse them with hot water in the adjoining sink.

  “What’s this guy want to do with it?” Reinhart asked. “Have his own restaurant?”

  “Storage space.” Marge got a bucket and began to fill it with the pinto beans and rice from the other stockpot. “Cheaper to buy a place like this than to build something or even, would you believe it, cheaper than renting over a couple of years. I got quite a lot of space all told. There’s a storeroom out back, and of course the second floor is empty: used to be an apartment where we all lived when I was a kid. He’s got a business over at the mall: home improvement, paint and wallboard and stuff, and has to keep a big inventory.”