Reinhart's Women

by Thomas Berger

Reinhart smiled. “You can?”

  “Surely. With chocolate.”

  Reinhart raised an eyebrow.

  “Unsweetened, of course,” said Raymond. “As in mole poblano.”

  “That’s interesting,” Reinhart said. “I think chili con carne is supposed to have been invented in Texas, but it was certainly based on Mexican cuisine, so what you’re suggesting makes sense.”

  “Oh, it’s not my own fantasy. It’s a standard on the menu at the Ten Gallon Hat. I cooked there for three or four years.”

  “The restaurant downtown? I’ve never eaten there.” Reinhart was excited. “I’ve got this project in mind, buying an interest in an old existing small-town kind of restaurant in Brockville and keeping the good old stuff on the menu, but adding terrific things from other cuisines, all fine dishes, nothing fake, but very ambitious when we wanted to be. We could in fact do anything we wanted. There’s a wonderful woman who owns it; it’s been in her family for years. She’d retain half ownership. I’d want her to. I don’t know anything about the restaurant business.”

  Raymond was not being ignited.

  Reinhart suspected why. “Oh,” he said, “what I meant was, if this thing gets going, would you like to be associated with it?” Raymond looked somewhat aggrieved. “I don’t mean to offend you. What I meant was, if you didn’t have immediate plans to start another religious colony.”

  Raymond shrugged. “I’d like to get back to cooking, in fact. I think it’s probably the best profession for someone of my personality. But, frankly, what I don’t care for is going in to some nice simple little place in the country and transforming it into a chic eatery designed to attract adulterers and sodomites from the city.”

  “All God’s children have to eat,” Reinhart said. “Look here: if I’m not able to work something out, this restaurant is going to be sold to some local businessman for storage space—after forty or fifty years of being open seven days a week. Did you ever hear of the gangster John Dillinger? He ate there!”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Raymond, “you want to put a bronze plaque on his booth, and submachine guns will make up a prominent part of the decor?”

  “I think you’re ribbing me now, Raymond.”

  The younger man stared at the barn for a moment. “Is this offer in atonement?”

  “Atonement?” Reinhart scowled. “What does that mean? Something about your father?”

  Raymond turned his head back. “Something to do with your son.”

  “Well, what?”

  “You don’t really know that he was one of the backers of Paradise Farm?”

  Reinhart shook his head slowly but with weight. “No, certainly not. But he did say, that time we visited, something about his church being a sponsor. Of course, one must understand that Blaine is a fanatical believer in the religion of money.” Suddenly he felt defiant, and he stared at Raymond with spirit. “But am I my son’s keeper? After all, did he not suggest that I myself move in here?”

  Raymond said: “At that time there was really going to be a Paradise Farm. I don’t accuse him of deliberate deceit, and it doesn’t seem to be the case that he and his partners broke the law.”

  “It was just a crappy thing to do,” Reinhart said. “No, a downright lousy thing to do. But look here, Raymond, maybe we can get this other project going: Paradise Restaurant: the idea, anyhow. I don’t think Marge would want to change the existing name, which is classic: the Center Café. Isn’t that great?”

  CHAPTER 20

  WHEN REINHART RETURNED FROM the country and saw the little yellow Gremlin still in place he tried to reach Edie by telephone. He tried several times again throughout the succeeding two hours, but there was no answer. He began to worry about her.

  He first went down to the lobby mailboxes to find the number of her apartment and then to the fifth floor, West wing. He had rarely been in that section of the building, which, extending really towards the northwest while the river at this point wended south-westwardly, was to some degree the Other Side of the Tracks.

  He found 516W and pushed the button. ... No response. He drummed upon the metal face of the door.

  “God damn it,” cried a petulant voice within.

  That certainly did not sound like Edie. Reinhart shrank in embarrassment: he had obviously got the wrong apartment.

  But then the door opened and there, in bathrobe and traditionally toweled hair, stood his friend. On seeing him, Edie gasped and actually began to hurl the door shut in his face. It seemed a reflex action. She caught herself, stepped behind the jamb, and bending her body so that Reinhart could see only her towel-framed face, was probably about to apologize.

  But he spoke first: “I’ve been calling you since last night. At first I thought you were out, but your car’s been in the garage all day.”

  She flushed within the environment of white terry cloth. “Maybe something’s wrong with my phone.”

  Reinhart grinned at her. “You sounded pretty rough just now, when you didn’t know who was pounding on the door. I think I have just seen your sweet side.” She grew pinker. This was the day when he made the girls blush, but he was not complaining. He decided to go for even more color. “You look very pretty in that outfit.”

  But this seemed a gaffe. She paled quickly. Obviously he was deficient in eloquence when standing in a corridor and addressing this kind of young lady, though he had been telling the truth. She was a nice big pink girl wrapped in white.

  But she was saying solemnly: “Last night I wouldn’t have been here, because I was at work.”

  “On Saturday night?” Reinhart nodded to take the harsh edge off his incredulity. “Where do you work, Edie?”

  She answered in that ingenuous or ingenuous-seeming style in which a statement is made a question: “A bowling alley?”

  Reinhart said: “Look, I’m sorry to have bothered you. I see you’re doing your hair or whatever. I just wanted to check on whether you were—”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” she suddenly asked boldly. “I work nights as a cashier in a bowling alley. The pay’s good, since it’s hard to get people, even men, to work at night. That gives me my days to myself. And my hours are the kind you wouldn’t know where they went anyway: five to midnight.”

  Reinhart shifted from one foot to another. “Well, as I say, I was just trying to get in touch to...” It seemed bad taste here to mention her apologetic letter, standing in the hallway, speaking to a young woman wrapped, even unto her head, in terry cloth.

  Edie said: “I don’t work tonight. Sunday and Monday are my weekend.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Of course, a lot of bowling goes on on both those days, but I’ve got to get off sometime.”

  “That’s true,” said Reinhart. He was beginning to feel stupid, but he was as yet unable to do anything decisive. “Probably you’ll be doing a lot of reading, then.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You mentioned you did a lot of reading.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes, that’s true.”

  “I used to be more of a reader when I was a young fellow,” said he. “I got away from it in later years, I don’t really quite know why. Unless you count cookbooks.” He exposed the palms of both hands. “When you’ve lived a long time, you find it hard to explain where the years have gone and what you did in them and why and why not.”

  Edie lifted her shoulders and let them fall, while smiling sympathetically. Winona too was invariably in sympathy with him, but she was his daughter. There were more differences than similarities. He thought here of Winona because he was trying to make some sense of his interest in Edie.

  “I’ll tell you why I especially wanted to get in touch with you last night: I wanted to invite you to have dinner with me, to celebrate my getting a regular job on TV.”

  Her reaction to this was to disappear for a moment back of the door, perhaps to collect herself. After all, she had been the only person in his circle of women, other than Genevieve (who had naturally i
nsulted him on the matter), to have watched his triumph in replacing Jack Buxton, or at least to tell him of it.

  When she returned to view her eyes were pink. She thrust a hand out of her robe. “Congratulations.”

  Her fingers were almost as long as his own and her palm almost as broad, but her hand was virtually weightless. The flesh of women is not as dense; in addition Edie was too shy to insinuate the least movement in her hand; it was up to him to do with it as he wished.

  He shook it gently and returned it to its owner. “Thanks. I realize now that you wouldn’t have been able to accept the dinner invitation anyhow.” He supposed he was smiling foolishly. “I hope you enjoy your day off.” He began to leave. He could not explain why, more than four decades too late, he was behaving like a schoolboy.

  Edie suddenly spoke in a bell-clear voice. “Why don’t we have dinner together tonight?”

  Reinhart was released from his strange paralysis. He turned back eagerly—and found, or seemed to find, that Edie had embarrassed herself and vanished behind the door.

  He addressed the empty space. At his angle he could see nothing significant through it, and he wanted badly to look at the interior of her apartment. But he did not dare to touch the door. “Last night I was going to cook. But maybe you’d rather go out tonight?” He remembered that in the code that obtained in the time of his young manhood it was considered ipso facto illicit for a woman to be alone with a man in his home, though for some reason quite O.K. for them to be together, unchaperoned, in hers. But like so many practices that once seemed preposterous, this one, when viewed from afar, could be seen to have had its use: the establishing of probabilities; a girl who visited a man alone would probably “put out,” or in any event not be offended by a “proposition.”

  Edie came back into view, her hands at her towel. “The thing is,” she said firmly, “it’s my turn to entertain you.”

  Reinhart looked down at her slippers. They resembled huge bearpaws and were covered with long synthetic fur.

  “All right, Thank you. I like your slippers.”

  “Do you know what they’re called? Abominable Snow Shoes. I’m not kidding!” She was laughing with white teeth. She seemed in perfect health, but that was a routine condition with the young.

  “Well,” Reinhart said, making a type of bowing movement, “I’ll see you later, then?”

  “Would seven be O.K.?”

  “Perfect.” He started away, then turned back. “May I bring something? Wine? It’s Sunday, but I always have some on hand.”

  The suggestion seemed to startle her. “Oh, no. No, thank you.”

  Reinhart went back to his own apartment. He feared her rejection of the offer meant that he would get no wine with dinner, whatever the dinner might be. Edie knew nothing about food and did not herself drink wine. God! It had been years since Reinhart had eaten a meal he had not himself cooked or at least ordered from a restaurant menu. He really dreaded being at the mercy of someone else’s table. ... That was what happened to you as you grew older: your habits became all-important; you could sleep only in your own bed and watch TV only with the sound set at a certain volume. As a boy, when Reinhart had to surrender his room to a relative and sleep on the living-room sofa he was overjoyed with the sheer novelty of it. So had he been hopeful when as young marrieds he and Genevieve went to eat at someone else’s house. He could not remember ever before having been invited to dine at the table of a single girl: such an experience, back in his day and milieu, would have been unique.

  What time was it now? ...Only five o’clock? He wasn’t cooking this evening. He had two hours to get through! He went to the liquor cabinet and poured a generous measure of Scotch, iced and watered it in the kitchen, and took it to the bedroom. He switched on the television set atop the dresser—A sturdy woman wearing a billed cap was bending a putter. Sunday afternoon and ladies’ golf, of course!

  He reclined on the bed, nape against headboard, Scotch cradled in two hands at his navel. He watched for a while, but the upholstered bodies no longer had their old appeal. He went to the set and roamed the dial. Tennis would hit the spot today, with younger legs under pleated skirts. This was not a concupiscent taste: he was interested in relative levels of vigor.

  But no more female athletes of any sort were available at the moment, which belonged, on one channel—indeed, his own Channel Five—to stock cars speeding around an asphalt oval and on another to two undersized Latin American prizefighters who pounded each other furiously without apparent damage to either. On “public” television a hirsute young chap was talking rapidly to a bald-headed middle-aged man about—by gosh, about the upcoming Jack Buxton Film Festival! ...But apparently it was not to begin for a while. At the moment what one got was a discussion between these two fellows, who werely oddly paired: the hairy youth spoke like a hoodlum, the bald-headed critic was peevishly effeminate. At the moment the latter was saying: “...really think that’s true? Oh, come off it.” To which the former replied: “Chroo? Of cawss! Wadduhyuh think, I’m loying?”

  Reinhart discovered that his Johnnie Walker was missing: a ghost had drained the entire glass while his attention was elsewhere. He returned to the bar and got a refill onto the same, or much the same, ice.

  He was restless. He showered again and made an entire change of clothing from the skin out, though he had put everything on fresh that morning. He must make arrangements with a professional laundry to do his work. As a TV personality he could hardly be seen trundling his wash down to the basement. The job could alter his life in many ways. He might be recognized on the street. One of the local papers had a show-biz gossip column. Could he ever afford to be seen with Helen Clayton? “Which TV chef is consorting with an invalid’s wife?” Your life is not your own when you get into the public eye.

  A good deal, but by no means all, of these reflections were ironical: it is amusing to mock oneself when things go well. And when one has waited so long for success that one has forgotten what is being awaited, there is a limit to the swelling of one’s head. But he was impatient for Monday to come, after all these years, and therefore while waiting first for sufficient time to pass before he could go down and eat Edie’s probably overdone and surely wineless meal, he drank more Scotch than he should have, certainly more than he would have if he himself had been cooking. It anesthetizes the palate, you know (he said to himself in the bathroom mirror), really belongs in the after-dinner range, an interesting and worthwhile potation, surely, but its place is postprandial.

  He winked at his large visage and added: “Listen to the epicure, who was himself reared on well-done meat and vegetables boiled to death and served dry. Who when in France as a soldier looked for whores and not meals. ... Who, hoohoo, is now drunk for the first time in many years.” Not helplessly. His stride was straight enough, and when speaking to himself at least, he could not hear that his tongue was getting stuck behind his teeth.

  But his emotions were intensified. Suddenly remembering that he had nothing to take to Edie, who had spurned his offer of wine, he decided to go out and find a florist who was open. This was not the kind of shop normally accessible on Sundays, but the alcohol evoked from Reinhart a stubborn determination to leave no mall unturned.

  This was a splendid aim, but in point of fact the same spirits had caused his sense of time to be deranged. It was 6:55 when he looked at the bedside clock. He brushed his teeth once again, put on his blazer, checked it insofar as he could for lint (but living alone, one must forget about a certain area in the back of garments being worn; Grace could now perform inspection service for Winona, he himself had no one), and left the apartment

  Edie was certainly a conveniently placed friend. He would now have been in no mood to visit someone by car.

  He reached her door and pushed the buzzer. She was quick to answer this time. No doubt the Scotch had something to do with his vision, but Edie looked even taller than usual. Before crossing the threshold he tried to figure that out and at last saw
that she wore high heels.

  “I’m sorry to say,” he confessed, “I’m empty-handed.”

  “Good,” said Edie, beckoning him into her home. She wore some kind of soft white blouse and an ankle-length figured skirt. This seemed an occasion for her. She was fairer of hair this evening, and her eyes had... whatever. More make-up, certainly, but—

  “That’s what ‘karate’ means, incidentally,” said Reinhart, interrupting his own process of observation. “In Japanese. Kara—‘empty.’ Te—‘hand.’” He smiled into Edie’s limpid eyes. “A bit of the useless information I’ve accumulated throughout the many years of my life.” For some reason he was delaying a survey of the apartment, staying just inside the door.

  “Won’t you come down here?” said Edie, who had gone ahead and now spoke from a slightly lower situation. She was in the living room, which like his own was one step down from the level on which one entered.

  Reinhart stepped jauntily down to join her. Half the room, that half towards the large window, was a kind of greenhouse full of standing or hanging plants, which seemed to exude freshness and verdant moisture, as the sun radiates warmth and light. Reinhart’s sensibility lacked in the horticultural faculty, and he had never before felt this effect from vegetable life. Nor was Winona, though a deft hand with cut flowers, a grower of plants.

  “Now I see what’s wrong with my apartment,” he said. He went to the window, or at any rate as close as permitted, and looked out through the greenery. The view, especially at this fading time of day, was none too vast, being mostly of an angle of the building, with only a glimpse of the river, as if one were looking illicitly through a chink. Yet living among these plants one would feel no deprivation.

  “I wish I knew enough about the subject to discuss it with you,” said he, “but I don’t think I’ve tried to grow anything, with the exception of lawn-grass some years back, since the scrawny little tree we used to be given annually on Arbor Day at school—which always died. I’ve thought about starting some herbs in windowsill pots, but I’m still too shy.”