This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  He mutely showed the two pasteboards.

  “Just go back now and get one for yourself.” She snatched them from his hand, and followed by the skinny simian, was admitted to the inner mosque by the hussar, who once the tapestried door closed behind them, said accusingly to Reinhart: “Don’t you know that kid is banned from this theater for life?”

  “I don’t even know who he is.”

  The doorman, really too young for the hussars, revealed that he went to high school during the daylight hours, where Kenworthy Raven, Genevieve’s brother, was his classmate. “And a real criminal,” he added.

  “Well,” said Reinhart, “you let him in.”

  “Jesus,” answered the doorman, who was undersized, “I’d rather get fired than try to stop him. He made a pair of lead knuckles in manual training.”

  Having reticketed himself and gained entry to the auditorium, Reinhart went in search of his charges. He found Genevieve sitting by herself, one place in from his favorite seat on the aisle. The latter she very prettily invited him to take, removing from it a pale-lavender bolero jacket and a pair of white gloves. For a second he saw the sheen of her knee, as she crossed legs and accidentally kicked his calf. By these visual rewards he was compensated for the loss of Kenworthy, whom he had been planning joyfully to encounter now that he had his number. Reinhart detested fresh kids.

  Genevieve laid a hand into the bend of his elbow. “I’m sorry but I told you we’d have to have a chaperone. I know you think Kenny is just awful.”

  “Not in the least,” said Reinhart. “I was beginning to get rather fond of him. Where did he go?”

  “He saw some of his friends down front and went to join them. They will probably make noise and be put out. Then he’ll get home before I do and when I arrive there won’t be heck to pay. But I don’t mind being reckless in a good cause.” Genevieve squeezed Reinhart’s elbow, but when he moved to capture the flexing hand, she quickly retracted it, saying, “Down, boy” and making a remonstrating moue.

  Now Reinhart had long noticed that he frequently ran into situations that were always one step ahead of him; by the time he met a challenge, it had passed and his response was obsolete for the next. Small wonder he was always weary. On the other hand, when with Negroes, a grave and careful people, he tended towards the headlong. His big problem was not a career or love, but a matter of timing. His quest, of course, remained: freedom. And the way to it was tortuous because as yet he could not define the nature of his captivity, let alone identify the chief warden, though naturally he knew as well as anybody that we are our own jailors.

  “So you weren’t kidding about your father?” he noted to Genevieve. “What do you suppose is wrong with him?”

  “Why, nothing at all. What a horrible thing to infer!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Reinhart, as an obese woman with a great head of hair chose the seat in front of him. “I didn’t necessarily mean he was depraved.”

  “Necessarily?” said Genevieve. “And I’m the one who is supposed to be insidious.”

  “Invidious,” said Reinhart. “Forget it.”

  “Anyway, what should I care about your opinion? He’s my father, not yours.”

  “True.” It occurred to him on their first date they were already arguing like man and wife.

  “I realize now what I missed before, because I didn’t know you well enough at that time.” Genevieve tapped his wrist with a sharp nail. “Mister, you hate love.”

  “Me?” asked Reinhart in some outrage. One of the many conveniences provided for the patrons of this theater was the Expanso-seat, which did what its name implied on application of the sitter’s rump, the seatback encroaching on the leg room of the person behind. Reinhart’s kneebones were being crushed and his view was blocked by the woman’s Watusi hair, and when he said “Me?” she turned and went “Ssh!” To which he agilely rejoined: “Ladies are please requested to remove their heads so as not to cause an annoyance to those behind.”

  Genevieve, the monomaniac, ignored this exchange, saying: “Yes, you. You are cold, selfish, and vile.”

  “I’ll be damned,” whispered Reinhart. “I’m always falling in love.”

  “Oh, Carl!” Presently his forearm was being massaged by her left breast as she clove to him in the maximum degree allowed by the seat, whose expansible feature worked only from front to rear. And the last thing he saw as the house lights were extinguished in favor of a strident newsreel, was the pink flower of her lips, shaping to whisper in return: “I do, too.”

  He wished to monkey with nobody’s affections, but being in a mistaken relation of love was a damned sight preferable to exchanging piques. Soon his arm was around her, fingers playing slow piano on her ribs, and they were temple to temple. Not even the perversity of the main attraction (an item about several unfortunate veterans, e.g., a cuckold, a guy without hands, etc., and their re-encounter with civil life; typically, the cuckold responds to his plight with melancholy irony, but the maimed chap, whom the VA fits out with a pair of hooks, disembowels a barroom fascist who criticizes Russia), not even this curious entertainment soured his pleasure in close-quartering with a girl for the first time in half a year. He realized he should do this more often; funny how you forget.

  Funnier that Kenworthy and his gang of louts went unheard from for the duration of the film. If essential things often slipped from Reinhart’s memory, it was nevertheless first-rate on incidentals: he never, for example, forgot a burning cigarette left on the dresser edge. Perhaps a scientist was what he had been cut out to be, and not a poet. Anyway, he was enormously stimulated by a handful of woman and led to expect the imminent coincidence of his aspirations and capabilities. As to Genevieve, she ardently surrendered herself to the movie, taking certain emotions from the actors’ surplus and making them her own with readjustments in her clinch with the ex-corporal—paradoxically torturing him with an elbow when the adulterers appeared, though the wife was the real miscreant; pinching his wrist on account of the disabled vet, with whose nurselike girl friend she seemed to identify; and so on though never uttering a word, which omission would never make Reinhart complain, for if anybody peeved him, it was that individual who talks during a performance.

  All too soon were the house lights illuminated in the brutal transition from reel life to real life, showing the latter as very sleazy: the aisles were runways of waste paper, Reinhart’s left oxford was secured to the floor by a wad of chewing gum, and Genevieve’s mascara had run so that her eyes looked hollow and feverish. At some instance of com she had wept, unnoticed by him. So he withheld certain corrosive judgments he otherwise would have made on The Best Years of Your Lie, and merely said, simultaneously getting after the chewing gum with a wooden ice-cream spoon he had freed from the discarded container in which it was wound—this item from beneath the stout lady’s chair—he said: “Now let’s go and have a drink.”

  “Oh, I never,” answered Genevieve. “I would never drink unless maybe an Orange Blossom or a champagne cocktail, and I haven’t had that since after the senior prom. Anyway, we can’t go with Kenny to a place where liquor is sold.”

  “You don’t really mean that your brother”—they were ascending the aisle, and Reinhart noticed that a paper napkin was stuck onto his sole; he had not eradicated the gum; and certain blanched faces at seat level were smirking at his flapping foot—“Kenworthy doesn’t really have to go along with us?”

  “Carl,” said Genevieve at the lobby crossroads where they prepared to separate for their respective washrooms, “we must get this straight. I have certain obligations to my family. Now you might not like them—the obligations, I mean, though it could also extend to the family—and you’re not required to. But anyway I wish you would take the whole thing seriously, and I’ll do the same for you, and that puts any relationship on a firm footing. Marriages might be made in heaven, but they have their feet on the earth.”

  Reinhart was proud to be seen with the trim girl who, finishing her
statement, gave him the bolero jacket to hold and went to wash her hands. That much was established; whether or not she was nuts was probably a meaningless issue. He questioned the sanity of too many people. It was more than likely that he went by an obsolete standard. Besides, proximity to her for hours in the dark had left him unconscionably horny; and you cannot seriously study the essence of a person you mean to devour.

  Desire was in sole possession of his heart and made him so impatient that he refused to wait out the queue of swarthy men before the urinals. Instead, he wet his fingers at the basin and ran them through his hair in lieu of the comb he never remembered to carry because of the many years he had been crew-cut. The mirror told him that if anything he had gained a pound or two since the last assessment. His collar, a hair’s-breadth too tight, kept a good deal of red in the parts above his neck. In everything but height he had begun strongly to resemble his father. Shaken by this realization, he felt an instant loss of concupiscence, and wondered in terror what he could do with Genevieve if laying her was overruled.

  A temporary expedient was soon at hand: he waited, first for her to come from the Ladies’, which took a good twenty minutes; then for a decision on the matter of the missing Kenworthy, which consumed another half hour and required two trips by himself to the area of the theater where the boy had last been seated, namely, five rows from the screen (on which the giants of the feature were again stalking). On the second of these expeditions an usher, taking him for one of those fiends who wander the aisle in search of little girls, or in flight from them, ordered the ex-corporal to void the auditorium.

  “We can’t just abandon him!” wailed Gen, when Reinhart returned to her central intelligence station in the outer lobby.

  “Nor can you and I stand here all night. It’s now eleven thirty.”

  “Good gravy, and I’ve got to be home by twelve.”

  Even at this grievous juncture Reinhart almost said “no kidding” again—there were states of soul in which he would have asked it of a headhunter with a knife at his jugular—but he overpowered his own demon, grasped her (or hers) by the arm, and marched them both to the parking lot.

  Always be sure you’re right, then forge ahead; Reinhart really lived by such maxims, though he couldn’t remember which had been told Edison by his mother and which by Steinmetz to his cigar. Resolution for once triumphed: Genevieve went unprotesting, and once in the car she pounced upon the radio dials and forced them to yield some dreamy music. Already had a miracle come to pass; the auto was Reinhart’s dad’s and the superheterodyne had been out of whack since November 1938.

  “What’s your idea of a good place?” asked Reinhart in guilty urgency, for at the edge of the lot, beside an ancient heap without fenders, he had spotted the S-shaped figures of a number of the young, among whom was surely the estimable Kenworthy. They were snorting vilely. Indeed, how strange that Gen had not noticed; but he quickly fired up the Chevy’s engine and in first gear it roared like a bomber. “There’s,” he cried, as he also had to shout down the radio, “there’s Fischel’s and The Bohemian Garden, or that place with the gilded carriage on the roof. But those date from before the war and I’ve been away a long time.”

  “I’m hardly an authority on roadhouses,” murmured Genevieve, who with her head on the seatback and closed eyes had been making the hum that Reinhart took for subtle static. “But in the way of swanky bars I’ve heard Daddy say nothing can touch The Roost.”

  “On top of the Wexler Hotel, in the city? It will take a half hour just to get there.” In the rear-vision mirror he saw the punks’ car back immoderately from its slot and follow his; though this may have been coincidental. “I thought you had to be home at twelve?”

  “As long as we’re in Dutch anyway, might as well do it up brown.”

  Reinhart’s financial resources would hardly permit more than beige; he had five dollars, less three thirty-five centses: for practical purposes, a good four clams. Yet he headed recklessly for the highway towards the city, being a veteran of World War II with service overseas. The fenderless specimen full of teen-agers took the same route, a block behind. But when Reinhart lost to the next red light, the other vehicle drew up squealing to parallel his and a boy with the face of a rotten banana, half skinned, hung out the window, saying: “Wanta race, Fat?”

  “There’s where Kenworthy went,” Reinhart told Gen.

  “Oh-oh,” she groaned. “Now you’re in for it.”

  On orange, the punks accelerated through the crossing.

  “He didn’t like you. He took offense,” she went on. “Which I was afraid of, frankly. You should have had his ticket ready when you met us. Turn right, here, and we’ll go to The Roost next time.”

  Reinhart dramatically outthrust his chin though his stomach wasn’t fooled for a minute. “If you think a bunch of kids are going to have any effect on what I do or don’t—Genevieve, a man can’t let himself be bullied!”

  “Who’s the bully?” asked Gen. “When you must weigh two hundred and fifty and he is sixteen.”

  Just as he feared, when the punks some hundred yards ahead saw there would be no contest, they skidded to a halt astride the centerline and waited for him to catch up. He did so in a whining second gear, gunning into high when he reached the other driver’s blind spot. At its moment of stress the Chevy belched stertorously, and crosseyed with rage Reinhart choked it too ardently, inundating the engine with gasoline, on which it drowned. Collateral with the rear right window of the other car, he was threatened by one of Kenworthy’s henchmen: “We’re going to get you, fella.”

  Now Reinhart suddenly passed into a state of calm. “Why?” he asked simply, the comers of his mouth dropping like an old hound’s.

  “Just a minute, fella,” warned the kid, a type even more scurvy than Gen’s brother, his neck the diameter of Reinhart’s wrist, his murky eyes ringed black from onanism. “One minute, Mac, don’t get wise with me.”

  Genevieve was poking Reinhart’s arm. “Be tolerant, Carl. They belong to the wartime generation who have lost their roots. Kenny!” she shouted. “You go on home!”

  “Up yours,” someone cried back.

  “Look,” said Reinhart, “you still haven’t answered my question. Why do you want to bother us?”

  The boy imitated Frankenstein’s synthetic head. “Because … you … are … a … jerk.”

  “He’s got you there,” Gen whispered giggling.

  Reinhart wondered how Claude Humbold would have replied to such provocation: probably a priori, like all men of force; he would never have got into the situation. Meanwhile, such traffic as there was had to go into the left-hand lane to pass them; this included an occasional interstate truck, manned by a brawny driver. No sooner had Reinhart become twenty than everybody started to fear teen-agers. Somehow he always managed to miss the power as it was transferred from hand to hand; he might as well have been a rickety runt weighing one-twenty, for his only weapon was guile.

  They lay off the bow of a roadside hamburger joint, which was built in simulation of a battleship, with porthole windows and dummy cannon. Foul weather flags hung like drying underwear across its superstructure: each sent a riotous message about another type of sandwich, with two left oyer for french fries and cole slaw.

  “Let’s pull in here,” said Reinhart to his second-closest adversary (counting Gen as the first). He pointed to the asphalt ocean surrounding the ship, managed to start his own motor, and led the way before anybody could say Frig you.

  “Listen,” he said to Genevieve as the boys pulled in. “I want you to do something for me. Get your brother out of that car for a few minutes, using any pretext. Either that, or you get in with them. And I’m not kidding.”

  When her little nose began to twitch, he held up a fist, a symbol of some menace that he had not yet worked out, but she fell for it and called to her brother across him: “You come here and get your allowance, Kenny. It slipped Daddy’s mind.”

  Kenworthy emerged fro
m the other car like an unreeling hose. In a slow wink Reinhart was also out of his. They passed each other with sneers. The punks showed their weapons as Reinhart reached the driver: Stillsons, tire irons, etc.; with comparable armament we might have retained Corregidor.

  “I ain’t gonna hoit youse,” said Reinhart, approximately; he also lowered his voice to a hooligan growl; this was the kind of delivery that impressed young people, who are ever seeking models. It would, however, take a while with these; meanwhile, they were derisive with their front teeth. The driver, who at least had a short haircut and a thick neck, seemed the best bet.

  Reinhart went to the far side and, leaning in the window, appealed to him cheek-by-jowl: “I’m surprised at you guys running with Raven. You don’t know about him?”

  “Clobber the slob, Bob,” urged the skinny kid in rear right, with the venom of the undersized.

  But as Reinhart had anticipated, the whisper of doubt had already damaged Kenworthy’s reputation with the stocky driver, who thereby proved he was normal as he looked.

  “Whadduh mean, whadduh yuh mean?” he howled at Reinhart and ordered his friends to pipe down.

  “Frankly,” said Reinhart, “I thought you were a bunch of fruits—”

  “Listen, man—”

  “—until I saw how manly you all look, smoking cigarettes.” He glanced at his own car and saw Gen doing a good job of retaining Kenworthy. “Then I figured you just didn’t know.”

  “Aw, we know he got clapped up,” said one of them.

  Reinhart concentrated on the driver. “Well, to make a long story short, Raven is what you call a transvestite.”

  “What’s that?” asked one ferret face.

  “Morphadike,” explained the driver with a self-satisfied grimace. “You’re shit, too, man. I happen to know he likes his ass. Morphadike, huh? Got both kinds of plumbing, huh? You’re crap, Mac.”

  “There ain’t no such thing,” said the smallest punk.

  “Naw,” Reinhart said. “What I mean is a guy who puts on girl’s clothes whenever he gets a chance.”