The sidesplitting yet sophisticated novels of Thorne Smith were among the fare on which Reinhart had feasted at age fifteen and beyond, and also the texts of drawing-room comedies of the New York stage: cocktails, dinner jackets, Manhattan penthouses, weekends in Bucks County, and elegant women. Above all, elegant women.
Two of Blaine’s books were about whores: Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and Moll Flanders, and he also seemed to have taken an interest in the scandalous situation in the turn-of-the-century slaughterhouses of Chicago, as represented by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. Real fun reading. Crime and Punishment was at first more understandable: not too many years earlier Blainey had doted on the sadistic comic books which slipped by the committee of clergymen and other public meddlers who withheld their imprimatur from depictions of pain and gore.
“Do you know,” Reinhart had tried to tell him, “that Dostoevski was once condemned to death as a member of a student revolutionary group, a pretty harmless bunch, actually put in front of a firing squad, which cocked its rifles, aimed, and—the sentence was commuted at the last moment. That sort of thing will affect a man.”
Blaine showed no fascination with the personal side of this. He blithely assumed it was normal to submerge the self in a cause, even extinguish it utterly, and the peculiar experiences of the author intrigued him not at all, nor for that matter the personality of Raskolnikov, whom he humorlessly interpreted as a premature Marxist, striking down capitalism in the figure of the old woman money lender.
In other words he was not only a tedious lad but also a ruthless one, at least insofar as his imagination went. Reinhart found himself yearning for the bygone days of the puppet show, then, following the gunfire in Dallas, he would have settled for the first phase of Blaine’s social consciousness. Blaine had already acquired the belief that the CIA was the Mr. Big behind the “military-industrial complex” which held Presidents captive and manipulated governments so as to murder decency and imprison virtue. Blaine admired Kennedy, then, because he thought him vulnerable. And Reinhart had to admit he had a point when the man was shot down. But look at the killer: a runt, a eunuch, a failure, acting utterly on his own. You might even say Oswald proved the power of individualism in a world supposedly controlled by the blocs to which he had no access.
But it could have been predicted that Blaine would embrace the more outlandish of the conspiracy theories, and from initial grief he turned soon, perhaps in overcompensation, to thoroughgoing savagery. In a society in which a Kennedy could be murdered, this adolescent grew to legal manhood with a conviction to the effect that all existing institutions were at the same time moribund and insanely malignant, rotten at the foundation but in the superstructure terribly efficacious for evil purposes. And everybody knows a dying tyrant is the most wanton.
Thus all acts of America as a state were perforce wicked: if apparently kind, as in the provision of grain to starving Asiatic populations, then worse because hypocritical, exploitation in disguise. One preferred a candid war as more honest: like Vietnam, where “we” devastated the country and incinerated children for sport, Texas-style. And with reference to civil rights, a redneck illiterate coon-baiter was preferred over the slimy degenerate who worked for integration of the races and a social détente in which goodwill and right reason were applied.
Yet fundamentally the situation was purely personal. That’s what galled Reinhart. He might have found it entertaining had he never become a father or had he sired another kind of son. Or had his own son maintained the current point of view without reference to his father, Reinhart might well have applauded first his self-sufficiency, and then his energy and courage in attacking the heroes and superstitions of the herd. Reinhart had never his life long held a brief for prating politicians, demagogic chauvinists, or nay-saying bigots. He was also ready to admit that many liberals, persons of goodwill, were, being human, vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy and suffered from poor vision, distraction, boredom. Excruciating injustices remained, even in America, and there were no doubt lands abroad where the initial form of totalitarianism might arguably be preferable to general starvation. There were many types of killers, and as far as Reinhart was concerned Ché might not be the worst.
Blaine had a perfect right to his opinions on public issues. When the chips were down Reinhart could defend few shibboleths.
Though the businessman quailed at televised pictures of burning stores in Detroit and Cleveland, and the Caucasian in him rankled, the failed shopkeeper, the near-bankrupt knew a certain vengeful delight. The thing was that in a time when Negroes themselves were rejecting the role, Reinhart felt more and more like an old-style nigger.
But, surveying the field, and distinguishing essence from the accidents of bad breaks, ill winds, and, yes, poor judgment, he could identify only one human enemy as responsible for his personal ruin: a rotten little punk against whom he had never seriously offended, whom he had once cherished and indeed yet loved.
No, two. He telephoned the other at her place of work—just after watching Sweet get the shot of goat testicles, though there was no apparent connection; Reinhart had to get the straight dope on this libel about his congress with the girl next door; all right, it did then concern his virility—and invited her to lunch.
Genevieve accepted too quickly. It was ominous.
12
For several years Gen had been employed in a dress shop or, properly, a “boutique” and there was more than jargon to distinguish it from the emporia of yore: for one, an incessant din of canned hard-rock issued from concealed speakers; for another, the salesgirls were high-schoolers and dressed in the wares of the house, skinny sleeveless sweaters thin as the membrane of an egg and over no underwear, and either flared-leg pants rising nowhere near the navel in front and in the rear swooping in and out of the apple-cleft, exaggerating the behinds of even the boyish, or a skirt so short as to be no more than a vulva-valance. The skirt was in cooler seasons undershot by colored tights, but they summered now with naked tan legs. They were all longhaired, perverse-babyfaced, flawlessly complexioned, loose-limbed, blatantly incarnate, and spoke habitually to Reinhart in fluty little yips.
Not that he loitered therein unduly, enjoying freeby ogles, scenes for which were in abundance: the shameless little customer-wenches seldom drew the curtain if indeed they used a booth at all and did not strip, indifferent as Polynesians, before some rack which took their fancy and tried on a succession of its burdens. No, Reinhart generally avoided the place, at the cost of his eye but to the protection of his heart. If he had to meet Gen at the shop he would from the threshold shout the nature of his mission to the nearest salesgirl and then wait at the curb, somberly inspecting the dog feces, yellow sputum, and rain-stained cigarette ends in the gutter.
Gen was manager of the establishment, one of a chain of six throughout the metropolitan area, and pulled down two hundred dollars a week, better than Reinhart had ever cleared from any of his business stunts, and was probably underpaid at that. For the place raked in massive amounts of hard cash from its spoiled clientele, or rather their adoring daddies, all natural and not the sugar brand of a wiser era. The comic-strip wife, walking blind behind her embrace of high-piled dress boxes, had been replaced by the adolescent superconsumer.
Reinhart’s tendency was to put other people’s daughters and his own son in the same category. Winona was not so classifiable, and Gen kept her isolated from the boutique clothes, having her rotundity covered instead in the modest garments typical of earlier decades and still offered for sale, no doubt with rural areas in mind, in Sears and Monkey Ward catalogues, of which anyway Winona loved to study the colored pictures while dribbling them with piccalilli from an upended sandwich.
The point was that Genevieve did not yearn to see Reinhart inside the shop, not with reference to his voyeurism clandestine or candid—Gen was never jealous; she was incapable of that much respect for him—it was merely that she liked to suppress all knowledge of their relationship from tho
se not already privy to it. She had never spelled this out for Reinhart, but he needed no house to fall on him. Emerging from the door while he stood expectantly on the sidewalk, she would march past without a word or glance or an iota of acknowledgment that he was physically there, let alone attendant and her relative by law. Falling in behind, he often felt as if he might be taken by a neutral observer as sex criminal or purse snatcher.
Once she had come out accompanied by a lithe man who was scarcely thirty, Reinhart judged, and dressed, shoed, moustached, and coiffed in killingly high fashion, jacket vented to his shoulder-blades, shoes with buckles, silky handlebar on his upper lip, and sideburns pointing to the corners of his mouth. Past Reinhart they flowed and when the fat husband, correctly identifying the smart youth as one of the owners of the chain—there were three, and pooling their years they could not have come up with ninety and they were already rich though having begun on a shoestring—when Reinhart, who had a merchandising idea or two of his own of which he would have liked to make this young genius aware, pushed up, begged pardon, and sought to introduce himself, the debonair chap without looking handed him a quarter and continued his conversation with Gen, who never batted an eye.
Today Reinhart opened the purple door and stuck his crew cut into the interior clamorous with music and papered in swirls of orange and lavender, with now and again an outsized wall-mounted blowup of a hooligan motorcyclist on which had been superimposed the face of the current President. Or a mug shot of John Dillinger, who when Reinhart was a boy had been fingered by the Lady in Red and gunned down in Chicago by Melvin Purvis of the G-Men after emerging from a movie called Manhattan Melodrama, costarring Clark Gable and William Powell—a newspaper extra with full details had been hawked through the quiet avenues of Reinhart’s suburb. And a depiction of Shirley Temple, looking weirdly old in this magnitude, with a well-preserved Stepin Fetchit, lately and anachronistically adopted as chief whipping boy by embittered Negroes, though in his days of glory he had owned three Rolls Royces at the same time.
You couldn’t possibly understand that era unless you had lived through it.
Reinhart stuck his head in and spoke to a passing mini-salesgirl, who had been born no earlier than the last years of the Korean War, which had furthermore been postclimactic to the real one in which he had served under arms.
“Would you tell Miss Raven I am waiting for her, please.” Gen used her maiden name for business.
In one revolution of eye the girl assessed and dismissed him. “OK.” She proceeded to take her time, stacking floppy-brimmed felt hats onto a china cranium which when bald displayed the phrenological scheme. He moved out to the curb, below which the gutter filth lay in eleventh-hour stasis in anticipation of the streetcleaning machine, bearing down on it, with whirling brushes, from the corner. Prudent Reinhart stepped back to the middle of a sidewalk suddenly thronged with pedestrians ejected frenetically from doorways on the toe of noon. All the tables would be gone everywhere if Gen made him wait.
“Hi, Carl. How they hangin’?” said a man who bumped him without apology, an individual he recognized as Gus Kruse, an auto-parts retailer who had once put Reinhart onto a job-lot of tires he himself could not use: a truckload of the old wide whitewalls, after the skinny ones had come in, at a wholesale price you could not reject. Reinhart, who then had his gas station, rubber-painted these in black and sold them to clients for peanuts as a come-on. But the paint peeled off within fifty miles, and even after the refunds he had lost friends.
“Gus,” he said and listlessly accepted a smaller hand which yet managed to hurt his. “How’s business?”
“I’ll live,” answered Kruse. “I regard the big boys in the shopping center as a challenge, though they hurt me the first year.” He had a patch of peeled red on the brown of his nose: found time to sun, so wasn’t killing himself. He made the same speech whenever encountered, followed by the same lie that a giant chain had tried to buy him out for a fortune.
“What are you doing these days?” Kruse asked, showing two stained teeth through the slot left behind by the pipe he sucked all day behind the counter.
“Oh, things,” Reinhart guardedly stated. Freezing the dead was not something you revealed flatly on a public sidewalk.
“Listen, Carl,” Kruse said, nastily confidential. He burned garbage in that pipe. He hung a finger in the crook of Reinhart’s elbow. “If you need something to tide you over, I could take on another man in the stockroom.”
Reinhart’s grin was like the yawn of one of the great carnivores. “Gus,” he said, “why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut?”
Kruse peered so closely his eyes crossed. “You are quite the skunk, aren’t you?” Off he went.
Up yours, thought Reinhart, though initially at a loss to explain why Kruse had evoked from him this vicious response. Then he remembered he was meeting Genevieve. He hoped he had not exhausted his armament in the phony skirmish.
At this moment Gen emerged from the shop. She wore a suit of lime-green linen. Her hair was pulled back so tight as to make her forehead smooth as metal and her eyes slanted. She also wore small earrings and long moss-colored gloves. He had forgotten when it was that Gen last smiled at him. You could not count such occasions as when, the previous winter, he had slipped on an icy walk and plunged into a snowdrift which concealed a spiky hedge. Then she had laughed aloud.
Reinhart was more than a little embarrassed to see this woman with whom he had lived twenty-two years and was now separated from.
She asked practically: “Where to?”
He had of course not chosen a place. He was unconsciously stubborn about that. Never in his life when meeting Gen for an outside meal had he come with a restaurant in mind. This habit had been the stimulus for many quarrels on rainy streetcorners, in curbed cars and hotel lobbies. He tried desperately now to cover up.
“I thought Al & Grace’s. There’s not much choice down here.”
Continuing in the same monotone, Gen said: “Al & Grace’s has been closed for six months since the fire. We could take the car and go to Gino’s.” Did Reinhart see or imagine a malicious star falling through her eye?
“That’s a thought,” said he.
“Not a happy one,” Gen said. “Gino called the house last night, and it wasn’t to give you a medal.”
“That guinea will get every cent I owe him.”
“I will not listen to your ethnithets,” said Gen, for once eloquent in her garbling of language though utterly false in feeling. Her father habitually used “jigaboo,” “yid,” and other offensive sobriquets.
“Don’t get on your high horse with me,” he warned her icily, then immediately tried his once-fetching grin: freckle-faced Tom Sawyer caught with his hand in the sugarbowl, as played by a cloying child star realizing a homosexual director’s fantasy of boyhood. “Of course you’re right. I didn’t come to quarrel.”
“Don’t crawl on your belly, Carl.” A group of pedestrians streamed between them, and by the time the field was clear Gen had got ten yards up the street with her imperious walk, which she must have been brushing up on lately through old Lana Turner movies on TV, because it was pretty outlandish. To pull that off she should be wearing those padded shoulders of wartime.
When he reached her she was already in the car and airing it. He folded himself up and got into the right-hand portion of the bench seat, which was so far forward as almost to touch the dashboard, Gen being short of leg. What this arrangement did to Reinhart’s knees was hideous; he felt like a double amputee.
“Going to call me, huh?” he asked. “Going to Gino’s anyhow. You think I haven’t got the nerve. I’ll show you.”
Gen was a woman driver, absolutely devoid of a sense of communion between herself and the two hundred horses pulling a ton of metal at her command. Sporadic braking caused the skirt to climb and remind Reinhart of her rather elegant, lean haunch. She did not know the thigh-problem which bedeviled most women of her years and even y
ounger. In general she had the sort of timeless look that might hold out indefinitely. Her calves were somewhat sinewy. She wore a scent that irritated Reinhart’s nose with imprecise memory. Somewhere in the mists of the past was a girl who had had the same smell. It was definitely associated with an archaic desire of his, one that he had perhaps gratified but in an indeterminate way.
Genevieve had a plate of lettuce leaves intermingled with boiled shrimp. What with the pressure on him Reinhart opted for a simple egg dish and was served instead with seemingly a folded sheet of kraft paper inundated in a sauce the color and texture of what you found on sidewalks frequented by sick derelicts: a so-called Spanish omelette. The waitress was the same as on that day with Sweet, but she showed no memory of him, good or ill. He had been prepared for this by Gino’s performance at the front door: “Good afternoon, folks. I hope yuz enjoy your meal.”
“Let’s get down to business,” Gen said, taking a ladylike bite of unbuttered Rye-Krisp while simultaneously looking at Reinhart and plunging her fork into the salad and bringing nothing back. It was some sort of trick. The lettuce did not adhere to the tines. Only when she repeated it did he see his body symbolically spread-eagled on the plate. “And after this,” she went on, “all communication will be conducted through our respectful lawyers. You can rest insured that while I don’t want to do you any favors, I am no more anxious for publicity than you are in this area.”
Vital Parts Page 27
