Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “In fact we’ve known each other for a while,” said Winona.

  “Then why,” Reinhart asked, pointing, “why then did you ask about her favorite color?” It struck him that his own question was silly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Winona answered. “It’s the kind of thing you say. The fact is, I know her pretty well, you see.”

  “I see,” said Reinhart.

  His daughter grimaced. “But I don’t think you do, really. ... Anyway, that’s why we acted so funny.”

  “Why couldn’t you have just admitted that you knew each other? Is there some law against that? Why wouldn’t I have been pleased to know it?”

  She grinned wildly. “I guess it was dumb, but once these things begin, well, you know how it goes, one expects the other will say it, and then neither one does.”

  Suddenly he thought: Well, what does it matter? He slapped his knees. “Sure you don’t want to eat my special eggs? It’s a classic dish, you know. I really made an effort.”

  “God,” Winona groaned, “don’t make me feel worse.” She put her flawless face into her cupped hands.

  “I didn’t mean that, dear. Everything’s got snarled up today! What I meant was, it’s O.K. with me that you and Grace already knew each other.”

  “Oh, Dad...” Winona took her hands away from her damask cheeks. It had more than once occurred to Reinhart, looking at her, that his daughter might single-handedly evoke all the clichés that were applied to beauty: peaches & cream, silken, velvet, and so on. “Daddy, it’s how we’ve known each other.”

  Reinhart looked towards the windows and enjoyed the glistening floor between the shag rugs: he had himself put that shine on the parquet with real wax and a rented buffer from the True Value hardware store.

  “We’ve been close friends for a while,” Winona went on, biting her underlip. “I didn’t quite know how to approach the subject with you, so she had the bright idea of the meeting-you-as-if-by-accident. It seemed a good idea when I heard it, I don’t know why now. It was stupid and, worse, dishonest. Not that I’m criticizing her, though: I was a full partner.”

  “Not that I’m criticizing you,” said Reinhart, “but what was all the skulduggery about? Why should I object to your being friends with a bright, successful, and prosperous woman like Grace?”

  “Well,” said Winona, “there was an idea, you see, of sharing an apartment.”

  “With Grace?” Reinhart almost shouted. “My gosh. That is some idea. You little matchmaker, you. Were you anticipating that Grace and I would get married, or would it be some up-to-date living in sin?” He was pretending to be in robust good humor while all the time feeling a looseness at the core.

  Winona was softly weeping: Reinhart went across to the sofa and held her. “Daddy,” she said, “how could I ever leave you?”

  “Darling, you won’t ever have to.”

  “Well, that was the reason, anyway.”

  “The reason for what, darling?” Reinhart’s own eyes were moist. You could not call a life a failure when you had produced a child like this.

  “The reason why we broke up, Daddy. Grace says she can’t go on unless we live together.”

  Reinhart nodded. For an instant he held Winona as tightly as before, and then he relaxed his grasp. After a moment he stood up.

  He spoke as lovingly as ever. “You wanted me to see that Grace was a fine person. You’re certainly right about that, dear. I think the idea was a pretty good one on the part of two very decent women. And listen here, Winona, when you get a good friend in life, you want to hang on to her.”

  Winona’s fine eyes began to widen. “Dad, I hope you’re not thinking exclusively of my welfare. You always do that, you know, and I won’t put up with any kind of sacrifice on your part. I love you, and I won’t have it!”

  “Oh, I’m not being excessively noble,” said Reinhart. “I think you are so fond of Grace that maybe you’d hate me, without even realizing it, if I came between you.”

  Her expression was anguished. “Don’t say anything like that, ever! Didn’t I just send her away?”

  “Take my word for it, Winona. I’m a veteran in the contradictory forces of the heart.”

  Winona began to weep again. “You know, I was telling Grace—it will be much harder with him than if he were the usual bigot. Damn it, Daddy, can’t you make it easier by being even a little nasty?” She was now grinning slightly through her tears.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Reinhart said furiously. “Talk about not making it easy on somebody!” He cracked his fingers. “Do you know why I’m such a tolerant fellow, Winona? Because I’m too chauvinist, that’s why! I come from a generation of men who weren’t concerned that much with women. When I was young I was obsessed with whether I was virile enough. We young men were all like that: it was the constant preoccupation in the Army, for example. Even our humor dealt with it incessantly: fruit, fairy, swish, pansy, fag, the words themselves were enough to provoke a guffaw. Then I’ll tell you something else: if we did hear of a girl who preferred her own kind, we assumed she was some poor little bitch who had simply never met the right man.”

  Winona, who had never looked more beautiful, uttered one flat, mirthless sound: “Ha.”

  “And then,” said Reinhart, “when I lived long enough to be absolutely certain of myself, I had become the father of a son, and my great worry in the late Sixties was that your brother might turn qu—gay.”

  “Blaine?” Winona asked in derisive disbelief.

  “Well, he’s grown pretty square by now, but in those days he dabbled in all the trendy things, radicalism, et cetera.” Reinhart flung up his hands. “But look, you don’t want to hear all this patronizing stuff. You stick to your friend, Winona. That’s my advice.”

  She was shaking her head at him. “But, Daddy, what will become of you?”

  Smiling with all the saintliness he could contrive, Reinhart did not hear the question. He was wondering how long he could conceal from this precious person, whom he loved with all his heart, that she would be the death of him.

  CHAPTER 2

  OF COURSE REINHART SOON admitted to himself that he was exaggerating in his inner sense of high tragedy. For one, nobody had expired of shame in a good century. Then, sexual deviation had not been regarded by the enlightened as a disgrace since at least the fifth century B.C. and in our time even the mobile vulgus had succumbed to a tolerance of variants. Nowadays Gay Pride spectacles were commonplace in our major cities. (Good heavens, must he someday salute as Winona and Grace Greenwood marched by?) That it would always be a joke with respect to Nature might be considered as certain, but then so too was flying when you weren’t born with wings, and eating cooked food and reading by electric light, and in fact, simply reading: no other animals did any of these things. If Homo sapiens in general was a pervert under the aspect of eternity, then why jib at a subspecies?

  As to Winona in particular (and what did he really care about anyone else?), now at least no man would befoul her! No other man, that is, for one had used her when she was sixteen, in her most extreme moment of obesity, in fact, when she could not have got a proper date—for some men are beasts, and no female person, baby, cripple, or crone, is exempt from their detestable advances! Winona had been illegally invaded only in the statutory sense: the honey-voiced fiend had appealed to her generosity, had not used force. Yet had that experience polluted heterosex for her till the end of time? It was not a question that could be or should be asked of the principal.

  The fact remained that Grace Greenwood was in love with his daughter, who, whether or not she reciprocated the emotion, at least was not offended by being the target of the other’s passion. So Reinhart would put it with scientific and perhaps legalistic precision. Grace was the elder, a forceful and successful businesswoman in what must be a game for high stakes, the competitive, even dog-eat-dog strife of American trade. Whereas Winona was a beautiful object whom others dressed and put in place and commanded to turn and took
pictures of. But then, whether exquisite or obese, Winona had been, since birth, the gentle, passive spirit on whom the dominant imposed their will. Bullied by her brother and habitually disregarded by her mother, Winona only came into her own when under her father’s protection.

  Reinhart was brooding on these matters as he cleaned up the dining room after the brunch that had never been consummated. Winona had offered to help, but her father advised her to go make peace with Grace.

  She winced and hung her head.

  A certain faint hope made itself known to him. “You are going to make your peace?”

  “The problem is how,” said his daughter, looking up with a different expression from any he had seen. He might have called it slyness had he not known her so well.

  “Well, far be it from me... but can’t you just give her a call?”

  “No,” Winona said through a firm set of mouth, “no, I can’t.”

  “I mean when she gets home.”

  “Take my word for it, Daddy.” She wore a strained smirk. “I think I’ll go out for a while. I really would insist on helping you with the cleanup if I didn’t know you were serious about wanting to do it alone.”

  This was true enough. Reinhart always felt a need to defend his dining room and kitchen against Winona’s fecklessness. Though never meaning less than well, she tended to break plates and glasses, and it was her habit to scrape into the garbage can the contents, however abundant, of any serving bowl or platter: no doubt this suggested an attitude towards the leftovers of a meal of which she had tasted all too little of the original! But she had paid for all of this, china, glassware, and provender, while making little use of any. It seemed only right for Reinhart to continue to the end that which had been exclusively his effort from the outset.

  Before she left, Winona of course again changed clothes, now to some apparently routine corduroy jeans (which were however a “designer” pair from which, in the ultimate chic, she had removed the label), a fancy blouse, and high-heeled half-boots. Reinhart was aware that this to him incongruous ensemble was actually a high style of the moment. It was not his business to ask her where she was going, but he now thought of Winona’s social life in a new way. Would she sit on some bar stool until picked up by a bull dyke in crew cut and vested suit, chewing on a cigar?

  It was a luxury to conjure up such bigoted images in private. He had himself, for a few days, thought of Grace Greenwood as his own girl friend. Of course his criteria for a female companion had altered greatly over the years. That sex no longer took priority among the various possible uses of a lady friend was due partly to his own time of life and partly to that of the culture. A sensitive man nowadays, even if young, did well to hang back—for example, had it not turned out that he was right to do so in this case? But not only because inversion was rife. Women in general had grown assertive, had their own magazines displaying naked men and relating filthy fantasies, took out loans from banks, tried murderers, and performed brain surgery. For ever so long now it would have been simple bad taste to buy a broad a rum-and-Coke, kid her along for a moment or two, and then expect to pry her legs apart immediately thereafter in the back seat of a gas-guzzler. Not that this sequence had been characteristic of his experience even when he was young and lusty. Oh, he might well have bought the drinks, but it was typical of the girls he frequented not to keep their part of the implied bargain. In truth, the one time that he did succeed, his companion had been Genevieve, for whom the parked car was a means to ensnare him for marriage—that being in the remote day when girls had a virtue that could be lost.

  Reinhart had had nothing to fear from female “liberation”: under the old system women had either disregarded him or run him ragged.

  But lesbians were something else again. But what? Not “masculine,” really, except for the cigar-sucking character alluded to in his bitter joke, who probably existed only in the imagination. He had seen more than one TV discussion show that dealt with these matters when the subject had come into vogue some years earlier, and while the “gay” men never seemed altogether credible when on such display, the homosexual women were seemingly well balanced and in fact often quite attractive to his eye—though in view of what had happened with Grace, should he not suppose his vision to be faulty, or even corrupt? Was there a name for the kind of pervert who preferred members of the opposite sex who were themselves inverts?

  By the time he had finished the kitchen cleanup Grace had surely reached home, if indeed that had been her destination. He went to his bedroom, sat down on the bed, and lifted the phone from the adjacent table. He was amazed to discover that without trying he had learned Grace’s number by heart. He must have had high hopes of some sort. Imagine being cut out, with a woman, by your own daughter!

  He fingered the dial. Before any electronic sound was heard at the other end of the line, Grace answered. The surprise made Reinhart mute for an instant: he could have sworn the bell had not rung. This was not the sort of situation in which he was ever glib. The result was that having impatiently cried “Hello” twice, Grace gasped dramatically and began a monologue in a high, fluttery voice that sounded for all the world as though she were giving a malicious imitation of an adolescent chatterbox.

  “I’ve been naughty! A quart of Pralines ’n’ Cream! You called just in time, but I knew you would. You always come riding to the rescue like the U.S. Cavalry, flags flying, swords clinking. Oh, I was joking, you know that. I never mean these things. I just get so flustered! Well, I mean, I didn’t really know how he’d take it, regardless of what you said. No, I didn’t doubt your word, but sometimes the closest person to another doesn’t see a certain side. And after all it could be pretty devastating. But he’s so sweet I could just hug him, but of course I see so much of you in him, though I must say you’re not always as good-humored—now don’t take offense, you know I’m just teasing. Are you on your way? I lied: I haven’t touched the ice cream. I’ve been waiting for you, but unless you come soon, I can’t be held responsible.”

  Up to this point Reinhart had been paralyzed with embarrassment. He could not of course reveal his identity at this late date, and he doubted that silently hanging up the instrument would be more satisfactory: Grace might believe it was the work of a sullen Winona. He was trying here to put himself vicariously in these roles. As he had told his daughter, he was not a tyro in emotional entanglements, but he had two barriers to cross here: plain sex, of which they belonged to the opposite one, and then the deviation from that. Would it have been easier if he were gay as well?

  Fortunately Grace gave no indication that she would soon stop talking—she who had always been so terse when knowingly addressing him. But are we not all of us different folks from usual when in the grip of passion? Trying to be fair, Reinhart dredged up some of his own memories, most of them necessarily ancient, but a strange fact was that the more recent events seemed even more remote, e.g., he had had a funny sort of fling in the Sappy Sixties with a freaked-out young girl named Eunice Munsing. He thought he had spotted her at the wheel of a cab the week before, fat face like a red balloon, but that might have been a mirage: for romantic purposes he liked to think of her as deceased. The point was that aesthetics always called for the drawing of the curtain across what other people called love, and perhaps one’s own as well, which is why the audience for hard-core pornography must always be a relatively tiny cluster of stoics.

  Grace suddenly arrested her breathless rush of nonsense about ice cream and asked: “Should I call your dad and apologize?”

  Reinhart thrilled with horror, and then at once, magically, his problem solved itself. Grace answered her own question, and added obsequiously: “Shall I do it now?”

  He considered making a falsetto grunt or murmur, but thought better of it and merely lowered the receiver to the bedside table to simulate the sound Winona might have produced in putting down the phone to fetch him.

  He walked around the room and stared, for once not vacantly, at a little fra
med snapshot of himself in uniform, taken next to a pile of rubble in Occupation-era Berlin. He now liked the looks he had had then, though he had not at the time: these transformations in taste occur after one has passed fifty.

  He returned to the phone, into which, unconsciously imitating Grace as he had known her, he barked: “Yes?”

  “Oh, Carl,” Grace replied, “Grace Greenwood. I wanted to just say I’m sorry I had to run like that, but I guess Win has explained. It was unavoidable, I assure you, just one of those things, and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on yourself. You’re a fine fellow.”

  Reinhart marveled at her change of tone. Once again she was in total command, without a weakness or a doubt. On the other hand, his own situation, if judged according to relative degrees of power, had changed.

  “Well, Grace, I might say the same for you! I just regret that you went without a meal.” And he couldn’t forbear from adding: “I wanted to introduce you to something you have probably never eaten. A classic, but not too much to take if your tastes are for simpler food. Not aïoli or eel with green sauce.”

  Grace grunted almost rudely. He suspected the regrets were all his own. But she spoke in a bright voice: “Listen, Carl, not even Winnie knows about this. I’m bifurcated like all of us: I really am interested in you.”

  For an instant Reinhart did not attend to her meaning: he was stuck on that “Winnie.” If there was one thing that Winona had deplored as a child (along with being hungry) it was hearing a diminutive of her name; not even her brother at his most malicious had easily resorted to this usage.

  But then he became aware of a new and even more beastly element in the woman! She was baldly confessing to be bisexual? She wanted to take on both father and daughter? Was he expected to be tolerant of this as well?