As he mixed his batter and poured his crepes one by one and turned them, stacked them when finished between precut squares of waxed paper, meanwhile bathing others in the hot sauce in the chafing dish (a luscious amalgam of sugar, butter, and orange juice, flamed with Grand Marnier and cognac), folding them into triangles, and serving them to the members of his audience on paper plates, with forks of plastic, as he went through this sequence as smoothly as his batter flowed, Reinhart was conscious of a feeling that was unique in his more than half a century of life: for the first time he did not feel as if he were either charlatan or buffoon. Thus, late, but presumably not too, was proved the wisdom of what in his boyhood had been conventional advice but which, alas, he had long ignored: Learn a trade.
But when suddenly, as usual for no reason, their corner was devoid of humanity except for Helen and himself, and he had a moment in which to turn to his associate, intending to show an expression in which gratification and exhaustion were compounded (that old face of the happy worker, none too familiar nowadays except on amateurs at charity functions), he saw that Helen did not share in his pleasure.
“Something wrong?”
She indicated the stacks of boxes. “Four sales, Carl.”
“Well, it’s early yet. Give it time. We seem to be attracting the audience.”
Helen came to the kitchen table and spoke earnestly: “For freebies, Carl.”
Reinhart looked at her. “I’m doing something wrong again?”
“Will you forgive me for speaking frankly?” asked Helen. But the question was a genuine courtesy, and she did not offensively wait for an answer. “This isn’t a lunch counter. The customers aren’t paying for their food. You don’t have any obligation to feed as many as you can within a certain time.”
“I’m sorry,” said he. “I guess I did forget. Stupid of me, but I was just mindlessly having fun. I realize that’s not the point.”
Helen had expressive eyes within those pale lashes. “There’s no law against that,” said she. “I enjoy what I do, too, most of the time. Please don’t think I’m criticizing.”
He realized guiltily that, distracted by his own performance, he had not even been conscious of what she had done when the crowd was there, had not so much as heard her spiel.
He scowled now. “Don’t be so damned nice, Helen! I told you I’m a raw beginner at this sort of thing. I really want your suggestions.” He scanned the empty aisle, and then lowered the Grand Marnier bottle to the second shelf of the work-table, where he tipped its mouth towards a plastic measuring cup and poured out a drinkable quantity of the orange liqueur. He passed the cup to Helen, below the level of the table top.
She lifted it to her mouth and threw down its contents as though they were bar stock, then lowered the glass and said: “I thought you’d never ask.”
Reinhart suppressed a wince. He liked delicacy in a woman. And Grand Marnier was not appropriately drunk in a rush, as if it were what his father called a “cordial” and sometimes furtively tossed off behind the tree on Xmas Eve with other male relatives whose wives were teetotallers. He now recorked the bottle without having had one himself.
But Helen was pushing the glass across his counter and leering significantly. He had no choice but to open the bottle and pour another. She drank.
“It’s a hustle,” she said, “like everything else.” She held the glass just beneath her full breasts. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem a little too anxious to please the public. In business you have to remember they are the enemy.”
Reinhart changed his mind about having a drink, but he chose the cognac and poured himself a tot. He postponed drinking it, however, and left it on the lower shelf.
“Huh,” he said in response to Helen. “That isn’t an easy theory to reconcile with the serving of food. It seems like a contradiction. Can you feed people you hate?”
“Hate?” asked Helen. “Who said hate? I’m not talking about anything nasty. What I mean is that they are what we feed on, like one animal eats another. Does a tiger hate its prey? Maybe ‘enemy’ is not the right word exactly. It’s not that kind of war. I said that because I have a friend who uses the term. He’s in carpets.”
At that moment a parade of wheeled baskets came around the head of the aisle. “I’ll try to remember,” Reinhart said. “I mustn’t be too eager to hand out free crepes.”
“But you don’t want to seem stingy either,” said Helen, tossing her right earring, a large green ball, with a movement of her head. “A good thing to remember is that we get them to stop by offering something free, but soon as they receive it they don’t have any further use for us. In other words, it’s in their interest to get the sample as soon as possible and leave, and it’s in our interest to make them stay until they hear our pitch. But once they’ve heard it and either bought the product or not, then it becomes our interest to get rid of them and not give them seconds.”
“Did I do that?” Reinhart asked. And he had been so pleased with himself for keeping the crowd in the obscurity of the mass and not identifying individuals!
“Well,” Helen said generously, and she even came to touch his forearm, “here comes a new attack. You’ll do just fine.”
It went without saying that the difficult aspect of any endeavor was the human.
The first basket to arrive was propelled by a very fat young woman. Neither did she have the flawless skin that sometimes accompanies obesity, whether or not as a result of it.
“Can I have another of those crapes?” she asked. “They’re the most delicious darn things....”
Which meant she was the kind of customer who should be discouraged. Seconds! But she was also the very sort of person who delighted a cook. She had not been able to resist coming back for more.
Reinhart managed to restrain himself from hastily meeting her wants. “Do you know,” he said genially, “these are easily prepared at home.” He looked over at Helen, but she was occupied with an older woman who had actually approached her of her own volition.
“You don’t mean that lousy mix she’s selling!” cried the fat girl, though in good humor. “I notice you don’t use it.”
Reinhart served her not one but two of the folded crepes and generously spooned sauce upon them. In addition to all else he could still remember his own days of obesity and the concomitant lust for sweets—which like all ardent appetites grew by its own feeding, but what could one do?
“The instant version saves a lot of time,” said he, having so to speak bought her attention. “You have to allow for that. Not all that’s quick is bad!”
“The trouble is,” said the young woman, already putting the soiled paper plate into one of the two ex-oil-drums that served as trashbins (she had virtually inhaled the crepes), “all that makes a crape Soozette worth eating is the flavor of the expensive ingredients: with the brandy and stuff even the mix would taste good, but who can afford them?”
The approaching crowd had suddenly dispersed, or perhaps it had been not so much an actual accumulation of persons as a trick of perspective. He turned to Helen. She too was again free.
From within she pulled her face into an elongation. “All my lady wanted was the way to the toilet. She got nasty when I said they didn’t have them in supermarkets.” Helen laughed in her hearty style. “Say, Carl, if worse comes to worst, we’ll just have to drink up the booze, so the prospects aren’t all bad.”
He asked her for the time and then he invited her to have lunch with him.
A certain quick transformation could be seen in her eyes. She looked at her watch and said: “Eleven twenty!”
“Can it be?” asked Reinhart. “We haven’t done much business, but we’ve got through the morning.”
“I’d like to take you up on the invitation, but I can’t.”
“Sure,” said he. “Some other time.”
“I’ll make it up to you.” She spoke in an intense whisper. It was a strange thing to say, and an odd style of saying it, and w
hatever the intended significance, Reinhart was all at once aroused. This happened seldom enough to the sedate middle-aged gentleman he had become.
He turned quickly back to his work. The cooked-crepe supply was not especially low—the stack held at least a dozen—but you could never tell when they might get another crowd. He put the iron skillet on a burner of the hot plate and turned up the heat. In his right peripheral field of vision he saw a lone, cartless shopper approach from the top of the aisle.
What precisely did Helen mean? Or did she herself know? He was shocked to find that where women were concerned he had regressed in recent years to the moral condition of his adolescence. Though today’s youth, according to certain authorities, reached adulthood with the sophistication of a procurer, in Reinhart’s day and place it had been routine enough to arrive at one’s full growth without any experience but the autoerotic, and dealing in fantasies was ineffective preparation for so much as conversing with a live female.
“Carl?”
He was being addressed by the person who had come down the aisle without a cart. He had actually recognized her at the instant she had come into sight, and he furthermore had done so from the corner of his eye. But when you had lived with a woman for twenty-two years—that portion of life generally known as the prime, when all the emotions whether loving or hateful were high, and there was a peculiar vitality even to the worst despair, and when at the end she had discarded you brutally—it was no great feat, even a decade later, to see her through the back of your head.
His ex-wife stood across the work-table from him.
He caught himself just as he was about to burn his hand, instead moving it deftly to take a paper plate to the chafing dish and there choosing a hot crepe. He spooned extra sauce upon it and presented it, with plastic fork, to the mother of his children.
“Free sample,” he said. “Bon appétit, Genevieve.”
CHAPTER 6
WHEN REINHART TOLD HIMSELF that he had recognized Genevieve on her first entering the top of the aisle, he was speaking with the habitual lack of precision that characterizes the internal dialogue. Undoubtedly there had been something about the figure and its movements that suggested an unpleasant memory, but it was a severe shock to be actually confronted by his spouse of twenty-two years, his ex of a decade. The presentation of the crepe was an act of the bravado that Genevieve had so often evoked from him in the last catastrophic years of their association.
It was typical of her to ignore the outthrust plate.
“Carl,” she said again, and neither time was it a greeting, “we have to talk.”
Reinhart continued to hold the crepe towards her. He began again, in the proper style. “Hello, Genevieve. It’s been a while. How have you been?”
At least some of his shock was due to her altered appearance. When last encountered—she in her early forties, he in the middle of his fourth decade—Genevieve had been the sort of woman who could be termed “handsome”: her features were well cut, with no ragged edges; her eye was clear, her skin uncreased, her hair of a uniform color, her figure as fit as if she were ten years younger. And if one loved her there was no reason to be this objective: she was a damned good-looking woman by any standard and miraculously so as the mother of two children, the elder of whom was in college. Reinhart himself, on the other hand, had been a sorry specimen, more than halfway through his third hundred pounds, spongy-faced, habitually flushed, short of breath, and loose of bridgework in time of crisis (which came with the rising of each sun).
But by now he had no visible paunch, despite the lowering of the chest which is nature’s fee for gaining the age of fifty; and if the hue of his hair was no longer youthful, its growth was, miraculously, as dense as it had ever been. He could still, unspectacled, read a menu at less than arm’s length, and he had needed no dental work since early in his forties. He believed that he looked his age but could reasonably be termed a healthy specimen of it. He might turn no female heads, but neither would he cause the aversion of faces. In truth, his current appearance might be pretty close to achieving second place on a personal list of his own lifetime images (first being always himself at twenty-one, or at any rate the representation thereof on a snapshot taken at a ruined German monument in Occupation Berlin, among other GIs and Russian soldiers, buddies for then and forever, conquerors of all the evil in the world—for the rest of that week, anyway).
But Genevieve was not simply a faded snapshot of herself of a decade past: she was the worn and cracked photograph of someone else entirely. Reinhart found he could recognize her better from the corner of his eye than straight-on. It would have defied his powers to say in precisely which respect she had not changed, e.g., the cartilage in her nose seemed to have undergone a softening; her eyes flickered behind what looked like peepholes cut through inorganic material rather than living skin; her hair was arranged significantly to lower her once high brow; the joints at the under-ear angles of her jaw were almost as evident, and stark as those on the skeleton that had dangled in the biology lab at high school, forty years before. Not to mention that she was very thin in body—and not in Winona’s sense, the willed emaciation of chic. Genevieve looked as though she simply had not had enough to eat in recent weeks: her complexion was a mixture of yellow and gray, her posture was none too steady, her clothes were too large.
Reinhart now found himself urging the crepe on her as emergency nourishment, as one would extend warm soup to the starving. And he was joined by an ally.
“Go ahead, ma’am,” Helen Clayton said encouragingly, coming towards them. “It’s free!”
“Get rid of her,” Genevieve told her ex-husband, without so much as a glance at the other woman. “I told you I wanted to talk.”
Despite her current disguise, which could have inspired pity, Genevieve’s stark spirit was all too familiar.
Reinhart retracted the crepe. He also became conscious of the pan on the hot plate, in which the butter had blackened, but he was not so distracted as to burn himself on its handle. He gathered up a wad of apron and lifted the skillet away.
Helen shrugged in good-natured indifference and turned away. Reinhart saw that she was that salubrious sort of person whom one need not worry about: she did not seek situations in which to find offense. He saw no utility in chiding Genevieve in front of her.
His ex-wife continued to stare at him.
At last he said: “I can’t deal with personal matters until I’m off duty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Genevieve asked, for all the world as if she genuinely did not understand.
“I’m working here. This is a job, to promote the sale of a crepe mix.” She frowned. Had she turned mentally incompetent in some fashion? “I’ll meet you for lunch if you like.”
“Lunch?” Her stare lost coherence. “Oh.” She returned her eyes to his. “I’m not looking for a handout.”
“You’re hardly being offered one,” Reinhart answered in a level tone. “I assume you’ve got something serious to talk about, if you bothered to look me up here. And if so, then lunchtime would seem to be the moment to talk about it, and I at least will be hungry then, having worked all morning.”
As if in support of his point, a cluster of shoppers were approaching, and Helen went out to gather them in. Now, incongruously, Reinhart heard her pitch for the first time.
“Have some free crepes,” she said, “and learn an easy way to make them at home. Why not? You don’t have to buy anything.” The words were less eloquent than the spirit in which they were spoken. Helen seemed to have a naturally persuasive manner that came into play in this function. The women rolled their baskets near. Among them was an old gent in a cap of hound’s-tooth check, who put his head on the side and squinted suspiciously at Reinhart.
Genevieve became aware, almost fearfully, of the strangers who moved to surround her. “All right,” she said, with a suggestion that these people were Reinhart’s bullies, summoned to force her to comply with his wishes. �
��Noon.” She filtered through the shopping carts. Reinhart was ignorant of women’s fashions—as he was reminded every time he looked at Winona—yet he knew that Genevieve’s attire was out of style by some years. In fact, he thought he could remember the coat from 1968.
“What you got here?” asked the old man, peering at the chafing dish. “Swedish meatballs?”
Reinhart served him a crepe Suzette. The old-timer took the entire triangle of it into the back of his mouth and swallowed it whole, as if it were an oyster. He rolled his rheumy eyes into his yellowed forehead, but said nothing. He took a paper napkin from the little stack at the edge of the table, cleansed his plastic spoon on it, and put the spoon into his pocket. “Why not?” he asked Reinhart with a shrug, and left.
But with successive waves of female shoppers Helen Clayton began to do good business. Insofar as Reinhart could spare attention to the matter, he thought he could identify the power of precedent. If one of the earliest arrivals in any cluster bought a packet of crepe mix, some others usually would follow, but if the customer waited until the group thinned out, a trend was unlikely to be set, not only for the obvious reason that fewer persons were there to be influenced, but also because the principle of like-follows-like can only seriously be applied to the mass. Thus an early purchaser could be seen as a leader and those who came next as followers, but the straggler was probably an isolated eccentric.
Of course, as Helen pointed out between sequences, “buy” was not the precise word for what a shopper did in dropping a packet of mix into her basket: she was as yet a great distance from the checkout stations and could, at any point between here and the wire rackfuls of gossip-tabloids, mounted just before the cash registers, discard any item which failed to pass the test of second thought.
Reinhart endeavored to keep himself in a state of commercial distraction, but succeeded only in part.
“I suppose,” he said in that same interim, yielding to an irresistible force, “you wonder who that woman is?”
“What woman?” asked Helen.
Reinhart's Women: A Novel Page 10
