Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  But now she showed her limitation, interpreting his speech in another way.

  “Gee, Carl, I wish I could, but I can’t today.”

  For a moment he was utterly perplexed. “Can’t what?”

  “Meet you anyplace. I told you it’s tough for me.”

  “Sure, Helen. That’s O.K. I really enjoy talking to you: that’s what I meant.”

  Helen ignored this sincere statement. “I haven’t been able to get through to Grace. We’re on her shit list, Carl. You know how dykes are: let them hear about anybody with normal urges and they look down on you.”

  There had been a time when Reinhart himself would not have found this assertion altogether irresponsible. Perhaps even now he might have his doubts that it could be easily refuted, but...

  “I think she’s just busy,” said he. “Grace is a real professional at her job.... The thing that hurts is that in attacking me, my ex-wife got you as well. By the way, she didn’t settle down. They finally had to commit her.”

  “Aw,” said Helen. “Aw, hell. I’m really sorry, Carl.”

  “Yeah,” Reinhart said. “My own feelings are pretty complex. I hate her guts in one way, and then in another I—well, just in a human way you’ve got to have some pity. She has this paranoid idea of being persecuted.” He snorted. “For example, you know that Cadillac you got out of? She claims that the driver was a Mafioso and that he threatened to kill her.”

  There was a long silence on Helen’s end of the wire. At last she said: “Well, she’s out of harm’s way now, Carl. She belongs there, I bet. Anyway, the doctors have the problem, not you. You’re not still paying her anything, are you?”

  “At the time of the divorce I didn’t have anything. She had previously put the house in her name.”

  Helen spoke softly through the telephone: “You’re a real nice, gentlemanly person, Carl.”

  “Oh, I guess we’re even all in all. I’m not speaking in self-pity.”

  “I hope I see you again,” Helen said, “whether or not we work together.”

  “Oh, we will!”

  “I don’t know,” said Helen, her voice drifting away.

  “Well, I do,” he said sharply. “You know, the Top Shop demo wasn’t my idea. Grace came to me.”

  “Uh-huh,” Helen said.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked, almost aggressively. “I’ll tell you this: Grace wants to keep on my good side.” He was taken aback by his own recklessness, but was not entirely displeased. It was, after all, a symptom of vigor.

  “Gee, Carl,” said Helen, “don’t go away mad!” She said this with mock petulance and a throaty chuckle. “You’ve got something on her? It wouldn’t be hard to get! Except I don’t believe she’d be ashamed. There’s a new attitude around, you know. How about having gay teachers in the schools? Would you want a daughter of yours in Grace’s clutches?”

  Funny how the worst could happen before one knew it—and turn out not to be the worst, after all.

  Reinhart was even able to make a joke: “Or vice versa!” And before she could react to this, he said: “I always thought that if I were king, I’d let my subjects be whatever they wanted to be, sexually. But to punish by execution anyone who mentioned what he or she was.” He cleared his throat. “What I meant was that Grace and I are old acquaintances. She enlisted me for the job because she knows I like to cook and she needed somebody to do that. Don’t ask me why she didn’t hire a professional chef. But she had to talk me into it. She’s not going to deny me now, when I want to continue. I really do enjoy working with you.”

  An intake of breath was audible from her end of the wire. “Gee, Carl... I’ll try to make it this afternoon. Can I call you someplace?”

  “Here, I guess,” said Reinhart.

  Helen laughed gutturally. Oddly enough, she reminded him of certain guys he had known in the Army, for whom everything had an immediate sexual connotation. It wasn’t easy to get on to that style again, more than thirty years later and from a woman—though no doubt it was better.

  Towards noon Winona returned his call. He told her of Blaine’s invitation.

  “Can you make it?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “He wanted you especially. Frankly, Winona, I must warn you that whenever your brother gets that earnest he undoubtedly wants something. So be prepared. I think it has to do with your mother.”

  Winona seemed lighthearted enough. “O.K.”

  “Seven, Blaine said. That’ll be all right? You won’t be on some overtime assignment?” It occurred to Reinhart for the first time that, in the standard style of the wandering husband (that stock character), Winona might sometimes have pursued romance of a kind while claiming to be held overlong at work. If so, was it not absurd of her? Why should she have needed an excuse?

  “I’m taking the day off,” she said, “so there’s no problem.”

  “Glad to hear it, dear! You could really use a little vacation.”

  “The agency’s not that understanding,” said Winona, “but the heck with them. They can just tell the client I’m sick for a change.”

  “Damn right,” Reinhart agreed. “You have a nice time.”

  “Wait,” said Winona. “Here, Grace wants to speak to you.”

  Grace came on the wire: “Carl, sorry I haven’t been able to get back till now. Everything’s cool. We’ll have something for you in a day or so. Meanwhile you’re on salary, of course. Take care!” She hung up.

  Reinhart remained for a while with the receiver in his hand, looking into the vulvalike thicket of lines in the etching that hung over the telephone table. Winona had brought that home one day.

  He was chagrined to have so quick an answer to the question he had asked himself. Q. Why had Winona needed to pretend she was working late when in truth she was having fun with her friends? A. Look at her friends!

  Hardly had he hung up when the telephone rang again.

  “Mr. Reinhart? Edie Mulhouse.”

  “Oh...”

  “Remember last night? Winona borrowed my car.”

  “Oh, sure, Edie. That was very nice of you.”

  “Uh, was there anything wrong with it, do you know? I noticed it is still in its slot in the garage.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Reinhart, “as it turned out, Winona didn’t have to use it. But you were very kind to lend it, and on such short notice.”

  “It isn’t a very fancy car,” said Edie. “She probably didn’t want to be seen in it.”

  “Why,” he protested politely, “that isn’t so.” Large as she was, Edie seemed overfragile of soul. “It’s a lovely car, I’m sure, and you’re a very generous neighbor. I know that Winona was very grateful. I hope she made that clear.”

  “She doesn’t owe me anything,” said Edie. “I admire her a lot.”

  “She’s not all bad,” Reinhart said modestly, “if I do say so myself.” And then he added soberly: “It’s nice to know you, Edie. The only other neighbors I’ve met in the almost four years we’ve lived here are just at the end of this floor. You know, I never lived in an apartment till I was middle-aged. I spent all my earlier life in houses in suburban communities where you necessarily were acquainted with everybody else. But there are things to be said for privacy.”

  “I hope I haven’t intruded on yours,” said Edie.

  Something suddenly occurred to Reinhart. “Winona did return the car keys, didn’t she? Did you look in your mailbox?” She was silent too long. “Just a moment, please, Edie. Hang on.” He put the phone down and went back to Winona’s room, where he saw the alien keys as soon as he entered, on her dressing table.

  Back at the phone he asked: “The tab is blue plastic, and it has a Chevy crest?”

  Edie said in a land of horror: “I used to have a Vega, but this is a Gremlin. But I kept the same key thing. I guess I should get another. Is that why Winona didn’t use the car? Maybe she couldn’t find it? She was looking for a Vega? How stupid I am!”

&nbs
p; Reinhart was annoyed with Winona, but there was also something regrettable about Edie’s self-abasement.

  “No, no,” he said with a certain harshness. “You’re too generous. We somehow slipped up on returning the keys: each thought the other was going to do it, I guess. What’s your apartment number? I’ll bring them to you right now.” He suddenly got a better idea. “What are you doing for lunch?”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you calling from your apartment?” It always took him a while to remember that most people, even women, worked somewhere outside during the day. But Edie said she was at home. She stayed noncommittal on the luncheon invitation: Reinhart found her frustrating, but in a challenging sort of way. He decided simply to bully her into being his guest, so as to expunge Winona’s bad treatment of her, which seemed to bother him more than it troubled her, to be sure, but that was no excuse.

  Edie met him in the garage. She wore jeans and a sweater today and over them a tweed coat. She was not a bad-looking girl, with pleasant clean features and very good skin. Something probably should have been done with her fair hair, which was cut short but, so far as Reinhart could see, according to no plan. And her expression tended towards the lackluster, though her blue eyes were, physically speaking, bright enough.

  “I didn’t realize,” Reinhart said by way of greeting, “that when I got up this morning I’d have a luncheon date with an attractive young woman.” He surrendered the keys.

  Edie flinched in response to the compliment. It would not seem by her manner that she had many such dates. She opened the passenger’s door of the Gremlin for him, held it, closed it. He was made uncomfortable by this courtesy—as he would not have been, had not indeed been, when it was done by Grace.

  When Edie climbed behind the wheel he said: “Do you know the Glenwood Mall? There’s a nice restaurant there.” He realized that his basic motive for this expedition was actually not to pay Edie back for her generosity (which gesture thus far seemed only to make her uncomfortable), but rather to eat another meal at Winston’s—and with, this time, a placid companion.

  In contrast to Edie’s social manner her style of driving was as forceful as a trucker’s. She was a notable tail-gater, light-jumper, and a bluffer in turning left at high-traffic intersections, blocking with her little yellow Gremlin any opposing vehicle, be it city bus or tractor-trailer. In no time they swung into a parking lot near Winston’s, in fact just facing the place where Genevieve had stood the day before to abuse him.

  Remembering that sorry event caused him to be less quick about hopping out than was Edie, though true enough they differed in age and spring of reflex. Whatever his excuse, she had time to sprint around the rear bumper and to get to his door before he had more than opened its catch.

  For quite a few years now he had been the occasional recipient of gallantry from young women, but the irony was evident for both parties when the smaller human being assisted the larger in a physical passage. However, Edie was sufficiently large and sinewy to give Reinhart’s spirit a shock as she not only seized and took the door as far away as it would go—for a moment he believed she might tear it off its hinges—but also slipped a large hand under his elbow and exerted enough lift so that if he had not quickly projected himself into the parking lot, he might have gone through the roof.

  On the approach to the restaurant, in anticipation of her probable intent to perform another manhandling maneuver at the entrance, Reinhart determined to forestall her: he was after all essentially the weight-lifter he had been as recently as 1941. He slid a hand up her near forearm, hooking elbows. But soon she ripped herself away and positively loped, with great, long, high-arched strides, to the large ornamental bronze opener, a bracket and not a knob, on Winston’s portal and pulled it and the door attached, and Reinhart was, or anyway felt as if he were being, scraped into the restaurant on the spatula of her left hand.

  The place was jammed today, though the time was pretty much as it had been the day before, when just after twelve a third of the tables had still been vacant. There was a good-sized, more or less unorganized queue at the moment, gathered before a sallow-faced man in his forties. This fellow was being conspicuously incompetent at the job. No doubt the regular hostess was not at hand for some reason, illness or vacation, and the man was on loan, so to speak, from a superior situation: perhaps he was the manager. Therefore he was doing a rotten job so that nobody would take him as naturally a functionary who merely directed diners to tables.

  Actually Reinhart and Edie, tall as they stood, were in a commanding position in the crowd, whose mean height was several inches lower, and the temporary maître d’ proved to be a snob in such matters.

  “Two?” he cried at them, up and over several intervening persons who had been waiting there since before Edie had parked the car. Reinhart considered making some public note of this, for justice’s sake, but was soon pleased he had not, for the man’s cry proved but the prelude to what was not the extension of a privilege but rather a virtual command. “Wait in the bar!”

  Reinhart was none too pleased to obey, but decided that any objection might upset his guest. “Well,” he said in a jolly tone, “shall we wet our whistles, Edie?”

  She giggled shrilly and made a shivering agitation of her large frame. He had not noticed the bar the day before, but there it was now, in a wing off to the left. He took a deep breath and tensed his ligaments before touching Edie’s forearm again, should she take retaliatory action, but he believed, even so, that she could more easily be led by contact than by speech at this point. As it happened she proved docile and almost weightless.

  The bar was empty, as Reinhart saw once they got inside it and his eyes made the adjustment to the gloom.

  “Have a seat, Edie,” he had to say. “What would you like? A glass of white wine?”

  The bartender came along. He was a young man with a supply of tawny hair and a brushy mustache that were “styled.” He looked silently, gravely at Edie.

  Reinhart grew impatient. “I’ll have a dry sherry, imported, if you’ve got one.”

  The bartender went away.

  Reinhart asked her: “Have you ordered?”

  She shrugged and said hopelessly: “I’ll try.” When the bartender returned with the sherry, she leaned towards him: “Got any juice?”

  “Tomato,” said he. “Orange.”

  “I guess it’s not fresh?”

  “No,” said the bartender, “that’s too much to expect.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Reinhart supposed he should have assumed she would be a teetotaller. “We should have our table before long,” he said. “I’m sorry about the delay.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Edie said expansively. The bartender slid away, giving the illusion he moved on rollers.

  “Well,” said Reinhart, “so we’re neighbors. What do you think of your apartment? Have you lived there long? Which direction do your windows face?”

  Edie gave him a long and earnest look. Her eyes were delicate in this attitude, and of a color that might have been seen as pale blue or again as a rich gray.

  “You’re just doing this to be nice, aren’t you?”

  He waited a decent moment before responding. Then he said: “If you really believe what you’re saying, you’re being rude.”

  “I guess you’re right, at that.” She began to smile.

  “Why don’t you have a glass of wine?” he asked. “It’s the natural product of the grape, you know. A wonderful food, and an aid to digestion. Would God have made fermentation if He didn’t want people to taste its products?”

  Edie was now simpering in good spirits. “Oh, Mr. Reinhart,” she said, “you certainly enjoy life.”

  This was a novel observation, but he was flattered. He signaled the barman, who came up with a skating kind of movement. Reinhart understood belatedly that the young man considered himself something of a comedian.

  “A glass of white wine for the lady, please.”

  The
bartender said: “I’ll go squeeze some white grapes.”

  “Did you know this?” Reinhart asked Edie when the glass had been brought and put before her. “That most white wine is made from red grapes?”

  “I certainly did not.” She looked back and forth between her glass and him.

  “If they leave the skins in long enough after the juice has been pressed from the fruit, the color goes into the liquid. If they take out the skins right away, the liquid remains clear.”

  “Gee.”

  “Enough of that,” said Reinhart. “Tell me about yourself.”

  Edie rolled her eyes. “Oh, gee. I’m twenty-four.”

  Reinhart said: “A human being changes drastically every couple of years. The earlier in life, the shorter the time span, so that a baby’s alterations come with weeks, even days. Then you get past thirty, and while time is of course as inexorable as ever, it is very difficult to measure in a credible way. You don’t make higher marks on the doorjamb each birthday.” She brought out the teacher in him.

  Edie still had not tasted the wine. She put the glass down now to say: “I was relieved when I stopped growing, I’ll tell you.”

  The bartender had scooted up expectantly. Reinhart was low on wine, but he would not reorder if their table was ready. He had to rise and go to the doorway to see what was happening with the queue. There was none at the moment: everybody else had been seated, apparently, for no one but Edie and himself had come to wait in the bar.

  Furthermore, yesterday’s hostess was back at her post, and her male replacement was nowhere in evidence. The couple sent to the bar had been forgotten. Winston’s was falling in Reinhart’s estimation.

  He went over to the hostess and entered a complaint. The young woman was in a different character from that of yesterday, when she had been so quietly amiable.

  “But I’ve been here all the while,” she said coldly. “There isn’t any man who ever does this job.”

  Reinhart slapped his hands together. “Then I guess it was a practical joke.” He smiled at the hostess, who did not return the favor. “You were probably seating someone, and while you were gone this guy pretended to take over. I fell for it. Sorry.” He felt himself begin to smile. “Actually it was pretty funny, now that I think about it.” This was the kind of trick that ten years ago would have made him furious: to be able to laugh freely at it now was to enjoy a luxury.