Reinhart in Love (22 page)

“What are you doing out
there
, Waldo?” said the nonchemist, still focused on the ceiling. Surely not the statement of a dying man. Reinhart decided to pay no mind to his badinage, and rather to establish the chronology of Splendor's disaster, albeit he would get no help from the principal.

“Let's see.” He strolled to the barred window and, because it was night, saw only a reflection of himself in jail, a somewhat romantic image. “You left the shop, by means of French leave, at about eight. Distraught, you repaired to your house. By eight forty, the chief of police, acting on an anonymous tip, was already there to find you with a hypodermic needle, a warm spoon, and an aspirin-bottlecapful of a liquid which proved to be a solution of heroin and water. You were arrested and taken before the magistrate, who set your bail at five hundred dollars. I want you to know that I don't have it, incidentally.”

Splendor laughed with his tongue, and said in an execrable accent: “Ah's the coon of Kuhn and Loeb.”

“That's all very well,” answered Reinhart. “Make your corny jokes, but you're in serious trouble. I'm sorry I ever came into the garage that day.” He moved from the vicinity of the toilet, which had just gulped like a frog, though the bowl was bright and its water so crystalline that Reinhart had seen another image of himself in it.

Splendor chortled. “Always call a spade a spade.”

That did it. Having picked up the turban, Reinhart called for Capek, who came eating a monstrous ham sandwich valanced with white fat, which he explained had been ordered for Accused in accordance with regulations covering sustenance of prisoners, but since Accused had turned it down, the chief gave him, Three, authorization to otherwise dispose of said provisions, which he was doing with little pleasure. He unlocked the cell with a greasy key.

“To hell with you, Dr. Goodykuntz!” Splendor yelled, and slammed his eyelids shut. Whether he meant the real or the fake was not clear.

“I'm not a lawyer,” Reinhart told Capek when they were in the corridor. “That guy can rot in jail so far as I care. Being somewhat gutless myself, I can't stand anybody else who's worse.” He didn't know why Capek brought out this candor in him.

They stopped at the desk and the patrolman, his belt toys tinkling, leaned over to throw his crusts in the wastebasket, which being full of resilient, crumpled paper, bounced them out again. Capek made a testy noise and crawled into the knee slot of the desk after his fugitive garbage, vanishing for a moment. So Reinhart addressed his concluding remarks to the surly gallery of wanted rogues on the wall above.

“You see,” he complained, “I'm interested only in success.” As the criminals stared back unfeeling, out of the moment of truth in which the prison camera had trapped them, he realized that they were not.

Untypically, Reinhart stuck to his resolve; he trafficked no more in Splendor's problems, and even read with satisfaction in the suburban weekly that his friend had drawn four months' imprisonment in the county jail. But he was never mean; he returned the turban to the costumer, and when his last mustering-out check came from the government, he cashed it and mailed an envelope full of greenbacks, registered under a false name, to the Mainwaring home on Mohawk Street. After all, his encouragement had caused Splendor to quit the job at Laidlaw's Body Shop & Towing and hence lose the family source of income.

Because of this quixotic act, Reinhart was penniless by April Fools' Day, for neither had he earned another cent from real estate.

“You ninny,” was what Genevieve Raven said to him that morning. “It hasn't rained for a week, Claude's gone out every day, leaving you here, and why?”

“Why?” echoed Reinhart, who had begun to react erotically to her needling and had recently dreamed she was flogging him with a silk stocking stuffed with discarded lingerie.

He had just run out and got them coffee. She drank hers with a nervous little flinch that both annoyed and intrigued him, and between sips put the wooden spoon into the paper cups and agitated the liquid counterclockwise.

“Because,” she said, “it's as clear as mud.” Meaning, rather, as glass, ice, cellophane, spring water, etc.: Genevieve either misunderstood clichés or purposely violated them, he couldn't figure which. Thus she used “funny as a crutch” for something that really
was
comical.
“Do
you realize you haven't got one cent out of him in a month? Your sixty-five for selling the Tenderloin was held back for the clothes you bought on his account at Gents' Walk, the cost of which was actually fifty-two fifty, because he always gets a ten to fifteen knockdown there, and as I doubt if you know, that's a very cheap price. If you scratch the sole of those shoes with a penknife, you will find they are largely paper. It's crazy to me that a boy your age doesn't take more pride in his apparel.”

“How come I don't remember you from high school?” asked Reinhart, who was sitting on the blunt fins of the radiator that ran below the front window.

“Mmm,” Genevieve murmured, “so he's rude too…. Why, that's simple: I never went to your dopey place full of factory workers. We used to live in the Heights, and I went to Heights H.S. and took academic, and could have gone to college but wouldn't for the world because Daddy refused to consider any of the nearby universities with their disgustingly low standards. Insisted on Smith, Bryn Mawr,
et al
., but I didn't dare run away from certain responsibilities here.”

“Ah,” said Reinhart, sympathetically. “You had to stay and help support—”

Genevieve rose from the swivel chair with such fury that the pencil flew from her bob. “How dare you take such liberties? Daddy could buy and sell you and your whole family and never miss the small change it took for the transaction.”

“Excuse me,” said Reinhart, who had vacantly got out his knife and scratched his soles, which looked like leather but it was hard to tell for sure. “I was admiring you. You're certainly quick to take offense, but I suppose that's natural in a girl who is so pretty and charming and bright.” He watched with scientific interest while her sharp little breasts quivered, her little butt twitched, and her cheeks blushed. She dashed off to the john.

Reinhart had suddenly got the idea that he could seduce her, which made him too grow hot of skin. He threw some water on his face from the gurgling cooler, and dried himself with an olive-drab handkerchief.

When Genevieve reappeared—certainly not with a background of flushing water; she used the restroom only for make-up and tears and never acknowledged its coarser conveniences; and with his typical consideration Reinhart managed at least twice a day to leave the office so she could take an unembarrassed pee, but doubted if she did; her modesty indeed aroused him—when Genevieve marched, like a little circus pony, back to her desk, Reinhart asked: “what should I do about Claude, then?” He made haste to conceal his GI handkerchief, as to which she had frequently attacked him (but why throw away a perfectly good square of cloth just because it wasn't white?).

“Honestly!” said she. “You're just pitiful without a woman to tell you what to do.” She deposited her round bottom, tweed-covered at present, into the buttock-shaped depressions in her revolvable seat. “You go to Claude and demand to be put on a salary, that's what.”

“Sure will take a lot of guts, considering I never do any work.”

“Oh my golly! You're about as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.” Profligate with office supplies, she broke a new pencil before his eyes—he was leaning towards her across the desk—and squinted hers like a child. “Don't you get the point of business, at all? It's obligations … anybody ever tell you you had a funny face?”

In delighted horror, he saw her slender fingers reaching for his nose and got a pronounced erection, to conceal which he strode rapidly into Claude's office and shook a fist at the rubber plant.

“Not like that!” Genevieve called. “Use a little sutt-let-ty once, will you? Like: ‘Reason will show that …'; ‘I have determined, Claude'; ‘Look here, Claude, fair is fair …' Once he guarantees to pay you a salary, then he'll have to give you work, see?”

Reinhart drifted back relaxing. “He might just show me the door, and then what would I have?”

A host of tiny lines advanced from Genevieve's temples to the comers of her bright eyes; when she played mock-sweet she looked middle-aged. She was unattractive in this aspect, and knew it, as women always know everything about themselves—which is seldom,
au fond
, a real gain though tactically advantageous, for what they know is that one day they will lose their looks, while a man's self-knowledge is limited to the harmless certainty that he will die. A vast difference,
vas deferens
, and it made Reinhart ache to introduce himself into Genevieve's quick little body, for her own good.

“Carlo Reinhart!” she said sarcastically. “You
dear
boy! How did you ever escape getting strangled in your cradle? I never knew a person before who didn't have an aim in life, and it's
so
exciting.”

For some reason he was suddenly stung, and answered: “Yeah? It so happens that I just like to live, enjoying every moment as it comes along, if possible, and making the best of the bad ones. I don't care about money or politics or religion or science, but just men and women, and then only the ones I know. I'll never lose any sleep over how many Hindus die of scurvy this year. You know why? Because it's not my fault they aren't getting enough oranges. I'm particularly uninterested in the Negro problem.”

“Well who is?” asked Genevieve. “You bring up such dumb things a person would think you didn't have any bats in the belfry.” She began testily to ring the bell on her typewriter carriage again and again.

“Ha!” said Reinhart. “If you only knew.” His psychiatric experience gave him a secret advantage over everybody.

At that moment Claude swept in from the street, bulled Reinhart aside, and without apology plunged into his office, shutting the door.

“Go get him,” whispered Genevieve, who wore a vest of fake leopard skin and bared her teeth apropos of it.

Reinhart was astonished at her ferocity over somebody else's concerns. How had he ever come to float between the Scylla of business and the Charybdis of woman? Now for the millionth time he had to go and earn his manhood.

He tiptoed to Claude's door and drummed upon it with the soft balls of his fingers, looked back at Genevieve, saw her tigrish snarl, desperately turned the knob, and strode in across the beige broad-loom that felt like walking on meringue.

“Bud,” Claude said to him before he reached the long blond desk, “bud, bud, buddy-bud, bud-bud, buddley, budget. Too bad, bud, but the budget beckons. How's that for a slogan? Get what profit you can from it, bud, because I'm canning you, retroactive fourteen days. Check with G. Raven to see if you still owe us anything on them clothes. If not, goodbye and don't forget your hat.”

“I don't wear one,” Reinhart admitted happily.

“I know,” said the boss, tracing his little mustache with an incredibly slender finger, considering it issued from a puffy palm. “I know, bud. You ain't worked out in none of a hundred ways, though I done all I could…. Bud! You're dreaming!”

A just charge, for at the moment Reinhart was gazing out the window upon the growing spring, in which he would wander free. A teen-aged maple, all knock-knees and buds, was waving at him from the edge of the gravel lot behind the office.

“Now, bud, I'll tell you what I'd do in your place,” Claude went on when Reinhart reluctantly turned back to him. “Kindly listeny-vous. Recall that slogan I put to you”—he threw his wrist in his face and consulted an enormous chronometer showing the date, the phases of the moon, the tides from Block Island to Cape Hatteras, and perhaps the time of day as well—“twenty-nine seconds ago…. Kindly repeat what I said twenty-nine seconds ago.”

“Bud, buddley-bud …” Reinhart began.

“No need for the overture!”

“‘Too bad, bud, but the budget beckons,'” said Reinhart.

Claude bounced up and pressed his assistant's hand. “You see how easy it is when you try? Bud, I
know
I could make a man of you if I had time. You got the stuff, but you fight it. You say Yes, but you think No. Straighten out your thinking, bud. One morning lately I caught a fishy look around your gills that may have been the work of the Kings. Live clean, boy, and you'll be a clean liver and have one. Laugh to show you get it, brother! Good, that's more than enough. Stop it, bud! Sounds like you're choking on a fishbone. Now if I was you and canned—though I never was, see, and why? Because I never worked for anybody else! Haha…. Bud! Knock off that laughing! … I would take that slogan down to Bauer Dairy Products in the city and peddle it to them for a hundred thousand dollars.”

Reinhart frowned in puzzlement and repeated the slogan to himself.

Claude read his lips and hooted derision. “Not just the way it was handed to you, bud. Make it your own, like: ‘Buy Bauer Butter, Betty, and Bake Better Batter.' ‘Bark for Bauer, Bowser!'“

“Billy Bones, Bridge Builder,” said Reinhart, brightly, “Begs for Bauer Butter.”

Claude shook his round head. Today he wore a mocha-brown sports jacket and a polka-dot clip-on bowtie, fastened nonsymmetrically. “That's narrative, bud, and won't do.”

“For Houses and Homes, Holler for Humbold!” Reinhart said.

Claude squinted at him suspiciously and began to pace to and fro in spring oxfords of brown calf and tan suede. His soles were Swiss-cheese crepe, and the skirt of his jacket had three slits though its waist closed with only one button.

“Golly, you sure like to fool, don't you, bud? I believe you could stand there all day and gas in this vein. Tell me am I right?”