Reinhart in Love (24 page)

“I got one
in
you, pal. En garde at all times, bud. I strike without warning.” He went to the rear window and raised its sash. “Get this clue: here's why I never installed the casement type, with crank—I'm too wide to go through half.” So saying, he climbed nimbly over the sill and dropped four feet to the ground.

“Claude,” Reinhart said, leaning from the window, “I guess I should tell you that I'll want to quit in June to go back to school.”

“Typical of you, bud,” replied Humbold, eying the gravel yard for ambush. “Gassing about faraway doings when I need a recon man at the front door. June! I live day by day, minute by minute. At this hour I'm a hunted man. Three collection agencies are on my tail. If a dark guy, or a pimply guy, or a guy with specks ask for me today, take him down to the basement and punch him in the mouth. Without no witnesses, he'll never bring you to court. By tomorrow I might have the necessary cabbage. By June I might own the state and you won't want to desert me. Plan to take night courses at the “Y,” or study how to fly a plane on Sundays. Hover in the blue over town and look for zoning violations. Report them to the village council, bud, and they'll owe us a favor, which we can use when I rip down that fieldstone dump where Mad Anthony Wayne stayed overnight in the year One, and want to build a nice bowling alley.”

He gave Reinhart the two-fingered bull's-horns, bullshit salute and hugging the stucco with a grating noise, crept towards the alley.

“I'll admit,” said Reinhart, having returned contemplatively to Genevieve's desk, “that this experience has shaken my faith in Claude as a businessman.”

“No it hasn't, it hasn't at all,” she ruled, smiling through a frown, or vice versa; whichever, her cheeks were stretched tight and shiny, and two dimples appeared that he had never seen before. Women are impossible when they think they've got one on you. Killing two birds with one stone, secretly getting back not only at Genevieve but also at Claude, who would have been horrified at the use to which his riposte was now turned, Reinhart said to Genevieve, to himself: Wait till I get one in you. Aloud, he asked: “Do you have any idea what the word ‘invidious' means?”

“Sneaky,” said Genevieve. She blotted her fresh lipstick on a Kleenex and studied the impression.

“No, ‘giving offense.' You frequently manage to be invidious, like many other people I know, particularly women. What do you mean by saying ‘No, it hasn't'? I may be wrong in believing that Claude is a bad businessman. Perhaps he is a good one. But I am right when I describe a certain opinion as being mine. You don't know what I think unless I tell it to you.”

“Mmm,” answered Genevieve, her upper teeth clasping her lower lip. “You got put on salary, didn't you? I told you just what to do and I must say you did it. Now all that's necessary is to fight him once a week on payday, to actually
get
the money.”

“That's what I mean. Is a good businessman so crafty over such small things? I can understand a big, glorious swindle, but what does twenty-five dollars a week mean to Claude Humbold?”

“Everything in the world,” said Genevieve, “that's all. He hasn't yet paid for a gallon of liquid soap for the washroom dispenser, which was delivered the same day I started work here six months ago. He owes on the stationery bill from last year, and the company ignores our orders. My ribbon is so faint I have to use a first carbon for the original. You'd think it would embarrass him to send out letters that smear at the touch, except he always uses the phone for important messages. Of course the phone company can't be beat out of their money, but he always waits till they dun him twice—which makes it darn tough when I have to place a long-distance call for him: they switch me to the business office and some old harpy who checks on our last bill.”

“Ah,” said Reinhart, “then he runs merely on faith in himself.”

“Yeah,” sneered Genevieve, “or on other people's in him. How he can still get credit is beyond me.”

“Maybe it's the same thing,” he replied to her first sentence. “Anyway, I hope you get your pay on time.”

“Oh, I'm the one person who does. He's afraid of my father, who's a lawyer, that's why. You must meet Daddy. He would be a good model for you, being very manly.”

Taking offense as usual, Reinhart said: “See what I mean about your invidiousness? What do you think I'm like now, a girl? I wish I could understand why you dislike me.”

He had no taste for the maudlin, and would have loathed himself for his plaint had she not responded to it so graciously. Women drop us low to raise us up, and vice versa: only our fellow man lets us stand upon the plain and looks us in the eye.

“Carl,” said Genevieve, ineffably sweet though not able to resist a small castration of his name; but this was the first time she had ever used it in whatever variant. She reached for the hand by which he supported his standing slump beside the desk, pulled back before she touched it, bit an eraser red, and smirked in the same hue. “Are you always so forward?”

“Genevieve,” said Reinhart for wont of anything more eloquent, looking for her momentarily to flee as usual; in fact, hoping she would. He suddenly felt terribly old and weary to be playing this game. He was getting to an age where he wanted only something definite, one way or the other: does she or doesn't she? as the hair-dye ads asked. He hadn't “known” a woman for months, indeed not since he returned to the States, perhaps owing to this very policy, which was either infantile or senile. Sometimes he believed he was in a state of torment so long-drawn-out that it resembled peace.

“Carl,” confessed Gen, pulling at the two ends of her purple-velvet string tie, with no damage to the permanent knot. “I'm not really engaged to anybody….” Reacting to Reinhart's depreciatory grin—he had never believed she was—she quickly bridled, saying: “But there's this fellow who thinks we are—”

“Genevieve,” Reinhart broke in. “I wonder whether we should do something harmless together, like seeing a movie?”

She answered gravely: “I'll have to let you know” and turned back with compressed lips to her work, but as soon as Reinhart had walked into Claude's office in vague pursuit of his obligations as Manager, Veteran's Division, he heard the outer door swish behind the fading heel-taps of her exit.

Reinhart sat down at Claude's desk and with effort conceived an original plan: he would call door to door in Vetsville, asking each tenant whether he could sell him a house. He remembered this was the means used by certain unfortunates during the Depression to peddle shoelaces, twine, and hairpins. Poor fellows; as a child he would ask Maw to give them a sandwich, and would sympathetically peer out the back door at them as they ate it on the steps. Vignettes of sadness invariably came to his mind when it had been exhausted by scheming. He proceeded to endure a fantasy in which he gave a handout to Claude, who had at last overreached himself; in this vision the boss wore the remnants of his grand attire, there were bird-droppings on his hatbrim, and his boutonniere was moulting.

He didn't hear Genevieve's return. She just suddenly shouted from the other room: “It's all right for tonight, if you don't mind a chaperone.”

Oh, you're kidding, said Reinhart, half to himself, but of course nobody ever is.

Nothing, thought Reinhart, better confirms the integrity of body and soul than a warm bath. He lay back in the one he had just drawn, his privates floating, a cool drip from one tap tickling his left foot and a hot one from the other Chinese-torturing his right—just the proper stimulation; even in a bath the world must be remembered. Maw had been kind to let him use her facilities, for he was no longer a resident of the house and while his own had no tub, it did offer a Navy surplus shower in a stainless-steel stall, more than adequate for shedding the dirt though of course deficient in the values of the heart.

Strange how hot water would cool you in June. Even stranger to him was the presence of June itself; no sooner had he got his civilian hide covered with spring clothes than he must strip them off and buy summer garb, for by June Ohio was a second Tunisia, just as it had been Baffin Land in the winter. For a third oddity, this problem of attire had given Reinhart far more difficulty than certain other phenomena of the same period, namely: marriage, change of domicile, return to college, and the pregnancy of his wife. Soon to be twenty-two, he was delighted he could still learn from experience: in this case, that life's big things, at least as a civilian, are subservient to the small. Who could ever know before the fact that a shrunken seer-sucker would claim a man's mind while his seed lay germinating in the belly of his Mrs.? (Which is what he got some perverse pleasure in calling his mate, aping the local butcher, a common man in extremis and a great fecund bull who had fathered eight children on a wife no bigger than five-one.)

“Boy,” sweetly called Maw from the hall outside, “are you enjoying your warshing up?”

“Plenty, Maw,” said Reinhart, raising and lowering a sopping wash-rag to make a liquid noise for her benefit.

“Do, boy, do, and when you're dry come out and I'll fry you a pork chop.”

“Better give me a rain check on the chop, Maw. The Mrs. will be expecting me home for lunch.”

“I'll just stick it between two slabs of bread as a sammidge,” Maw said, and stole away.

Now there was another singularity to add to the list. Maw had taken on this new, beneficent character from the moment Reinhart had revealed to her his having taken a Frau. It upset all the theories about mother versus wife; Maw not only
loved
her daughter-in-law but liked her son for the first time within his memory. He regretted now that he had not let her in on his getting married before it had been a fact accomplished, but immediate relatives were so inconsistent. He supposed his father-in-law's to be the more predictable reaction; the man had first threatened to murder him unless the marriage were annulled, and then when it was made known that a portion of Reinhart's essence was already inextricably deposited within the body of his darling daughter, he determined to commit homicide on the instant, ran to fetch a weapon while Reinhart stood paralyzed and the females wailed, found a souvenir Samurai sword, and charged the usurper, whom he would certainly have run through had not Reinhart's dear wife-of-one-hour thrown herself in front of hubby, offering her own breasts as target. Reinhart would never forget that gesture, and fell in love with her on the moment, as he had never been able to, despite frantic efforts, before. “You're saved, thug,” said his dad-in-law, dropping the blade forthwith, the gilded tassels unraveling from its grip. “But I'll never like you.”

Knowing his hand would be spurned, Reinhart did not put it out, but stated in amelioration: “What a nice sword! Where did you buy it, sir?”

Reinhart's new relative was a beastly handsome man with wide shoulders, narrow waist, and a copper suntan already in April; he had the barber cut him bald, and his eyes were the lead-gray of a bullet. He said: “That saber is mine. As a U.S. Marine I took it off a monkey Jap after giving him three slugs in the gut. Then I busted out his front teeth, which were gold, had them strung on a chain, and brought them home as a necklace for my baby girl—the one you violated, Mr. Nobody.”

“Reinhart,” said Nobody. Something impelled him to smile with an open mouth, though he closed it soon enough when he saw Mr. Raven's interest in his oral architecture.

“You're safe on that count,” said his enemy. “There's no jewelry in silver fillings.” He clenched his own cruel teeth, meaning levity.

“Oh Blaine!” whined Reinhart's mother-in-law, a thin woman pale as putty, who leaned in a phthisic slump against the foyer wall beneath one of those feather-pictures of a multicolored bird. “Promise me there'll be no violence.”

“I'll presume, but never promise,” said Mr. Raven. He retrieved his sword, sank it into the tin scabbard he had dropped against the baseboard on his charge, and saying “Genevieve, I'll talk to you in my study,” gave them his hard back.

Yes, Reinhart had wedded his colleague Genevieve Raven, who now turned, brushing him with her round behind, and said: “You see, Daddy isn't so bad.”

Spend eighteen years remarkable for their lack of event, then have everything happen in the next four. As a high-school punk Reinhart had envisioned having a million at twenty-two, a princess as lover, and the Medal of Honor, yet he had never expected to be married: we daydream glories, not obligations. He had also looked forward to fathering illegitimate issue by the basketfuls, replicas of himself whom he would come upon in mythic ways later in life: “I was born in an orphan asylum, sir, but I feel a curious affinity with you.” His bastards would all be athletes and ballerinas, and he would gather them around him to sweeten his still-unmarried dotage.

Reinhart lay his head back upon the cold rim of the tub and hissed to represent the piercing of this sophomoric bubble. Obviously, he was less than desolate at the puncture, but was cautious about calling himself happy, fearing hubris as he had been taught to by his father. It so happened that Genevieve had been a virgin at the moment of truth. He was the one man in the world who could claim to know her as Jacob did Rachel. This was anything but sexy, in his old definition of that quality, but then it was possible he had been hideously wrong about sex ever since puberty, seeing it, pre-Genevieve, as naturally illegal. Just as when as a small boy he would not believe people really did anything in that line—they maybe kissed and looked at each other's parts—when a large boy he thought only married people didn't do it, their mutual possession being recorded with the city clerk and in no need of further proof. Wedded intercourse was so obscene that the language, rich in fornications and adulteries, had no word for it; husbands and wives probably kissed and looked at each other's parts. It was too humiliating to think that a little creature could result from the sport pursued in the back seat of parked cars; and you
slept
with a woman only to keep warm.