Reinhart in Love (28 page)

“Oh, good,” said he. “Feeling better? Let me get that window open for your foot.”

“Ouch,” Genevieve yelped, and because the dashboard glow showed him so little of her, explained: “It hurts when I bend it.”

“That splint won't take a minute,” Reinhart offered, peering in over the lowered front seat. In the forest an owl asked its imbecile question.

“Oo,” said Gen in echo, “it is certainly desolate up here.”

“We'll be home in ten minutes.” He crawled across to the wheel.

“Do you think I should be jolted so soon?”

“I'll drive easy.”

“Actually no, it's definitely not broken. You could feel the break if it were, couldn't you?”

Reinhart preferred to believe she was not badly hurt, for a motive of which he was only half aware and therefore scared of: he had not begun to grow until the sophomore year and thus had known a time when his lusts exceeded his physique and many of the women he desired stood higher than he; his only hope of having them, he was told by his fantasies, lay in their being in some way enfeebled—say with a broken leg. This also explained his attraction to girls who wore glasses.

“Couldn't you?” Genevieve repeated, in a much stronger voice.

“Can
you?”
asked Reinhart, keeping his eyes on the speedometer, which at rest still bravely indicated ten miles an hour.

“I don't know. I feel something … oh, that's just the clip on my—sorry.”

He turned and mumbled shabbily: “Uh, I was in the medics.”

She rustled, and then answered as if through a woolen scarf: “Then I guess you'd know.”

“Yeah,” said Reinhart, almost surreptitiously opening the door as if it were rather his fly. He clambered awkwardly into the back of the car, and lost all sense of his body when he got there, for technically the rear enclosure of that model would not contain an object of his mass.

“Haha,” he chuckled in his hysterical bedside manner, “Herr Dok-tor Reinhart”—he cleared his throat. “Now where's the complaint, little lady?” He inadvertently touched her ankle, and it seemed to burn him. He reminded himself that he was the veteran of a good many campaigns in the Pubic Wars. What unnerved him in the present engagement was the captiousness of the foe. Since he didn't know where he stood, neither was he sure of where he might wilt. Genevieve suddenly stirred and kicked him right in the mouth with her knee. Had he light, he could have looked right up into her secrets.

Rubbing his sore lip, he said: “That's a relief. The ankle feels okay to me. Probably a pulled tendon.”

As if her teeth were clenched in pain, Genevieve left interstices between her words: “The … other … one.” And when he gingerly touched another ankle, or perhaps the same, for he hadn't known which he felt the first time, she went on: “Not… the … ankle.”

Somewhere along the route north he must have passed the site in question, where perhaps the damage was negligible. But he heard nothing but two breathings, of which he failed to recognize one as his own, and in truth and with the best intentions, he could not have stopped before the terminus. Having too quickly assessed the driveway, he thought too soon about garaging his vehicle, and proposing to return his hand to the gearshift, he found it trapped. Her two thighs were stronger than his one arm, at least without exhibitionist brutality on the part of the latter. Simultaneously she complained that the bruise was scarcely
there
, though in an excruciatingly amiable tone. It was hinted that he must go and demanded that he stay. And the owl outside continued to doubt everybody's identity.

Something of a pants-fetichist, Reinhart resented her wearing a girdle like a married woman: all boilerplate, except at the only point worth protection; Fort Knox with an impregnable wall and open gate would drive the subtle criminal mad.

“Don't you hate owls?” asked Reinhart, furiously.

She violently started, and his hand had freedom. Yet liberty is cold, lonely, and embarrassing; he immediately sought a more constricting arrangement. Himself temporarily taken care of, he began to worry about Genevieve—as if she were not present. Indeed, in his mind's eye he saw her in her office person, which was the one he wanted, which explained his remark on the owl: that bird had named his confusion.

“Yes,” said the unknown girl he was involved with on the back seat, and put some pressure on his relevant hand. He had forgotten what she was supposed to affirm, and went looking with his other set of fingers. Nylon, taut elastic, skin, more armor, zipper, more skin; the passage here was tight, but he forced it and encountered a ham-mockful of heavy life.

“Why did you burrow up to my shoulder?” said his apparent friend. “I love you.”

Aw no! Reinhart pleaded to himself, the dear emotions are not what I wish; I just want to win.

“Hear me?” shouted Genevieve with remarkable volume for her size and place. His ears rang. “Love you, love you, love you! … And do you me?”

“Ummmm,” he muttered, and suddenly took heart at the character of her underfurnishings: in the most intimate connection they could both remain fully dressed. Perhaps because of this, life had never seemed stranger to him than at that moment when he worked beneath her skirt. He found room for himself on the narrow seat; he felt warm and thought cool; the rest was art. Genevieve seemed either to be indivisible from him or to have vanished completely, he was not sure until that moment came for the reckoning of other matters, and then it had gone beyond that.

“God, I feel awful,” he said into the juncture of her neck and shoulder, or rather to that portion of her jacket bunched there. The one grand fact established, their knowledge of each other was still limited.

“Mpf, mpf,” said she from beneath him, and when he shifted slightly: “I'm almost suffocated! … No, stay!”

“No point in doing anything else, now,” Reinhart lugubriously observed. “I'm sorry I didn't take precautions, but if worst comes to worst, I will stick by you.” He was naively afraid of his own fertility.

“You don't mean—you don't mean—” With a kind of instinctive judo, using only her universal joint, Genevieve pitched him right off onto the floor. “You aren't implying we did something?” No tears now; she beat her knuckles on his head.

“Come now!” said Reinhart sardonically. He made a rain hat of his webbed fingers, to catch her blows.

Genevieve pulled down her skirt and looked as good as new, what he could see of her. Her mind, though, was still being ravaged. “Oh, you couldn't have. You couldn't have taken advantage of my ignorance. Tell me it was just petting.”

With this, Reinhart's postcoital sadness degenerated into a boredom in which he was conscious of every night sound; the owl, his question now answered, was silent, but the trees talked among themselves in their soughing vocabulary, and an internal-combustion engine climbed a distant hill.

“Sure,” he said wearily, “that's all it was.”

“Because,” said Gen, swinging her spiked heels to the floor and hence, since he covered it, the small of his back, “because we didn't even have our clothes off.”

Eventually they both reached the front seat, Reinhart again at the wheel, but Genevieve was still looking for reasons. “Because,” she said, “you didn't even kiss me.”

Taking this as an accusation, he leaned over and put their mouths together. Hers was very tight, no doubt owing to a conviction that if you guard one orifice, you retroactively protect them all.

Meanwhile, behind his back he turned on the ignition and found the starter with his left foot. There was nothing left to delay getting her home forthwith. Thus when he left her lips the motor was purring nicely—and a brute flashlight came through the window as if to poke out his eyes as well as burn them, and a voice foul as a man's could be ordered: “Leave the car, and keep your hands in sight.”

Hideous apprehensions claimed Reinhart's fancy as he obeyed: lovers' lane bandits, etc., and he got ready to risk death before dishonor. But he had to take a minute or two to fetch back his vision, which was momentarily one burning green ball.

“Hi, Reinhart,” said his assailant, in quite another voice from the earlier.

“Capek! I recognize your voice but I can't see you.”

“Sorry about my light. In approaching a darkened vehicle, carry flashlight in left hand, have weapon accessible to right, take initiative from suspect. I admit I believed it was you, but couldn't take a chance.”

“Why did you believe it was me?” asked Reinhart in pique.

Capek, whom he was beginning to make out, drew him some paces from the car. “I don't want to embarrass your lady,” he whispered. “We got a tip you and her were up here. It come from her father.”

Reinhart scowled. “Are we trespassing here, Capek?”

“The girl ain't twenty-one, Reinhart, though no charge is placed against you. But I better get her back.”

“We were just going.”

“Sorry, Reinhart, I'm supposed to bring her.” Capek pointed to the police car he had left, with headlamps lighted, down the trail.

“I suppose Kenworthy reported on us to your dad,” Reinhart told Genevieve a moment later. He explained about her mode of travel home.

“Oh Carl, it's just a mess,” she said forlornly, inclining her head towards her right shoulder. “I know it all seems so provincial to a man of your experience and wide travel. Thank you for not taking advantage of me. I think you should know I had a crush on you since the first day you came in the office and swept the papers from my desk. If you can't return that feeling, well, I guess life in the long run is tragic and we must accept it.”

All this while Capek was discreetly waiting down the road; he had even dimmed his headlights.

“Now,” said Reinhart, “don't talk as if the world has come to an end. We'll see each other in the office on Monday. And I will most certainly take you out again. I had a great time tonight!”

“No,” moaned Genevieve. “After this Daddy will send me away to school.”

“But what have we done that's so awful?” Reinhart asked rhetorically and hypocritically, and as if to minimize his falseness, opened the door, took her in his arms, and nuzzled the apple of her right breast through the blouse.

Genevieve ardently squeezed his bull neck. “No, no, no!” He drew away. She pulled him back. “No, I won't go back at all tonight. I'll stay with you, wherever you go! I'll become your concubine if nothing else.”

“Ah,” murmured Reinhart into the mouthpiece of her unseen nipple, “you're talking wild.” He had introduced her to adulthood, the realm of improbabilities and disappointments, and to abandon her there was perhaps to murder a soul—so important did he think he was at this time, so good did he feel about that importance; to believe you can destroy someone by a crime of omission, there is no greater amour propre than that.

“By God,” he said in great elation to the swelling fount of life against his cheek. “That's something for me to do. I'll marry this poor girl!” He then told Genevieve as much to her face.

“But there are only three places in the U.S. and possessions where you can get married immediately: Nevada, the Canal Zone, and Guam,” she said in a chagrin so poignant that Reinhart pulled away from her bosom and echoed it.

“There is? Damn!” Then he caught himself. “I didn't mean right now.”

“But right now is when I have to go home!” she wailed.

“Oh,” Reinhart accepted her questionable argument, so as not to cast his nobility into doubt vis-à-vis himself.

Cradling his head again to ensure their maximum unanimity, Genevieve gave a rundown on marriage regulations in their hunk of America: Ohio, girl and boy both twenty-one, blood test required, wait five days for license; Kentucky and West Virginia, same except three days' wait. “But in
Indiana
, the girl can marry at eighteen without parental consent.”

“How long a wait there?” asked Reinhart.

“It's hopeless,” cried Gen. He felt her shaking her head. “Three days. It's tragic we haven't enough money to fly to Nevada. Though Maryland isn't bad: forty-eight hours and no blood test. But that time would have to be added to how long it would take us to drive there.”

“That might be a week in this heap,” Reinhart noted.

“We could steal a better car,” said Genevieve wildly, pony-prancing her feet.

“As long as we go in for theft, we might as well steal enough money to fly to Guam.” His wry wit gave him second thoughts. Besides, his knees were killing him in their impossible position; and then he had reckless hopes that Capek would just get tired of it all and drive away. These proved vain; the officer's headlamps were now lighted and blinking in signal from bright to dim.

“I guess it's not a good idea, Gen. Look, I'll see you at the office on Monday. We'll talk everything over there. Just remember nothing is bad as you think.”

She squinted at him. He wished the whole business had taken place in daylight; it was his peculiarity that he liked to see the women he made love to, not to mention those he had almost married. She followed as he backed from the seat, closely retaining his face with the force of that magnetic squint.

When they stood together on the road and he tried to deflect her towards the police car, Genevieve said, “We
did
do something, didn't we? You must think I'm pretty naïve. Well sir, I mean to charge you with sexual assault.” She dashed towards the law, and Reinhart would have admired her speed and grace had he not been hysterical. Nevertheless, he caught her at about the three-quarter mark of the track, symbolically presented his saber hilt-first, and they arrived before Capek's guileless gaze almost nonchalantly.

“We decided to tell you, though it has been a secret,” said Reinhart to the officer. “We got married earlier today in Indiana. Now, I think that settles everything.”