Reinhart in Love (40 page)

“Instant,” said Fedder, smiling in the guilty, self-derisive manner that some men affect on approaching an area where food is prepared. “You can sure see you are alone.”

“No,” Reinhart elucidated, running water into the kettle. “I always used this when Gen was here.” His ready use of the past tense made him feel awful.

“You used it?” Fedder asked with terrible urgency. “You … didn't … do … the … cooking?”

Reinhart quailed a bit. “I'm afraid so.”

“Oh gosh. Well. I see.” Fedder snickered nervously.

Swelling back again, Reinhart said: “Now look, Niles, you know I'm not effeminate. It's just—hell, I don't like to be a housewife, but how can you ask a girl to work when she's going to have a baby?”

“Uh-huh,” Fedder answered, thinking. He tore a paper towel from the dispenser alongside the sink and patted his wet neck.

“I felt rather guilty, I suppose,” Reinhart went on. “Women are so little! And what a hell of a big job having a baby is. On the other hand, come to think of it, I seemed more worried than she.” He fitted the whistle-gadget to the spout and placed the kettle upon the back burner. “You want a doughnut, Niles?” He grasped the bag that lay on top of the breadbox (not within, where baked goods sweat and grow soggy in warm weather; outside, they merely grow stale). Having opened the bag and withdrawn a sinker and found it hard, however, he suggested toast.

It appeared that Fedder, like so many flabby people, was not interested in food. He neither accepted nor declined, but when the coffee had been poured and they sat at the card table, he ate three of the four pieces of bread that Reinhart had toasted, heaped them with butter and jam, and yet could not be said to have paid them any real attention. But he was profoundly concerned with the love-problems of his neighbor, who on the other hand now regretted having made the disclosure and was chewing his own toast with the greatest care.

“You see, Carl,” said Fedder. “Doesn't it occur to you: there may not have been enough
sharing
in your marriage. From what you say about guilt, and from this thing about your doing the cooking”—he stopped to wipe his bejellied hands upon a paper napkin, then balled the napkin and left it sitting redly, stickily before him—“I just wonder what you left to Jenny. What was her role? You see, washing the dishes is all right for a husband to do, some drudgery like that to relieve the wife of. But cooking is creative. Deprive a woman of this function and—Well, in my opinion the unhappy marriage occurs when everything interesting is done by only one of the team.”

Reinhart went to make more toast, as much from curiosity as to how many pieces Fedder would absent-mindedly stow away, as from hospitality. “Genevieve doesn't care at all for the kitchen,” he said en route. “If it was up to her, she would live on soda crackers and rattrap cheese. And that's just fine with me. Who wants a wife to have an enormous appetite? I don't think I could get sexually interested in the most beautiful girl who gorged.”

“Ah yes,” cried Fedder, “but make her cook for you, boy. Don't you see it gives her the upper hand to control your sustenance?”

Reinhart noticed an island of green mold in the center of the bread slice he took from the wrapper. He tore the paper and thumbed through the rest of the loaf; the mold was a vein running through to the heel—which meant that Fedder's three pieces and his own one, now in their respective stomachs, had probably also been contaminated, and that Fedder might be poisoned unless the toasting had counteracted the properties of the fungus that were unfriendly to man. For himself he had no worries; he currently doubted his powers only in the matter of a wife.

He cut the center from each slice before dropping it into the toaster, and said to Fedder: “When all is said and done, wouldn't you call intercourse an act of aggression?”

Fedder looked uneasy and drank what would have been the grounds, had it been real coffee, from his cup. “I see it as a mutual endeavor, Carl. I don't understand this strain of bad feeling that is so important for you.”

“You don't think there is an underlying strife?”

“I can't see it.” Fedder had his index finger on the blade of the butter knife.

“Don't we resent those we love?” asked Reinhart.

Fedder smiled and asked why.

“I don't know, I'm just trying to get to general principles.” He returned to the table with the new toast, which Fedder soon seized. “Because everything I did with Gen, I did sincerely. I never contrived anything. I felt she needed to be taken care of, though it is true that before we were married I thought of her as efficiency personified. But she is so young. You know there are some girls whom the physical side of marriage frightens. Have you ever read any of those articles in the women's magazines? At one time, in the Victorian era, it was far worse. Certain young ladies, having led protected lives up to then, were driven insane on their wedding night when their husband dropped his pants.”

“Go on,” said Fedder, waving a crust at him, “you exaggerate.”

“And this tie with their fathers. What about that?”

“Bee,” Fedder said, “happened to be raised as an orphan, so I can't speak from personal experience. … I don't want to sound smug, Carl, but she and I just haven't had any troubles at all in six years. And as it happens, she isn't a college girl.” Reinhart started to speak but waited while Fedder said: “Six and a half, really.”

That was surely one way, then, to preserve the home: share your wife with other men. Reinhart kept reminding himself of the shameful data he had on Fedder, yet he got great comfort from talking to him and still respected his counsel.

“But tell me,” Fedder went on, masticating the crust he had been waving, “tell me about this coming child.”

It struck Reinhart as a foolish comment coming from a three-time father. “What is there to tell? Gen has been pregnant since May.”

“Ah then,” said Fedder, wiping his mouth with the whiskbroom of his fingers, “she'll be getting big soon.” He pushed his chair away from the card table, and lifted one hairy haunch across the other.

“So soon?” asked Reinhart, with a pinched feeling in his bowels. How humiliating! Gen enlarging in her parents' house, he shriveling up in Vetsville.

“Did you never hear the old verse? “Three months and all is well, three months more she begins to swell—'“

“Sure,” Reinhart interrupted. As he remembered, its ending lines were indecent, and he was puzzled at Fedder's loose attitude towards maternity.

“Don't you feel different?” Fedder asked impatiently. “Just a fellow one day, next a father?”

He was some sort of schizophrenic, Reinhart decided, now in one mood, now another.

“You seem to take it lightly enough,” he said.

“Me? You see, for you it's the first. That's the difference. Me? When I was in your shoes I suffered torments for every day of the nine months, and when the time for Bee's confinement approached, I went to sick bay, at the base, with total nervous collapse. That's how I feel things.” He resented the attribution of nonchalance.

They were out of refreshments again, but Reinhart was damned if he'd toast more bread. In fact he felt very logy and got up from his chair, plunged to the floor and began to do pushups, an exercise he disliked because the obstacle there is your own weight: lifting a barbell, you could contrive extra strength by hating cold iron and thrusting it from you in repugnance; to do so with your own body was somehow self-defeating.

Therefore when he finished he was rather dejected, as well as out of breath. He rolled supine, leaned back on his arms, and looked up at Fedder.

“You know the idea I've had for quite some time?” he asked. “That I should go back and start everything over. That is, everything that's happened since leaving the Army. I should go back to the separation center, turn, and walk into civilian life again, this time through the gate of horn.”

“Pardon?” asked Fedder.

“I read the
Aeneid
not long ago,” Reinhart explained, and then because Fedder still looked blank, he said: “You know, the two gates of Hades, one of ivory, one of horn. Through the ivory gate ‘the powers send false dreams to the world above,' but the horn gate provides ‘a ready exit for the true spirits.' Oh well, it's not important.”

“Carl,” said Fedder, who from Reinhart's perspective seemed to have grotesquely large knees. “Carl,” he repeated, looking down at his host with three parts seriousness and one of amusement, “I know you won't be offended if I ask: On thinking it over, don't you find your attitude towards marriage is a bit, well, somewhat on the sophomoric side?”

Reinhart got heavily to his feet. “That seems to be Gen's position on the issue, and it's pretty wild when you realize that all I've done for the past three months is work, whereas all I ever did before getting married was loaf. That reminds me of the favorite principle of psychiatry: that the truth is always the reverse of appearance; the kind man is really a sadist, and so on. I believe it, but the trouble is that once knowing about it, you are corrupted. Wanting to do your friend a favor, you must punch him in the face to make sure he knows you don't hate him secretly.”

Fedder by now was smiling broadly, and Reinhart realized that his neighbor had applied these remarks to explain the kick he had received the day before.

“Listen, Carl,” Fedder said, leaving his chair. “Let Dr. Niles prescribe. Forget your troubles for an afternoon, hey old boy? You're going on a picnic with the Fedder Family. Now we won't take your No. We've got more than enough food for all and sundry. We insist.”

His use of the first person plural disturbed Reinhart, who said: “Hadn't you better check first with your wife?”

“That won't be necessary,” Fedder boasted, sticking out his belly and hitching up his shorts. “When you've been married for six and a half years, you know the other partner. Most of these uncertainties are the product of the early months, old fellow. You'll see. It's only a matter of time. Meanwhile, enjoy an afternoon with your neighbors. And don't worry about wives. Yours will come back, and mine will love you.”

It was an odd thing to hear, but Reinhart managed to combine the relief of his own embarrassment with the suppression of any element that might give his neighbor pain, by uttering a laconic: “No doubt.” Furthermore, upon the instant he resolved upon his honor that never would he succumb to Mrs. Fedder's attractions. This oath was necessitated by his having seen, at Fedder's first mention of “picnic,” a terrible image of himself and Bee making mad love amid the crushed fruit in a wild-blackberry bramble, while Fedder fed peanut-butter sandwiches to his children just over the next rise. Some people, like Maw, suffered vision of bloodletting, illness, and death. With Reinhart it had always been sex, and nowadays the fantasy was horrible which in his bachelorhood had been a real joy of life. And he detested picnics.

Some hours later, as a member of a little group of bucolics that ringed an outdoor oven in the county park, Reinhart had nothing to reproach himself for but egomania. The happy truth was that Beatrice Fedder had no discernible interest in Reinhart. Indeed, she seemed to find him barely tolerable, and when by chance they stood briefly side by side, was first to move away, her thin nostrils finely drawn in what, he told himself delightedly, could not be other than dislike.

“How do you want your hamburger, Carl?” asked Niles, squatting before the oven, poking into its fire with a long green stick.

His middle daughter (whose name Reinhart had naturally forgotten), swinging from foot to foot, struck up a silly chant: “Hamburgers, hotdogs, hamburgers, hotdogs …”

“Ah,” said Reinhart, remembering Fedder's attitude in his kitchen, “so you do the cooking?”

Fedder turned up a soot-stained face. “Only outdoors.” He curled his lips in good humor and said to his wife, who stood behind the chimney, which cut off much of her slender body from Reinhart's gaze, which seemed to be her point: “Golly, Bee, I can't get a fire going when I'm watched. Why don't you take Carl for a walk?”

Both principals recoiled from the suggestion so vehemently that even Fedder would have noticed had his head been up, but it wasn't, and he was also distracted by his little daughters, who were continually delivering their minuscule idea of fuel: ice-cream sticks, discarded soda straws, half-burnt matches, and dry grass: it was plain they loved him dearly.

“Go ahead,” said Fedder, peering into the grate. “Carl doesn't know this park, Bee.”

“Why,” cried Reinhart, who was a native of these parts, to which the Fedders had moved only since the war, “I've been coming here since I was as old as—” he pointed at one of the little girls but was halted by the nonrecall of her name, which he knew was hardly the kind of failure to demonstrate before her parents, and was mumbling certain guesses—“Bainbridge,” “Crowley,” etc. (what ever had become of “Jane” and “Ruth” and “Betty”?)—when a cloud of yellow smoke drove them all from the oven.

“Wood too green,” Fedder shouted merrily, and flapped a large, dirty handkerchief to open a channel through the cloud. How gay he was, surrounded by his little girls chirping like wrens, and his stately wife—for so she was, with somewhat elongated features, clean jaw, prominent cheekbones, and suntan. Taller than Fedder, she wore yellow shorts above exceptionally long thighs. Her shirt was the puffy kind that needed the help of the wind to reveal vital upper data, but they were not likely to be voluptuous. Here and there—neck, forearm, etc.—Reinhart saw bones and tendons. She faintly favored the male members of the House of Windsor, except as to eyes; and also an underweight motion-picture actress who always played newspaperwomen.

“Be friends,” Fedder adjured his wife and his neighbor, and dropping his handkerchief, harassed them in the style of a dog herding farm animals.