Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  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.

  In a word, Genevieve had made him a man; with her he made love for the first time in his life, as opposed to mere screwing, although he didn’t actually love her until she defended him from her father. The distinctions were very clear to him as he squeezed suds from the washcloth onto his shoulders, counted one-two-three until they crawled to the center of his vertebral column, and then brought the brush into play. Consonant with his present mood, in which the commonplace was strange and wonderful (rather than merely sinister, as he usually saw it), he was struck by the circumstance that one owns a back from birth to grave, yet never sees it. Likewise with one’s face!

  “How about a nice glass of Mr. Ochsenaugen’s homemade grape wine?” asked Maw, again prowling outside the door. “Betty O. whom you always thought was cute, still unmarried, crushed the grapes with her feet last September.”

  “Maw!” shouted Reinhart in the basso given him by the tub, “you advocating strong drink?” Which of old had followed sex on her list of prohibitions, no doubt because it was conducive to sex.

  “A married man,” said Maw, “needs his strength.”

  That seemed rather dirty to her son, who heard her set the glass against the door and give a warning to look for it on his exit.

  “Phew,” Maw said. “What a hot day! This weather must be killing that poor little thing.” By which she meant Genevieve, who was short but most sturdy and far from feeble, though it was true that as a woman in her second month she took things easy, on doctor’s advice and with husband’s blessing. Maw, however, believed it was one month, only the Raven family knowing that sin had preceded sanction, so she went on to envy Genevieve’s luck in being delivered next January.

  “Don’t count your Reinharts before they’re hatched,” Reinhart almost said but checked himself. He had just returned from Psych class at the university and was overconscious of instances of concealed hostility in his speech. Certainly he didn’t wish to curse his own barely formed embryo somewhere deep in Gen’s linings, signals from which he believed he had received last night with his ear at her still-small belly. He had heard tiny chirps and though it was probably ludicrous to interpret them as “Daddy” peeped by a fledgling, neither did he hold with Gen’s own theory of mere digestive adjustments—wives, he learned, can be extraordinarily antiromantic.

  Like a hippopotamus, Reinhart settled on the bottom of the tub until, at one end, only his eyes and nose broke water. Twenty minutes later he emerged and lumbered into the closet, trailed by a fluid spoor. Since his accident with the bathroom supplies they had been rearranged and some staple items—viz., the surplus toilet paper—taken to the basement cupboard, so the pleasure of his present encounter with the linen store was unalloyed: he seized a thick towel and polished his buff to euphoria. A full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door suggested stocktaking, and he did not flee from it, but with a curtailment of breath drew much of his fat up under the ribs and, ignoring what remained, pronounced himself “on the way back,” for, being a conservative, he believed that perfection had existed at some past time and that true success was invariably retrograde. On the other hand, he disapproved of childhood as it was manifested by your standard American kid, and looked forward to bringing up his own offspring with just severity, relieved by arbitrary instances of massive kindness, de haut en bas: “You don’t deserve it, but I have bought you a pony.”

  As an example of the change in his own parent, when he left the bathroom and disremembering the glass of Ochsenaugen ‘46 propped against the door, kicked it across the hall runner, Maw came grinning with a wet sponge and chortled: “Glad it was of the white and not the red, or it would look as if a person died here of hemorrhage.”

  Later, having pressed the pork-chop sandwich upon him—having kindly removed the rib, though until he was halfway through he chewed with care, and then in the last mouthful grated terribly on a sizable fragment of bone—Maw reminisced over her own cup of coffee.

  “You yourself were never what anybody called a cute baby. You were inclined to make the darndest pickle-face when anybody tried to be nice, and would make funny sounds at them when no more than fifteen months. I forgot when it was you began to defy me, but it was soon.” She swallowed and hastened to correct a false impression: “Not that I’m criticizing, mind you. Maybe you’ll have better luck with yours. Anyway, when I recall you as a tiny kid, with your mop of yellow hair, I always see you sitting on your little throne. I guess you can’t remember that cunning little potty-chair with its rack of beads on the front for the child to toy with while he was doing his business, which you’ll find out quick enough that while it seems a simple thing to ask, no kid will be good about it. Anyway, you would have
sat there all day if I left you, just running those red-and-blue beads back and forth like an idiot.” She quacked with laughter and asked: “Were you counting them?”

  “I guess so,” said Reinhart, whom nothing could harm nowadays. It seemed an eon since he had got home from the Army and wanted something to do; on the other hand, the time had gone by very quickly. Husband, householder, student, and in the afternoons he still worked for Humbold, which is how he had got the Quonset hut in Vetsville for Gen, the germinating seed, and himself. Twenty-five a week from Claude, ninety fish a month from the G.I. Bill—in the aggregate, not enough for better quarters. Not that he himself required better—he was delighted with the tin domicile, thinking of it as a kind of amateur clubhouse where camping was a lark.

  “What will you call it?” asked Maw, at the sink, where with running water and two fingers she swabbed out her cup. “I still got the name-book your aunt gave me when I carried you, if you can use it. As it happened, I never, liking ‘Carl.’ Haven’t you ever wondered how it got the o? Blame it on your Dad, who claimed to have had a great-uncle in Germany who wrote poetry, was an anarchist, and committed the Dutch act at twenty-two. That man was named Karl, and Dad wanted to make a difference between him and you even if you turned out to sound Italian.”

  “A poet?” asked Reinhart with a great surge of heart, after the quick passing of a shadow from it: in one month he would reach the age at which Uncle checked out.

  “Blew out his brains,” said Maw. “No doubt over some illicit romance.”

  “I wish I had known that when I was in Germany and looking for relatives.”

  “Oh, Dad would never tell you that. He’s not one to embarrass a fellow. So don’t let on you know.”

  Neither would Reinhart let on to Maw that Genevieve always called him, with her intuitive tact, by the poet’s name. Anyway, she and Maw, while each professed frequent concern for the other, seldom met. Gen had come to his parents’ home once, got immediately ill on the glass of Ochsenaugen ‘46 served by his father as cocktail, and spent the rest of the evening in the bathroom. Maw had yet to visit Vetsville.

  “Well, this was very nice.” Reinhart pushed away his plate of crusts (he had never eaten one since the night he saw Officer Capek reject them; as in the case of the butcher, he nowadays selected normal men to emulate). “And thanks too for the bath, which hits the spot in weather like this.”

  “Any time,” said Maw. “You know the old homestead door is always open for the return of the prodigal. And by the way, I asked my roomer to leave.”

  “Emmet Swain?” asked Reinhart. “But why, now that I’m no longer here?”

  “That’s just the point—so’s you can visit overnight if need be.”

  He took his seersucker jacket from the back of a kitchen chair. “Maw, I seldom get your logic though I don’t question your intentions. But I’ve got to go now. The Mrs. will have lunch waiting—”

  “I’m sure she’ll have a nicer one than I could give you.”

  “—and then I must get to work. By the way, Claude sends his regards.”

  Maw opened the front door and spread-eagled herself against it. “That man is a genius. I’m sure glad you decided to stay with him even though going back to college, and I’m certain that poor little thing misses her job there, which she quit, though I expect she has more than enough to do around the house all day. Does she do a lot of warshing, boy?”

  “Lots,” said Reinhart over his shoulder, as he descended the porch steps. Which reminded him that he must stop at the laundry and pick up a bundle.

  “My God,” shouted Maw, “you’re already sweat through the back of your coat again. One thing, though, it must take off a lot of lard.”

  Reinhart admitted as much and got in behind the wheel of the office automobile, Claude’s Gigantic, which he used for everything these days just as if it belonged to him, but drove on its own terms, the car having from long service with the boss acquired a soul. Thus it testily slammed its own door now and began to edge away from the curb before Reinhart was quite set; nor did it honor the stop sign at the next corner, but blasted through with a groan of the horn. To the nearby cop Reinhart helplessly showed his imitation of Claude’s one-finger salute, which was accepted and returned.

  As it happened, Reinhart’s home was the very same hut that his first clients, the Clendellans, had vacated in favor of the Onion. They had left behind a box of newspapers, a broken alarm clock, a bottle of sour milk, and a ripped canvas chair. All of which might still be found, by the curious, in the high grass of the back yard, except that the milk bottle had broken when Genevieve pitched it out the window. For she too had altered. So neat, so deft, so competent as a maiden, as a wife Gen verged on the slatternly, there was no denying it—nor did she try to, but smiled lazily at the mess in the kitchen sink, threw the magazines from couch to floor, lay down and regarded expressionlessly the corrugated vault of the roof, sighing now and again in stupefied contentment while Reinhart rolled up his sleeves and got after the dishes, which was no more than fair since he had also prepared the meal that soiled them.

  It had been April 1, Reinhart’s patron-day, that marked the point of departure for everybody’s way of life. As they left Claude’s office at five-ten that afternoon, the secretary said: “Look, I’ll make it simple and meet you at the Orpheum at seven twenty-nine.”

  “But why?” asked Reinhart, wincing as a drop of liquid fell from the sky onto his forehead. Looking aloft for the malicious starling, he discovered that it had instead been and was indeed a light rain, which increased while he watched.

  Instantly encasing her head in a collapsible cellophane hood which she had drawn from a tiny sort of cartridge case on her charm bracelet, left wrist, Genevieve replied—

  But Reinhart hastily explained: “I mean, I’ll get my father’s car and pick you up at home, like a decent human being.”

  “Oh no you won’t,” was what Genevieve had silently mouthed during his speech and now pronounced aloud while reversing her coat, which proved to be waterproof gabardine on the other side. A kind of compact case, from her purse, yielded abbreviated rubber caps for the toes of her shoes.

  “Here,” said Reinhart, offering his arm for her to hold while she put them on.

  “You’ll use any excuse for contact, huh?” She supported herself on Claude’s front window, leaving a tiny handprint, very clear, for she was exquisitely made. “I told you about Daddy. Do you want to provoke him?”

  “This is to be done on the sneak, is that it?” She couldn’t be touched; he couldn’t show his face at her house; he anticipated a great evening. “All I propose to do is take you to the movies.”

  “Oh yeah?” leered Genevieve from her glassine cowl, like a Martian nun. She saw her bus approaching the corner, and squished towards it without another word.

  “Are you kidding?” Reinhart asked his reflection in the plate glass.

  But at seven fifteen he stood before the only movie theater in his suburb, on which they had stuck a tiled entranceway, like a great blue urinal, while he was abroad, BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIE, said the marquee, which evidently was still being mounted by the same witty or illiterate manager. Reinhart had gone there for years to see Cark Garble, Betty Grabble, and other celluloid celebrities. From a somnolent woman encased in glass he bought two tickets bearing the legend (for he was the kind of fellow who in idle moments read all such): “We reserve the right to change the price of admission without notice.” Thus they could outwit a degenerate with only thirty-five cents to his name, or a parsimonious one, but apparently they had stopped using it against Negroes, for Reinhart saw two go in, looking clean and grateful.

  He inspected the glossy stills of a coming attraction, which had also got confused. One caption read: “He had the face of a boy, the lusts of a man, and the body of an animal”; yet the photograph above it showed a well-known actress in regal attire.

  “Guy,” said a nasty voice nearby, which sounded as if it had bad breath.
“You Carl?”

  A teen-aged boy-man, with the face of an animal and the hair to go with it, stood beside him, tall as he though fearfully thin. Reinhart was restrained from arbitrarily kicking him into the street only by a habit of seldom acting on hateful impulses, as well as a certain pity: the poor boy had a forehead of vile pimples.

  Suffering a poignant recall of himself in that state, Reinhart said in a fine equilibrium between benevolence and distaste, “What is it, son?”

  The kid jerked a thumb over his left shoulder and slunk nihilistically through the glass door into the lobby. Receptive even to the most unlikely commands, Reinhart trailed him. The remodelers hadn’t yet reached the interior: it was still Bagdad in the time of the more sensual caliphs, though the ticket-taker at the harem portal was dressed more like a corporal in the Austrian hussars. Under a false little stucco balcony with closed shutters, from which hung a fringed shawl embroidered in Arabic runes, next which began a series of those Moslem windows with frames like parentheses, except that they were not in this case windows but rather niches holding jugs more than large enough to accommodate Ali Baba and figured like so many paisley neckties—under the balcony, the punk stopped, cleared the lank hair from his eyes with a spastic movement of his entire body, extended a bony paw and said: “Tickets.”

  When Reinhart gave him only raised eyebrows, the kid directed a high-pressure stream of saliva between his own shoes and read his forehead welts in Braille, to see if he had lost any. Then he faced the shawl and howled directly into it: “Ain’t got!” And who should step out from behind the fringe than Genevieve Raven.

  To the punk she said: “All clear?” His neck flexible as a hose, he sank his head to the center of his chest and grunted. Genevieve then addressed Reinhart: “What does he mean you haven’t got the tickets?”