Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  “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.”

  Capek immediately had to shake hands with the happy couple. “You understand,” he said, “I had to do my duty. When you make your complaint, you might say if you want to that I never harassed you. If you want to, that is. I got a wife myself and three kids, and I need this job.”

  “Capek,” Reinhart assured him, “you’re such a good egg that I wouldn’t report you for using a rubber hose.”

  Capek bared his teeth in horror and roared away in first gear, not shifting till he reached the main road.

  As to Reinhart and Genevieve nee Raven, they found U.S. Route 52 and took it west, Reinhart alternating between 55 mph—which is what the Chevy could make with, in the jargon of the road, “everything hung out”—and the 20 ordered by the signs in incorporated villages, population specified. Over the border, near a place called Longnecker, Indiana, they stopped at a motel where the conveniences were infamous but the rates moderate. Luckily, Gen had a wad of money; mainly ones, but enough; which led her intended to suspect some forethought on her wacky part. Wacky because she would allow him no further intimacy till after the ceremony, though they registered with the wino motelman as Mr. and Mrs.

  Next morning, Saturday, they proceeded to the nearest town showing cannon and balls and in the courthouse thereof, after first having stopped at a rube doctor’s shingle and dropped some blood which he found free of spirochetes, entreated the state of Indiana for a license to fornicate unhampered—which is what it amounted to, sourly reflected Reinhart, whom all this trouble was making an anarchist.

  “How do we spend our time till Monday?” he asked his espoused, as they stood on the courthouse lawn near the armament that helped win, or lose, the battle of Shiloh—whichever, the birds had since beshat it. “Since you don’t want to—”

  “Now don’t say something awful,” Gen broke in, as if he would have: he was marrying a stranger. She was some the worse for their travels, although having supplied herself with toothpaste, etc., from Woolworth’s. “We better place certain calls.”

  They did. She fortunately got Kenworthy instead of her father; he was under the weather from a working over by his friends; he planned to run off to the Navy; but first he would disseminate her news. Then Reinhart called Claude’s office number and left a message with an imbecile phone-service operator, spelling out everybody’s name and asking two days off for himself and the secretary.

  Finally, he called Dad.

  “Carlo! Are you at the drugstore? Would you mind picking up a few items?”

  “No, Dad. I called to explain about the car. I have it with me in Indiana…. I didn’t come home last night.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m serious, Dad. I came over here to get married. Spur-of-the moment.”

  “Isn’t that nice! Have you got yourself a girl?”

  “Of course.” Reinhart heard him turn away from the phone and say to Maw: Carlo went over to Indiana and got himse
lf a wife. He returned to the wire and asked: “Will you be coming home again, or do you want your socks forwarded?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Reinhart. “I’ll be home on Tuesday. Sony about the car.”

  “Oh don’t worry about that, Carlo. I won’t last much longer and then you will get it anyway. Carlo, Maw would like you to buy a couple dozen fresh eggs from one of those roadside stands, and I will reimburst you in dewtime.”

  Chapter 11

  Genevieve had been better than her word: not only did she withhold for three days, though their county-seat hotel had a double bed on which Reinhart tested a number of gymnastic hypotheses, but immediately after the judge pronounced them man and wife she began to menstruate and kept it up for four more turns of the earth. Which brought them back to Ohio and denied Reinhart the knowledge of what it was like to do it in Indiana, though he was experienced as to England, France, Germany, and even tiny Luxembourg.

  Back in town, for three weeks he and she were constrained to live separately with their respective parents, meeting only at the office on workdays. Ridiculous state of affairs, but necessary because of the housing shortage on the one hand (he couldn’t himself afford to rent or buy any of the listings he peddled to clients) and her father on the other (Reinhart wasn’t afraid of him, but it made sense to avoid the issue). So in addition to these failures as businessman and son-in-law, he went loveless to boot—as of course did Genevieve, who however did not seem to mind, the utterance of “I will” having quenched her premarital spark. Try as he would to get at least some of the old snottiness from her in lieu of sex, he drew a blank. Her once-bright eyes were filmed; her head hung interminably over the works of the typewriter, looking for a stray bobbypin that fouled the gears; she mumbled much.

  Claude as usual showed his perfect taste—perfect in what it claimed to be: there is no other standard. “Bud and G. Raven, congrats etcetera!” he cried on their first day back. He gave Gen one of his souvenir vials of cologne and Reinhart a mechanical pencil. “Consider them two days’ vacation another wedding prezz, you friends. Name the first one after me and I’m good for a silver teething ring any old day. See him or her grow up to respect their God, country, and bidniss.” He collared Reinhart and led him to the front window. “See them two-bit stores across the street? Well I don’t! No bud no, what I got in mind is a big supermarket claiming the whole block, and rising above it in the noonday sun is a gigantic red sign reading: Bud Reinhart & Sons!”

  Because of pride, Reinhart wouldn’t do the obvious: ask Claude to help them find a home; as a husband, he must begin at least to create the illusion of his own efficacy. However, every landlord with a vacancy was also a man with a high price for his favor in this congested time, and Reinhart’s being in real estate seemed only to up the ante. The lowest bribe demanded—for the most squalid rattrap of a flat—was two hundred dollars. The government owed Reinhart no more mustering-out money, and though his application had been entered for unemployment compensation, he had to wait a time for the first check—during which period the bureau kept calling him with one bleak opportunity after another, until he settled it once for all by changing his specification from “general clerical type” to “astronomer.” (They could only offer you something germane to your registered profession, and like all public offices dared not reject the statement of a clean-shaven Caucasian; for Reinhart, still heavy, had returned to keeping himself neat.) And as to Claude’s promised twenty-five per week, he had yet to receive more than a promise slightly fainter at each repetition.

  Anyway, he didn’t want to get a home by bribe, which was to start right off on the corrupt foot and suggested a search for a whorehouse or bookmaker rather than a nest to contain one’s hen and potential chicklings: no more than two weeks after the ceremony and perhaps seventeen days following their lone intimacy, Gen announced to him in her now phlegmatic way that she was pregnant. They were standing at the water cooler. Owing to the announcement, he drank the cup he had filled for her.

  “That proves it then,” she said, meaning they had really done something on the back seat, and smirked wanly.

  “Well,” said Reinhart, overlooking, in the guilt he still felt over the alleged violation, that common sense was here being raped unless her Indiana menses had been spurious, “well, now we must get a place all our own.” Besides, he was getting pretty hard up.

  He saw nowhere to go but Vetsville. In search of clients he had been calling there in the Gigantic every other day and found that, save for a random crank, it was the choice of nobody, that everyone was a customer for an abode in another district so long as the new house required no cash down, very little per month, and in the aggregate came to no more than, say, $3,000—which, moreover, it was assumed the government would cough up. With these specifications the people with properties to sell disagreed fervently, and Reinhart could see no clear right in either case, though now his own ox might be gored it is true he leaned towards, the have-nots.

  Trying to be dispassionate, for tactical as well as ego reasons, on one trip he stopped by the Vetsville administrative hut and said to the manager there, a fellow who had lost his foot to a German mine: “I think it might be wise from a business point of view for me and the wife to move in here.”

  “Izzat right?” asked the guy, jerking his artificial hoof, through which motion he got rid of the bad feeling that such an office engenders and leaves festering in the nonmutilate. His smile therefore showed no sarcasm. “If you sold a house to every present tenant, and the next couples on the list moved into our Quonsets, there would still be a hundred and fifty ahead of you.”

  “That’s considerably more,” said Reinhart, “than the number of guys from this area who went to war, as you can count from the temporary war memorial they have set up down at the high school.”

  “This dump,” responded the manager, “is principally for GI Bill college fellows from anywhere in the county. You’d see the difference if you went elsewhere: the kids in ours are worse-dressed, for example, and the wives are worse-built, but you will usually hear better grammar…. If you are going to college, I can put you down as Prospective Number 267. Of course you have three kids.”

  “None at all, yet,” said honest Reinhart.

  “Ah,” the manager replied, lifting an ex-Army cuff to scratch his good ankle, “then forget it. Come back when you have two and talk to me. It may be I can work you in with two if you also have a dog.”

  Reinhart felt too negative after this to call on clients. He drove back towards the office. Whenever he was really depressed, he thought about Negroes, he didn’t know why: brown faces just appeared in the gloom of his mind and, furthermore, with no particular message; their expressions were impassive, perhaps representing the incontrovertible facts of life. Whatever, he was impelled to drive through the colored district, where at the drugstore corner he saw a friend.

  He pulled to the curb and called through the open window: “Nicholas, it’s me!” The Maker reacted adversely to being sought out—he looked for you; the other way around, he would offer to escape—however, he halted at the attractive sound of his Christian name, signaled with a shoulder-shift to a henchman half-hidden in the doorway to an upstairs barbershop, and sidled to the car.

  “Doc Goodykuntz! I ain’t seen you since the lecher, man. When you comin’ back?”

  “Never,” said Reinhart. “I’m trying something else now. I got married, and at this moment that looks like a bust too.”

  The Maker was as hard to see in full daylight as after dark. Between hat and coat, he showed only a dim mouth. Reinhart would never have recognized him in a Turkish bath.

  “Whass matter, the little woman cut you up or burn you with the hot i-ron?”

  “We get along fine,” said Reinhart, “but just can’t locate a place to live.”

  The Maker’s lips closed in a self-kiss. “Whachoo looking for, class or on the other hand, convenience? Near to the streetcah, the saloon, and the poolroom? Near to or av
oidin’ the in-laws? Specify, man. I ain’t no good on the hidden motive.”

  “You want to sit in the car?” Reinhart issued the invite most timorously, lest it be too bold for the Maker, who might be too grand.

  “Why, is it hot? I hope you done switched the plates.” Nevertheless he accepted immediately and climbed in—lighted a cigar, in fact, to do which he rooted through the glove compartment ostensibly in search of matches, ignored those that he found there but managed to inspect everything else, and finally got his fire from the dashboard gadget. “I can get you five C’s for it,” he said, careful to belch the smoke in the direction away from his host.

  “Your information service has slipped up, I see,” said Reinhart. He explained about the Gigantic.

  “I long know that,” the Maker answered with a shrug. “If Claude the Hum don’t pay you soon, he going to owe you five C’s anyway. I make you square with him.” He reached over and honked the horn at a gaudy couple on the sidewalk, then shouted to them: “Doc Goodykuntz has returned!”

  “Quiet!” ordered Reinhart. “That’s all finished. It was one big flop.”

  “You talkin’ goofed, man.” The Maker produced his billfold. “I done sold twenty-three one-way tickets to Andorra at five clams each, though some is paying them off at one dime per week. You share is fifty-seven fifty. Forty … forty-one …” He was counting off the bills.

  Reinhart went wet as he understood. “What a horrible thing to do!” he moaned. “Find them, give it back. I’m not even sure where Andorra is.”

  The Maker lifted his white hat for a quick, beady glance. “That ain’t how you talked at the lecher.”

  “I know. It was a terrible mistake. So people really listen when I talk!”

  “Ha-hee,” laughed the Maker, forcing the money into Reinhart’s fist. “I ain’t so dumb, man. I know there ain’t no Andorra. But why tell them suckers and make them feel mean? Five bucks for a place to dream about ain’t the worse bargain. They lose it on the numbers or craps, anyway. Matter of fack, that’s just how I lost my share of what I got for the tickets.” He showed the now empty maw of his wallet. “Next time, pick a place that will fool me also.”