Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  “And myself, too,” said Reinhart, looking at the dough and waiting for the enlightenment to clear his conscience. He decided the worst crime was to judge events statistically.

  “Though that already is the U.S.A., if you ax me,” stated the Maker, staring at the frayed end of his cigar. “Man, we got everythin’ you want right here. Oh say can you see—”

  “No patriotism, please,” said Reinhart, wincing in shame.

  But the Maker’s mouth fell and he answered solemnly: “Now don’t lay no Communism on me.”

  Starting the engine, Reinhart asked: “You don’t have any idea where I can find an apartment?”

  “Is that what is eatin’ you?” The Maker almost swallowed his cigar. “Is that it? I thought it was that daddy-in-law. Why, where you want to stay, Vitsville? Now you just run up there again tomorra. The manager done read his list wrong. You and the Mrs. is the first names at the top.” He left the car, but put his hat back into the window. “If you’d ever stop worrying for two minutes, you’d be knee-deep in sugar. Man, I might even run you for President.”

  Within a fortnight Reinhart and Gen moved in to their very own Quonset, and Reinhart congratulated himself on getting on the Maker’s good side; imagine such power used to your detriment! … But late in the afternoon of moving day, Genevieve the antiromantic, having hung some monk’s-cloth curtains, sat down on a cardboard crate full of a disassembled ready-to-paint chaise longue with wheels (gift of Dad), sighed, and said: “Humbold isn’t so bad. True, you have to fight him for your pay, but he did use his pull to get us here.”

  “He did?” disingenuously said Reinhart, who had been drilling a hole through the metal wall for the purpose of affixing through it a bolt-and-nut device on which to hang his framed discharge certificate—the environment seemed to demand such an exhibit. She would never hear of the Maker through him.

  “Oh sure, I thought you knew I asked him. He could have been a lot quicker about it, but since Vetsville is subsidized by public tax money I believe Claude doesn’t want his connection advertised.”

  “Why is that?” asked Reinhart sullenly, junking all his newly instituted superstitions; he might have guessed that connections and not wizardry would always win out in Ohio.

  “Why, because there’s nothing rotten in the state of Denmark, not much.” She had tied a handkerchief over her head and wore blue jeans which showed to good advantage her perfect rump, even to a suggestion of its cleft. Reinhart reached for it from time to time in exploitation of his proprietorship, which she didn’t seem to mind, nor indeed to notice.

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, throwing down his drill, “who cares? We’ve got our own place now. You know what that means.” He went behind her and, bending over, felt her up through the flannel shirt she wore on loan from her brother.

  A naked mattress lay where the movers had coarsely hurled it. Genevieve suffered herself to be led in that direction, but resisted his also trying to undress her in transit. At length he saw, by half, her natural person, and marveled at the quality of her endowments. She tried at least to retain her underpants, which were of an almost luminescent white. During this commotion her breasts leaped like sportive animals. He had her off her feet with his wrist in the crossroads and his hand through to the other rise, boasting: “I can lift you right up to the ceiling like this, on one arm.”

  She suddenly went limp and whispered: “It’s only two P.M.“

  “I’ll pull down the curtains if that bothers you,” said Reinhart, swaggering the full four steps to the other side of his house. In the window were the faces of several preschool urchins. Reinhart shook his fist at them; luckily he had had no time to divest himself and therefore offered them no basis of comparison with their fathers. He closed the newly installed curtains, which, designed for the standard window, more than sufficed for this spyhole: he and she were captives in a tin prison of love. He pricked his thumb on one of the clips holding the monk’s cloth to the rod-rings, and a drop of blood welled sluggishly from the ball…. Reinhart never wasted an accident; he told himself now: Either she was not a virgin or I did not have her that night on the back seat.

  Behind his back she had rolled herself in the mattress, a wiener in a bun. Like the crank eater who inspects his sandwich for foreign matter, Reinhart suspiciously unfolded her covering.

  “Does it have to be now?” she asked, trying to hide three points of vulnerability with but two quivering hands.

  Reinhart said in mock annoyance: “Don’t act as if you were about to be murdered.” As always at such moments, the various parts of his clothing fused into a single garment, easily shucked. Now, at the moment when, savagely bare, he supposed he would be most frightening, she began to shake with laughter from pearly teeth to rosy nipple.

  “It looks so funny!” With tardy consideration, she displayed the back of her head and haha’d to the rear of the hut, where the sink was filled with new dishes still wispy with excelsior.

  Now one of Reinhart’s many peculiarities had been that while his body performed the act of love, his mind invariably went elsewhere; because of this his potency was seldom in question, though no doubt his sanity could be challenged: having achieved his concrete aim, he did not stay to enjoy it but rather fled to abstractions, did sums, examined theorems, etc., though when not inside a woman—which of course was most of the time—he could hardly add up his change and if forced to, escaped into fantasies of screwing. That is, for him the here and now were always somewhere else. But since marriage is pointless unless you can develop a sense of fact, which is more important than love in this context, which perhaps is love, Reinhart set out now to become a husband.

  Far from troubled by Gen’s jeers, he used them rather for stimulation. They were about to enact that drama of crime and punishment which he had explained to his audience when drunk; and naturally the poor girl was frightened. In human relations, there is always an onus that wants bearing.

  “Darling,” he said to the groove of her flawless but shivering back, “I love you.”

  That stopped her hysterical laughter, or rather converted it into what was at once less serious and more useful. “How I hate you!” she cried, scrambled up, and ran nude along the narrow alleyways among the cartons and unarranged furniture.

  “Aha!” shouted Reinhart, standing where he was. “We didn’t do it on the back seat!” For this was not the comportment of a person deflowered long since.

  “Certainly not!” screamed Genevieve, her breasts between the breastlike curves of a loveseat-back. She laughed corrosively again. “I wouldn’t let a man touch me, least of all you.”

  Logician Reinhart, in an Aristotelian pose, finger pointed rhetorically downwards, presumably towards reality, asserted: “But I’m the one you married.” Genevieve was touched by this argument. She brushed the curls off her white forehead and frowned with an extended underlip. She was of course still bare and wore a lipstick that matched the hue of her nipples.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said, inching in her direction with no discernible movement of the body above his ankles.

  “Then why must you hurt me?”

  “I can sue you for fraud,” he warned.

  She made a sudden dash for a straightbacked chair and gained it; Reinhart saw her pretty parts through the slats. He feinted the beginning of a move, and bluffed her behind the secondhand sofa purchased with his commission from the Maker’s swindle. She was now trapped in a diminishing passage which ended in the metal wall. However, he was far too shrewd to follow, but returned to the mattress and lay supine.

  “What are you doing that for?” asked Gen, too proud to deprecate the impasse by coming out the way she went in. In a moment she climbed over the sofa-top and into its flowered seat, where she arranged herself as if for a polite visit, knees together, bare feet on floor, hands limp, and head inclined sympathetically.

  Fortunately, the year had reached May and the temperature stood at seventy, else Reinhart would also have had cold to conte
nd with. He balled his clothes for a pillow, and began to whistle a little tune through his teeth.

  “Don’t you look silly!” said Genevieve. “That’s really all I’ve got against you, that you act so silly. I didn’t ever say I wouldn’t ever do it, but we aren’t even moved in. Otherwise, I really love you and I’m not sorry we got married. Now please throw me my clothes?”

  Reinhart’s lids fell slowly over his eyes, and a kind of divine catalepsy crept through his trunk and limbs. Certain holy men in India lie in this position and support an erection for days, so that childless women might with a touch of the hand absorb its fertility.

  “All right, stay mad.” Genevieve fell silent for a while; to get her clothing she would have to step across the yogi’s magic body; perhaps she already felt its emanations. Rainfall gushed over their tin capsule in one of those sudden showers that increase self-esteem: you alone have been chosen by heaven for a quick cleansing. Reinhart was absolutely one with the natural world, his spirit at peace.

  “I guess I wouldn’t mind just sitting there with you,” said Gen. “If you want me to.” Reinhart could hardly reply to this, since he didn’t really hear it, occupied as he was by pure will. At last she rose and went haltingly to the mattress.

  “You don’t have to sulk,” she said, falsely bright. “A person who has never been touched by a person of the other sex has a right to be careful.” She knelt. “I think it’s awful. I think it should be changed. I mean the way it is. There’s love, and then there’s sex that makes it dirty. How would you like to be a girl? Carl …” She touched his hand. “Carl, let’s arrange the furniture now for our little house.” Her fingers stole up his forearm, around the bicep, and into the armpit; out again to trace the junction of clavicle and shoulder cap, across and up the neck, over the chin of stubble (for he hadn’t yet shaved), with fingers parting to sweep around the nose; her hand reclaimed its integrity between his eyebrows, went through the wheatfield of hair, returned, became a fist, and tumbled limply down the precipice of his forehead, bounced through the hair on his chest, and proceeded to the Mason-Dixon groove that remained as a memory of his absent belt.

  All this while Reinhart was in the stasis of authentic power. Her fist became a hand, and arched, like a cat stretching, from the belt-line to his navel. She lay on her side now, face soft against his shoulder, a breast apparently just missing contact with the hollow of his elbow.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she murmured. And without warning her fingers clenched into a small but formidable weapon, and she punched him right in the summit of his belly.

  So much for the philosophy of the East!, which proved as inefficacious here as in his other experiments: trying to seduce unknown girls with thought waves, etc.

  As soon as he caught his breath, Reinhart turned to her in injured hauteur and asked: “Now why did you do that?”

  Expecting retaliation, she had rolled herself into a tight ball like a spider, which any amateur entomologist knows is, contrary to legend, a docile little organism afraid of every undue vibration on its web. He could barely hear her muffled voice: “Because I’m scared.”

  He said: “They call me Gentle, Genial, Jovial Carlo,” and strove to earn at least the first adjective. She murmured: “I think I’m falling asleep.”

  “Yes,” whispered Reinhart. “We’ll do it some other time. We’ve got years.” He put his big hand lightly over her eyes. “Isn’t it nice and restful here in our own house, with the rain on the roof?” Her even breathing tickled his palm, and under his wrist she mumbled in drowsy security.

  True love being known for its treacheries, Reinhart chose this moment to enter her fiercely. This time there could be no doubt he had succeeded in making her his own. It was also legal, for the state has first to come between a pair before it will get out of their way, and its sanction meant much to Reinhart, who was rhythmically practicing respectability with no fear of a cop’s hostile flashlight. The conviction that for the first time in his life he was doing what everybody everywhere approved, gave him the endurance of Galahad, who had the strength of ten because his heart was pure, though Reinhart wondered why Sir G. was always represented as a eunuch. This was his last reflection, nor did he do sums. As darkness fell he was still occupied with his little bride, and she—who proved no fink when the chips were down—him. An inspector of love would have had the greatest difficulty in determining where one left off and the other began.

  Like everybody but the perverse, who were not worth bothering about except for laughs, Genevieve liked it once she knew what it was. When you were married, loving was a ready pleasure, always at hand, free as the radio. Because of this, the Reinharts seldom left their hut for the outside entertainments, expensive and hollow, that wives traditionally demand from workaday hubbies with tired feet and sore billfolds. Reinhart could only make the classic assumption that the needs of such women were not met in the domestic arena, i.e., in bed, for his own dear companion never groused. Her premarital complaint had been simply that she was without a husband; obtaining one, she fell quiet. Reinhart loved things that worked out so neatly, the world being in general rather messy. And if he at first missed her needle in his ribs—for though provocation made him nervous, thinking back through twenty-two years until his memory dissipated the mist, he realized that without it he might still be wearing a diaper—he had an obligation that more than made good the loss: shortly Gen was truly pregnant.

  He demanded that she quit her job, and “My,” said Maw, who saw all manner of things to admire in Genevieve that anybody else would take as commonplace, “she sure agreed to that.” He himself got serious about his own, and actually looked forward to his biweekly struggle with Claude for the wages, which he had begun to win. To these were added the unemployment payments of 20 per, making 25 times 52 plus 20 times 52, equaling $2340 the year, or $195 per month. This they could feasibly live on, for the Vetsville rent was 42.50 at every new moon and Reinhart became a shrewd shopper, purchasing the economical cuts—beef hearts, pork hocks, and veal kidneys—at which your typical contemporary housewife turned up her nose (and furthermore he learned to cook them nicely: the hocks with sauerkraut; the kidneys in a pie, the crust of which took six minutes to prepare with a modern mix using cold water; and so on).

  Reinhart cooked because he believed that carrying a child was enough for a girl of twenty; with the same motive he performed the other chores: garbage-emptying, eradication of tea-stains from the sink, dish-washing, and the lot. Marriage for him was the marvelous opportunity to use the energy he had stored up for years as a large man who did little. He even purchased another set of basic dumbbells from York, Pa., to replace those that Maw had sold as scrap metal, and in the interstices between his duties exercised for the first time since 1941. By means of these and several performances of the act of love every night, he lost seven pounds in a month; he was still 220 but not flabby.

  In the middle of June, when the weather had turned warm enough for Gen to eschew her slip and wear only pants and brassiere under the blue housecoat which her husband opened so often that the zipper was fouled and its function taken over by safety pins, Reinhart let the federal government assume from the state the provision of half his livelihood. Under the GI Bill he enrolled in the Municipal University in the City, and began to draw the stipend of $90 a month. For which he was obliged to attend summer-session classes, three each morning starting at eight, ending at eleven. He made the ten-mile trip, to and fro, in the Gigantic, and by talking real estate to his fellow students between bells, justified the gas-and-oil charges he added to Claude’s account at the local Flying Red Horse, which the boss never paid anyhow.

  The day Maw had fried him the pork chop, his second Monday of school, he next stopped to claim the laundry from a sullen Chinese whose iron had made sinister little burns at the points of the collars of all his shirts, and then drove to the mud slough, with its permanent tire grooves, in the front yard of Quonset No. 10, or as he had had a jeweler
etch into the brass doorknocker, gift of his aunt: SANS SOUCI—REINHART.

  Some relentless college girl had lately been hired to divert the children on balmy days, in a simulated summer camp on the other side of Vetsville, now that they were on vacation. Unharassed, Reinhart walked to his screen door and shouted “Hi-ho.” The dust cloud raised by his arrival preceded him through the entrance. “Geneveeeeve,” he sang, as was his wont, before looking round the one partition, a kind of baffle just inside the door, which kept area snoopers from seeing, in one wink, right through the house and out the rear exit. He stepped beyond it into the one room that was their all: standard sofa in foreground; double bed made up as a parody of another sofa, against the wall in the middle; sink beside the back door, cabinets above, stove nearby, but the midget refrigerator was closer to the bed, for the outlet was there. Scattered in attendance to these main furnishings were lesser conveniences: straight chair or two; one overstuffed, with footstool and extra pillow; magazine rack; bookcase holding Reinhart’s old notebooks, zoology text, and a dog-eared copy of King Arthur, with “Carlo R. age 10” in a childish mess on the flyleaf. Dad’s wheeled chaise longue, really a garden item, had been assembled and put outdoors. Gen sometimes lay there of an afternoon, unless the nearby garbage can, murmurous haunt of flies, had not been collected for an inordinant while and sent forth its effluvium. It was marvelous how she had lost every trace of her premarital snobbery.

  As he entered, this valuable person was lying on the real sofa, looking towards the fake one, which wore as cover a huge cloth of dim Paisley, woven by ostensibly indigent Hindus, for it was stamped “India” and had been bought locally for one dollar. On the cover lay a paperbound book, on its cover the title Check for a Short Bier. Gen whiled away the nine months with reading of this kidney, which Reinhart not only approved; he had suggested it. Nothing like vicarious violence to give you the illusion of movement while you lie still.