Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  Her hands instantly ran all over him, like a team of hamsters. “I’m ol’ Homer’s lit-tul cousin, and I’m your date, and I am goeen to call you Goody.”

  Chapter 24

  Billie-Jo proved to be this girl’s name, complete with hyphen; she wrote it on the bartop with a finger wet with condensation from her glass. Her smile had too much gum in it, her teeth being small though clean, and her cheeks were flaccid unless she smiled; she was not unfair to look upon in the present, but you thought she might be extraordinarily pretty in the future, if, straight-faced, she would smile, or, smiling, she would sober: thus she was always at once both a disappointment and a promise, like life itself.

  But Reinhart was annoyed with Blesserhart for having picked up these quiff—for Homer had one too, a brunette with features strong as a Turk’s—when he had said he was going fishing down the river. So after considerately ordering the girls’ drinks replenished—rum and coke for Billie-Jo and bourbon and gingerale for the other, who was called Grace and looked about the age to have that name which had now passed out of fashion, that is, about ten years older than the others—when the bartender with rude deftness had splashed in the coke with one hand while simultaneously foaming in the gingerale with the other, Reinhart dragged Homer off to the men’s room.

  It was reasonably clean this early in the day and furnished with a vending machine from which you could purchase a comb for one dime. Over the urinals were those birdcage things holding a disinfectant the emanations from which opened up your sinuses, and in each drain a ten-pound chunk of ice lay melting. Homer stood a considerable distance from his stall, legs spread, as if he were watering the lawn.

  “Blesserhart,” said Reinhart, “I thought we were going fishing. How did your cousin and her friend get into the act?”

  “I sweared I never knowed they was hereabout, Doc,” Homer answered, stripping the gears with his zipper. He then bought a new comb, though one already showed in his back pants pocket, ran it twice from eyebrow to nape, and discarded it in the flip-top wastecan. “They got a tent show in the lot neckstore and come in here when they seen ar machine setting outside. I can’t say if Billie-Jo knowed it was mine or thought it belonged to a couple a salesmen with hot pants. Anyway, them two come in and Billie-Jo reckonized me right off and said, ‘Hi, Homer.’ An I said, ‘Hi, Billie-Jo.’ An she said, ‘Homer, I wanna innerduce you ta’“—

  “Yeah,” Reinhart interrupted, “that goes without saying.”

  “Sure,” Homer agreed. “And I tell you this, Doc, when Billie-Jo fown out who you was an all, why, you couldn’t hold her back from going right over to that telephome to wait on ya.” Staring at his shoes, he exclaimed: “Well, will you looky there—I peed on my toes!” He slid under a compartment door, for the sit-down toilets were all pay-type, and then climbed out over the top trailing a long string of tissue.

  “So I uz thinking, Doc, you’re sure right about that feeshing down the river, I uz sure going and am still.” He frowned upon seeing that the dye from his shoes had come off on the paper, and accused them of inverse practices. However, he quickly regained his bonhomie and said to Reinhart: “But what I uz wondering about, Doc, is if you’d care to take a minute and drop your load.”

  “No thanks,” Reinhart answered, grimacing. “I don’t have to go.”

  Laughing like the devil, Homer figured out the confusion. “I don’t mean take a crap, Doc. I mean take Billie-Jo over behind the tent and put it to her. I guarantee you won’t regret it, though it’s true I ain’t laid a hand on her since she was fourteen an she must be twenny now if she’s a day, got damn.” He squinted. “If it’s all the same to you, Doc, I’d just as soon leave this toilet because that chemical smell is getting to my eyes. Got damn, I druther smell shit than that, woon’t you? … Anyway, I thought we could take in the tent show, and that don’t open till seven. We can just as well go down the river later: I ain’t got nothing else to do, as I told you being farred from my job, and you’re sure welcome to join me. There ain’t nothing beats feeshing at night.” He smiled with his vacant mouth and swung out of the men’s room. Reinhart stayed behind to reflect that he either played along with Blesserhart or found another means of getting where he wanted to go: Homer had obviously decided to stay and would not be dissuaded even by Dr. Goodykuntz: you find such strong wills in people who otherwise have little recommendation, and their existence must be acknowledged and come to terms with if you are ambitious.

  He ran a washbasin of cold water and threw some on his head, for fatigue had set in at the thought of spending several hours with Billie-Jo. Suppose they were seen by someone he knew—it would spoil the pattern altogether: Sewer Official Flees with Carnival Girl. That could never be explained to Genevieve, who would not forgive him even if he then proceeded to commit ostensible suicide. On the other hand he had very little inclination towards going out onto the highway again and thumbing another ride; he was psychologically comfortable with Homer and in the role of Dr. Goodykuntz: you could hardly count on the next guy’s being as amiable as the former, or swallowing the latter, at least to the same degree as Homer…. No paper towels, but the washroom was equipped with one of those hot-air devices which could be swiveled upwards to dry the face. Better, said an enamel plate on its top, Than Towels: Avoids Chapping! Or so, anyway, went the theory. In practice Reinhart confirmed what he already knew, and left after ten minutes still dripping.

  “Where’d everybody go?” he asked the bartender, who was refilling a nest of stainless-steel compartments with cherries, olives, lemon slices, lemon skin, pearl onions, orange segments, pineapple chunks, and lime rounds, having already checked his extensive stock of potables.

  “And yet,” the bartender admitted to Reinhart, leaning on his balled towel and speaking from the side of his mouth as if the place were packed to the guards, “before we close tonight some wiseguy will roll in and ast for pinecone cordial with a cumquat in it, like they serve in Manitoba, or somewhere. The Joker is what you get a lot of in this business and is worst than your drunk. Sometimes you can’t tell him from the expert, who knows better than you how to mix a thing, leans over and supertends running the glass-edge through powdered sugar for your sours and so forth. Then comes the Sophisticake, who wants for his girl to have you reckonize him and so will call you by the first name. You get all types in a bar. This is where to learn human nature.” He smugly leaned away.

  “Or anywhere else,” Reinhart could not forbear from stating; he had little taste for the arrogance of barkeeps, barbers, and taxi drivers and saw no good reason why they should know more about man on the basis of drunks, dirty necks, and addresses of ill repute, than a cost accountant or shipping clerk with his statistics and manifests, or for that matter, than an agoraphobic spinster with her African violets on the window sill. “Where’d you say the others went?”

  “Who?” said the bartender, after the fashion of his trade, though Reinhart’s party had been the only people in the place. “I got my job to do, sir. I can’t keep track of every customer.” He backed off, smiling by the book, and took a little sip of the coke-over-ice-chips that such a fellow always keeps in a recess below the bar.

  Reinhart spotted the dim orange glow of a booth-light midway along the gloom of the west wall, and soon found his friends beneath it: the light, not the booth itself, though Homer and Grace, in a clinch, looked as if they might manage the other as well, and were gradually sliding sub rosa. This movement was checked by the entry of Reinhart’s long legs. Grace for some reason sat on the outside, and the booth was so narrow that his right knee extended into her crotch, so that she could go nowhere and Homer’s hand was pinched. They of course continued to ignore Reinhart.

  Would the same had been true of Billie-Jo, who instantly molded herself against his right side like a great piece of soft cheese.

  “Kuh-yoo-it?” she said close, referring to the other couple, and he knew his ear was all over lipstick.

  Having brought with him his third tot
of brandy, he now consumed it neat, and tried to avoid her personal attention with a merry but superficial reaction which missed the point at every interchange. Thus when she again said “cute,” this time meaning him, he laughed blatantly and vibrated his arm so as to shake her loose—however, she not only successfully rode out the tremors but improved her position by means of them: his shoulder was now clamped between her breasts and his elbow on her belly.

  Meanwhile, across and under the table, Grace was doing something to his captive knee, sort of jazzing it slowly though otherwise occupied with Homer, who was gobbling like a turkey behind her head.

  “Ah!” cried Reinhart, jerking himself from the booth, Billie-Jo of necessity coming along partway and falling one knee on the floor. “I’ll buy another round for all.” The girls declined, which should have made him suspicious, but he refilled Homer and himself, and so it went for hours, all afternoon, and—though he switched to beer—in no time at all, not having eaten since breakfast, Reinhart was stinking drunk.

  However, it had always been Reinhart’s peculiarity that alcohol never put him into oblivion. His coordination suffered, but his senses grew ever sharper. For example he had not while still sober realized, as he did now, that the girls were trying to pick their pockets, Grace succeeding with Homer, if a jackknife, a coil of wire, and a burnt-out sparkplug constituted success. She also found a condom, naturally in his watchpocket; it was loose, i.e., not in the little regulation red-and-white Trojan folder, and therefore may have been secondhand for all anybody knew. Snickering, she dangled it as public property and might even have inflated it had not Reinhart expressed opposition. Homer of course was himself altogether unconscious, his head lolling in whatever direction he was pushed by Grace, who gave him a shot with her elbow from time to time to emphasize his helplessness. His eyes stayed somewhere in the upper region of his skull; you could see only their blank underparts. His mouth wore a fixed smile: the man to whom no damage could be done. He had even left the key in the Buick’s ignition and the windows open: Who wanted it? Who wanted him? Who gave a damn? Reinhart, having his cross to bear, envied Homer greatly. For him, Homer had succeeded Splendor as an image of freedom, yet the fact remained that Reinhart, always Reinhart, still represented reason, order, and responsibility, because if he didn’t, who would?

  That is to say, in this situation he alone had valuable property which could be robbed, and therefore as much as he might have liked, he could not forget himself in the fashion of Homer. This was the story of his life, but he was not without devices. In the present case, on one of his trips to refill the drinks, he had ducked into the john and switched his money from inside coat pocket to right-foot sock, all the way under the instep, where he could feel it wrinkly, tickly, on his way back to the table. So he was safe enough from Billie-Jo’s maraudings, unless he passed out, which was unlikely.

  But what he could not for some time understand is why, now that Homer was unconscious and would hardly be able to see the show, he, Reinhart, did not tote him to the car and himself drive down the river and proceed to fake the suicide, etc., afterwards hiding out until the stink blew away from the sewer disaster, then reappearing, or if not, having Gen join him in Salt Lake City or wherever, that is of course after the baby was born, and together carving a new life.

  Why he did not do this was a mystery to him until he felt Billie-Jo’s hand working like a mouse in his pants pocket. The liquor and the frottage had made him horny. And not only Billie-Jo. With Homer out of the running and anyway moneyless, Grace shunted him like a wad of old clothes into the corner of the booth and rode Reinhart’s knee with new vigor. There was something merciless about her strong nose and stark eyes that both appalled and attracted him; and his feelings were the same, in reverse detail, towards Billie-Jo, who like a wad of cotton candy was both clinging and intangible and inspired in him a desire to wreak some cruelty upon her while at the same time he was being victimized by Grace. In their combination these two girls made up a parody of one exemplary woman.

  Which went to show that it was not really lust that detained him, but the possibility of isolating the truth about that condition. He never forgot his mission to bear witness to the principal phenomena.

  Billie-Jo lingered for a moment in the misapprehension she had found a roll of bills.

  “Ah, but you have!” said theoretical Dr. Goodykuntz, including Grace in his audience. “Money is power, is love, and vice versa. All the good things are one, and this is their homeland. Abe Lincoln rose from log cabin to White House; about his sex life there is a deficiency of data, but it can be safely assumed that he would attract many women with his sad, emaciated face alone. George Washington on the other hand, looking like the portrait of himself, which is to say, in one dimension—no profile or back-of-head, if he turned sideways he would disappear—where was I? Oh—G. Washington is said to have perished from the effects of leaping unclad from a lady’s window into a snowbank in Alexandria, Virginia. Which, whorehouse or private domicile? On entry of the police or husband? Who can say. Stories vary. The whole thing may be a canard. But the point remains, why won’t you find it in the history books but, instead, told around Army barracks? Four-F’s thus never know this terribly important detail—whether true or false—about the Father of Our Country. At least he wasn’t a fairy, like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.”

  “Wha you find, B.J.?” crassly asked Grace, who on the precedent of Homer seemed to think Reinhart was drunker than he actually was.

  “Only his dummy,” answered Billie-Jo, giving Reinhart a push as she came out of his pocket with the other hand. “Hey, Goody,” she shouted in his ear as if he were passing out, “wha you give me and Grace to let you do wha you want? C’mon, hoss.” She kicked his ankle. “You want a party?”

  Now Reinhart, the valve-lifters of whose mind were clattering so loudly he could barely hear her—and besides, Grace’s presence stirred something infantile in him—thought she had asked him if he wanted a potty, and he declined: no, thank you.

  “Tole you he sounded fruit to me,” Grace averred. “All thet talk.”

  Her evil look pierced Reinhart’s oysterish consciousness. “Yeah?” he rejoined. “That’s what so negative about your world-outlook, my good woman. You’re always opting for dead ends. Ignore the pun and reflect that lust is ever temporary, like the appetite for food. Neither the steak nor the sex you had yesterday have any bearing on that for which you hunger today. That is why eating and screwing—I beg your pardon—coitus, are crafts rather than fine arts like epic poetry and portraiture. Not to mention that gluttony is finally paralyzing: when you satisfy such a taste, all movement stops. And one of the ways a person can turn into a thing is by going into a condition of absolute stasis—a characteristic of an inanimate object being that it cannot move of its own volition…. And you are only parading your ignorance if you state your belief in some kind of equation in which silence is a necessary condition of potency in the man. The male Zulu [Reinhart made this up] chatters incessantly during the sexual act, that is to say, gives everything while his mate accepts anything, and I don’t have to tell you what a stallion he is.”

  Reinhart sank his glowering face in the beer glass. He felt the girls signaling above him, but failed to take alarm, for he could handle anything in the fields of sex, pocket-picking, roadhouses, or carnival tarts, and they had better believe it.

  He must have muttered the last phrase aloud because Billie-Jo ran a lock of hair over his nose and said: “We don’ believe you, Goody. Show us you are a man. Come over inna tent and show us, Goody. I don’ think you kin.” She edged him out of the booth. “But you better pay the man fore we go, hon. Where’s your roll?”

  Grace slipped out before they did, hard and mobile as a greased bearing. She wore spikelike bangs, among the black of which there were threads of gray, and the same kind of sailor-slacks as B. J., but hers were stuffed into low cowboy boots with spiked heels. She grinned knowingly at Reinhart as he registered h
ow she was shod.

  She said: “Mebbe we can do business with this stiff, B.J.”

  Meanwhile, deprived of his support, Homer melted all over the booth-bench and dripped onto the floor.

  Reinhart shrugged at that, but sounded a deep, testicle-laugh at Billie-Jo’s obsession with his wad. “Ignorant people like yourself always assume that they are craftier than the person of culture. Of course, sometimes they are, like the rotten little chippie that made a fool of poor John Keats. But I don’t have consumption,” he gloated with his chin in the air. “I paid the bartender as we went along.”

  “O.K.,” B.J. answered good-naturedly, and took his right arm as Grace clamped onto his left. “I won’t fight you, Goody. I do anything you want. Don’t be shy to ast me.”

  They were strong, though of course Reinhart could have overpowered them; the drinking had altered his sense of balance, but hadn’t touched his strength. However, he staggered along quietly between, only rarely using the girls’ arms for actual support, and swallowing a lot, for a strange sensation, which resembles nothing so much as thirst, follows on an afternoon of beer.

  ‘I’ll come back for him,” he shouted to the bartender, indicating Homer’s putative corpse. “He’ll be all right. Don’t worry about him.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” answered that person, who had changed identities since Reinhart last noticed. No, nothing nightmarish: the other’s shift had probably ended. Reinhart was not of the persuasion of drunks seen in movies, for whom the world spins around like a pin-wheel, and who are always encountering weird, masklike visages, voodoo-looking types—these usually in murder films. No, he was high but reasonable, and took an epiphany of his father-in-law, sitting at the bar, as not the real thing but rather an apparition created by his conscience. He knew that what he should have done, he had not: jettison these trollops, reclaim Homer, and set off down to the river. But he simply couldn’t resist seeing what concluded from the premises established; and surely, in Western civilization, curiosity is a good.