This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “But if I take this new job will I get stuck?” Reinhart asked, giddy with apprehension. “Can I stay available for better offers? Maybe somebody will call me from New York. I was in the Army, you know, and made certain contacts.” He stood up, passing Claude’s nonplused face en route. “Oh yes, I did. Always grabbing the initiative as you do—and I’m not criticizing you for it—you assume I am a fool. I never before had so many people who wanted to tell me what to do. You civilians could stand better manners, for one thing. For another, none of you have ever been out of Ohio. What do you know of the purple fog that rises at twilight from the Devonshire moors? That’s just one example, but it makes the point.”

  From astonishment Claude progressed rapidly into a sort of heart attack. He clutched himself pectorally, fell into the just-vacated chair, and from a mouth that threatened to froth, called weakly: “H2O!”

  Reinhart galloped into the outer office, where Genevieve blocked him before he could get to the bathroom and fill a tumbler. She had undoubtedly been listening at the intercom: Claude kept his transmitter open at all times, in what now proved to be a destructive exhibitionism—for the disloyal secretary whispered: “He’s faking. Demand thirty a week with the car thrown in. The tires are bald, the heater’s on the Fritz, and besides he’s getting the new Cad at twenty per cent below list.”

  Reinhart could hardly make himself heard; he had a rather thin voice for so thick a thorax; besides, from the inner room Claude was trumpeting like a herd of elephants charging Tarzan’s tree-house.

  “I just realized,” he replied, “after a false start, that I’m not cut out for business. I’m going to get out of town and take up something exciting.”

  Genevieve shook her head. “Uh-uh.”

  She was an arrogant little person, and had not, for whatever good reason, been to college. Nowadays Reinhart was constantly surrounded by inferiors, in terms of cultivation and experience, though Genevieve did have the prettiest neck, a supple ivory column that never showed a tendon or a crease, suggesting a like condition of thigh. Her leopard vest swelled and trembled like a living pelt. He fought a compulsion to put his hands inside it and still what was jiggling there. She arched her back in further provocation.

  “Well, I’ve got to get Claude a glass of water.”

  “Uh-uh.” Genevieve inexorably stalked him into the corner beyond the washroom door. “You see, I know your secret.”

  “Oh,” said Reinhart, “I was afraid you might find out.” He despaired of making her understand, for women were notoriously disloyal to friends and hysterically afraid of Negroes. Nevertheless, he bravely waded in: “The whole thing is relatively easy to explain, preposterous as it would seem.”

  “Preposterous?” she said. “If I thought you meant that, and weren’t just saying it because you’re embarrassed, I’d slap your face.” She opened her teeth and ran her tongue along the biting surfaces. The inside of her mouth was exquisite, a pink-satin hollow ringed by an ivory picket fence. If Reinhart had to characterize Genevieve with one word, he might have chosen “clean” over “pretty,” and there was no doubt that in a skin-to-skin relationship she would be very savory.

  “Oh, you don’t know about Dr. Goodykuntz.” He suspected they were talking at cross purposes, as a man is condemned to do with a woman, for Genevieve here showed mock shock and shaped her mouth as if to breathe on hot soup.

  Claude’s sudden quiet frightened Reinhart, and he whispered: “Have you no pity? How can we take a chance on whether or not he’s faking? What always makes you so certain?”

  “That’s just the way I am,” said Genevieve. “And I never asked you to fall in love with me. If my fiancé finds out, I can’t answer for your safety.”

  There, presumably, was his secret. The girl was mad. He moved as fast as he could towards the washroom, but she beat him out by a shoulder, and went inside and locked the door. Only after all that did he remember the water cooler standing there like a transparent-domed invader from outer space. So can a woman distract a man that he will forget mortal obligations. He filled a paper cone and rushed back, spilling half, to the boss.

  “Gloop,” Claude swilled the drink. “Twenty-five a week, bud, and the car for five hundred.” He looked perfectly all right; indeed, while he clutched his heart with one hand, he had been making memos with the other.

  “I haven’t got five hundred,” said Reinhart. “And really, Claude, I don’t see how I can go on working for you if you think I’m so naïve. In the modern world if you have good manners everybody thinks you’re stupid. Now to show you I’m not, here’s my idea. Assign the Gigantic to Humbold Realty as a company car, thus getting a tax exemption for it. Besides, it’ll save wear and tear on the new Cad.”

  Claude considered that for a moment, then let his features collapse into the old anguish. He fled from chair to closet and stuck a great tongue into the mirror on the back of the door there. “You’re killing me, bud. It hurts me when I laugh. You’re malignant, but you don’t savvy bidniss one little bit or you’d know I can’t let the firm be represented by a four-year-old heap.”

  “Why not? You’ve used it up till now.” Defiantly, Reinhart took the giant cigar from the redwood coffin and lighted it. He was making his stand here and now, and belched a great mushroom of smoke towards the boss.

  Surprisingly, Claude made no objection. He explained patiently: “I was skating on thin ice, bud, and I fell through on my tokus. This firm ain’t been conspicuous for sales in the last few weeks. If it ain’t my old car, then it’s you who jinxed me. With my big heart, though, I’m willing to try anything before I turn you out like an old dog. Always keep a positive face towards life, bud. When you’re losing money, up your buying. If you get beat up once, start a fight with a bigger fella. That’s the way of Jesus Christ, bud, who got out and walked on the water when his boat leaked. Nothing stopped that tough little guy, because his sainted mother was behind him all the way.”

  “So was the devil,” Reinhart noted sarcastically. “Don’t you remember, he said: ‘Get thee behind—’” He was interrupted by a piercing whistle from the cigar, and a second later it exploded towards the lighted end and there was a manifestation of excess smoke, very white.

  Maintaining his composure, Reinhart looked over the boss’s shoulder into the mirror and said nonchalantly: “In the movies a victim’s face is covered with black and the cigar peels back like a banana.”

  Humbold was clutching himself again, this time at his domed gut. He staggered across the room as if in a final seizure, emitting the cries of sundry jungle birds, bounced off the far wall, and caromed back to the closet, where the door was still open and Reinhart stood aside, so that Claude spun right into the hanging clothes therein. When he emerged, he was fully dressed for outdoors in a belted raincoat the color of an unborn calf; there were epaulets at his shoulders, cartridge loops on his chest, and chromium rings at intervals along the belt: he could attach law-enforcement gear in imitation of Officer Capek, or canteens of brandy if he wanted to climb Everest. He wore a rain cap to match. He was still laughing.

  “Poor bud,” he bellowed. “You’ll have to get up earlier in the morning to outfox Claude Humbold. You got the raise, sidestepped the car, and thought you had one on me. But I got the laugh! Get the point, bud?”

  “No,” Reinhart answered aggressively, because he in fact did. Somehow Humbold had won.

  “I got one in you, pal. En garde at all times, bud. I strike without warning.” He went to the rear window and raised its sash. “Get this clue: here’s why I never installed the casement type, with crank—I’m too wide to go through half.” So saying, he climbed nimbly over the sill and dropped four feet to the ground.

  “Claude,” Reinhart said, leaning from the window, “I guess I should tell you that I’ll want to quit in June to go back to school.”

  “Typical of you, bud,” replied Humbold, eying the gravel yard for ambush. “Gassing about faraway doings when I need a recon man at the front door.
June! I live day by day, minute by minute. At this hour I’m a hunted man. Three collection agencies are on my tail. If a dark guy, or a pimply guy, or a guy with specks ask for me today, take him down to the basement and punch him in the mouth. Without no witnesses, he’ll never bring you to court. By tomorrow I might have the necessary cabbage. By June I might own the state and you won’t want to desert me. Plan to take night courses at the “Y,” or study how to fly a plane on Sundays. Hover in the blue over town and look for zoning violations. Report them to the village council, bud, and they’ll owe us a favor, which we can use when I rip down that fieldstone dump where Mad Anthony Wayne stayed overnight in the year One, and want to build a nice bowling alley.”

  He gave Reinhart the two-fingered bull’s-horns, bullshit salute and hugging the stucco with a grating noise, crept towards the alley.

  “I’ll admit,” said Reinhart, having returned contemplatively to Genevieve’s desk, “that this experience has shaken my faith in Claude as a businessman.”

  “No it hasn’t, it hasn’t at all,” she ruled, smiling through a frown, or vice versa; whichever, her cheeks were stretched tight and shiny, and two dimples appeared that he had never seen before. Women are impossible when they think they’ve got one on you. Killing two birds with one stone, secretly getting back not only at Genevieve but also at Claude, who would have been horrified at the use to which his riposte was now turned, Reinhart said to Genevieve, to himself: Wait till I get one in you. Aloud, he asked: “Do you have any idea what the word ‘invidious’ means?”

  “Sneaky,” said Genevieve. She blotted her fresh lipstick on a Kleenex and studied the impression.

  “No, ‘giving offense.’ You frequently manage to be invidious, like many other people I know, particularly women. What do you mean by saying ‘No, it hasn’t’? I may be wrong in believing that Claude is a bad businessman. Perhaps he is a good one. But I am right when I describe a certain opinion as being mine. You don’t know what I think unless I tell it to you.”

  “Mmm,” answered Genevieve, her upper teeth clasping her lower lip. “You got put on salary, didn’t you? I told you just what to do and I must say you did it. Now all that’s necessary is to fight him once a week on payday, to actually get the money.”

  “That’s what I mean. Is a good businessman so crafty over such small things? I can understand a big, glorious swindle, but what does twenty-five dollars a week mean to Claude Humbold?”

  “Everything in the world,” said Genevieve, “that’s all. He hasn’t yet paid for a gallon of liquid soap for the washroom dispenser, which was delivered the same day I started work here six months ago. He owes on the stationery bill from last year, and the company ignores our orders. My ribbon is so faint I have to use a first carbon for the original. You’d think it would embarrass him to send out letters that smear at the touch, except he always uses the phone for important messages. Of course the phone company can’t be beat out of their money, but he always waits till they dun him twice—which makes it darn tough when I have to place a long-distance call for him: they switch me to the business office and some old harpy who checks on our last bill.”

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, “then he runs merely on faith in himself.”

  “Yeah,” sneered Genevieve, “or on other people’s in him. How he can still get credit is beyond me.”

  “Maybe it’s the same thing,” he replied to her first sentence. “Anyway, I hope you get your pay on time.”

  “Oh, I’m the one person who does. He’s afraid of my father, who’s a lawyer, that’s why. You must meet Daddy. He would be a good model for you, being very manly.”

  Taking offense as usual, Reinhart said: “See what I mean about your invidiousness? What do you think I’m like now, a girl? I wish I could understand why you dislike me.”

  He had no taste for the maudlin, and would have loathed himself for his plaint had she not responded to it so graciously. Women drop us low to raise us up, and vice versa: only our fellow man lets us stand upon the plain and looks us in the eye.

  “Carl,” said Genevieve, ineffably sweet though not able to resist a small castration of his name; but this was the first time she had ever used it in whatever variant. She reached for the hand by which he supported his standing slump beside the desk, pulled back before she touched it, bit an eraser red, and smirked in the same hue. “Are you always so forward?”

  “Genevieve,” said Reinhart for wont of anything more eloquent, looking for her momentarily to flee as usual; in fact, hoping she would. He suddenly felt terribly old and weary to be playing this game. He was getting to an age where he wanted only something definite, one way or the other: does she or doesn’t she? as the hair-dye ads asked. He hadn’t “known” a woman for months, indeed not since he returned to the States, perhaps owing to this very policy, which was either infantile or senile. Sometimes he believed he was in a state of torment so long-drawn-out that it resembled peace.

  “Carl,” confessed Gen, pulling at the two ends of her purple-velvet string tie, with no damage to the permanent knot. “I’m not really engaged to anybody….” Reacting to Reinhart’s depreciatory grin—he had never believed she was—she quickly bridled, saying: “But there’s this fellow who thinks we are—”

  “Genevieve,” Reinhart broke in. “I wonder whether we should do something harmless together, like seeing a movie?”

  She answered gravely: “I’ll have to let you know” and turned back with compressed lips to her work, but as soon as Reinhart had walked into Claude’s office in vague pursuit of his obligations as Manager, Veteran’s Division, he heard the outer door swish behind the fading heel-taps of her exit.

  Reinhart sat down at Claude’s desk and with effort conceived an original plan: he would call door to door in Vetsville, asking each tenant whether he could sell him a house. He remembered this was the means used by certain unfortunates during the Depression to peddle shoelaces, twine, and hairpins. Poor fellows; as a child he would ask Maw to give them a sandwich, and would sympathetically peer out the back door at them as they ate it on the steps. Vignettes of sadness invariably came to his mind when it had been exhausted by scheming. He proceeded to endure a fantasy in which he gave a handout to Claude, who had at last overreached himself; in this vision the boss wore the remnants of his grand attire, there were bird-droppings on his hatbrim, and his boutonniere was moulting.

  He didn’t hear Genevieve’s return. She just suddenly shouted from the other room: “It’s all right for tonight, if you don’t mind a chaperone.”

  Oh, you’re kidding, said Reinhart, half to himself, but of course nobody ever is.

  Chapter 10

  Nothing, thought Reinhart, better confirms the integrity of body and soul than a warm bath. He lay back in the one he had just drawn, his privates floating, a cool drip from one tap tickling his left foot and a hot one from the other Chinese-torturing his right—just the proper stimulation; even in a bath the world must be remembered. Maw had been kind to let him use her facilities, for he was no longer a resident of the house and while his own had no tub, it did offer a Navy surplus shower in a stainless-steel stall, more than adequate for shedding the dirt though of course deficient in the values of the heart.

  Strange how hot water would cool you in June. Even stranger to him was the presence of June itself; no sooner had he got his civilian hide covered with spring clothes than he must strip them off and buy summer garb, for by June Ohio was a second Tunisia, just as it had been Baffin Land in the winter. For a third oddity, this problem of attire had given Reinhart far more difficulty than certain other phenomena of the same period, namely: marriage, change of domicile, return to college, and the pregnancy of his wife. Soon to be twenty-two, he was delighted he could still learn from experience: in this case, that life’s big things, at least as a civilian, are subservient to the small. Who could ever know before the fact that a shrunken seer-sucker would claim a man’s mind while his seed lay germinating in the belly of his Mrs.? (Which is what
he got some perverse pleasure in calling his mate, aping the local butcher, a common man in extremis and a great fecund bull who had fathered eight children on a wife no bigger than five-one.)

  “Boy,” sweetly called Maw from the hall outside, “are you enjoying your warshing up?”

  “Plenty, Maw,” said Reinhart, raising and lowering a sopping wash-rag to make a liquid noise for her benefit.

  “Do, boy, do, and when you’re dry come out and I’ll fry you a pork chop.”

  “Better give me a rain check on the chop, Maw. The Mrs. will be expecting me home for lunch.”

  “I’ll just stick it between two slabs of bread as a sammidge,” Maw said, and stole away.

  Now there was another singularity to add to the list. Maw had taken on this new, beneficent character from the moment Reinhart had revealed to her his having taken a Frau. It upset all the theories about mother versus wife; Maw not only loved her daughter-in-law but liked her son for the first time within his memory. He regretted now that he had not let her in on his getting married before it had been a fact accomplished, but immediate relatives were so inconsistent. He supposed his father-in-law’s to be the more predictable reaction; the man had first threatened to murder him unless the marriage were annulled, and then when it was made known that a portion of Reinhart’s essence was already inextricably deposited within the body of his darling daughter, he determined to commit homicide on the instant, ran to fetch a weapon while Reinhart stood paralyzed and the females wailed, found a souvenir Samurai sword, and charged the usurper, whom he would certainly have run through had not Reinhart’s dear wife-of-one-hour thrown herself in front of hubby, offering her own breasts as target. Reinhart would never forget that gesture, and fell in love with her on the moment, as he had never been able to, despite frantic efforts, before. “You’re saved, thug,” said his dad-in-law, dropping the blade forthwith, the gilded tassels unraveling from its grip. “But I’ll never like you.”