This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Honey!” shouted Reinhart with his customary ebullience, and kissed her mouth, nose, ears, and forehead, and ran his hand into the housecoat. “What’s new with the heir?”

  Sitting in the sun had brought out a few amber freckles below her eyes. She was the same girl who had worked in the office, only now relaxed in every part, softer but as firm. For once Reinhart had done something to somebody that agreed with them!

  “Oh,” she answered with a drowsy smile, “I told you it’s much too early. Would you mind reaching me over that book?”

  Doing so, Reinhart renewed his acquaintance with the title. “What does that refer to, hon? Is a midget the victim?”

  “He works in a circus,” said Gen. “You get all the circus life as setting.”

  “Gripping?”

  “Very,” said she, taking the book with limp fingers that lost their purchase before she had conveyed it to her lap. “Oops.”

  “No, no,” cried Reinhart, “don’t you bend over. Let me get it.” He reclaimed the book from the uncarpeted floor, and saw light through one of the cracks there. “We have natural air conditioning,” he noted. “Comes in handy on these hot nights.”

  She continued to wear the fixed smile produced on his entrance. It was her standard countenance day in and out; he had never seen anyone so perpetually pleased.

  “Any mail come? Any calls?”

  “Your government check and a thing about a sale at Milady’s.”

  “Look, sweety, why don’t I take you down there and get a new dress? We have the money.”

  “Why?” she said lackadaisically. “In three months I won’t be able to wear it…. Then there was a call from a Mr. Melville.”

  “Yes,” said Reinhart. “But you mean Mr. Mellon. He’s that ex-sailor who lives in Hut 25. Looks like I’ve made a sale. Isn’t that nice! Do you remember, from when you worked at the office, the five-room cottage on Chrysanthemum Lane, one-car garage, automatic-stoker furnace, quarter acre of fruit trees, sixteen-five? Wonder where Mellon suddenly got the money.”

  “I could have got it wrong,” said Gen, “but I thought it was Melville.”

  “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to work at that typewriter any more!” said Reinhart in a statement rather than a question. “By the way”—he sat on the floor at her legs—“the Mellons have a couple of cute kids. We’ll keep up with them and when ours is big enough we can take him over there to play under those apple trees. Nothing like eating green apples when you’re a kid. Then you get sick and your mother gives you castor oil in orange juice. Did you ever do that?”

  He reached up and pulled her face down to meet his. Gradually rising while still fastened to her lips, he lifted and carried her front-piggyback, losing his trousers en route, to the pseudo couch-real bed. The skirt of her housecoat was already up when they arrived, and today she wore no underwear at all. Fortiter in re met suaviter in modo, and both in due time reached that moment of absolute integrity, until which time was cyclical. They at last pulled apart to cool, with a suction-noise of navels; he placed his finger in the recessed button of hers and said: “When I was small I thought babies came out here, somehow. It took me years to learn about life. … I looked at a marriage book in the library the other day: we can still do it for months…. But you’re perspiring. Better let me put something over you—summer, contrary to popular opinion, is a great time for colds.” He drew the Indian thing over her and dressed himself.

  “Shouldn’t I make you some lunch?” she asked, her cheeks flushed fruit-pink. A damp curl lay asymmetrically on her forehead, and much of her breast was exposed above the cover.

  This was one of their family jokes, and Reinhart gave the traditional answer, which was amusing if you were part of it: “Sure, breaded veal cutlet with tomato sauce.”

  “No,” said Gen, “I don’t mean the kidding.” She waved the petals of her hand. “You work so hard and I lie around all day. Are you sure a pregnant woman can’t do anything? Not according to the doctor.”

  “Ha!” said Reinhart. “The doctor! What does he know? He has to deal with those slobs who, if you’ll pardon the expression, keep their wives constantly knocked up and make them scrub floors as well. So naturally he makes the best of it, telling the prospective mothers that a little hard labor won’t hurt them. No, absolutely no. I don’t want you to do anything but produce a new life. To see you work would offend me. As if creation isn’t labor enough! You let me handle everything else. I’ve got the energy and strength of a dozen of the washed-out people you see these days everywhere you look.” He thrust one wrist underneath the overstuffed chair and, keeping his arm almost straight, lifted it a yard off the floor. He replaced it in slow motion, the hard way, and said: “I’m very bright in class, too, and make penetrating comments. It is all the bunk that you can’t be strong both in muscle and brain.”

  In the kitchen corner, while continuing his lecture, he washed his hands and opened a can of tuna. “You see, it’s a question of will, not any mystical thing about aptitude or talent. In Psych we are messing with aptitude tests, which is why this comes to mind. Imagine having to take a test to find out what you’re interested in. It goes like this: Do you like to sing? Yes. Dance? Yes. Enjoy being the center of attention? Yes. Diagnosis: You are psychologically equipped to be an entertainer.”

  He mashed the tuna into some mayonnaise. “Of course, you could never figure that out by yourself. Without the help of some bore with his categories, you thought you’d make a good accountant.” He used his newest gadget, an ice-cream scoop that expanded and contracted with a touch of the thumb, to deposit a ball of tuna fish onto a lettuce leaf. With sliced tomatoes, his plate was as professional as any handed over a drugstore counter.

  “But you see, it’s will. Everything’s a question of will. You have to want to be an entertainer, say. Then the talent will appear. Take me. I never thought I could cook, and never even tried it. But now I want to, so I can. Voilà, Madame!” Having placed two buttered Rye-Krisps on the plate, he swept it to Genevieve. “Anybody can do anything. Everybody can have his own Renaissance.”

  But she had gone to sleep on one cheek, her mouth crumpled like a child’s, one hip high. He might just slip his hand under … no, the poor girl was weary. He sat on the floor nearby and, resting the plate on the hassock, ate her lunch.

  The telephone rang as Reinhart was washing the dishes. Always here or when one is on the toilet, he complained to the dishtowel on which he hastily dried his wet hands so that he would not be electrocuted. But he spoke enthusiastically into the mouthpiece.

  “Mr. Reinhart?” asked the caller, from a throat rich as cream. On the repetition, it lisped to boot: “Misthter Carlo Reinhart?”

  “Yeth,” replied Reinhart in his automatic sympathy and then hid behind a cough.

  “I believe your thecretary may have—I called before. My name ith Melville. To get to the point, I am an author.”

  “How interesting!” said Reinhart. “Yes, sir. Well, sir. I have just what you want. Don’t make a move until you see what I’ve got to show you. How does this sound: a barn, Mr. Melville. Now wait a moment—a barn with electricity and running water. Bohemian but convenient. Asphalt tiles on the floor. Gas space heater. Half acre with trout stream. I know how you authors love barns. I can pick you up in fifteen minutes, and we’ll drive out. It is out of town a ways but that’s the privacy you fellows like. Where are you staying?”

  “Why?” Melville asked suspiciously.

  “So I can pick you up.”

  “Oh. At the moment I am in the City. Downtown. In your county courthouse.”

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, “no doubt doing one of those exposés, eh Mr. Melville? Well, you just hold on there, I’ll pick you up at the main entrance in about thirty minutes. O.K.?”

  “Yasss,” answered Melville, exhibitionistically abandoning his lisp. He sounded like a pretty weird bird, but Reinhart assumed that was normal for the profession.

  “You were right, ho
n,” he said to Genevieve, hanging up. “It was Melville, and he’s an author, and they’ve all got money. I know he’ll fall for that barn, because authors are also famous for being impractical. Look, we’ll keep up with him after the sale and be invited there to those literary parties where they drink Scotch and make little smirking comments—you’ve seen them in the movies. But I wonder where around here he’ll find other writers to come to them? Ah well, enough of that. Will you be O.K. now? Want me to run up some new magazines or a Coke from the drugstore?”

  “Oh, are you leaving?” asked Gen, awakening with her hair flat and her eyes wild. “I must have dropped off.”

  “No, no, no! Don’t get up.” Reinhart came to her bed and kissed her goodbye. “Just don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got it all taken care of. There’s a tuna plate all prepared in the fridge, and a milk bottle full of iced tea. I’ll be in and out of the office all afternoon; in case you want to get hold of me, leave a message with the phone service. Claude still hasn’t hired another secretary, by the way.”

  Gen became alert at any mention of the office. Reinhart believed she had enjoyed working there, and he looked forward to inviting her down for a visit after the baby came.

  “Oh,” she said brightly, “he’s saving the salary. He’s up to something, the big crook. I wish I could get a glance at his files. Who does his typing now?”

  “He takes it to some public stenographer, I think. Of course, as yet I haven’t had need of any for myself. But I feel it in my bones that a sale can’t be far off. And then you know what I’ll do to celebrate, Gen? I’ll buy you a big—”

  “Carl,” she broke in, beseechingly. “Carl, would you let me type the Agreement to Buy? Please? I’ve got my portable here.”

  Reinhart guessed aloud that that would not hurt her, if she kept the vibrations down by not typing too fast, but to himself he reflected on the caprices of women. He had taken her away from all that; yet, to go back to it was the favor she asked, not gems or furs or costly scents. Sigmund Freud had made a useful confession, quoted just that morning by the Psych instructor: “The question I have never been able to answer in thirty years of research into the feminine soul is, ‘What does a woman want?’”

  Chapter 12

  “I know it was a disgraceful trick, Carlo. Absolutely inexcusable,” said Splendor Mainwaring, as Reinhart drove around the courthouse block and passed the entrance to the jail on the back street. “But in my defense let me say I thought you would immediately recognize my voice.”

  “How could I recognize you with that fake lisp?” Reinhart demanded. Unfortunately the Gigantic had an automatic shift, and he could not relieve his rage by stripping the gears. “You seem to think I devote my life to studying your habits. You mean nothing to me. Nothing. I owe you no obligation whatever, and I’ll thank you to stop trying to claim one for me. What did I get out of your last caper?”

  “Well,” Splendor answered shyly, “you surely did better than I with it.”

  Reinhart swung impetuously into the curb in the center of a block. A middle-aged pedestrian stared in frightened supposition that they had chosen him on this hot afternoon to swoop down on and rob, this satchel-faced Negro and this enormous lout: at least such was Reinhart’s apprehension. The pedestrian developed greater and greater horror until his eyes threatened to fly from his head. At last he exploded in a sneeze. A mere spasm of rose fever. But before this happened Reinhart had issued Splendor an ultimatum.

  “Get the hell out!”

  “You don’t mean it,” said Splendor, with an introverted look as if he had asked it of himself. He made no move to leave.

  “I didn’t invite you to enter in the first place,” Reinhart said haughtily, because Splendor, however outrageous, had very decent manners. “You insolently climbed in when I stopped for the traffic light. You’re lucky I didn’t mistake you for a prisoner escaping from jail and beat you up…. You aren’t escaping, incidentally?”

  “Oh my no,” answered Splendor, showing a paper. “Here’s my release. I am rehabilitated, and may re-enter society at my own risk.”

  “All right, Jack,” said a harsh voice with a foul overlay of false patience. A motorcycle cop dressed in a science-fiction getup—helmet, goggles, boots—sneered through his masks into the window on the driver’s side. “Jack, this is a restricted zone and you can’t even stand here. You know better than that because you can read good as anybody.”

  “I certainly can, Officer,” said Reinhart. “And I’m on my way.”

  “Not without a ticket you ain’t, Jack.” With malevolent legerdemain, the cop created a summons-book and placed it on the window ledge, aiming for Reinhart’s cheek as he flipped open its long metal cover.

  “One moment, Officer. I’m on court business. This man has just been remanded in my custody.” Reinhart seized the document from Splendor and shoved it at the goggles.

  “How was I to know?” With the other part of his bicameral character, the cop grinned obsequiously, put away his book, and made the motorcycle scream.

  As they lurched into motion again, Splendor said: “You see, I have my uses.” He took his release from the seat, where Reinhart had aloofly dropped it. He was apparently the source of the strong chemical odor abroad for the past five minutes; in the county jail they probably disinfected his clothes and issued him yellow soap for his person. But thinking of such pathetic details merely increased Reinhart’s anger.

  “Look,” he said. “I have never received a satisfactory explanation from you as to why you took dope that night. Until I do, there’s no point in our even talking. And before you brag about getting me out of a traffic ticket, reflect that it was your fault I was threatened with one in the first place.”

  A boiling day. Sweating, Splendor looked like bronze in the rain. He wore the costume of a white-collared down-and-outer—black suit, shirt without a tie. Now he took from his jacket a piece of chewing gum that obviously had been concealed in a pocket lining for months, through disinfecting and worse; it was battered and melted, yet still in its paper, which he removed like a surgeon and then offered Reinhart half.

  The ex-corporal knew these touching particulars for what they were. “Go to hell with your fleabitten gum; you’ve got a nickel to buy a new pack.”

  Splendor chewed deliberately, his eyelids synchronized with his lips, all four opening and closing together in elephantine rhythm. “Despair,” he said at length, “ineluctable despair, so profound that it is hopeless to try to explain it systematically. At crucial moments God tends to desert me.”

  “Then you should get a better one,” Reinhart stated cynically. “There’s no point in having a religion that is worthless at the showdown.” Reaching a less congested area, where there were fewer cars in motion and more at the curb, some attended by undershirted people squinting in the heat, the Gigantic picked up speed of its own volition. For the most part, it did its own thinking; only in the extremity did Reinhart, its God, have to send down an edict.

  “But I know there is a sense here that we cannot yet perceive,” Splendor went on with the old obliviousness. Jail hadn’t changed him one iota.

  A snotnosed kid ran into the street after a red ball, and Reinhart had to exert his divine power on the car, which enjoyed running down human beings.

  “How arrogant you are,” he replied. “Like all people who yap about God, you think He spends His time manipulating your fortunes exclusively, like a personal stockbroker.”

  “No,” Splendor answered dolefully. “No, just the other way around. He pays no attention to me at all.”

  “That’s the same thing. I wish I could make you see that,” said Reinhart. “Why don’t you forget about having someone else take Care of you, and straighten out under your own auspices?”

  “Because I have great flaws, Carlo.”

  You would have thought a man in jail for three months might, when he got out, want to look at the scenery. True, the route home was not much for the eye, yet to him at least i
t should have signified freedom. But no, he sat like a mummy, wrapped in dogged introversion.

  “Your faults are not terribly large,” sneered Reinhart. “Moreover, they don’t seem to me authentic. I believe your real and only trouble is that you are second-rate.”

  As if in confirmation, Splendor humbly lowered his head and observed silence until they reached the Negro quarter and he had to direct Reinhart to Mohawk Street, now a terra incognita of sunlight alternating with shade from psoriatic sycamores. Actually, it looked rather nice. In the back yard of the Mainwaring home a grape arbor began sturdily near the kitchen door and then went into rapid decline as it proceeded towards the alley; by Indian summer the weight of its purple fruit would bring it down alongside the broken wheelbarrow, which of course was at rest but gave the illusion of being in slow, crazy motion, rustily laughing. As it had for going on a third of a year, the burned-out car lay abaft the shed, its only new circumstance a group of kids simulating a trip to Chicago, brown as if they had been singed in the same fire that cooked their vehicle.

  The Mainwaring house had yellow siding with green trim, both colors fading graciously like those of an old necktie many times to the cleaner’s; here and there the paint had defected from areas the size of, say a squirrel—oops, no, it was a real squirrel dangling from an ingenious noose the particulars of which could not be made out from the street, except that at its house-end Mr. Mainwaring grinned through the open window and shouted down: “Got the sonbitch!”

  Splendor returned his salute from the car and said lifelessly: “How it buoys one up to see his father.”

  “What does he have to do, poor fellow,” asked Reinhart, “trap to eat?”

  “Oh good heavens!” said Splendor. In his efforts towards gentility he sometimes, like a European learning English, used a maidenly turn of speech. This propensity, added to his failure ever to speak of a woman, caused Reinhart to wonder again whether Splendor was a queer—which, if he were, would do much to explain the impasse of his life. On the other hand, he never spoke of men, either—excepting Dr. Goodykuntz, who was rather more idea than person. The truth was, he lived in the universe all by himself and therefore could be characterized by none of the standard definitions. As to whether this was an attribute of Negroes in general or of this guy alone, Reinhart could only admit that he had forgotten Splendor was colored until he saw Mr. Mainwaring’s indigo face.