Her thumb moved to the ball of the next finger. “Second: You will have to face the reality of your job with Claude. You haven’t made a sale since the Onion, and that was March. I know you go out every day with clients, but you might as well sit home if you don’t sell anything!”
Gen was hitting the target. He could only whine: “I get a salary from him.”
“Yes,” said she, “and there’s something fishy about that. Why should Claude Humbold, the world’s most famous deadbeat, pay you twenty-five dollars a week for contributing nothing to his business? Frankly I don’t believe it.”
He wanted to ask a question, but she waved her hand in his face, with the thumb on its middle finger. “Third: I wouldn’t ask a dog to live in this hobble.” She threw her elbow towards the hovel, which just sat there rustily insolent but Reinhart was desperately wounded and caught at himself in the midsection, lurching against the pipe, which made a bleak noise as the flange attaching it to the rusty wall came loose screw by screw. But he had a moment to recover his balance as well as to support Genevieve, before the railing gave way.
Gen never batted an eye. Leaning against his forearm as she had leaned on the pipe, she closed thumb and index finger and said: “Four: Tactlessness, sneering, sarcastic comments, inconsiderate behavior, rudeness—these are some of the things that constitute your flaws. For example, you don’t know how to react to graciousness on the part of the next person. I ask about your short story and you tend to veer away, sort of hanged dog—”
Reinhart belched out a confession, and felt great relief. “I’m a liar, too, Gen. I didn’t write that story, a friend did—well, actually—”
Genevieve shrugged. “So O.K., that’s all there is to it. You’re not going to offend anybody by an occasional lie. See, you always worry about the wrong thing. Lack of judgment; not able to size up a situation properly; knowledge of books but not of human nature.” She squeezed his hand and said disarmingly: “Excuse me, Carl, but I’m getting a lot out of my system. I certainly don’t mean to offend you.”
An automobile rolled into the compound, whitewashing them for a moment in its headlights. Their hut was so placed as to check in every arriving vehicle by such a signal; even inside, at night, with the blinds drawn, there was a second of false daylight against the window. It wasn’t much of a place; Reinhart had just conned himself for a while into thinking that home is where the heart is, and that Genevieve agreed. Actually, he had taken his fresh bride to a dump. Small wonder she had stayed in bed. Completely unrealistic; he always had been and apparently always would be. One possible interpretation of an incident in Germany was that his foolishness had killed a man. Had he here murdered love? He was scared to ask, now that Gen had got so formal. What a mess he had made of the postwar era, and it not a year under way.
“I think I can summon it all up very simply,” Genevieve declared, tapping his sternum. “You haven’t any aim. It’s just about all included in that.” She nodded her small head, frowning wisely. “You have charm, brains, good looks—everything required, but they go for nil.”
“Really?” asked Reinhart. “Good looks?” He was flattered.
“Don’t be smug,” said Gen. “That makes it all the worse. Now you are always kidding about my baby, but I wonder if you are prepared to become a father say six and a half months henceforth? It is a grave responsibility, Carl, and not a thing to constantly talk about in a silly fashion.”
Reinhart checked the interior through the screen door, at the same time slapping a mosquito a split second before it would have stabbed him in the neck. The patriarch of the Raven clan had seemingly passed out, head and arms on the table. Mrs. Raven had withdrawn to the easy chair under the bridge lamp, where she read a magazine impassively. Reinhart suddenly had an idea that she was strongest of the lot—once again he was thinking along the lines of his toad: true freedom is found only by being consistent with oneself.
“Do you know what it is to bring a new human being into the world?” Gen continued relentlessly. “The poor little thing!”
He thought she had said “You poor little thing” in arch satire, and he discovered, by doing it, what “bridling” was: a movement of moral infirmity, like everything connected with a horse, one of the few animals to submit unconditionally to humanity.
“A child needs a Daddy to be proud of,” Gen went on.
Now here Reinhart struck back as hard as he could. “Like that drunken bum in there,” he snarled, jerking his thumb at Raven. For a second, he didn’t care whether that remark destroyed everything between them.
But Gen would decide on her own what was disastrously offensive and what was not. “At least,” she answered soberly, “he had something to degenerate from.”
Please go back to defending him, Reinhart wanted to tell her. He was not tough enough to accept the winning of an argument involving a betrayal of loyalty. But that was before he understood that Genevieve would make any sacrifice to prove her point; she would even sell out Daddy. Few women are lawyers, because few defendants can afford a counsel whose best efforts will always go towards self-justification: “I know my client is guilty, but I took his case anyway,” etc.
“Aw,” said Reinhart. “He’s not so bad.”
“Don’t try to conceal your own failures behind another man’s.”
“All right,” he droned. “But where is the point of this long sermon?” He made a surly smile, and scratched the hairless inner surface of his forearm. It was strange how she became repugnant to him when they differed in opinion: her sweet mouth became a great trapdoor that opened to emit vile nonsense; her shortness seemed troglodytic; her scent was as oppressive as that of flowers at a laying-out.
“I’m trying to make it easier for you to take,” she explained. “When my parents leave here tonight, I am going home with them for an indefinite period of time. Perhaps we will come together again at a now unsuspected future date. Marriage is not a simple proposition, Carl. You can’t just bull your way into it and expect it to take. That was your error. Now that I carry a new life, well I just can’t risk it. Meanwhile, I want to say there are things about you I will miss. There’s no getting away from the fact that you are oftentimes sweet.”
Reinhart’s eyes were smarting so fiercely he could hardly keep them open, the side-effect of that filthy cigar, the soggy, turdlike butt of which he still held. He felt three or four mosquitoes attack him en bloc, and didn’t care.
At last he said: “Nobody speaks to me like that. Why don’t you go to hell, you little Philistine?” He made it a cool question and did not raise his voice. However, he was far from striking a pose; his mind was sketching out a bitter, lonely future with a tragic upshot, such as killing a stranger in a quarrel, twenty years hence, and only later discovering: Ah! It was my own son. The other way around, with young Sohrab slaying Rustum, was scarcely to be preferred. Or something unthinkable in the case of a daughter. This is what happened when you fell in love with a person beneath you in culture.
Genevieve could not be touched, though, if she had first decided on herself as the aggressor and you the victim. She looked at Reinhart in romantic pathos and touched him on the arm as if to say Buck up, poor chap, then swinging the screen aside, went indoors and packed a suitcase while her mother read on. Her father did not move. After watching them for a moment, Reinhart descended to the ground and staggered through the tire ruts, distraught. He roamed for a time between the Quonsets until something drew him stealthily to approach Fedder’s open window. As he slunk beneath it through the darkness, treading down a petunia bed, he heard very clearly the noise of bedsprings in the rhythm of love. Fedder and his wife Doing It. Extraordinary. Why, why? At present Reinhart felt no such desire and could not understand anyone else’s feeling it. He was sexy when afraid but not when angry. He wanted to stick his face in the window and shout: Cut it out, Fedder! No more of that!
It struck him that he had never noticed Fedder’s wife; he could not have picked her from a group of t
hree. Fantastic, the data you picked up about people. Seeing them in the sunlight next day, he would know they had made love the night before; yet he would recognize the woman only by her proximity to Fedder. That is, Fedder could be walking with his sister, or female cousin, or mistress, and Reinhart would assume it was his wife and then go on to relate to her this somewhat shameful, though legal, datum: a midnight squeaking of bedsprings. But why should it be shameful? The old Greek Stoics wouldn’t have agreed; according to certain authorities they copulated in public, as part of their campaign to reduce everything to the humdrum: What are you doing there, Diogenes? Answer: I’m planting a man. … Now Reinhart began to doubt he had ever loved Genevieve. She really was a kind of tramp to have let him take such liberties on their first date.
The scandalous nature of his espionage became known to him at that point, and the blood throbbed noisily through his inner ears. Suppose a car came by and with its headlights caught him among the petunias. He withdrew across the stubbly plain to the shadow of his own abode in quick, short dashes interspersed with frozen moments of surveillance, like a certain type of animal; like a rodent, in fact, who has no defense against his enemies but agility. Yet Reinhart far exceeded the median size of man, and he had just heard from Gen that he was clever, charming, and handsome. Why then was she leaving him? For she was: through his own window, this time, he saw her stuffing underwear into a valise, those white rayon pants he had been wont to pull down whenever the mood came over him. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, he kept muttering; for as if it wasn’t bad enough already, it would make history to boot. Let’s see, he would say in time to come, in placing an event, let’s see, that happened shortly after my wife walked out. His child would be born half an orphan though its father still lived.
Oh, it was absurd. Yet he saw Gen start to pack her brassieres, of which it appeared she owned an inordinate number. He had never known that before. Remarkable, there must have been fifteen; some were massive molds armatured with wire; others, mere ribbons. You could say this for her: she had always been so clean and fresh and firm all over.
He drifted along the side of the building and filtered in through the back door. His mother-in-law looked up from her magazine.
“Can I get you something, Mother?” Reinhart asked, keeping his manners even under stress.
She graciously smiled No; they understood each other, he and she.
“Carl!” shouted Genevieve, as if he were still outdoors. She was feeling her oats.
“Come now,” Reinhart said quietly.
She shouted again.
“Why are you yelling? I’m right behind you.”
“Would you mind,” she asked with some attempt at moderation, “telling Daddy it’s time to go?”
“Not at all,” Reinhart answered frigidly. He stepped to the card table. With his wide figure between Raven and the ladies, so that they could not see his method, he slapped the crown of Daddy’s cropped head, arching the palm and gathering in the fingers just after the blow in order that there be no loud report. This had a curious effect on Raven. He raised his head and made a great, groggy, crosseyed grimace, sneered “Yaaaaa,” and fell again onto his folded arms.
“Come on,” said Reinhart. He caught him under the shoulders. Annoying work, for Raven was limp as a sandbag and miserably heavy, and though declining the responsibilities of full consciousness, he made a humming, sputtering noise to prove he was neither dead nor asleep. But the only fact about him that Reinhart found insupportable—for like all sons he was ready to enjoy the weaknesses of all fathers—what Reinhart could not forgive him was that Raven really did measure up as a superior person in the basic features that were difficult if not impossible to learn. For example, he was most marvelously constructed: not just in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist, which anyone might approximate with effort and self-denial, but in the shape of his ear, in the junction between his neck and head, and the angle of his jawbone. It was hard to get a bad perspective on him, speaking optically. By his mere presence, Raven derided Reinhart’s recent struggles to get back into shape; the best he could have got back to was inferior to Raven’s worst; and while Reinhart might lose a few more pounds from his body, short of the most elaborate plastic surgery he would never have the face of a noble Roman.
Not to speak of manners. Reinhart was very courteous, but he had but meager acquaintance with the manners of a gentleman, even though he had known some Europeans in their native habitat. It was easy to say that simple decency was enough, that the spirit overruled the forms, but, just as you loathed the relative who though radiant with love celebrated Xmas with cheap gifts, so did you despise the man who with all the good will in the world pulled the soup spoon towards himself when it was genteel to push it away. Yet Raven could have eaten peas with a knife or sucked coffee from a saucer, and it might have started a trend.
As a working hypothesis (for he was interested in all forms of freedom), Reinhart thought this was true because Raven did not care. But the same could be said of the uncouth. Next Reinhart laid it to grace, and while this seemed closer to the mark, it failed to account for such a phenomenon as Reinhart’s own father, a very graceful man at table but one who would never inspire emulation as he skillfully dunked a doughnut and got it to his mouth before the coffee-soaked portion fell off.
No, Raven derived his authority from a conviction that he was always right. Thus he truly was an aristocrat, whether or not he stemmed from a good family. Reinhart would rather have felt this about himself than have owned a uranium mine; and he immediately forgot Gen’s particular criticisms, in the assumption that her fundamental complaint against him was that he came out so ill when measured against her father.
Reinhart was thinking all this, bitterly, as he manhandled Raven through the front door. Taking advantage of the broken rail on the porchlet, he dropped his father-in-law over the side, then came round and dragged him to the car and into its back seat, where the cushions were worn through and vomited naked springs and hairy stuffing. This was Raven’s automobile, an old Lincoln Continental in disreputable condition and therefore the dernier cri in taste. The Gigantic sat gaudily next it like a fat boy entwined in tinsel.
“Oh no,” said Genevieve, coming up with her suitcase and mother, “Daddy drives.”
“Now I realize you are out of your mind,” answered Reinhart. “He’s unconscious.”
Pushing Reinhart aside, Gen went to the back window of the Continental and called in: “Daddy, time to drive us home!”
Reinhart drew Mrs. Raven aside and asked: “What’s wrong with her?”
His mother-in-law smiled in simple-minded pride. “She’s always been spirited. That’s a Raven trait.”
“Oh stop it!” said Reinhart. “Not you, too.”
“Oh Daddy,” Genevieve cried impatiently. “Don’t be so weak!”
A muffled sound of aspiration came from the back seat. Suddenly the door was flung open and Raven crawled out, knees half buckled. He shook himself vehemently, then straightened out and exhibition-istically put all his muscles in tension, making a fine show in the knitted shirt.
Raven thrust his jaw at his son-in-law and then his hand. “I take a better view of you, uh—fella. Maybe we Ravens are too New England for our own good. This is essentially the Century of the Slob, and we have to go along with it, willy-nilly. You stole my girl like a brigand and brought her to this pigsty, but I’ll say this for you: you lay a good table and you aren’t showy. What’s your school?” However, luckily for Reinhart, Raven jerked haughtily away before he could have answered, climbed behind the wheel, and started the engine, revving it brutally. Mrs. Raven slipped into the rear.
His bluff called, Reinhart said dolefully to his wife: “Don’t you love me any more?”
“What a silly thing to say!” She changed hands on the suitcase. “Why do you think I’m going to all this trouble?”
“But I don’t know what you want,” said Reinhart.
She put down the valise—as it happened, on his toe; however, it was very light, being filled chiefly with underwear.
“In one word, Carl, your idea of life is—well, it’s”—she seized his neck and pulled his head down close. “You think that, huh-huh …” She laughed nervously into his earhole.
“Go on,” he begged, twisting his neck from the tickle.
“I can’t!” For a moment she was very kittenish, and he believed their troubles were over.
But the next thing he knew, Gen had reclaimed his ear and said into it: “You think that, uh, doing it” (she giggled, then turned severe) “takes care of everything.” She grabbed her suitcase, leaped into the front seat, and her father drove away—not at all fast; no doubt the old Continental could do no more; but Reinhart took it as another outrage that the Ravens whined along the road leading to the main highway at a speed no faster than a cripple could limp, so that he had to stand there watching them for an unbearable length of time. Of course, no one forced him with a gun to stand there, but he knew that that was what you did when your wife—or indeed, anyone else—deserted you, unless you had got the initiative, in which case they had to stand and watch you. There were precedents for everything. The old human race was not so dumb as it looked, and had worked out many devices.
In his moment of desolation, that is, he was not altogether bereft of hope. And from any angle, his situation looked better than his next-door neighbor’s: a man, not Fedder, suddenly left Fedder’s hut and drove away in an automobile; Fedder himself arrived on foot a quarter-hour later, probably from a meeting of sewer enthusiasts elsewhere on the compound. Putting these data together with the information he had recorded earlier, Reinhart could not but conclude, from his observation post behind the curtains, that Fedder was a cuckold.
This Old Heart of Mine Page 29