This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Isn’t it true,” said Reinhart, more in pity than irony, and tried his. You know, it wasn’t brandy but it wasn’t bad. He fetched the bottle.

  “Careful, Bee,” said Beatrice Fedder to herself, mouth at her second glassful. “You’re starry-eyed enough as it is.”

  There was something about her, he couldn’t put his finger on it, that Reinhart found awfully grating.

  “Ah, Bee,” said Bee, and then to Reinhart: “Mustn’t mind if I talk to myself; she’s my only confidante.”

  “Uh-huh,” Reinhart answered. He stood at the little table from which the lamp had earlier fallen on him, and refilled his own glass. He had not yet chosen a seat, though that portion of the couch not occupied by slender Bee yawned at him like a hungry mouth.

  “It’s a holdover from when I was a kid and had an imaginary playmate,” Bee continued. “I used to sit by myself and talk for hours. They thought I was warped.” She smiled dreamily.

  From where he stood Reinhart could see Fedder’s house through the window. He supposed that Beatrice did not appreciate what a fine husband she had. He understood, suddenly, how splendid was Fedder’s faith in her, to suffer her to go alone on a hot night, wearing shorts, to the home of an attractive man. Reinhart never respected Fedder more than at that moment, because it was then that he decided to seduce his wife.

  What had happened was this: The more he reminded himself of how awful it would be in terms of morality, the homier he became. The more he admired Fedder, the more he wanted to be obligated to him. The more Bee bored him, the more he desired her. It was also true that, accustomed to his regular piece, he feared that another sexless night might drive him to rape a stranger.

  Having decided on this monstrous aim, however, he had no better opening device for its instrumentation than to drop heavily on the couch as far as possible from Bee, like a schoolboy. Real booze might have helped, though it appeared his partner, at least, had been hoaxed by the ersatz. She smiled at him through narrowed lids.

  “I came originally from upstate,” she asserted.

  “Yes,” said Reinhart. “I remember Niles told me you’re an orphan.”

  “Raised in a Home, sleeping in my narrow iron bed, never knew my parents.” She found a squashed package of cigarettes, wrapped in a handkerchief, in her blouse-pocket and lighted one, mopping its end with dark lipstick. Reinhart worried about the irritation to his eyes. And, sure enough, here came a great cloud of smoke directly at them.

  “At eighteen, I went out on my own. Bee girl, I said, what do we want to do?”

  “You wanted to be loved,” said Reinhart, wincing a watery smile.

  “I didn’t care about that. Love is all you ever heard around the Home, which was full of social-worker types always grinning sadly at you and fondling your behind.”

  The drink had coarsened her, Reinhart noticed and was not sure whether that made his job easier or more difficult. In his current

  mood he was tempted to return to an adolescent conviction that girls who talked dirty put out. On the other hand, it meant that the image of her that had aroused him—the dissatisfied, respectable wife—must be altered to the grosser.

  He rose, emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass, and sat down an inch closer.

  “So,” she went on, evacuating a lungful of cigarette, an unattractive thing in a woman, “I got a job in a beauty parlor in Bucyrus. Christ, have you ever smelled the hair of some old biddy under the dryer? Then the guy that owned this place, called himself Monsieur Rene”—he kept waylaying me in the booths, the oily little crumb. At the Home they always told us you’ve got to be agreeable when out in the world, don’t be bitter. But he had a wife, and one night after hours she came in and caught us and went for me with a scissors. Me, not him. Luckily what she grabbed was the thinning shears—you know, without points?” Her cigarette was already down to the nub. She put it out and said: “Honey, you wouldn’t have any more?” Holding out the empty glass.

  “If we’re lucky,” said Reinhart with an invisible shudder, “there may be a can of beer in the icebox.”

  Back in the darkened kitchen, he peered out at Bee in the light. She had crossed her legs in masculine style and fired up a new smoke. Luck was against him: six cans of beer lay on their sides in the bottom of the fridge. Gen had bought them for the ill-fated dinner party, in case Daddy went dry. Of course, he could have told Bee there was none—had he not been afraid of her.

  “Don’t bother with a glass,” she called. “I can take it right from the can and save on washing up.”

  Grotesque. This type of woman Reinhart had always thought of as being big and burly and found somewhere like teamsters’ picnics.

  She took a belt from the can he had fetched, and wiping the end of her fine nose, which had got wet from a bit of foam clinging to the far side of the rim, said: “I guess I’m talking your arm off. Don’t worry about your wife, honey. There are plenty more fish in the sea, and a lot of them would prefer your kind, believe me.”

  Reinhart wanted to get her off the subject of his broken marriage. It was offensive to hear the condolences of a lush; moreover, she seemed to take the line that he, and not Gen, was a very special type outside the standard. In love even a genius yearns to be commonplace.

  “What happened after the beauty parlor?” he asked.

  “After that,” said Bee, “I married your friend and mine, Niles Fedder. I haven’t ever done anything interesting, unless you count following him to San Diego when he went into the Navy. Did you ever see California? It’s not what you would expect. I went up to L.A. once. Did you know that Hollywood isn’t anywhere? I mean, you look for something gathered together—you know how they say in the papers ‘the movie colony’? Well, it isn’t really. It isn’t any place you can put your finger on.” She handed him the empty beer can, and he fetched her a full.

  She widened her eyes over the container at her mouth, and drank glug-glug-glug. At the first beer Reinhart had lost all carnal desire, and if that were not enough, he felt sorry for her, and sat down with a long face.

  Bee finished the can, and looked at him in prolonged pathos.

  “Honey,” she said, “don’t you worry about your wife. She’ll be back when she realizes that there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t have potency problems.”

  Now, for a moment Reinhart just continued to nod. Then he asked quietly, lugubriously: “Where did you ever get such a vicious idea about me?”

  “Why,” said Bee, her forearms guarding her bosom—the size of which he had been trying to estimate for a half hour, while she on her part had been sizing him up as a eunuch; it was unthinkable; he might burst—“Why, didn’t Niles tell me she left because of that?”

  Reinhart shouted: “That sweaty little skunk!”

  “There’s no need to be nasty,” said Bee, lowering her guard when it became apparent his violence was not to be directed towards her. “It has nothing to do with the kind of person you are at heart.”

  “I ask you,” said Reinhart, strangely calm again, “I ask you …” Addressing heaven, he said no more aloud. He was saved, by an involvement in the drama of the situation, from embarrassment; it was rather like being drunk. But to get a gain here, you must pay with a loss there. He got nerve, but he lost judgment.

  Putting his left hand at her sacroiliac, he thrust the other into the neck of the blouse and found her nearer breast, which as he expected was very small but well-formed. She wore no brassiere. Along her upper lip ran a hairline of beer foam; her visage in general was attenuated, patrician, noninvolved.

  “This excites me,” he said. “Believe me, it does, Bee. There’s nothing I like better.” His left hand went into the back waistband of her shorts. Down as far as the coccyx he encountered no underpants. In the depths of summer the temperature of her skin was January. He had lied to her; at this point there was nothing in the world he wanted less than tail, and his groin agreed with his mind. But he panted with simulated passion and labored relentlessl
y as a mercenary worker on piece rate, two hands going, breathing raucously in her ear. For a long time he spared her lips, supposing them a barometer of sincerity that might show him for what he was, but at last nothing would do but to press his mouth to hers, having lifted her half upon himself by means of the natural handholds though she stayed stiff as a board.

  His fears had gone for nought; in kissing Bee he committed himself to nothing; it would have been like eating Jello except that his lips tingled from the residue of nicotine on hers and close up she smelled like an ashtray in the office of a brewery.

  Very likely the whole business was a foolish idea, yet the history of the West might very well be considered as the product of roundabout potency-proving, with say, Napoleon’s conquest of Europe as a sort of getting-one-up on a large scale. So Reinhart trudged on, regretting only that Bee was still ostensibly paralyzed with fright.

  Or was she? Turning away in false catching of breath, he saw her reach for the live cigarette she had dropped on top of the beer can at the onset of his attack and take a long, insouciant drag. That stung him into more purposeful techniques. He probably should have ripped her clothes off, like the protagonist of a historical novel, but Fedder might find out and, having to pay for new ones, interpret it as the pettiest of bourgeois revenges. So Reinhart was careful with the top button of her side-fly; the rest was zipper, and her shirttail was caught in it, reminiscent of Genevieve.

  Gen, Gen, see what you are responsible for!

  He freed it and shortly had her bare. She wore pants and brassiere of white skin, between the tan places. He could grant objectively that this was attractive; a non-eunuch might have been stimulated … but not he, to whom the horrors gained access in the most banal of modes: from bull to ox at the flutter of an accusation. He now dared not loosen his belt. Nor could he even perspire: he kept wiping his forehead to check.

  “You see, honey?” asked Bee, who understood too well, though he still wore his trousers. “Why keep on? That only makes it worse.” She slipped her hands around his neck, which brought a little breast against his cheek like a paraffin lemon.

  It is impossible to tell another woman you have made love to your own wife on the average of three times a day since moving into your present domicile—Reinhart formulated this as a law, like Gresham’s. Bee stroked his head. She made no move to get back into her clothes, and suggested the modern mother who while bare-ass acts nonchalant so as not to give phobias to the children.

  Reinhart turned a corrosive irony on himself, threatening to fabricate substitute equipment of broomstick-end and two walnuts, but in truth there was nothing to do but wage the good fight regardless of deficient armament. At Thermopylae, retreat had been taboo. She was very heavy for a skinny girl—he had to lift her to get himself out from under so as to strip for action. But now she struggled, apparently with an intent to retain him for comforting.

  “Let go!” Reinhart whined.

  “Don’t you fret, honey,” said Bee, sympathetically holding him fast. She was more artful than strong; it was as if he were caught in a large hairnet. All this was going on with Fedder in the next hut no more than fifty feet away. Nothing impeded his breaking in at any moment, and Reinhart found himself wishing he would and get served right—but the ill luck seemed invariably to go in one direction: against Reinhart.

  “Ah, what’s the use, Bee?” he finally asked stoically, and slapped her bare bottom. “Go get dressed.”

  Putting on her blouse, she said ladylike: “I hope your evening hasn’t been ruined.”

  “Not in the least,” answered Reinhart. “It’s always worth while hearing other points of view.”

  She had yet to put on her shorts, and looked very lithe in shirt-tail and hip-length nudity.

  “It’s really all relative,” she said.

  “Isn’t it, isn’t it?” Reinhart responded. “Bee, contrary to what Niles told you, and the performance you just witnessed, the situation with my wife was just the other way around. She has been pregnant for weeks.” He, too, took his time in dressing.

  Bee raised her eyebrows.

  “All right,” he said, “go check with the gynecologist.”

  “No, I believe you,” she hastily assured him. Whether she did he would never know, but he realized at that point that she had all along been trying to be kind. “But speaking for myself, I always heard it was so great to have kids, but I can tell you it’s overrated.” At last she slipped into her shorts, and Reinhart felt released from a suspense that he hadn’t appreciated till it was gone. “But what’s so great about doing something anybody can do?”

  “Just that,” said Reinhart. “Isn’t it splendid to be normal?”

  She fastened the hook-and-eye at her waistband; he was happy he hadn’t ripped it. “That’s a man’s idea. It’s always a man who says a woman’s aim in life is to have kids. No woman is so sentimental.”

  “I’m not sure I understand your use of the word.”

  She sat at the edge of the couch. “I would say sentimental’s when you pretend so hard to yourself you have a feeling you really don’t have but believe you should, that you end up feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “Well,” said Reinhart, “you end up with a real emotion, anyway.”

  Bee grinned. “There you are, the typical man: any old feeling is good as the next. But a woman is very particular about such things.”

  “That would explain something, then,” said Reinhart. “You know, never in my life have I understood my mother.”

  Bee shrugged.

  “Never,” he repeated, “and you might say that if I can’t grasp the principles of a woman I have known for twenty-two years, how can I expect to with one I’ve known less than four months?”

  Bee shook her fine head; never, in whatever state, had she lost what Reinhart liked to think of as her equanimity. “You and your principles! Stop thinking of women in general. Stop thinking of women at all. If you want to get your wife back and keep her, you’ll have to catch her attention.” She rose and put her hand out.

  “May I ask,” said Reinhart, taking it, “what Niles does in that line?”

  “He sent me over here, didn’t he?”

  “Of course.” Reinhart only hoped that in gaining Gen’s eye he wouldn’t have to go as far.

  “What I like about tonight is that I have profited by it,” he told her. “You never know, do you, when you get up each morning, what the day will bring.”

  Bee said shyly: “So long, Carl.” She was really a fine person.

  In saying he had profited, Reinhart meant that he had examined adultery without committing it and gained data on women without actually compromising himself. He was getting to be a real exemplar of the American Way.

  Chapter 17

  Because his experience with Bee had turned out without prejudice to anybody, Reinhart maintained his admiration for Fedder. He wouldn’t have changed him one iota. The world would be a much better place if it were populated with more Niles Fedders. Fedders who keep the old earth spinning. Long Live Fedder!

  Reinhart had seen him twice since the day he had got to know both him and his at close quarters, and greeted him both times with an enthusiasm that caused his neighbor to recoil, for Fedder balked at tasting his own medicine. “Niles!” shouted Reinhart on the first occasion, Monday evening when they emerged simultaneously, each from his own hut, to fetch the garbage cans that had been lifted that morning by the Vetsville sanitary squad and hurled back empty. “Niles, where would that sewer main run? Down by Unit H?”

  On Wednesday he encountered Fedder on the University campus. Niles and a group of friends, dressed to a man in T-shirts and chino pants, emerged from the Student Union humorlessly sucking at icecream cones, some vanilla, one chocolate, one mottled. “Fed!” cried Reinhart. “Wouldn’t there have to be an auxiliary pumping station for the sewage somewhere between Vetsville and town?”

  Fedder introduced his companions, who all seemed to be named Jack, and amiably chid
ed him: “Now you get interested in the sewer, now that your boss has been awarded the contract.”

  “My boss?” Reinhart asked stupidly and gaped at one of the Jacks.

  “Humbold’s his name,” said Fedder. “Don’t you read the papers?” He waxed bitter. “If you ask me, there’s something suspicious about the deal. I thought he was a real-estate man, not a sewer contractor. And his was the only bid submitted. Doesn’t that sound strange? That’s typical small-town politics for you.”

  “I’ll tell you, Niles, I haven’t seen Claude for some time. But then, we have never been what you might call close. Businessmen are like that….” From the way they held their heads, Reinhart inferred that neither Fedder nor his companions were ready to confirm this statement, and he went on with some defiance: “For all I know that’s the way you have to be to make good in business. I suppose it’s as good, or as bad, as anything else.”

  “Not morally?” butted in one of the Jacks, then crunched at his cone.

  “Oh, I guess not,” Reinhart answered impatiently. He didn’t want to get hung up with these guys. What had become of the good old College Joe with his idiot fraternities and junior proms? “And as to the town,” he told Fedder, a little chary about meeting his eye even though he hadn’t cuckolded him—or perhaps because he hadn’t—“you’ve been there only since the beginning of summer and already know more about it than I do in twenty-two years.”

  Fedder, shrugging, had to step aside for a girl who came down the Union steps and chose to enter the sidewalk at the corner which they were blocking. She had the high, hard behind of the very young.

  “No wonder, then,” said Fedder, “that the Yahoos have such an easy time of it. I understand the same mayor has been in office since 1928, and the chief of police is his brother.” He explained to his friends, who apparently lived in other suburbs. “The Vetsville Civic Committee petitioned for this new sewer, but little did we know that the town would jump at the chance to build it, and thereby develop a damned good argument for gobbling us up. Whereas we’re seeking incorporation as an independent community.”