Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Helen raised her hands. “Listen...”

  “Well, I’m not.” He wondered whether he might have been too defensive.

  “It’s O.K. by me, whatever,” she assured him. No doubt she meant it: generosity seemed a basic trait with her. But it was evident that her disappointment was still greater than her tolerance. She smiled wryly and put her car into reverse.

  “Wait a minute.” Reinhart had said this on an impulse, surprising himself. “It would be a shame to waste a perfectly good afternoon.”

  But perhaps it was in the interest of pride that Helen continued to back out of the slot down behind the motel office.

  “I think the moment has passed, Carl,” said she, though in as friendly a manner as ever.

  “The idea was terrific. I’m sorry I didn’t understand it at first.”

  Helen was now driving up the ascending slope, towards the highway, the old engine laboring. “I think you were kind of shocked, that’s what I think.”

  “I may have been,” Reinhart confessed. “I guess time has caught up, maybe even passed me in some respects, Helen. It’s funny when you realize that has happened.”

  The car had reached the entrance to the highway by now, but Helen stayed where she was even after a gap appeared in the traffic.

  “Is that your trouble?” she asked. “Is that all?”

  Reinhart was actually a bit annoyed by her scoffing, kind as he knew she meant to be. “It’s a real thing,” he said, “feeling your age. You can’t say that time suddenly pulls a trick on you. You’ve had plenty of warning, God knows, but it seems as if you are suddenly in a different category. I’m actually in better condition now, in every way but chronologically, than I was ten years back. I’m even healthier! I’m not overweight, and I drink very little. My blood pressure’s lower, and so on. But I’ve got ten years less.”

  “Gosh,” Helen said, “I hope I didn’t make you so morbid. Heck, I’ve got at least one friend who’s older than you, and he still has a lot of fun.” She looked at him in what he took to be compassion, and his pride was affected once more.

  He said seriously, but with a smile: “Sorry, I really didn’t intend to throw myself on your mercy.” A thought came to him. He looked back at Al’s and saw what he wanted: an outdoor telephone at the corner of the office. “I’m going to use that phone. You want to stay here or back up?”

  She did the latter, and he got out and went to the booth.

  He dialed his home number and waited until it rang uselessly a dozen times. He remembered that Winona had a modeling assignment which would occupy her all day. Furthermore, the job was about thirty miles from town, at the warehouse of a furniture firm. No doubt she would be depicted sitting at the foot of one of the beds currently on sale. Reinhart suddenly wondered whether there were men who might find this an erotic image.

  He returned to Helen’s old car.

  She immediately asked: “Is the coast clear?”

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t you just call home to see if anybody was there?”

  Reinhart laughed in admiration and a certain embarrassment. “Woman, you scare me! Can you always read minds?”

  Helen joined in the laughter. She started the engine.

  Reinhart said: “I’ve never done this before, but I don’t see any real reason why it wouldn’t be O.K.” In truth, he could see several reasons, foremost among them being that he had always considered the apartment as Winona’s, where he was essentially a guest. “See, I live with my daughter. But she’ll be working for several hours yet.”

  “If she’s a good girl,” said Helen, driving forcefully along the highway, “she won’t begrudge her dad doing what comes naturally, I don’t think.” She operated the car in what not too many years before had been thought a style peculiar to men: wheel in a firm but easy grasp, body comfortably slumped. “Gosh, my dad used to like the girls well enough, the son of a gun. Not that that made me happy when I was a kid! I caught him once kissing some floozy in the garage when we lived over on Elm. They were probably going to do more, but I just blundered in. I was ten or eleven, went to put my bike away...” Helen rambled on in this wise. Reinhart found her presence to be very soothing. This was hardly the mood in which he had gone to any other tryst in all his life. But, once again, you change with age. One of the first things to go is the sense of sex as suspenseful.

  He gave her directions from time to time, but said little beyond that. She related another anecdote about her father’s lighthearted lechery, her mother appearing as only a pale, inconsequential shadow. Still another symptom of Reinhart’s growing older; to his own mind, was his recognition of the miracle of descent. It was common enough not to see how X, a beauty, could have been born of ugly Y, or how the genius Bill could be the sire of Bill Jr., the imbecile, or why the Fates would bring a saint from the loins of a criminal. But the fact was that no sons or daughters, spitting images though they might seem to be, resembled their parents in any way but the superficial! This was quite a radical theory, but it was firmly founded on Reinhart’s own experience as son and father. Really, the more he thought about the matter, the more he saw that his immediate relatives had always been utter strangers.

  When they reached the apartment building he directed Helen to enter the underground garage and find the parking slot that was assigned to Winona.

  The elevator could be boarded at the level of the garage, but only after its door was unlocked. Reinhart found the proper key on his ring.

  “They’ve got it all worked out, haven’t they?” asked Helen. “The way to do things right, how to lock a place and so on. I’ll bet this is an expensive building.”

  “Do you like that?”

  “Are you serious?” she asked, and pulled his face to hers and kissed him.

  The experience was unprecedented for Reinhart, so far as he could remember; and try to remember is what he did now, lest he lose his bearings utterly. Men of his age and situation were not routinely embraced in elevators. In emotional moments he took comfort in the crafting of general rules, while knowing, all the while, that the only truth is particular.

  The door slid away, and they deboarded at the fourth floor. Reinhart was in an equilibrium between wanting vainly to encounter a recognizable neighbor and hoping to sneak in and out undetected. That is, he had a perfect right to bring a woman home, on the one hand, while on the other furtiveness made for more excitement. Yet Helen was the married one. She seemed to move boldly enough around town. He thought of asking her about this, but decided that it would be bad taste until they knew each other better. Which in turn caused him to reflect that he had never gone this far with any nonprostitute of whom he knew less.

  But they were alone in the hallway as he unlocked the apartment door.

  “This is real nice,” said Helen in the foyer.

  “There’s a river view,” said Reinhart. He helped her out of the trench coat, which he hung over a straightbacked chair. Whenever the need came to dispose of a guest’s outer clothing, he was reminded of a deficiency in the apartment: there was no closet near the front door. He and Winona were in their third year of residence and had yet to provide a halltree or row of hooks or whatever. Yet he forgot about the problem as soon as the guest went away. In his uncertainty now he spoke of this banal matter to Helen.

  Suddenly he saw that she was now as uneasy as he was, rather, as he had been, for this state is oftentimes relieved when it is seen as shared.

  He put his hands around her from the rear and lowered his face into her neck. How long had it been since he had last done that sort of thing? This was much too simple an embrace to try on a whore, and too immodest. The complicated ecstasies can easily be purchased, but nobody sells an honestly warm caress.

  She took away his hands, but only to pull him by one of them into the short hallway that obviously led to the bedrooms. Her taking the initiative, in his domicile, excited him. He had always been aroused by sexual rudeness or arrogance on the part of a woman, tho
ugh in early life he had never understood this.

  Until this moment his bedroom had been a monastic cell. He went to the buttons of Helen’s blouse, she to his belt buckle. He would have lingered at the task, but she was impatient, and they were both undressed in no time at all.

  He thought of something. There was an outside chance that Winona might come home early; accidental events were always possible. He stepped across his bedside rug and began to close the door. He could hear Helen draw the sheets over herself. Her body was as opulent as he had supposed: he was worried about doing justice to it.

  Something hard to identify either by outline or movement entered the hallway. A shadow is exceptionally fearsome when one is naked, and for an instant Reinhart shrank back. But then he remembered Helen, whom he was obliged to protect as guest and as woman, and he projected his head through the doorway.

  The figure had reached him. It was identifiably human by now, and smaller than he, but bent as he was he looked into its face. It was Mercer, his missing daughter-in-law.

  She supported herself with two hands on the doorframe and made a strenuous attempt to speak coherently, but succeeded only in breathing on Reinhart. That such exhaust fumes were not colored blue was a wonder.

  “Mercer,” said her father-in-law quietly. “You’ve given us all quite a scare.”

  “Wwww...” said she, and spun suddenly about and staggered back up the hall, turned the corner, and by the sound of it, soon fell.

  “I’m sorry,” Reinhart said to Helen’s face on his pillow. “That’s my son’s wife. I’ll have to do something about her.” He opened the closet and took his robe from the hook behind the door.

  “Some days,” Helen said cheerily, “are like that.” She made no move to leave bed.

  Reinhart closed the door behind him and went in search of Mercer. He came back immediately.

  “Say, Helen,” he said, “I’m going to be occupied for quite a while. I guess you’re right about it’s not being our day.”

  She climbed out of bed. Helen was really something to see, and she lacked absolutely in false, or perhaps even real, modesty.

  “Can’t I help?”

  “I don’t think so,” said he. “But thanks.”

  “Is this an old story?” She began deftly to dress.

  “I don’t really know. Until now I’ve been on only the most polite terms with the lady. My son and I aren’t the closest of pals. ... Listen, I really am sorry.”

  Helen for the first time turned inscrutable. “Better get out there,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  It occurred to Reinhart that some member of his family, small as it was, had been available to ruin every effort he had made during the last fortnight.

  CHAPTER 8

  MERCER HAD THE THIN, fine-angled sort of face that was once thought to be aristocratic, especially by those who had been filmgoers in the pre-War era. Whether cut of bone was still a criterion for good birth, or whether indeed there was still something, anywhere in creation, that deserved the designation of high-class, was one of the many matters on which Reinhart lacked authority.

  His daughter-in-law was a slender, comely young woman, with good long legs, a flat chest, and skin that seemed always somewhat roughened by the weather. She had exceptionally fine hands, of which Reinhart was aware because in the six years of her marriage to his son his association with her had amounted to little more than a handshake on arrivals and departures. And all too few were even those occasions, owing no doubt to Blaine’s disinclination to frequent his father. But though Mercer might not be to blame for a negative situation, neither could she be commended for making the least effort towards the positive. Reinhart would not have been astounded had she failed to recognize him on a public sidewalk.

  And even now, as he clasped her naked body to him, they were no more intimate except in the most superficial sense. Mercer in fact was unconscious.

  Here he was, alone in a bathroom with an unclad young woman, himself quite stark beneath the terry-cloth robe, of which even the knotted belt had worked loose in his struggles to move her person, which could change in an instant from altogether inert to woodenly rigid, to rubbery elastic, to pluckingly prehensile. ... He had not performed such a job since delivering his father-in-law from the parking lot of a roadhouse bar many years before. At that time brute force was an available, even a gratifying technique. But you couldn’t handle a young wife and mother with the same means that were appropriate to a husky drunk you furthermore detested. Moreover, you weren’t getting any younger.

  He had stripped and hauled her showerwards because she had vomited all over herself and, alas, not only down her bosom and through her lap and onto her shoes—no, she had also puked onto the predominantly pale-blue couch and the altogether beige rug and rolled over the one and tracked through the other. Even more regrettably, she had been drinking not gin or vodka or Italian vermouth or even dry sherry, but rather a fluid that was, at least when regurgitated, maroon.

  He propped her now in the shower stall in his tubless bathroom, and because her knees threatened to buckle, he briefly held the knobby patella of the left one, so discouraging the incipient slump. Her sleek thigh rose above his wrist, her flat belly pressed against his shoulder cap. He could not help noticing when undressing her that her chest was not so flat as when she was clothed. She had indeed a remarkably shapely figure for a mother of two. These observations were not erotic, but rather in the service of a moral inquiry: why would such a young healthy body have nothing better to do on a standard weekday afternoon than fill itself with red wine?

  When it seemed as though she might lean there in the tiled corner and not slide away, at least not until he quickly got the water flowing, Reinhart released Mercer’s kneecap (surely one of the most discreet below-the-waist points of contact, if contact had to be made, and it did), rose smartly from his bend, and seized the glass knobs that controlled the flow of water to the shower. The mix could be a tricky matter when one sought a compromise between melting iceberg and searing steam. In the strait compartment of tile, the characteristic stench of vomit could not be eluded. His own children had been great pukers when small, and in fact Winona, as might have been expected, was notable at the art or craft, performing it often, at a certain age, in public places: restaurants, movies, and of course on parents’ night at school. “Throwing up” had its endearing side for Reinhart, and washing the puker was to some degree an exercise in nostalgia, for it had usually been he, and not Genevieve, who had handled such emergencies as might soil the handler.

  In mixing the waters to achieve a comfortable balance, one could not, when sharing a narrow cubicle with another body, avoid getting soaked. Almost immediately his terry-cloth robe absorbed several pounds of water. He had avoided looking at Mercer’s face, because though she had been consistent in keeping her eyes closed thus far, she might at any moment open them up, and her subsequent embarrassment would be a horror to him, for he would have no means of relieving it at this moment. Whereas if he could just get her cleansed, put into a pair of Winona’s pajamas, and tucked into bed, the worst of it would be in the past when eventually she came to consciousness.

  But to clean her effectively he could hardly keep his face averted. God, there was puke on her fine chin and snot running from her delicate nose. This was, he had to admit, less repulsive on a handsome face than it would have been on someone ugly or old: yet another example of life’s inequity. Furthermore, one quick shot from the shower-head and her face was impeccable once more. He seized her, by shoulder and waist, and turned her under the spray of water.

  He would have preferred to disregard the matter of soap, in applying which there could be no modesty, but when undressing her he could hardly have ignored certain olfactory suggestions that she had not lately had a good wash.

  He lifted her over the curb of the shower stall. She had not yet come to, and he gently toweled her dry. Only a few more yards of thin ice to cross. He dropped the dampened towel and
draped her trunk with a dry one. Obviously Winona should not be inconvenienced; he would sleep on the couch tonight. He lifted Mercer again and carried her to his own room. This was a more taxing job than any he had yet performed. He had to swing her this way and that to negotiate two doorways, and even slender young women are much heavier than they look. In the hallway the towel that had covered her slithered to the floor.

  Reinhart was now carrying an unconscious, naked woman while himself wearing a soaking wet bathrobe that gaped open almost to the crotch. What a perfect moment for someone to burst in unannounced. Blaine, for example. Or, far worse, Genevieve! He actually listened in bravado-dread for such an intrusion. Come on, it’s all I need! But how could they get in? Well, how had Mercer penetrated the locked door? It might well be the kind of day when such things were arranged by the Fates, to whom it meant no more to spring a lock than to whip ex-wives into frenzies of hatred.

  So goaded by resentment and self-pity, Reinhart managed to carry the leadenly limp burden to his bed. He covered Mercer with the spare blanket from the closet and then went to Winona’s room to fetch night clothes. His daughter’s chamber was scarcely uncharted territory. Winona would have hired a maid, but why squander money when he was home all day? He ran the vacuum twice a week, changed linens, and whatnot: little enough.

  Winona had been none too neat as a fat girl, but as she turned sleek she became tidier in all respects. Of course, her appearance was her fortune. She could not be seen in clothes that had spent the night on the floor. Her walk-in closet was a rustling, ghostly forest of dry-cleaner’s plastic bags. Reinhart had no cause to inspect her more intimate apparel, but when by chance he was present as she opened a drawer, the contents thereof always looked so immaculate that he was once moved to ask whether she wore anything twice. “Oh, gosh, Dad, a few more times than that,” she had said solemnly. But not many more, he realized: which explained why when emptying her wastebasket, he always saw tumble forth so many of those little tags and labels, straight pins, and clear plastic.