Reinhart in Love (32 page)

“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 it 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.

“Good heavens, no!” Splendor went on. “I would imagine it's just simple-minded cruelty. Or perhaps he wants to make a dish of squirrel as a delicacy, ‘like they done make in Jawgia.'” His parody was inferior. For the third time he said “good heavens,” making Reinhart ache to strike him, and explained: “They don't want for funds. My sister does very well.”

“Loretta?” asked Reinhart. “Where does she work?”

“I'd hate to say,” answered Splendor.

“Well,” said Reinhart, revving the engine, “best of luck to you, Splendor, in whatever you try.”

“I was wondering, Carlo, whether—”

But here Reinhart cut him off, in fear of some dreadful proposition. “Just a moment, you had better know that I'm married now.”

Splendor acknowledged, or disregarded, this news with a tremor of eyelids, and reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“Also, my wife is pregnant,” Reinhart added, and then perhaps needlessly explained what this meant: “I'm going to be a father.”

His colored friend had found a sheaf of papers within his clothes. “I wonder whether, Carlo, you might read this and let me know if I've really said
anything.”

His manuscript was of yellow paper, ruled in blue, legal length, and written in pencil. All Reinhart could judge at that point, as Splendor handed it over, was the handwriting, which appeared to be that precise, bland, anonymous style used on example-charts in grammar school. Reinhart had not known that any living person wrote in that fashion, except perhaps fat girls.

“Yes, Carlo,” said Splendor, smiling in self-congratulation. “It's no mistake. I became a writer while in jail, and this represents my maiden effort. Perhaps it is nothing to be proud of, who knows? That is, you will. But I—well, the creative artist can hardly judge his own work, can he? And I suppose you have studied English literature while in college? And American literature as well?” he asked with his hand apprehensively clutching the door-lever as if a certain kind of answer would send him bolting.

“Only English,” said Reinhart, and added ironically: “I hope that is enough to qualify me.” What would the guy do next? Once again he had something that was more colorful than what Reinhart had, albeit Reinhart was a prospective father. A writer yet! The ex-corporal found a temporary consolation in assuring himself that the story, or essay or whatever, stunk; but he glanced at the first sentences and was frightened by their grace: “I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations, for the last thirty years, has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom, as yet, nothing, that I know of, has ever been written. …”

“Is this fiction or nonfiction?” Reinhart asked, for want of a more articulate response.

Splendor at last wiped the perspiration from his welling forehead, and hung the handkerchief out his window to dry. “Now,” he said with condescension. “Imagination, Carlo, my dear fellow. I am hardly an elderly man.”

“I have read essays in which a writer pretends to be somebody he isn't really, so as to make a point,” said Reinhart, temperamentally jerking his shoulder; “yet it is not fiction, so to speak.”

“Have you an example?” Splendor asked politely, though his chin was insolent.

“Naturally,” said Reinhart. He lighted a cigarette to gain time and was inconsiderate with the expelled smoke. “Charles Lamb's ‘Dissertation on Roast Pig.'”

“Of course!” Splendor bared his teeth. “You're just the man to read my feeble effort. Now, tell me what you think of it. No holds barred. Tear it to pieces. Give it to me but hard. That's what the beginning author needs, and not the politeness of friends.” He opened the door and swung himself out. “I'll expect to hear from you at your convenience, Carlo. Remember to be merciless.” He suddenly leaned so far in through the window that, though the car was wide, his eyes were almost crossed on Reinhart's nose. “I'm sure it's inconvenient, what with your being married and almost a father, but I have no one else to ask: I wonder whether you might lend me some money? I can gladly pay you back within a week.”

Reinhart thrust the manuscript into the glove compartment and took his wallet from his pocket. “How much?”

Splendor confessed: “I could use a quarter.”

“For God's sake, don't be tiresome.”

“If you resent it, don't do it,” said Splendor, who chose preposterous moments to be proud. Still, he did not withdraw his head and trunk from the car. Anyone walking by would think he was held captive in a sort of modern pillory.

“I mean,” said Reinhart. “A quarter!”

“All right, make it a dime.”

Now Reinhart did an unforgivable thing. He took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, crushed it into a ball, and threw it onto the seat below Splendor's forequarters rather than hand it to him; and hardly had the Negro picked it up when Reinhart pointed the indicator at “Drive” and … almost blasted off with Splendor still retained; threatened to but didn't. It was unforgivable because the ten-spot was all his folding money: his, his wife's, and his unborn child's.

“So long, Splendor,” he said not unkindly, stopping his foot a half inch above the accelerator.

“Thanks for everything, Carlo. I can pay back your loan when my story is purchased by the
Saturday Evening Post.”

Reinhart answered “Sure,” and watched him cross the yard and mount the rickety porch. He always walked as if mounted on springs and the back of his head was a perfect brown egg.