Reinhart's Women (12 page)

“First one,” he replied in good humor, “is to get yourself some Instant Crepe Suzette Mix.”

Helen, who was proving an amiable sort, assured him she was earnest about acquiring “kitchen tips.”

“Of course we eat a lot of take-out. I can’t do this all day and then come home and cook much at night.”

“Who’s ‘we’? You and your husband?”

“Well...” Helen leaned towards him as if to share a confidence; he sensed that she might have dug him in the ribs had he been close enough. “You didn’t think I was one of
them,
did you?”

“Them?” The question was altogether honest.

Once again she made her lips prominent and silently mouthed a word. It was
lesbian.

Reinhart averted his face. “No,” he said, “certainly not.” He had not yet had time to think of this third phase of coping with the problem of Winona: he had first to deal with it himself, then to witness Blaine’s reaction, and now finally to deal with the rest of the world.

With unwitting cruelty Helen persisted. “Did you know
she
was? Grace, I mean.”

He mumbled: “I guess so. But I don’t much care.” He tried to keep from sounding the defiant note.

“I’ve always kept away from them. They make me feel creepy. But Grace is all right to work for. I’ve done a number of jobs for Epicon, usually through her, and she’s always been a perfect lady with me.” Helen laughed coarsely. “But, then, I doubt I’m her type. She likes them skinny, and she likes them young.”

“Well,” Reinhart said, “here come our customers.” God had mercifully steered a young mother and a small child to the head of their aisle.

But Helen Clayton still had time for another innocent thrust: “You should see her present
friend.
My God, she’s positively beautiful. I’ve seen her call for Grace after work in her car. I’ve seen—”

“Madam,” Reinhart desperately called to the young woman, though she was still remote and was at the very moment bending low to poke into a frozen-food compartment, “would you like a crepe Suzette?”

Futile as this was practically—the woman could not hear him—it did serve to distract Helen from her previous theme.

She said in an undertone: “That’s supposed to be
my
job.”

“Sorry,” said Reinhart. “I’ve got beginner’s nerves.”

“Aw, you’ll be just fine.” She considered him a buddy now.

The young mother had not heard him, but it could be seen that her little son was attracted by the promise of a novelty, down there in the corner, a man in a marshmallow hat and a red-haired lady, and he trotted their way.

“Hi, little kid,” said Helen, when he came near. “Do you like real sweet things like candy and ice cream?”

The child silently thrust his open hand at her.

Reinhart said: “I haven’t even sauced any crepes yet!”

Helen ignored him and continued to smile at the little boy. When the mother came along, the child turned to her and made demands. The young woman sighed and groaned. Reaching past a stack of the crepe-mix boxes on Helen’s table, she found a jar that Reinhart could not have seen from his angle, unscrewed the top, chose a bright green pellet, and gave it to her child. He was pacified for the moment. His mother shrugged for Helen’s benefit, put the jar on her wheeled cart, and pushed on.

“What have you got over there?” Reinhart asked. “Are you selling other things?”

“I took the precaution to get a jar or two of Gourmet Fruit Drops off the gourmet shelf,” said Helen. “You always want to have something to use on the real little kids.”

Reinhart was impressed by her acumen. “I’m going to take your suggestion and make some finished crepes, in sauce and all ready to eat, so that the customers can taste them right away. Then maybe they’ll stay and watch me cook some more from scratch.” He looked at Helen, expecting approval.

But she frowned. “Thing is, you’ll be giving them the pay before they do the work. That’s never a good principle. Think of it. If you got your money in advance, do you think you’d work as hard? Human nature.”

“But will they have the patience to stand and watch a demonstration? That young woman just now didn’t even glance at my setup.”

“Thing is,” said Helen, “you’ve just got to get the feel of the crowd: some will do one thing, some another. I mean, as crowds. Individuals within the crowd are something else: they can usually be ignored, but not always. There might be a troublemaker, for example. But there might also be somebody there you want to play to, like maybe, for you, a good-looking girl. If you can hold her, you get the feeling you can hold anybody, and that’s good for the self-confidence. Or maybe you like a different kind of challenge, some sour-looking individual who will be against you by nature, skeptical, you know? That might put you on your best behavior.”

No other customers were yet in sight, and in the preceding hour Reinhart had seen hardly any of the supermarket personnel but the manager, DePau. As yet it was an inappropriate place, this isolated corner, to speak of the psychology of crowds.

“I don’t think I’m so good at handling people,” Reinhart said. “If I have any gift in life whatever, it’s for
making
something. I discovered that late enough. I wish I had known it when I was young, but in those days I never showed any inclination to work with my hands. In manual training at school, for example, I couldn’t saw a straight line. I never had any talent at art, and with mechanical things I’m at a loss. When I got out of the Army, I just sort of fell into real estate, and from then on it was a series of jobs of different types that dealt with the public. I don’t mind admitting I never did well at any of them. Then I took up cooking, just as a practical thing at home: I had to bring up and feed a daughter.”

“Listen,” said Helen Clayton, speaking with solemn conviction, “being really able to make something is the greatest ability there is, because you’ve always got that regardless. People come and go, but what do you care? You’ve always got what you do. You could be alone on the moon.”

Again Reinhart wryly scanned the deserted aisle. “There’s a somewhat different character to working with food than, say, with wood or precious metals. Cooking is a craft, or perhaps a performing art, but the product that is created is made to be consumed in a unique way: it is taken internally and, if digested, becomes part of the flesh of a living creature. In a sense then, cookery is the
only
truly creative art. But you do need people to eat the resulting product.”

But the point seemed lost on Helen, who was very intelligent but whose philosophy was of another character, being tactical rather than strategic, and in fact Reinhart’s favorite people had been her sort during what in retrospect now were established as the most happy times of his life, viz., his days in the wartime Army.

Suddenly customers appeared in bulk. A plausible reason for this might be that the crowd had been waiting for the doors to open: admitted together, they had toured the aisles in ensemble and had only now reached the last. But subsequent events of the same sort, at arbitrary times, disqualified the argument. People appeared by ones or en masse, crowds formed or failed to collect, according to some law that could not easily be identified. Reinhart discovered that though the action could be hectic when people appeared in number, it was more satisfying than when persons came by sporadically. Although his private code had always exalted the individual and, as the case might be, dreaded or despised the mob, in a public situation such tastes are a weakness and not a strength.

But the principal difference between this role and all the previous jobs that had pitted him against his fellow man was that for the first time he had a genuine skill to display, and his being in this situation was not still another example of Fate’s inclination towards the arbitrary.

As he mixed his batter and poured his crepes one by one and turned them, stacked them when finished between precut squares of waxed paper, meanwhile bathing others in the hot sauce in the chafing dish (a luscious amalgam of sugar, butter, and orange juice, flamed with Grand Marnier and cognac), folding them into triangles, and serving them to the members of his audience on paper plates, with forks of plastic, as he went through this sequence as smoothly as his batter flowed, Reinhart was conscious of a feeling that was unique in his more than half a century of life: for the first time he did not feel as if he were either charlatan or buffoon. Thus, late, but presumably not too, was proved the wisdom of what in his boyhood had been conventional advice but which, alas, he had long ignored:
Learn a trade.

But when suddenly, as usual for no reason, their corner was devoid of humanity except for Helen and himself, and he had a moment in which to turn to his associate, intending to show an expression in which gratification and exhaustion were compounded (that old face of the happy worker, none too familiar nowadays except on amateurs at charity functions), he saw that Helen did not share in his pleasure.

“Something wrong?”

She indicated the stacks of boxes. “Four sales, Carl.”

“Well, it’s early yet. Give it time. We seem to be attracting the audience.”

Helen came to the kitchen table and spoke earnestly: “For freebies, Carl.”

Reinhart looked at her. “I’m doing something wrong again?”

“Will you forgive me for speaking frankly?” asked Helen. But the question was a genuine courtesy, and she did not offensively wait for an answer. “This isn’t a lunch counter. The customers aren’t paying for their food. You don’t have any obligation to feed as many as you can within a certain time.”

“I’m sorry,” said he. “I guess I did forget. Stupid of me, but I was just mindlessly having fun. I realize that’s not the point.”

Helen had expressive eyes within those pale lashes. “There’s no law against that,” said she. “I enjoy what I do, too, most of the time. Please don’t think I’m criticizing.”

He realized guiltily that, distracted by his own performance, he had not even been conscious of what she had done when the crowd was there, had not so much as heard her spiel.

He scowled now. “Don’t be so damned nice, Helen! I told you I’m a raw beginner at this sort of thing. I really want your suggestions.” He scanned the empty aisle, and then lowered the Grand Marnier bottle to the second shelf of the work-table, where he tipped its mouth towards a plastic measuring cup and poured out a drinkable quantity of the orange liqueur. He passed the cup to Helen, below the level of the table top.

She lifted it to her mouth and threw down its contents as though they were bar stock, then lowered the glass and said: “I thought you’d never ask.”

Reinhart suppressed a wince. He liked delicacy in a woman. And Grand Marnier was not appropriately drunk in a rush, as if it were what his father called a “cordial” and sometimes furtively tossed off behind the tree on Xmas Eve with other male relatives whose wives were teetotallers. He now recorked the bottle without having had one himself.

But Helen was pushing the glass across his counter and leering significantly. He had no choice but to open the bottle and pour another. She drank.

“It’s a hustle,” she said, “like everything else.” She held the glass just beneath her full breasts. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you seem a little too anxious to please the public. In business you have to remember
they are the enemy.”

Reinhart changed his mind about having a drink, but he chose the cognac and poured himself a tot. He postponed drinking it, however, and left it on the lower shelf.

“Huh,” he said in response to Helen. “That isn’t an easy theory to reconcile with the serving of food. It seems like a contradiction. Can you feed people you hate?”

“Hate?” asked Helen. “Who said hate? I’m not talking about anything nasty. What I mean is that they are what we feed on, like one animal eats another. Does a tiger hate its prey? Maybe ‘enemy’ is not the right word exactly. It’s not that kind of war. I said that because I have a friend who uses the term. He’s in carpets.”

At that moment a parade of wheeled baskets came around the head of the aisle. “I’ll try to remember,” Reinhart said. “I mustn’t be too eager to hand out free crepes.”

“But you don’t want to seem stingy either,” said Helen, tossing her right earring, a large green ball, with a movement of her head. “A good thing to remember is that we get them to stop by offering something free, but soon as they receive it they don’t have any further use for us. In other words, it’s in their interest to get the sample as soon as possible and leave, and it’s in our interest to make them stay until they hear our pitch. But once they’ve heard it and either bought the product or not, then it becomes our interest to get rid of them and not give them seconds.”

“Did I do that?” Reinhart asked. And he had been so pleased with himself for keeping the crowd in the obscurity of the mass and not identifying individuals!

“Well,” Helen said generously, and she even came to touch his forearm, “here comes a new attack. You’ll do just fine.”

It went without saying that the difficult aspect of any endeavor was the human.

The first basket to arrive was propelled by a very fat young woman. Neither did she have the flawless skin that sometimes accompanies obesity, whether or not as a result of it.

“Can I have another of those crapes?” she asked. “They’re the most delicious darn things....”

Which meant she was the kind of customer who should be discouraged. Seconds! But she was also the very sort of person who delighted a cook. She had not been able to resist coming back for more.

Reinhart managed to restrain himself from hastily meeting her wants. “Do you know,” he said genially, “these are easily prepared at home.” He looked over at Helen, but she was occupied with an older woman who had actually approached her of her own volition.

“You don’t mean that lousy mix she’s selling!” cried the fat girl, though in good humor. “I notice you don’t use it.”

Reinhart served her not one but two of the folded crepes and generously spooned sauce upon them. In addition to all else he could still remember his own days of obesity and the concomitant lust for sweets—which like all ardent appetites grew by its own feeding, but what could one do?