Reinhart's Women (13 page)

“The instant version saves a lot of time,” said he, having so to speak bought her attention. “You have to allow for that. Not all that’s quick is bad!”

“The trouble is,” said the young woman, already putting the soiled paper plate into one of the two ex-oil-drums that served as trashbins (she had virtually inhaled the crepes), “all that makes a crape Soozette worth eating is the flavor of the expensive ingredients: with the brandy and stuff even the mix would taste good, but who can afford them?”

The approaching crowd had suddenly dispersed, or perhaps it had been not so much an actual accumulation of persons as a trick of perspective. He turned to Helen. She too was again free.

From within she pulled her face into an elongation. “All my lady wanted was the way to the toilet. She got nasty when I said they didn’t have them in supermarkets.” Helen laughed in her hearty style. “Say, Carl, if worse comes to worst, we’ll just have to drink up the booze, so the prospects aren’t all bad.”

He asked her for the time and then he invited her to have lunch with him.

A certain quick transformation could be seen in her eyes. She looked at her watch and said: “Eleven twenty!”

“Can it be?” asked Reinhart. “We haven’t done much business, but we’ve got through the morning.”

“I’d like to take you up on the invitation, but I can’t.”

“Sure,” said he. “Some other time.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” She spoke in an intense whisper. It was a strange thing to say, and an odd style of saying it, and whatever the intended significance, Reinhart was all at once aroused. This happened seldom enough to the sedate middle-aged gentleman he had become.

He turned quickly back to his work. The cooked-crepe supply was not especially low—the stack held at least a dozen—but you could never tell when they might get another crowd. He put the iron skillet on a burner of the hot plate and turned up the heat. In his right peripheral field of vision he saw a lone, cartless shopper approach from the top of the aisle.

What precisely did Helen mean? Or did she herself know? He was shocked to find that where women were concerned he had regressed in recent years to the moral condition of his adolescence. Though today’s youth, according to certain authorities, reached adulthood with the sophistication of a procurer, in Reinhart’s day and place it had been routine enough to arrive at one’s full growth without any experience but the autoerotic, and dealing in fantasies was ineffective preparation for so much as conversing with a live female.

“Carl?”

He was being addressed by the person who had come down the aisle without a cart. He had actually recognized her at the instant she had come into sight, and he furthermore had done so from the corner of his eye. But when you had lived with a woman for twenty-two years—that portion of life generally known as the prime, when all the emotions whether loving or hateful were high, and there was a peculiar vitality even to the worst despair, and when at the end she had discarded you brutally—it was no great feat, even a decade later, to see her through the back of your head.

His ex-wife stood across the work-table from him.

He caught himself just as he was about to burn his hand, instead moving it deftly to take a paper plate to the chafing dish and there choosing a hot crepe. He spooned extra sauce upon it and presented it, with plastic fork, to the mother of his children.

“Free sample,” he said.
“Bon appétit,
Genevieve.”

CHAPTER 6

W
HEN REINHART TOLD HIMSELF
that he had recognized Genevieve on her first entering the top of the aisle, he was speaking with the habitual lack of precision that characterizes the internal dialogue. Undoubtedly there had been something about the figure and its movements that suggested an unpleasant memory, but it was a severe shock to be actually confronted by his spouse of twenty-two years, his ex of a decade. The presentation of the crepe was an act of the bravado that Genevieve had so often evoked from him in the last catastrophic years of their association.

It was typical of her to ignore the outthrust plate.

“Carl,” she said again, and neither time was it a greeting, “we have to talk.”

Reinhart continued to hold the crepe towards her. He began again, in the proper style. “Hello, Genevieve. It’s been a while. How have you been?”

At least some of his shock was due to her altered appearance. When last encountered—she in her early forties, he in the middle of his fourth decade—Genevieve had been the sort of woman who could be termed “handsome”: her features were well cut, with no ragged edges; her eye was clear, her skin uncreased, her hair of a uniform color, her figure as fit as if she were ten years younger. And if one loved her there was no reason to be this objective: she was a damned good-looking woman by any standard and miraculously so as the mother of two children, the elder of whom was in college. Reinhart himself, on the other hand, had been a sorry specimen, more than halfway through his third hundred pounds, spongy-faced, habitually flushed, short of breath, and loose of bridgework in time of crisis (which came with the rising of each sun).

But by now he had no visible paunch, despite the lowering of the chest which is nature’s fee for gaining the age of fifty; and if the hue of his hair was no longer youthful, its growth was, miraculously, as dense as it had ever been. He could still, unspectacled, read a menu at less than arm’s length, and he had needed no dental work since early in his forties. He believed that he looked his age but could reasonably be termed a healthy specimen of it. He might turn no female heads, but neither would he cause the aversion of faces. In truth, his current appearance might be pretty close to achieving second place on a personal list of his own lifetime images (first being always himself at twenty-one, or at any rate the representation thereof on a snapshot taken at a ruined German monument in Occupation Berlin, among other GIs and Russian soldiers, buddies for then and forever, conquerors of all the evil in the world—for the rest of that week, anyway).

But Genevieve was not simply a faded snapshot of herself of a decade past: she was the worn and cracked photograph of someone else entirely. Reinhart found he could recognize her better from the corner of his eye than straight-on. It would have defied his powers to say in precisely which respect she had
not
changed, e.g., the cartilage in her nose seemed to have undergone a softening; her eyes flickered behind what looked like peepholes cut through inorganic material rather than living skin; her hair was arranged significantly to lower her once high brow; the joints at the under-ear angles of her jaw were almost as evident, and stark as those on the skeleton that had dangled in the biology lab at high school, forty years before. Not to mention that she was very thin in body—and not in Winona’s sense, the willed emaciation of chic. Genevieve looked as though she simply had not had enough to eat in recent weeks: her complexion was a mixture of yellow and gray, her posture was none too steady, her clothes were too large.

Reinhart now found himself urging the crepe on her as emergency nourishment, as one would extend warm soup to the starving. And he was joined by an ally.

“Go ahead, ma’am,” Helen Clayton said encouragingly, coming towards them. “It’s free!”

“Get rid of her,” Genevieve told her ex-husband, without so much as a glance at the other woman. “I told you I wanted to talk.”

Despite her current disguise, which could have inspired pity, Genevieve’s stark spirit was all too familiar.

Reinhart retracted the crepe. He also became conscious of the pan on the hot plate, in which the butter had blackened, but he was not so distracted as to burn himself on its handle. He gathered up a wad of apron and lifted the skillet away.

Helen shrugged in good-natured indifference and turned away. Reinhart saw that she was that salubrious sort of person whom one need not worry about: she did not seek situations in which to find offense. He saw no utility in chiding Genevieve in front of her.

His ex-wife continued to stare at him.

At last he said: “I can’t deal with personal matters until I’m off duty.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Genevieve asked, for all the world as if she genuinely did not understand.

“I’m working here. This is a job, to promote the sale of a crepe mix.” She frowned. Had she turned mentally incompetent in some fashion? “I’ll meet you for lunch if you like.”

“Lunch?” Her stare lost coherence. “Oh.” She returned her eyes to his. “I’m not looking for a handout.”

“You’re hardly being offered one,” Reinhart answered in a level tone. “I assume you’ve got something serious to talk about, if you bothered to look me up here. And if so, then lunchtime would seem to be the moment to talk about it, and I at least will be hungry then, having worked all morning.”

As if in support of his point, a cluster of shoppers were approaching, and Helen went out to gather them in. Now, incongruously, Reinhart heard her pitch for the first time.

“Have some free crepes,” she said, “and learn an easy way to make them at home. Why not? You don’t have to buy anything.” The words were less eloquent than the spirit in which they were spoken. Helen seemed to have a naturally persuasive manner that came into play in this function. The women rolled their baskets near. Among them was an old gent in a cap of hound’s-tooth check, who put his head on the side and squinted suspiciously at Reinhart.

Genevieve became aware, almost fearfully, of the strangers who moved to surround her. “All right,” she said, with a suggestion that these people were Reinhart’s bullies, summoned to force her to comply with his wishes. “Noon.” She filtered through the shopping carts. Reinhart was ignorant of women’s fashions—as he was reminded every time he looked at Winona—yet he knew that Genevieve’s attire was out of style by some years. In fact, he thought he could remember the coat from 1968.

“What you got here?” asked the old man, peering at the chafing dish. “Swedish meatballs?”

Reinhart served him a crepe Suzette. The old-timer took the entire triangle of it into the back of his mouth and swallowed it whole, as if it were an oyster. He rolled his rheumy eyes into his yellowed forehead, but said nothing. He took a paper napkin from the little stack at the edge of the table, cleansed his plastic spoon on it, and put the spoon into his pocket. “Why not?” he asked Reinhart with a shrug, and left.

But with successive waves of female shoppers Helen Clayton began to do good business. Insofar as Reinhart could spare attention to the matter, he thought he could identify the power of precedent. If one of the earliest arrivals in any cluster bought a packet of crepe mix, some others usually would follow, but if the customer waited until the group thinned out, a trend was unlikely to be set, not only for the obvious reason that fewer persons were there to be influenced, but also because the principle of like-follows-like can only seriously be applied to the mass. Thus an early purchaser could be seen as a leader and those who came next as followers, but the straggler was probably an isolated eccentric.

Of course, as Helen pointed out between sequences, “buy” was not the precise word for what a shopper did in dropping a packet of mix into her basket: she was as yet a great distance from the checkout stations and could, at any point between here and the wire rackfuls of gossip-tabloids, mounted just before the cash registers, discard any item which failed to pass the test of second thought.

Reinhart endeavored to keep himself in a state of commercial distraction, but succeeded only in part.

“I suppose,” he said in that same interim, yielding to an irresistible force, “you wonder who that woman is?”

“What woman?” asked Helen.

“You’re being too diplomatic.” He smiled sadly. “But I appreciate it. She’s my ex-wife. I haven’t seen her in many years.”

Helen shrugged and then smiled in return, but not in reflection of his wryness: she had a remarkably sweet temperament. “Hell, Carl,” she said, “what the hell?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t worry. If it’s done, then it’s done. That’s the way I always feel.” She continued to smile at him.

“Well,” he said finally, “I’ve got my companion for lunch, and I’m not looking forward to the occasion.” He rubbed his chin and added, on what was really an innocent impulse: “I’m sorry it won’t be with you.”

Helen swallowed visibly. Her reply had a certain intensity, an undue earnestness. “I should be able to make it right after work, if that’s all right. I can’t ever at lunchtime, you see. I’m sorry, but that’s a standing arrangement.”

Again he was taken by surprise, but he felt he must apologize. “Oh, I didn’t mean—That is, your personal business is, uh, your business...”

“Listen,” said Helen, “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.” More shoppers were coming; she turned to deal with them.

Reinhart poured and cooked more crepes, served them to smiling women. This was more attention than he had got from the female population in decades. Things were supposed to be changing in the relations between the sexes, but women still seemed to like being served by a man who specialized in a craft that was routinely their own.

But what did Helen mean?
What
would she “be able to make right after work”? But more importantly, whatever, why was he apprehensive? What a tame old fellow he had become!

Finally the batter he had brought from home was coming to an end, and he was about to ask Helen for the time when he saw Genevieve rounding the corner at the head of the aisle. He served the crepes, of which luckily there were two more to divvy up than the number of customers who awaited them, and then addressed his partner.

“I guess we can break for lunch now? Though, come to think of it, a lot of people who work might do some shopping on their lunch hour, and we’ll miss them.”

“No,” said she. “The kind of people who shop at lunch aren’t the kind who’d buy this product, generally speaking. Take my word for it.”

“O.K.,” said Reinhart. “I will. I always take your word.”

Helen rolled her eyes and made a lump in her round cheek. “But don’t turn on me when I’m wrong!” This was the kind of affectionate-joking exchange that he was comfortable with. Though he had few personal precedents for it, the movies of his youth and the early TV comedies often depicted men and women who were pals with an undertone of something warmer, which might come to fruition when the girl removed her owlish spectacles or when the man simply opened his eyes: but you, the moviegoer, even as a kid, knew the score all the while. The wit inherent in this situation was far from being inferior.