Reinhart's Women (14 page)

“Have a nice lunch.” He was reluctant to leave her company, especially to join Genevieve. He realized that he was thinking of Helen as his protector!

Genevieve stopped about four feet from the table and waited expressionlessly—which in her current case was actually with an unpleasant expression even when she was not intentionally displaying one: her lower face was strained and pinched and overlooked by nostrils seemingly tensed in reaction to a foul smell. She showed no acknowledgment of his apron and chef’s bonnet as he now removed them. In the latter years of their marriage he had assumed he could have come home in a full suit of armor or loincloth and turban without provoking her to make a response.

DePau, the manager, had assigned him a locker in the employees’ coatroom at the rear of the store. There had been only one available, and Reinhart and Helen had to share it. Reinhart had felt odd about this on his arrival that morning. Now the intimacy of the narrow metal cabinet, in which his old tweed sports jacket hung against her trenchcoat, was inviting to think about.

“I’ve got to go back in for a minute, to get my street clothes,” he told Genevieve. Her nod was curt, and it seemed bitter as well, but that may have been but the effect of her permanently disagreeable configuration of feature.

Reinhart would have liked to be bolstered by one more encounter with Helen, but when he reached their locker her coat was already gone: she lost no time in getting to her noontime date, which she had furthermore characterized as being habitual. Was she that attached to her husband, or did the brute demand punctuality? No doubt some men were still like that, or more so than ever, now that classic virility was under siege.

On the way back, passing through the storage area, beyond which the trucks were being unloaded, he ran into DePau. The manager looked careworn: he shook his head and hastened on. It was doubtful that he had recognized Reinhart. Reinhart was old enough to remember a time before the supermarket, or at any rate before it was the institution without which most citizens of the republic would presumably starve. So many basic matters had changed during his lifetime. In his boyhood it was not unusual to know people who had no telephone, and a great many persons went without gasoline-driven vehicles: among them milkmen, whose vans were pulled by horses. Patches of dung, flattened and imprinted with tire-treadmarks, were not uncommon features of the roadways. Dogs, who ran free in those days, had an addiction to public excrement (“It’s their perfume,” said an aged female neighbor), of which horse droppings were fortunately the least offensive.

But reminiscence did not armor him against the prospect of lunching with his ex-wife. Luckily he had permitted Winona to impose upon him a generous loan against his first paycheck and could afford to take Genevieve to one of the better of the several eating places in the mall, i.e., not to a fast-food assembly line, of which the familiar names were present, nor to the Chinese establishment, which appeared to be the standard chop-suey parlor.

On joining Genevieve, he took the initiative. “I was surprised to hear you were even in town.” He began to walk up the aisle.

But for a moment she did not move. She squinted at him and asked: “Why did you say that?”

He refused to return to her, but he did slow his pace.

“Because it’s what I felt.”

“Why ‘even’?”

“Excuse me?”

“‘Even in town’?” She scowled. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

This reminded him of his own admonition to Blaine, at the end of their Sunday drive a week earlier. It was becoming a favorite family saying.

“I trust you’re not going to keep being so touchy,” he told Genevieve. “I meant no insult. By ‘even’ I meant that I hardly realized you were in town. I didn’t anticipate seeing you. It’s been a good ten years, hasn’t it?”

She merely shrugged. Time was apparently of no importance to her. To Reinhart it was incredible that you could be so intimately associated with someone in one era and meet as distant acquaintances in the next. Human relations remained a good deal less explicable than anything in atomic physics. Certain platitudes had not changed since Homer.

Genevieve’s stride had altered since the old days. It was hard not to see it as a trudge.

They turned at the head of the aisle and went along parallel with the endless shelves of products baked from dough and packaged in cellophane.

“I didn’t come to talk of old times,” said she.

“No,” said Reinhart.

And simple and honest as that word was, again she responded defensively. “You’re saving I don’t have any feelings, is that it?”

Reinhart made no answer until they had gone the entire route to the front doors, which swung open automatically when their weight reached the mats.

Outside, on the concrete ramp, he stopped and said: “Believe me, I’m not trying to needle you in any fashion. I apologize in advance for anything you interpret as a gibe. And that’s the last I want to hear of it. It was your idea to look me up, remember. So far as I was concerned, we terminated our association a decade ago.”

As he had suspected, this speech, which really should have been considered insulting, was favorably received by her. Mean people are usually deeply gratified when others confirm their ruthless assessment of humanity.

“All right,” said Genevieve, trudging on, “that’s fair enough. I don’t want any special favors. I didn’t come for myself.”

“I didn’t think you did,” said Reinhart, stepping onto the blacktop. Across a block of parked cars was the restaurant he thought he’d head for, a place called, merely, “Winston’s.” He simply liked the name. The façade was mall-banal, and he knew nothing of the cuisine, but at least it was not called by some term which evoked unpleasant gastronomical anticipations (like “Old” something, or any name in the diminutive).

Nor did the place immediately offend upon entrance. They were seated by a young woman who was civil but not falsely enthusiastic; her clothing and style of hair were unobtrusive but attractive; and she was prompt but not breathless. She led them to a table capacious enough for two more persons. The table top, though not made of wood, was at least not of mirror-gloss, and the disposable mats were not imprinted with patriotic lore, maps of the region, or little-known and useless facts intended to entertain. The cutlery was clean and of a goodly heft, and the napkins were of paper but thick and wide.

Reinhart asked Genevieve whether she wanted a drink.

She sat rigid, both forearms pinning down the prone menu. “No,” she said. “In fact, I don’t really want lunch. I don’t want anything from you.”

Having taken it all,
is what he might have said at some early time, just after the divorce. But the honest fact was that a great deal of their worldly goods in the last years of the marriage had been provided by Gen’s effort and not his own: he could admit that now. Not to mention that he had always disliked the house, the neighborhood, and the suburb, which was not altogether the fault of those three entities, as he could also admit now, but the truth was that he had never been unhappy to be done with them all. The further truth might be simply that he was never cut out to be a father or even a husband. But it is not an easy matter to disqualify so much of your life. Being in Genevieve’s presence summoned up such basically disagreeable questions.

“And furthermore,” she added, “I don’t want to drink anything.”

He felt a quick flash of rage at this command, but before he acted upon it a reason for restraint appeared with almost the same speed. His balance of spirit was still new enough to wonder at. There were deeply gratifying rewards for living well into middle age.

“A lot has changed, Genevieve, since we last saw each other. I’m no longer a boozer, but neither am I that other monster, the teetotaller. I just don’t drink for effect any more.”

“Then why drink at all?” she asked in her manner of old, in anticipation of an argument that was not only untenable but ignoble as well.

“To amuse the palate,” Reinhart said. “Beyond sheer matters of nourishment, that should always be the purpose of putting anything in the mouth.”

“I’ll drink a cup of coffee.”

“And what will you have to eat?” He opened and scanned his own copy of the menu (which was unsullied by thumbprints, grease spots, or ketchup drippings). Wonder of wonders, there were other foods than shrimp and steak and prime ribs. For example, there was fresh ham. There was meat loaf. There was Irish stew! Reinhart had a good feeling about this place, though of course the only proof would be in the eating. “It’s quite an adventurous bill of fare, for this place and time,” said he. “If that’s real Irish stew, made of lamb, then it’ll be a treat. Nor is a really good meat loaf to be dismissed....” He looked at Genevieve over the bill of fare. “You really should eat something.”

For the briefest instant she showed a look of vulnerability such as he had never before seen. “Coffee will be fine, Carl,” she said, and perhaps it was his imagination, but he detected the hint of a softer note than he had ever known her to sound. One of the alterations in her appearance (now that he was seated across from her in a good light) was her color of hair: it was off, somehow; still brown, but without a glint of life. It occurred to him that without heavy dyeing she might be pure white: that happened to some younger than she. Suddenly, as if warm water had been poured on him from above, he felt flooded with pity.

He leaned forward and asked: “Are you O.K.?”

But she bridled at this.
“I’m
not the problem.” She could not resist adding: “I never was.”

The waitress came then. Genevieve would not budge from her lonely cup of coffee, but Reinhart had put in a solid morning of labor. He asked whether the stew was of lamb. It was.

“I don’t suppose you have Guinness?”

But surely they did. The waitress was a mellow-voiced young woman with neat hair and a clear complexion.

“All right, Gen,” he said when they were alone again. “I realize you’re showing great patience. ... You want to discuss Blaine’s problem, I’m sure. I don’t know what I can do. He’s so touchy with me that I can hardly talk to him. He didn’t even want me to know about Mercer’s departure.”

Genevieve pointed a finger at him. “Don’t worry about Blaine,” said she. “We’ll work that out, he and I. That’s no big deal.”

The waitress arrived with the cup of coffee.

Reinhart remembered that Genevieve was wont to smoke a cigarette at table, and he dreaded the moment, no doubt imminent, when she would take the pack from her purse. But it did not yet come.

Genevieve pushed the coffee aside without tasting it. “It’s your daughter,” said she. “My God Almighty, to have something like that in our family. I could just imagine what you’d be saying now if
I
had raised her. But she’s lived with
you
during these ten years.”

“That’s right,” said Reinhart, “and I’m very proud of her. She has been a wonderful daughter, and I love and admire her.”

Genevieve looked at him for a long time, and then she said: “Blaine told me you were completely brazen about it, and I’ll tell you, despite my private opinion of you, I thought he was not being quite fair. ‘She supports him,’ I said. ‘He’s not going to openly attack her, even to you—especially to you, given all those years of bad blood.’ But I know something about you, Carl, or I thought I did anyway, after more than twenty years of marriage. I know, or thought I knew, that you can’t stand sexual perversion. So far as I know, that’s your only sacred principle.”

Reinhart stared down into the tines of his fork. What was interesting about this accusation was the tiny grain of truth amidst the inert matter. It had never quite been “sacred,” nor had it been his “only,” but “principle” had a certain justice. Nor was he repudiating it now.

“I’ll stick to what I told Blaine. I don’t intend to be a spokesman for gay liberation. What I would like most is never to consider the subject. I wish everybody would drop the matter as something to be discussed and go about their business, each in his or her own way. But I know that’s hardly likely, at least not for a long time. And of course there’s no getting away from the fact that one is more sympathetic—make that
less unsympathetic
—to certain things if they apply to someone close.”

Genevieve’s face had become ever more masklike. “I always wondered why she wanted to live with you after the divorce, leave her nice home and room and all, her mother and brother. I really resisted accepting the loathsome suspicion that you and—”

“No, Genevieve,” Reinhart said with kindly firmness, “no, you don’t want to pursue that line, whatever the malice you still have towards me. No, I have never had a sexual connection with my own daughter. I realize that incest is the current fashionable subject with the quacks of popular psychology and the hacks of TV, but Winona and I would never make case studies.”

At that point the waitress brought him a mug of almost black liquid, surmounted by a good two inches of yellow foam: they knew how to pour Guinness here! But he could feel with his fingertips that it was much too cold; very chill stout tastes like varnish smells. He put both hands around the mug, to warm it a bit, but it was too cold to grasp for long.

“The fact is,” he said to Genevieve, “Winona is doing fine. There’s absolutely nothing to talk about with regard to her, unless one wants to praise her for becoming a success. But Blaine
is
in trouble. I don’t mean to disparage what you’re doing for him: I’m sure that’s going to help. But neither would I dismiss his difficulties.”

Genevieve breathed with effort and seemed to suppress a cough. “Mercer’s just a bit high-strung. I’ve had some experience in that area. Daddy was apt to go off half-cocked occasionally.” She made the kind of crooked smile reserved for lovable rascals.

At Reinhart’s most benevolent hour, full of holiday fowl and spirits, he could have elevated Blaine Raven no higher than the level of dirty skunk. Another of television’s recent trends, complete with new jargon-term for the actors to mouth in lieu of showing credible emotion, was the theme of the “battered” wife. Genevieve’s mother (had been a forerunner in this area of domesticity, but luckily she was able to escape from time to time for a ride in the flying saucer which landed secretly in a vacant lot near her home. When, after many years of Raven’s disgraces (arrest for beating up a whore who had been his client, disbarment as an attorney, bankruptcy, alleged indecent advances towards a black sailor in the men’s toilet of a downtown tavern—in view of his lifelong record as a bigot this may have been a bum rap, or again a logical conclusion) and finally his self-incineration while blotto, when Reinhart’s mother-in-law was free at last, she soon died, whether or not of a broken heart no one could ever know, but Reinhart thought it likely. One person may be connected to another by bonds which a third person can never understand. He was himself still attached to Genevieve, but in a fashion he could not have understood without this meeting. His old fear of her (yes, always, fear by one name or another) had been replaced by... God, could it only be pity?