Reinhart's Women (17 page)

“You’ve worked there before?”

“Sure,” said Helen, “and he’s never missed once in sneaking a feel back at the lockers.”

“That guy? I’ll be damned! And he looks like such a prude. In the old movies a man who looked like that would play a preacher or maybe a mortician.” It was amazing: Reinhart couldn’t get over the basic fact that he was in a good mood. As they walked slowly towards the parking lot Helen was usually touching him with hip or shoulder. They formed a unit of affection.

“I don’t know whether he really thinks we’re in cahoots,” said she, “but he wants to get back at me. He’s not my type.” She bumped Reinhart for emphasis.

“Cahoots,”
he echoed happily. He had a deep attachment to the slang that predated World War II, probably for the simple reason that he himself was of the same vintage, but there had been a geniality to that language and an ebullience, which so far as he could see had been replaced only by grunts of insolence and anxiety:
get it on, hang in there, that’s a turn-off.

“Should we take both cars?” Helen asked. “Probably simpler to leave one here and pick it up on the way back.”

“I don’t have a car,” said Reinhart. “So that’s even simpler. But where are we supposed to be going?”

She swung in against him. “When will we have a better opportunity?”

An erotic interpretation could be made of this, but Reinhart was not yet so old that he had forgotten the frustrated expectations of his youth. In those days, anyway, women conventionally implied much more than they meant to do, and he had been marked for life by such experiences.

Therefore he said, modestly: “We might have a drink.” They were now walking among the ranked cars.

“Thing to do,” said Helen, letting his arm go and plucking into her strap-hung purse, “is to pick up a bottle.” She found some keys and went purposefully to a large, battered, dirty blue automobile parked between two sensible, neat, economical vehicles manufactured by former enemies of the United States. Reinhart had not owned a car in a decade, and he could by now identify few makes. Helen’s chariot looked as though it had been designed for the sheer purpose of squandering fuel.

She entered the front seat on her knees and slid over to lift the peg on the passenger’s door. The interior of the car was in somewhat better shape than the coachwork. It had a homey feeling, though probably only because it was Helen’s. Funny how machines are like that.

Reinhart slipped in. The plastic seat was warm, no doubt from the sun that had penetrated the windshield, though at the moment it was in seclusion behind a barrier of cloud. Helen started the car, making a noise like that of a dishwasher within which a glass has broken, and having driven no more than a hundred yards across the asphalt, she stopped at a liquor store.

Reinhart understood that he was expected to make a purchase. He asked Helen for her choice of beverage, though he was puzzled as to where they were going to drink it: from the bottle, in the car?

“Gee,” said Helen, “I’m partial to Scotch, but it’s pretty expensive—”

Reinhart raised his hand. “Say no more, my lady. Your needs will be answered.” After what should have been a degenerative experience—perhaps his job was gone for good, and would Genevieve stop at that?—he had moved ever closer to exuberance.

He dropped his balled apron on the seat and went into the store and examined the appropriate shelves.

The bulbous man behind the counter said: “Can I help?”

“Just choosing a Scotch,” said Reinhart, “for my friend. She thinks it’s a good way to kill an afternoon.”

“If she’s somebody you’re out to impress,” said the liquor dealer, “may I suggest Chivas?” He turned to the shelves behind him and found a boxed bottle.

“By George,” said Reinhart, playing a role for his own delectation, “I think we ought to spare no expense to please the little lady.” He withdrew his wallet and paid the bill. He assumed that Helen would give him a lift home after their drink: he now no longer had bus fare.

“Where do we give this a belt?” he asked her when he regained the car. “We really ought to have glasses and ice.” He brandished the bag and could not forbear from gloating: “This is the
crème de la crème.”

Helen frowned as she started up. “Uh, that’s not like cream dee menth, is it? I don’t go much for cordials, in general.”

He allayed her fears by unbagging, unboxing, and displaying the bottle. “The fact is that I’m not much of a whiskey drinker,” he said. “Not nowadays, anyhow. In view of that, I thought only the best would do.”

She gave the Scotch a loving smile. “Now you’re talkin’.” She gunned the car off the blacktop onto the highway. This was a suburban shopping area in which one mall abutted another for what a local promotional effort sought to have called the Miracle Mile, but it consumed even more space than the name asserted. Beyond the malls began a sequence of motels: the notable names were represented, Ramada, Holiday, Best Western, and a far cry they were from the bleak “tourist courts” Reinhart could remember from childhood trips with his parents, when in fact Dad usually decided he could not afford such luxurious accommodations and instead checked them into that even quainter facility of those times, the “tourist home,” viz., someone’s private house, where Grandma or Sister Sue had to vacate her little bedroom, second floor rear, for the lodging of strangers at one dollar the party, and you had to queue up for a toilet of which the seat never cooled.

But in among the local examples of the famous chains, with the conspicuous landscaping of genuine shrubbery which doggedly persisted in looking like synthetic, the palatial parody of their reception areas, the high marquees celebrating the current gathering of men dressed in polyester—tucked into an interstice, as it were, between two of the gaudies was a simple, almost austere rank of discrete little huts, called, remarkably for this day, Al’s Motel.

It was into the forecourt of Al’s that Helen easily swung her car. Reinhart honestly believed, by at least 75 percent, that she was stopping there in the performance of some errand.

Helen slowed to a crawl in the approach to the square little building where respects, and a fee, must be paid before access was gained to the cottages behind, but she now said, with evidence of concern: “This is real private, Carl,” and pressed her foot down. The car gained speed. They descended a slight elevation and turned in back of the little office building. Helen stopped there. “You can check in through the back door if you want.”

Now Reinhart was suddenly soaked to the skin, as it were, with embarrassment, as if God had peeled away the roof of the automobile and poured a bucketful on his head. He sat there grinning as moist heat went everywhere except into his cold toes. As it happened, he had never his life long checked into any public hostelry with a woman who was not his legal spouse, in fact, who was not Genevieve, his only wife. And indeed seldom since their honeymoon had he stayed overnight with her except at their own dwelling. They had rarely traveled in their two decades together. There had never been a sufficiency of money for routine existence, for the two children had arrived in the earliest years (Blaine indeed so soon that Reinhart still might all too easily wonder about the boy’s paternity). His extramarital experiences, most of them with professionals, had been in private places, their own apartments or the hotel bedroom which was his first temporary home after the break with Gen.

“Helen,” he said, “can’t we just be friends for a while? Maybe when we know each other a little better, things will work themselves out.”

“Gee, Carl,” she said, smiling an insinuation, “I guess I misinterpreted. ... Uh, well, you’re a special kind of guy, you know. It’s not easy to figure you out at first.”

Reinhart rubbed his chin. “Do you think I’m gay? Is that what you’re saying?”

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.