Reinhart's Women (28 page)

But clearly he felt humiliated at the thought of people digesting their steaks while he performed. For his own part Reinhart was only now remembering that he had never really liked Buxton as an actor—or at any rate, he had not found Buxton’s roles sympathetic: there was always a resentful streak in the character, of whom one expected the worst, owing to the cocky, smart-ass personality he displayed at the outset. But then he came though courageously in the pinch, kept the plane aloft though badly wounded, or fell on the grenade, saving his comrades.

Buxton was still worrying. “I started out on the Broadway stage,” said he. “I was trained for musical comedy, long before I went to Tinsel Town.”

So they really said that. “I’ll bet you’re good,” said Reinhart. “I look forward to the show.”

Buxton leaned over. He had maintained his familiar widow’s peak of yore, and the scalp looked genuine, but why a professional would have his hair dyed matte black, leaving sparkling white sideburns, was not self-evident.

“Say,” he said, “you wouldn’t know where a man could get a drink?” His breath smelled of mint Life Saver.

“Well, now...” Reinhart reached into his pocket for the half-pint of brandy.

But Buxton said: “Not here.”

They got up and were heading for the men’s room when Jane came along and carried Reinhart away.

“We’ll do the omelet run-through,” said she, and when they had left Buxton behind she said: “It’s Has-Been City around here lots of mornings. Watch yourself with that one: he’ll hit you up for a loan.”

Reinhart felt he owed Buxton some loyalty, the actor having embodied the old-fashioned virtues until both he and they went out of fashion, to be replaced by nothing and nobody worth mentioning. “I always liked him in the movies.”

“He was through before my time,” said Jane in her brisk way.

Time was all. Twenty years earlier some Jane might have seen Buxton as a rung on her own climb to success.

They were in the kitchen now. Reinhart practiced the movements he would make on camera. Taking the eggs and butter from the refrigerator to the counter consumed too much of his allotted three minutes. On the other hand, as Jane pointed out, too much premeditation would diminish the dramatic effect. The eggs, for example, should remain whole, to be broken on camera.

“Debbie will ad lib something about making the perfect omelet,” said Jane. “O.K., that’s your cue to answer. You say, ‘Well, Debbie, first you break the eggs.’ Don’t, for God’s sake, tell the old Hungarian-omelet joke—you know, ‘First you steal two eggs’—we’ll get too much bad mail. Everybody takes everything personally.”

Debbie was the “co-host” of the program, with a man named Shep Cunningham. Meeting her backstage apparently violated some show-biz rule, and having rarely tuned in to Channel Five. at this hour, Reinhart had little sense of the woman. Cunningham, however, had formerly been anchorman on the
Six O’Clock News:
his amiable, insensitive face above a wide-bladed tie and even wider lapels was remembered. But Reinhart was to have no direct connection with him whatever this morning.

“For all the woman’s movement,” said Jane, “anything in the kitchen this time of day is always played to the ladies.” She looked up at one of the clocks that were mounted overhead at frequent intervals throughout the studio. Monitor TV sets were everywhere, as well. Someone was speaking through a public-address system: it was like the voice of God, and hence quite startling when it uttered foul language.

Jane said: “You’d better put on the chef’s hat and apron.”

Reinhart was getting into the spirit of the place. “Oh, God,” he said, with real despair, “I forgot to bring them!”

Jane shook her head. “Your office sent them over.” She led Reinhart to a little dressing room, where he found the cook’s costume and donned it. The
toque
was pristine, but the apron was imprinted, over the region of the heart, with the logo of Grace Greenwood’s firm: the name EPICON printed in the form of a croissant. This was something new.

Jane came along just as he emerged: she apparently had a sixth sense about these matters, for he was certain she had not been lingering there. Again she took him to the chairs in the corridor. Buxton was missing.

Jane said: “O.K., it’s just waiting now. You can watch the monitor.” She pointed to one high on the wall across from him. “I’ll have somebody bring you coffee, O.K.?”

A young man brought the coffee. As discreetly as he could, Reinhart dosed it with brandy. He had had the sense to buy expensive cognac: cheaper stuff was hardly drinkable in the best of times, but with morning coffee it would erode the stomach.

The monitor was showing a rerun of an ancient situation comedy, in which the adult male characters all wore crew cuts and suits a size too small, and all the children were well behaved and everybody did absurd but decent things. The sound was turned down to a murmur, and when the old show gave way to the seven o’clock news report, the volume came up to a level of command and the backstage noise died away.

International crises were routine this morning and given little more than noncommittal platitudes by the newscaster, an attractive fair-haired woman who used the intonations of a man. Locally a citizen had handcuffed himself to a light-pole at a downtown intersection as a protest, but against what had not yet been established, and opening the cuffs had thus far been beyond the powers of the police, who believed them of foreign origin.

Then, to the strains of a lilting musical theme, the
Eye Opener Show
came on. There was Shep Cunningham, between his desk and a photomural of the cityscape. Reinhart saw and heard him on the monitor screen, though presumably the man himself was just a partition away.

After a greeting and an observation on the rainy weather, Shep said: “But enough of this nonsense. Let’s get to the beauty part. Here’s Debbie Howland.” The camera panned to his left, the curtains there parted, and out came a very winsome young woman with dark red hair and a jersey dress in lime green. She had an ebullient stride.

“Good morning, Shep,” said Debbie, taking a seat next to her partner.

Shep winked at the camera and said: “Notice
I
don’t get to walk across the set. Maybe if I lost ten pounds?” He grinned and shrugged and said: “Tell us who we’ll meet today, Deb—or should that be ‘whom’?”

Debbie smiled into the camera. “Shep, when you think of that classic quality known as Hollywood there are a few names that embody it in themselves alone: personalities like the Duke and the never-to-be-forgotten Bogie, and likewise with our guest this morning, Mister Hollywood himself, Jack Buxton.”

“Oh, wow,” said Shep. “I want to ask him how he feels about our new pals the Chinese Communists—after fighting them so many times in Korean War films.”

Reinhart suspected this reference was not authentic: in his own memories Buxton was always involved cinematically with World War II Germans. Indeed, if memory served, at least once he had played a Nazi.

Debbie went on: “And then our own Bobby Allen, Man in the Street, live out there in the pouring rain, will get an answer to today’s question—hey, Shep, it’s not about sex for a change—”

Shep groaned. “That’s bad news.”

“C’mon, now, this is important: ‘Nuclear Power—Love It or Leave It?’”

“That
is
important,” said Shep. “I was kidding.”

“And then,” Debbie said, “a French chef will show us how to make the perfect omelet in a minute. Sound good?”

“Mouth’s watering already,” said Shep. “My beautiful wife Judy’s on a diet kick. I don’t know, maybe I’m weird, but alfalfa sprouts on low-fat cottage cheese is not my idea of breakfast.”

“Come
on,”
said Debbie.

“Washed down with herb tea.”

“Come
on.
You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I am,” said Shep. “Incidentally, that’s the same thing my wife said the last time I tried to get friendly with her.”

Debbie rolled her eyes. “Oh-oh. I think it’s time to hear from our first sponsor.”

Under his apron Reinhart tipped the cognac bottle into the now empty Styrofoam cup. It was just as well that Buxton had not reappeared: the cook would not have been keen on sharing his supply of Dutch courage. He was himself no professional performer, and the nearer he got to going on camera, the more he realized how crazy he had been to let Grace do this to him. For God’s sake, he wasn’t even a professional chef.

Anxiety makes the time fly. Suddenly Jane came and led him onto the TV kitchen, holding a finger to her lips, so that he couldn’t ask questions. But he looked up and saw a clock, and already it registered 7:35—and then without warning was at a quarter to eight and a voice was reading brief headlines from the news, and then, in an instant, a red light glowed from the darkness before him and Reinhart was on the air! Or so the sequence seemed.

Across the room, though actually very close to him, Shep Cunningham sat at the desk, and Debbie was just entering the kitchen. Reinhart had been deaf to the preliminary comments, and for a moment he had the terrified feeling that she might be coming to expose him as a fraud.

But she was smiling.
“Is
there a secret to omelet-making, Chef?”

Reinhart was amazed to hear a deep, mellow baritone voice emerge from his chest, as if he were lip-synching to a record made by someone else. “I suppose it could be called that, Debbie, but it’s not the kind of secret that would interest a Russian spy.”

Debbie giggled dutifully here. Luckily he overcame an impulse to build a large comic structure on the feeble piling of this witticism.

Quite soberly he said: “It’s simply speed. The egg, once out of its shell—which has been called nature’s perfect container incidentally—the naked egg is a very sensitive substance.” He was aware that persons out there, off camera, were gesturing at him, and now Debbie stepped lightly on his foot. Of course, he must begin to break eggs!

Amazingly enough, everything he needed was at hand—and his hand was sure, in fact even defter than when he was alone in his own kitchen. In one movement he seemed simultaneously to have not only cracked two shells but opened them and drained them of their contents. His flying fork whipped the yolks and whites into a uniform cream. Meanwhile the butter was melting in the skillet.

He was speaking authoritatively. “Speed’s the secret, but we don’t break the fifty-five-mile limit: we let the butter reach the frothing point. Meanwhile, we’ve got our filling ready. In this case it’s Swiss cheese, for that simplest of dishes, a plain cheese omelet. But if it’s properly made, there’s nothing better, and nothing more elegant.”

“Or more nutritious,” said Debbie, nodding vigorously. “Gee, Chef, I can’t wait.”

“Just about time... We’ve got our cheese all grated already—and may I strongly recommend that you always grate your own cheese from a fresh piece: you can do that in a blender or a food processor, if it’s too much work for you by hand. In this case the cheese is simple Swiss, but an even more delicious filling would be Swiss mixed with a bit of Parmesan.” A moment earlier he had put two tablespoonfuls of the cheese from the canister into a shallow bowl. “Ah, there we go, just as the frothing begins to subside and before it turns color, the eggs go in quickly, quickly, and you keep stirring them, stir, stir, as they begin to thicken and curds appear... and
now
the cheese goes in, all at once!”

He emptied the contents of the bowl onto the mass of eggs, lifted the skillet from the burner, inserted the fork under the near edge of what was already an omelet, folded one half across the other, and slid the finished product onto a china plate.

“My goodness,” said Debbie, “you don’t even cook the top side? That must be my trouble, why my omelets are so dry. I always turn ’em over.” She accepted the dish from him, and holding it high, raised a fork in her other hand.

“Yes, the top becomes the inside of the omelet, and you want that moist,” Reinhart said. “And you must remember that whenever uncooked eggs are around heat, something’s going on. The hot omelet continues to cook for a while after you take it from the pan. That’s happening right now, in fact, Debbie.”

“Mmm, oh, golly,” said she, making rapid eyeball movements as she tasted a modicum of egg from the end of her fork. “Hey. Say. Oh-oh, Shep, we’ve got a winner, and don’t think you’re getting any of it.” Shep in fact was not behind his desk or anywhere in sight, so far as Reinhart could see. Debbie waved her fork and looked into the camera. “Well, now you know how to do it like an expert.” She turned back to Reinhart. “Thank you, Chef—who appeared here courtesy of the Epicon Company. Back to you, Shep.”

And just like that, Reinhart was off and Shep, back at the desk, was on, and reading a list of local announcements: fund-raising charity dinners, Shriner circus, and the like. Debbie put down her plate and disappeared behind the set. For a moment Reinhart was desolated: not only was his performance over, but functionaries kept hauling equipment past him as if he did not exist and he stood in what seemed evening, for the glare of the lights was gone.

But then the estimable Jane was at his elbow, steering him out. When they reached the outer corridor she said: “You were dynamite, Carl. Thanks a lot.”

“Thank
you,
Jane. Do I go back to Make-up to get cleaned up?”

The light had gone from her eye with her thank-you. Already she looked at him as if he were a stranger. “You can take it off with soap and water.” She pointed to the men’s room and went away.

So much for show business. Reinhart shrugged and laughed for his own benefit. He went through the door into the lavatory, which was deserted. He had always assumed the performers had a private washroom of some kind, but perhaps that was true only at the big network studios in New York and Chicago. This place was clean enough, with dispenser of liquid soap and a wall-hung paper-towel device. He began to run a bowlful of warm water, but turned the faucet off abruptly.

He had heard a muffled sound: it had been barely audible, but there was sufficient of it to raise the hair on the back of the neck, though he could not have said precisely why: something instinctively dreadful.