Reinhart's Women (31 page)

Helen kissed him and while so doing ran her hand down his body. It did not escape his notice that until only recently her performance would have been seen as infringing on the masculine, whereas his own... After she left, he rose and before the mirror performed various body-builder’s poses: face overlooking distended biceps, forearm, wrist, and hand in the swan’s-neck formation; then the full-front wedge, with prominent deltoids; then the hands joined at the crotch, trapezius muscles sloping between shoulder and neck. By God, he still was far from being a wreck. In high school and the early time in college, pre-Army, Reinhart had religiously used the products of the York Barbell Co., York, Pa., and for several years his principal heroes had been not of the tribe of Jack Buxton, but rather the extraordinarily swollen men depicted in the York weight-lifting magazine,
Strength and Health,
fellows who had to turn sideways to penetrate the standard doorway. His fifty-four-year-old body had not altogether forgotten this period of its history, and one already had had, after all, a few years in which to practice stoicism with regard to the relentless degeneration in muscle tone. And Helen had commended him as lover. No doubt she was merely being polite, but what the hell, it was anyhow nice to hear.

He unflexed as he felt the first suspicions of a crick-in-the-neck. The fact was that no middle-aged body, not even one well maintained, could do better than just get by. There
were
laws that could not be abrogated by state of mind.

Checking out formally at Al’s was not done. One merely walked away, leaving the key in the door. Nor had Reinhart himself checked in. Helen had performed that task for him. That she was obviously a habitué of the motel did not bother him any more than, presumably, it bothered Al, if indeed there was one. Helen was a fine figure of a woman: he was not required to assess her beyond that point.

After taking an inordinately lengthy shower for such wretched facilities—indeed, the hot water ran out before long, and finally even the cold dwindled to a staccato drip—Reinhart drove home in Winona’s Cougar, which had been his all day, and which in fact would be his so long as she stayed with Grace, who had an extra vehicle. It occurred to her father that it had been Blaine, really, who managed things in such a fashion that Winona had finally been
obliged
to move in with her lover, an action which until now she had been reluctant either to take or to forget about.

Where
was
Blaine? And what of Mercer and the boys? How long could they continue to live at the apartment—by which question Reinhart actually meant: how long could
he
stand it? Because, by all appearances,
they
were coping very well. ... Yet he had been on TV for almost ten minutes that morning, and later on Helen Clayton, his junior by a dozen or fifteen years, had praised his performance in bed!

Therefore it was in a hearty, Elizabethan mood that he drove home, and with ebullience that he opened the apartment door to join his grandfamily, whom he had by no means neglected to go and roll in lust with a doxy. Far from it! He had that afternoon roasted a lovely plump chicken, with butter and thyme in its cavity and bastings on the quarter-hours, and made a potato salad with a vinaigrette of olive oil and shallots. Remembering his own childhood, he believed that what had pleased him most when eating elsewhere than at his own home had not merely been the dessert as simple sweet course, but rather as an entertaining, even surprising event, e.g., when the ice cream was dosed for once not with Hershey’s chocolate syrup but with jam made from greengage plums or pulverized hard candy, or the Jell-O came to the table as turned out of a ring mold, the central well filled with high-peaked whipped cream and surmounted by a maraschino cherry. (These events had never taken place at his own home: his mother disapproved of such caprices.)

Therefore he had applied thought to the dessert he would leave for the boys and of course for Mercer too, if applicable. It must be something that, like the chicken, could be eaten cold to advantage. He decided upon a splendid
dacquoise,
in which layers of meringue alternated with a filling compounded of butter, sugar, and almond extract, and the whole structure was eventually shrouded in sweetened whipped cream and dusted with powdered almonds. There was no mammal who could turn away from such a confection until it had been devoured: one could stand on that truth.

He prepared as well a platter of choice crudités: bright cherry tomatoes, sticks of jade pepper, serene cucumber, stanch celery, and romaine allowed to stay in the long whole leaf. (As a boy he had hated salads made from iceberg lettuce, a gnarled and ugly plant that seemed to be made solely for packaging. And what fun it would have been to choose the raw elements and eat them from the fingers.)

All these lovely things he had left in the fridge, wrapped and in fact identified by Scotch-taped label, and on the kitchen counter lay a prominent notice addressed to whom it concerned among his guests (for either of the boys might be treated as being at least as responsible as their mother): the menu was printed in capitals, for the convenience of those who could read at all, big or small, in the order in which the dishes should be attacked, which was optional, but it was required that each of them know that the chef left his best wishes for a good appetite and, it went without saying, his affection.

Now nobody was home when he got there, and when he went into the kitchen and saw that aside from the filthy coffee cup on the counter, three cigarette butts in its saucer, there were no dirty dishes in evidence, he understood, before opening the refrigerator, that his guests had not touched the supper he had provided, for not only was Mercer incapable of washing a plate, she could not manage even to scrape one, still less insert it into the dishwasher below this very counter.

Reinhart discarded the butts in the pedal can and rinsed the heeltaps of powdered coffee from the cup. It was not until he opened the otherwise unused dishwasher that he saw the note, which was impaled on one of the little plastic-covered fence-palings around the wire tray designed to support glassware during the commotion of the wash.

Went out for burgurs.

M

The only thing that really annoyed him, he told himself, was the misspelling. How could anyone who lived in this culture make such an error? Jesus Chryst!

Cold roast chicken being one of the glories of the world, Reinhart ate his supper in good appetite. There was a virtue in dining alone. In Mercer’s presence he would have felt obliged to wash down his food with the homogenized milk he had laid in for the children. As it was, he could dig out of the broom closet the crisp little Chenin Blanc and quaff it in good conscience.

“Hi,” said Mercer, in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Mercer! I didn’t hear you come in: I was thinking.” In the grip of his old-fashioned, instinctive manners Reinhart left his stool. His daughter-in-law was both female and his guest. “May I get you anything? Coffee? Hey, where are the boys? Is it too late for them to have some of the meringue-and-whipped-cream cake I made?”

“Gee,” said Mercer, “they really stuffed themselves at Burger City. You know how kids are: eating makes them sleepy. They went right to bed.” She lowered her chin and up across her thick eyebrows gave him a long look of the sort that signals its maker’s preoccupation with another subject than that under discussion.

Reinhart asked: “Do you want to talk to me about something, Mercer? Let me get you a chair.” He did as promised, from the dining room. The kitchen was equipped only with the one stool, which, after he had seated her, he regained.

Mercer proceeded to sit there in silence. She was the sort who could persist in that sort of thing without apparent discomfort, but Reinhart was surely not. Nor did he even feel he could properly finish his wine. Unfortunately he had not got in one last swallow before she appeared, for he had had one coming for quite a while and had been prolonging the suspense: a little funny thing he had been doing with favorite foods and beverages since childhood.

Finally he rose and Saran Wrapped what was left of the chicken. The roast bird also gave him a pretext to say something pertinent as well as morally neutral: “Still a lot of chicken left, if you want a snack later. Remember it’s high in protein and low in calories, especially if you don’t eat the skin.” He shrugged and put fowl and plate into the fridge.

“I was thinking,” Mercer began at last. She vigorously rubbed an index finger beneath her nose.

Reinhart took his stool once more, but by the time he had sat down she had again established silence.

When he was certain of this, he said: “What were you thinking?”

She looked up. “Huh? ...Oh... well, I don’t even know if I could say it to anyone else.”

“Why, sure you could, Mercer,” said he. “If you wanted to, that is.”

Suddenly she grinned. In such an expression her nobility of feature disappeared entirely. A grin for her was a grotesque disguise. Furthermore it was utterly mirthless. Reinhart suddenly felt like slapping her face, to bring her out of it.

But instead he said: “Or then don’t tell it, if it’s embarrassing.” He eyed the wine bottle longingly when she turned her head away, but then plugged it with the cork and pushed it out of their lines of vision. There was still a good solid mouthful of it in the glass. What would be better, to let it sit there quietly or to empty it in the sink?

She stopped grinning at last and said: “The thing is, my parents always wanted me to have a profession. I mean, it was me who wanted to get married and have children.”

“Uh-huh.” She had taken him by surprise, but he thought quickly. “You mean, it was a switch, given your place and time.”

“That’s right!” Mercer said brightly. “Another funny thing is that I got really good grades in college, in the tough stuff like math and science. You can ask Blaine.”

“I wouldn’t call that funny,” said Reinhart. “I’d call it impressive. Blaine, you know, was a brilliant student, but I think he did least well in math.”

“I remember!” Mercer cried. She seemed happily nostalgic. “I really hated him then.”

“That’s right. You
did
know each other in college.”

“Well, I knew who
he
was, but he never noticed me.”

“He was probably too busy with his political protests and so on,” said Reinhart.

“I hated all that,” said Mercer.

So had Reinhart, but he was actually embarrassed to remember that period, from which nobody, of whatever stripe, emerged victorious. Suddenly defiant, he seized his wineglass and emptied it into his throat, then put it in the dishwasher.

This event had no discernible effect on Mercer. Now that he thought about it, she had been in residence for twenty-four hours and had spent at least part of that time alone in the apartment, and though he had concealed his few bottles of alcoholic beverages, she could easily have purchased her own. But he had seen no evidence of that. Nor had she acted as if drunk or drugged.

Mercer was shaking her head. She addressed the black-and-white vinyl tiles of the floor. “I should have gone into computers.”

Reinhart sat down again. “Excuse me?”

“Or something,” said Mercer. “But you see, it never occurred to me that you could think you were cut out for something naturally and then discover that you weren’t. That doesn’t seem to make sense, but actually it’s true.”

“That’s right,” said Reinhart. “It’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it?” For the first time he actually felt an affinity with his daughter-in-law. “I know just what you mean! For about twenty years I thought I was supposed to be a businessman. Isn’t everybody? You know. That everything I tried ended in failure made no useful impression on me: I always assumed that I hadn’t yet found the right business. I was in my late forties before I discovered the truth.”

“But,” said Mercer, “I was designed by Nature to be a mother, and if you bear young, then it’s certainly your job to care for them. No matter what they say, that’s obviously the way things were designed. And if you’re taking care of your children, you can’t go out and chop down trees and find food and do a man’s work. No matter what they say.”

“Mercer,” said her father-in-law, “I’m going to make some coffee. I hope you’ll join me in having some.” He put on the water. “I take it that by ‘they’ you refer to the people whose profession it is to harangue the populace in the interest of various causes that will obviously benefit the haranguers but be of dubious service to those listening.”

Mercer made a wry mouth. “Funny, isn’t it? He was a war-protester in college. But he told me once that secretly he would have liked nothing better than to be a fighter pilot or hero at hand-to-hand combat.”

“Blaine? I’ll be damned.” Did one’s son inherit, along with certain physical traits, one’s own fantasies as well?

The water was boiling. He had intended to make powdered coffee, but it was just as easy to grind some real beans and put the product into the four-cup filter pot and fill the top with water. He went to the dining-room china cabinet and brought back a pair of demitasses and the sugar bowl.

Mercer accepted the cup but spurned the sugar.

She rolled her eyes. “Let’s face it, we belonged to the wrong generation.”

“But then again,” said Reinhart, “who hasn’t?” But this was polite hypocrisy: there had been nothing wrong with his.

CHAPTER 15

N
EXT MORNING AFTER BREAKFAST
and the wait for the bathroom Reinhart eventually got himself cleaned and shaved and put together, and he left the apartment, intending to shop for food.

But while he was in the garage, unlocking the door to Winona’s car, he was hailed from across the way.

“Oh... good morning, Edie!” For it was that tall young woman, at the door of her own automobile. He found himself pleased to see her. It had been years since he had known someone so slightly as to forget her when she was not present and yet feel a mild gratification when encountering her by chance.