Reinhart's Women (32 page)

He closed the Cougar’s door and went towards Edie. For a moment she looked as if, in a kind of panic, she might dive into her car and flee—never had he known a shyer person—but he slowed down, grinned less broadly, and looked not directly at her but just beyond, and she was able to hold her ground.

“Well,” he said, “well, well.” He decided to seize her hand and shake it, being certain that once contact had been made she would lose a good deal of her nervousness. This proved true.

She showed him owlish eyes. “Well... how is Winona?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “If you haven’t seen her for a day or so, it’s because she’s staying with a friend.”

Edie nodded vigorously. She was dressed in a beige cardigan, plain white blouse, and, he noticed, not jeans but what resembled the so-called sun-tan pants that were the summertime uniform of the U.S. Army in World War II. He always imagined that he could smell soap when near her.

“She must,” said Edie, “have lots of friends.”

“Enough, I suppose.”

Edie looked unhappy, and he immediately regretted having told her: after all, she was a defenseless creature.

“Speaking of friendships,” he said quickly, “we’ve also got a lunch to make up for. How about today?”

In answer she heaved a great sigh. Reinhart had never seen anyone do that at such a point, but he found it strangely attractive. Or perhaps it was strange that he found it attractive, for it might be taken as merely a helpless acquiescence to fate.

“O.K.” He beckoned and almost bowed. Something about Edie caused him often to come close to doing a parody of an old-fashioned gentleman. “Shall we step over to my car? Or rather Winona’s, which I have the use of at the moment.”

But suddenly she became defiant. “No, at least I can provide the transportation.” She marched around to the passenger’s door of her Gremlin, unlocked and opened it.

Reinhart didn’t mind being chauffeured. Now that he operated an automobile only sporadically—Winona generally drove her own car—he found that he no longer had the old ease that had once characterized his technique of driving, and the traffic seemed heavier and more uncompromising, despite the “fuel crisis,” which should in reason have had another effect. But then one’s sense of anything is highly colored by one’s age.

Having pulled out of the garage, up the inclined driveway, and stopped at its intersection with sidewalk and street, she turned questioningly to Reinhart.

“Take a left.”

She accelerated away. He noticed that she tended to take him literally, in her need to comply, but he had lived long enough not to confuse this with obsequiousness: there are people who perform this way because of a serious outlook based inconspicuously on self-respect.

When they had reached a street important enough to have traffic lights he asked: “What kind of food would you like to eat?”

“Oh, anything, really.” She was stealing little glances at him. She shook her head at the dashboard and swallowed with apparent difficulty. “Uh,” she said, “what’s it like, being on TV?”

Reinhart smiled expansively before he realized that he was doing so. When it did occur to him, he frowned: vanity in a man of his age was an embarrassment. “You saw me?”

“Oh, sure.” She how gave him a smile that could be called dazzling. Her teeth were slightly larger than average and absolutely perfect. “You were just terrific!”

“Thank you,” said Reinhart, crossing his ankles the other way. “Thank you very much.”

“Imagine that,” Edie said, “cooking like that. What a terrific thing!”

“You’re being generous.”

“Oh, I think it’s really great. But it’s hard to understand how Winona stays so slender, with you in the kitchen!”

“That’s simple,” Reinhart said. “She hardly ever eats anything I make!” He worried that he sounded indignant, and added: “Makes sense, of course, for a model. I’m not complaining. I cook in the spirit of scientific inquiry. I’m fascinated by what happens to flavors and textures when food is prepared in certain ways. But of course I myself like to eat. What I cook never goes to waste.”

“I’m certainly never going to miss that show from now on,” Edie said.

“Actually,” said Reinhart, “I was just making that one appearance on the program. I gather they have all sorts of guest cooks. I do some things for this food company, you see, to promote their products, and they booked me on the show.” He was reminded that Grace Greenwood had yet to be heard from on the subject of his performance. She had not even had the courtesy to return his call.

Edie stopped the car at a red light. They were now in an old-fashioned suburban shopping area, which, unlike the malls, had not been constructed for the role but had simply grown into it over the years and now was congested and somewhat down-at-heel and gave Reinhart the familiar feelings of nostalgia and despondency.

“See that delicatessen?” he asked, pointing. “My uncle took me in there once in 1936 or 7. We were coming back from a ball game. I had a cold roast-pork sandwich, heavily salted, on homemade bread. The proprietor was a Swiss. His wife made all the baked goods, and he made his own horseradish and sausages and of course all the cooked meats. Funny how I still remember that, though in more than forty years I’ve never been back.”

“Do you want to try it now?” Edie asked eagerly. “We could get something there for lunch.” She had a dreamy smile for the deli; she was probably sharing in his nostalgia.

“No,” he said decisively. “I’ll tell you why. It’s unlikely that the Swiss would still be there, and I really don’t want my memories polluted by the sight of what it may have become. But the idea of getting some takeout food is a great one on a day like this. We’ll pick up—not here, but in the next bunch of shops we come to—some cheese and decent crusty bread, if it can be found, and wine, and have a picnic. There are various parks to choose from, or we could just drive out into the country somewhere.”

He found Edie’s presence much more satisfying than that of any other female person he knew at this time, which might not be saying much had he not been able to include Helen Clayton, who was enthusiastically heterosexual.

Edie made an odd shrugging movement and hunched farther forward over the steering wheel. “I think a picnic would be great.”

“Hey.” He pointed to the shopping mall that was coming up ahead, the signs for its principal enterprises towering on great standards which rose from the flatness of a former meadow: BOGAN’S...TOP SHOP... KIBORWORLD. “Pull in at the Top Shop, and we’ll take on some provisions.”

“O.K.!” Edie made her agreement an ebullient little event. She slid the Gremlin into a parking space on the asphalt plain, and they entered this branch of the Top Shop, an even larger example than the one in which Reinhart had cooked crepes Suzette.

They went through the automatic doors and once inside stopped and looked at each other with affectionate smiles. Hers was only slightly below the level of his. He had not known so large a female person since he was in the Army. But unlike Edie, Veronica Leary, his friend in the Nurse Corps, had been a great beauty. Of course he himself had been but twenty-one years of age at that time.

“Well,” he said finally, breaking the deadlock of genial silence, “shall we go see whether they have any edible cheese?”

They loped in step for a while and with a purposeful air, but had no reason to suppose they were nearing the dairy section. There was here the kind of vastness on which progress had no effect, as when one drove towards a distant mountain: for every step they took, the farthermost wall receded in the same degree.

But at last they reached the long, open, refrigerated trough that held the various products which took their origins from the milch cow, and Reinhart was about to sift through the packaged cheeses in search of one that would bear being eaten, when, down at the bottom of the aisle, he saw a familiar figure.

It was Helen Clayton, at work alone. She stood before a metallic table which held paper-platefuls of cubed cheese. There were two kinds, bright orange and off-white, and in each cube was an embedded toothpick. Helen extended a plate to anyone who passed her.

Each saw the other at the same moment. Helen’s greeting was to elevate her paper plate. Reinhart’s wave was a kind of salute.

“Would you be offended if I talked to that woman down there?” he asked Edie. “She’s a business associate.”

Edie simpered at the extraordinary suggestion that anything would offend her.

“I just want to say a word to her about business,” he nevertheless found himself explaining almost guiltily. “It would be boring for you. Look through these cheeses and choose something you like.”

Helen greeted him breezily when he reached her table. “Hi, there!” She thrust the paper plate at two female shoppers in turn. Then there was a lull in the traffic. She put down the selection of samples and gave him a more personal grin. “Whatcha doin’ in this neck of the woods? Grace send you to check up on me?”

“Pure accident,” said Reinhart. “Just was passing by and dropped in to pick up a few things. Speaking of Grace, she hasn’t been in touch since I did the TV thing. I thought it was successful, if I do say so myself, and the television people seemed to like it. They said something about inviting me back. But Grace hasn’t even returned my call.”

Helen made a slow wink. “She’s having love problems, I believe. I didn’t get this assignment from her. I hear she’s been out sick for a while.”

Reinhart felt an involuntary wave of revulsion. He simply couldn’t help it: Nature did assert itself from time to time. “Oh. Well, that’s the way it happens, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Helen said with a wry mouth. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

In desperation he reached for a sample of cheese: an orange-colored piece was closest. He clasped the cube behind his front teeth and slid out the toothpick.

“This has no taste at all,” he wonderingly told Helen while chewing. “Why are you giving out samples of it?”

She shrugged. “It’s new, I think. I haven’t tasted it. I’m watching the calories, as usual.” She suddenly leered at him, in a discreet but intense way that had almost the intimacy of a touch. “I’m off when the cheese is gone. That’ll be any minute by the looks of it.” She opened her lips and closed them silently, moistly, warmly.

“Uh,” Reinhart replied, “I can’t make it today. Uh...” For some reason he was at a loss for a feasible excuse.

“Look, honey,” Helen said, changing into a pal, “I know you’re with your daughter. What I meant was, only if you were going to be free a little later.”

Now Reinhart moved quickly, without reflection, to consolidate this fraudulent, fortuitous gain: Helen had actually seen Winona once, calling for Grace, but didn’t know she was his daughter. Let it go at that! And it was even better if she believed that he was Edie’s parent. But what would happen when Helen found out? That was the kind of thing Reinhart would have found inhibiting as a very young man, but he had since learned that a good many claims in life are never put to the test, and from those that are, often enough, truth still does not issue, and finally in the rare event that it does, even rarer is to find the mortal to whom it matters.

Anyway, he and Helen, though colleagues of a kind and certainly lovers in the physical sense, would quite likely never really know each other at all well.

“Yes,” he said now to his friend, “ordinarily I don’t get to see that much of her at this time of day. We thought we’d get something for a picnic.”

Helen looked up the aisle. “I’d know her if you weren’t anywhere around. She’s a chip off your block, that’s for sure. Doesn’t look anything like the ex-wife.”

Reinhart stepped out of the way so that she could offer the cheese to several women who appeared, distractedly pushing their carts. Two of them spurned the offer, but one, a jolly, fortyish person, took a cube in an excessively dainty fashion, fingers fanned. After an instant he understood that she did this in an intentional burlesque of gentility.

After taking a nibble, she asked Helen, in good humor: “Why are you giving this away? Because you can’t sell it? It’s
terrible.”

“It’s a cheese-industry promotion,” said Helen. “To get people to eat more cheese. There were several other kinds when I started, blue and Swiss and so on, and flavored spreads, onion, mustard, port wine, but they’re gone by now. There were also some brochures that gave various recipes for dishes made with cheese—soufflés, casseroles, and the rest—but people have taken them all by now. One thing, though, never did show up: I was supposed to have some standing posters for this table. I don’t know what became of them! You run into that a lot these days.”

“Gee,” said the woman, depositing her toothpick at the end of the table. She looked quizzically at Reinhart. “You’d think they’d give out better cheese if they want you to buy some. Put the best foot forward, you know?” She rolled her cart away.

“I’ll be seeing you, Helen,” said Reinhart.

“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” said Helen. “It can’t hurt.”

Edie seemed in a standing coma as he approached her, but eventually she saw him and smiled.

“Did you see any cheese you liked?”

“I wasn’t sure what kind you’d want.”

“What about yourself? Don’t you like cheese?”

“It’s just that I don’t
know
what cheese to get!” Her tone was that of authentic distress.

He had been unknowingly inconsiderate. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Suddenly I’ve lost interest in cheese. Let’s attack the subject from a new angle. Tell me what would be a typical lunch for you.”

“A hot dog,” said Edie. “Or a hamburger, unless it would be a pizza.”

“Let’s go to the car,” he said, “and drive someplace in the country and get a hot dog. This place is depressing me.”

When they reached the car, she gave the keys to him. “Please drive where you want.”

Reinhart unlocked the passenger’s door and held it open for her entrance. Then he went around to the driver’s side. Edie was looking at him when he inserted himself behind the wheel. He did not of course need to push back the seat.

She said: “I’m sorry I couldn’t choose a cheese.”