Reinhart's Women (41 page)

What time was it now? ...Only five o’clock? He wasn’t cooking this evening. He had
two hours
to get through! He went to the liquor cabinet and poured a generous measure of Scotch, iced and watered it in the kitchen, and took it to the bedroom. He switched on the television set atop the dresser—A sturdy woman wearing a billed cap was bending a putter. Sunday afternoon and ladies’ golf, of course!

He reclined on the bed, nape against headboard, Scotch cradled in two hands at his navel. He watched for a while, but the upholstered bodies no longer had their old appeal. He went to the set and roamed the dial. Tennis would hit the spot today, with younger legs under pleated skirts. This was not a concupiscent taste: he was interested in relative levels of vigor.

But no more female athletes of any sort were available at the moment, which belonged, on one channel—indeed, his own Channel Five—to stock cars speeding around an asphalt oval and on another to two undersized Latin American prizefighters who pounded each other furiously without apparent damage to either. On “public” television a hirsute young chap was talking rapidly to a bald-headed middle-aged man about—by gosh, about the upcoming Jack Buxton Film Festival! ...But apparently it was not to begin for a while. At the moment what one got was a discussion between these two fellows, who werely oddly paired: the hairy youth spoke like a hoodlum, the bald-headed critic was peevishly effeminate. At the moment the latter was saying: “...
really
think that’s
true?
Oh, come
off
it.” To which the former replied: “Chroo? Of cawss! Wadduhyuh think, I’m loying?”

Reinhart discovered that his Johnnie Walker was missing: a ghost had drained the entire glass while his attention was elsewhere. He returned to the bar and got a refill onto the same, or much the same, ice.

He was restless. He showered again and made an entire change of clothing from the skin out, though he had put everything on fresh that morning. He must make arrangements with a professional laundry to do his work. As a TV personality he could hardly be seen trundling his wash down to the basement. The job could alter his life in many ways. He might be recognized on the street. One of the local papers had a show-biz gossip column. Could he ever afford to be seen with Helen Clayton? “Which TV chef is consorting with an invalid’s wife?” Your life is not your own when you get into the public eye.

A good deal, but by no means all, of these reflections were ironical: it is amusing to mock oneself when things go well. And when one has waited so long for success that one has forgotten what is being awaited, there is a limit to the swelling of one’s head. But he
was
impatient for Monday to come, after all these years, and therefore while waiting first for sufficient time to pass before he could go down and eat Edie’s probably overdone and surely wineless meal, he drank more Scotch than he should have, certainly more than he would have if he himself had been cooking. It anesthetizes the palate, you know (he said to himself in the bathroom mirror), really belongs in the after-dinner range, an interesting and worthwhile potation, surely, but its place is postprandial.

He winked at his large visage and added: “Listen to the epicure, who was himself reared on well-done meat and vegetables boiled to death and served dry. Who when in France as a soldier looked for whores and not meals. ... Who, hoohoo, is now drunk for the first time in many years.” Not helplessly. His stride was straight enough, and when speaking to himself at least, he could not hear that his tongue was getting stuck behind his teeth.

But his emotions were intensified. Suddenly remembering that he had nothing to take to Edie, who had spurned his offer of wine, he decided to go out and find a florist who was open. This was not the kind of shop normally accessible on Sundays, but the alcohol evoked from Reinhart a stubborn determination to leave no mall unturned.

This was a splendid aim, but in point of fact the same spirits had caused his sense of time to be deranged. It was 6:55 when he looked at the bedside clock. He brushed his teeth once again, put on his blazer, checked it insofar as he could for lint (but living alone, one must forget about a certain area in the back of garments being worn; Grace could now perform inspection service for Winona, he himself had no one), and left the apartment

Edie was certainly a conveniently placed friend. He would now have been in no mood to visit someone by car.

He reached her door and pushed the buzzer. She was quick to answer this time. No doubt the Scotch had something to do with his vision, but Edie looked even taller than usual. Before crossing the threshold he tried to figure that out and at last saw that she wore high heels.

“I’m sorry to say,” he confessed, “I’m empty-handed.”

“Good,” said Edie, beckoning him into her home. She wore some kind of soft white blouse and an ankle-length figured skirt. This seemed an occasion for her. She was fairer of hair this evening, and her eyes had... whatever. More make-up, certainly, but—

“That’s what ‘karate’ means, incidentally,” said Reinhart, interrupting his own process of observation. “In Japanese.
Kara
—‘empty.’
Te—
‘hand.’” He smiled into Edie’s limpid eyes. “A bit of the useless information I’ve accumulated throughout the many years of my life.” For some reason he was delaying a survey of the apartment, staying just inside the door.

“Won’t you come down here?” said Edie, who had gone ahead and now spoke from a slightly lower situation. She was in the living room, which like his own was one step down from the level on which one entered.

Reinhart stepped jauntily down to join her. Half the room, that half towards the large window, was a kind of greenhouse full of standing or hanging plants, which seemed to exude freshness and verdant moisture, as the sun radiates warmth and light. Reinhart’s sensibility lacked in the horticultural faculty, and he had never before felt this effect from vegetable life. Nor was Winona, though a deft hand with cut flowers, a grower of plants.

“Now I see what’s wrong with my apartment,” he said. He went to the window, or at any rate as close as permitted, and looked out through the greenery. The view, especially at this fading time of day, was none too vast, being mostly of an angle of the building, with only a glimpse of the river, as if one were looking illicitly through a chink. Yet living among these plants one would feel no deprivation.

“I wish I knew enough about the subject to discuss it with you,” said he, “but I don’t think I’ve tried to grow anything, with the exception of lawn-grass some years back, since the scrawny little tree we used to be given annually on Arbor Day at school—which always died. I’ve thought about starting some herbs in windowsill pots, but I’m still too shy.”

Edie invited him to sit down. Comfortable facilities were available: a sofa upholstered in tan-flecked brown, a chair or two, modern but capacious and genial. He chose the couch, where he could expand in any direction. When he sat down, he was looking across at a long low bookcase, pleasantly variegated with spines in various hues. He thought he might ask Edie what she read, but when he looked for her, she was gone... but not far. Back of a counter, at the top of the room, was her kitchen.

She soon returned with a glass of sherry. He could not remember that he had been asked, but perhaps he had. She found a little knee-high table at the end of the couch and brought it near him.

“Are you all right?”

“Me?” asked Reinhart. He smiled at her. “Sit down, why don’t you?”

She chose the rust-colored chair.

“Come sit on the couch,” Reinhart said. “I want to talk to you like a Dutch uncle, as they used to say. ... And don’t worry that simply because I’ve had a few drinks I will behave improperly. I have always been what the American lower-middle class thinks of as being a ‘gentleman,’ which is to say, a prude with respectable young ladies.”

Edie smirked at this statement, but she did not blush. She sat down on the couch, at just the right distance from him: not so close as to embarrass, not so far away as to offend. But she sat tentatively, towards the edge of the cushion, as if she might rise. She was now wearing an apron, a merry one, in colorful stripes.

“Ah, you’re cooking,” said he. “Well, I won’t detain you.”

“And am I nervous!”

“Please don’t be.” He started to get up. “Why not let me do it?”

“I want to do it myself,” Edie said. “I think I
can
do it, and when I invite a guest, I
should
do it.”

This was a new aspect of her, or at any rate one he had previously not given her an opportunity to show. Her manner in her own domicile was very different from that she displayed when abroad. And how right she was to feel strength here: it was a warm and wonderful little cave. The rug was the color of peach preserves. In the embrasure of the window a geranium was blooming redly: one of the few plants in all the world that Reinhart could identify offhand. A hanging pot was blossoming in white stars. He still retained the aftertaste of Scotch, which was not altogether pleasant, yet he was not really sorry he had drunk so much. He felt in a vulnerable state, but well protected here.

She returned with one little bowl of small, withered black olives, the sort that are cured in fragrant olive oil, and another filled with smoky salted almonds.

When she was back in the kitchen Reinhart called up-room; “Are you going to tell me what the bill of fare is?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t, so that if something doesn’t turn out well I can change it!” She looked up from her work, across the counter. “Are you ready for more wine?”

“Not yet, thanks.”

“Isn’t it drinkable?”

“It’s superb, a lot better than I can usually afford.”

Edie came back. Her apron’s stripes included Reinhart’s favorite combination of turquoise and navy.

“This is just a delightful apartment,” he said. “It makes one feel good just to sit in it.”

“It could be bigger. What you see is all there is, except for the bathroom of course.”

“It’s just the right size for a person living alone, I’d say.” He finished his wine but held onto the glass lest she take it and leave for a moment. “Mine will probably be too big now. You see, Winona has moved out. She’s gone to live with a friend, a woman friend, and it’s high time she came out from under my wing, to tell you the truth, and lived with someone of her own age, more or less.” He looked at Edie with feeling. “I’m misrepresenting that. I’m acting as if it’s Winona who needed me, rather than what is true, the other way around: she supported me for a good many years. I kept house, of course, but she was the one with the career.”

“I’m sure you were just biding your time,” said Edie. She put out her hand for his wine glass.

He surrendered it. He was becoming aware of a sort of motherly force immanent in her. When she returned, he said: “I confess I had a bit to drink before I came up here. I was nervous on general principles, and then I was feeling a funny reaction to getting the new job, a mixture of elation and maybe megalomania and greed—and most of all, disbelief. But then I remember that I did step in to fill the breach left when Buxton had his heart attack: I did it, off the cuff, ad lib! Yet even that gives me mixed feelings. Maybe I’ve wasted my life. Maybe I should have been a performer of some kind from the beginning, studied acting or even tap dancing or whatnot.”

Edie had not sat down this time. She said, in her new maternal style: “I think you’re wrong about wanting to be anything other than you’ve been.” She went back to her work without his feeling that she had left him: that was a true art, but apparently unstudied.

“I hope you’re aware,” he said, “that it’s all I can do to stay out of your kitchen, but I know what goes on in mine and how I hate to be watched.” There were times when you just had to plunge your hands in to the wrists, so to speak, or retrieve something edible from the floor or scrape off charrings or mask raggednesses with sauce or garnitures. But if the error had been to put too much salt in solution, you might be in real trouble, though you could try boiling a raw potato in the liquid. Over the years one learned a lot of tricks. These would make nice little bits for the show. Already he was thinking professionally.

Q. If by accident some hardboiled eggs got mixed up with uncooked ones, how could you distinguish each from each without breaking any?

A. Simply spin each egg on its side. The cooked one will spin in uniform revolutions, whereas the raw egg will wobble erratically.

Edie came to him. “Dinner is ready.”

He got up and said, face to face: “We’re about the same height when you wear those shoes.”

“What a relief,” said she, “to be able to wear heels without making someone feel lousy.”

“You mean men? I thought that had changed nowadays.”

“You can’t change biology,” said Edie. “Most men are bigger than most women. If you’re not like most people, then you are in a special situation. You can’t just say it isn’t true.”

She led him to the counter between living room and kitchen. Two places had been set there for a meal, with wooden-handled eating utensils of stainless steel and blue bandannas for napkins. Each setting was on its own island of a straw mat, bound in blue fabric. As Reinhart sat down Edie went behind the counter and with a big wood spoon and fork served spaghetti and sauce; already combined, from an earthenware casserole onto painted plates of similar crockery.

Accepting his, Reinhart noted with approval that it had been prewarmed. He asked her if he might at least pour the Valpolicella, which was already uncorked.

“I see you have a glass for yourself.”

She put her own plate onto the counter and came around to the eating side and took a stool. She lifted the glass he had just poured.

“I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m drinking wine.”

“I didn’t mean—

Edie touched her glass to his. “To your health.”

It was a fine and simple and unexpected thing to hear.

“To yours, Edie.”