Reinhart in Love (18 page)

The telephone rang and added to his chastened mood; he no longer believed it a summons to sensuous indulgence.

Maw set up a great din in the kitchen as proof she wouldn't listen: it made a person feel too important if you were nosey about his affairs.

A man's voice said: “Carlo, the game's afoot,” like Sherlock Holmes, and it was nobody but Splendor Mainwaring.

“Carlo,” Splendor went on, “are you there? I haven't heard from you in days, and as I know you are the soul of dependability, worried that you might have fallen ill or into incapacity. Oh tell me my fears are unwarranted…. Yes? Good. And you have read your Goody-kuntz, of course?”

Reinhart cleared his throat, groping for an excuse, and luckily Splendor took it as an affirmative, anxious as he obviously was to get on.

“And naturally are enthusiastic,” he said. “I don't mean to discount your independence when I say this is as anticipated. You will then be equally happy to learn that the introductory assembly has been scheduled for two nights hence, namely, Wednesday evening at eight o'clock. Please wear a severely conservative suit; white shirt, with if you will a button-down collar and staid necktie, regimental stripe preferred; other accessories in accord.”

“Just a moment, Splendor, I—”

“Sorry, Carlo, I was coming to that. Be assured you will be handsomely reimbursed from the first collection.”

Reinhart began to perspire back of the knees. Being a good guy is the worst thing in the world; once, out of politeness he had praised his aunt's awful sponge cake, and then found himself forced to eat two more pieces. To be constantly agreeable was actually against his ethic; yet he was, and to hell with it. Talked out of Filth; talked into some nutty project by a crank, who if that wasn't enough was a Negro to boot, so that he couldn't be refused with impunity, because Reinhart just could not bear to close the door on any unfortunate who opened it and asked for him.

He groaned, and Splendor answered: “Grand. I have rented the empty store at 221 Wyandotte Street for the assembly and circulated notices by means of an exceptionally active individual who penetrates all quarters of this district.”

Despite the deepest foreboding, Reinhart smiled at this point and asked: “That wouldn't be The Maker?”

“You too know him! That demonstrates his extensive coverage. Every augury is good. I'll see you Wednesday at eight. Meanwhile, Upward to you and yours.”

Reinhart, whose mind could move swiftly when he didn't ask it to, realized in a flash that “Upward” was the
Heil
of Splendor's projected group and would have been familiar to him had he read his Goody-kuntz. So to maintain his deception he answered likewise and hung up.

Since in all of his anticipatory fantasies of Splendor's meeting he was the conspicuous white, obviously humiliated figure creeping about front and center, he had to order himself next morning, after a night of them, to cease to think about it upon the count of three—a kind of self-hypnotic device he had invented and which usually worked very well, the mind being as craven as a citizen living in a dictatorship.

Nevertheless, he spent all day Tuesday in a shadow cast by the Mainwarings. Even the initial stimulation of his work had diminished like a suntan in two weeks of rain. He wondered whether the midweek slump at the office was habitual. Genevieve failed to be insulting and wore a blouse with smudged cuffs, a real heresy in a person of her profession. She might be enduring her Period; but what of Claude, who had lost his paternalism as quickly as he had, on the first day, assumed it, and now pretended Reinhart wasn't there, staying in his office with the door shut.

When Reinhart finally applied to Genevieve for a ruling on the matter—she being the sort who always had an answer; he had begun to admire that gift above all others—he managed to evoke from her an expression of impatience almost as comforting to him as the information imparted.

She pointed her pencil at the window, which ran with rain. “At last I've met the person dumb enough not to come in out of it.”

“I get it!” said Reinhart, rising from the long table where he had sat for hours browsing in the literature of some international real-estate firm which offered for sale Spanish castles, Scottish moors, and all of Austria. “You can't sell a house in this weather.”

“Gawd,” moaned Genevieve, “the girl who gets you! I'll bet you also eat like a horse.” All this while she efficiently typed away with her fingers, never looking at a text. When he inquired, she stated that, one, the forms were in her head and, two, conversation with him was hardly a distraction.

At five, after Claude had blundered out like a sick bullock, unspeaking, Reinhart left too. Genevieve wrinkled her little nose at him when, from the sidewalk, he glanced back through the window. On an impulse, he kissed the palm of his hand and pushed it towards her with a gesture used by policemen to halt traffic. Her face stretched in mock superciliousness, eyebrows way up there, mouth way down here.

Wednesday morning the weather was worse, and Reinhart suffered some painful ague from the night in his basement chamber. You could have got a drink by running a goblet through the atmosphere there; his old zoology notebook was swelling up and bursting open page on page; and the walls leaked not only water but mud as well, in long rivulets which ever replenished his bedside pond. On such a day his parents were sure to develop hideous symptoms if he were present to see them. Therefore he dried himself on an old shirt, dressed in damp clothing, and left without breakfast by the cellar exit. Got coffee at the Trojan Cafe, where he exchanged hubris with Achilles, the proprietor, while at the same time keeping an eye on a number of swarthy little Myrmidons who circulated behind the counter violating the pastry.

Sucking on the first Turn from a handy pocket roll, feeling a certain sandiness between the duodenum and the jejunum, he reported to the office, where Genevieve, since Claude had telephoned that he was taking the day off, assumed the scepter and bossed him about as one might a serf. He knew then the annoyance of a job whose status wasn't specified, and after straightening the books in Claude's office, dusting the window sills, and fetching lunch as ordered, he balked at a four o'clock command to run out for coffee light, hold the sugar, and said something insubordinate like: “Who do you think
you
are?”

Genevieve glared at him for a moment, then ran weeping into the anteroom lavatory and stayed there for forty-five minutes, during which time—damned if he had anything to apologize for—Reinhart tried Claude's swivel chair on for size. What he needed was a real desk of his own. He began to dislike Claude again, he loathed Genevieve Raven, he dreaded sleeping another night in the cellar…. He threw hostility around at various imaginary targets—anything to distract him from anticipating an evening among black fanatics.

“Splendor,” Reinhart was pleading, three and a half hours later as he towered over his friend in the Mainwaring hall. “Splendor, here I must absolutely put my foot down. I mustn't wear that turban. No, never.” The command to wear a dark suit he had obeyed to the best of his ability. Since he owned none, he borrowed a blue serge jacket of his father's, sufficient in girth but clownishly short in trunk and arms. As trousers he wore a pair of ancient oxford-gray flannels tracked through the ragbag, a Siberia to which clothes were banished from the trunk prior to total liquidation. Their legs had been wadded in close community with a woolen scarf used for camphorated-oil rubs: Reinhart therefore exuded an odor from his shanks, but it warded off chills and small dogs.

The turban, however, was too much. Splendor continued to press it on him soberly—indeed, downright morosely for a man with such a gaudy project, his eyes rather obscured as if he wore contact lenses cut from snapshot negatives. The only reason Reinhart finally accepted it was that Splendor manifestly felt worse than he.

“There is only one size,” Splendor said dolefully. “So it should fit. Oh,
I'm
sorry!” he exclaimed as Reinhart stoically put it on. “Did you want one, too?”

“This isn't mine?” asked Mohammed Reinhart, giant monarch of the revolting hill tribes. In the yellowed hall mirror he was properly Mongoloid, as well. Relieved that Splendor was not asking this of their friendship, he jokingly barked: “You call me mad, English dog? Haha, Alexander the Great was mad, Caesar was mad, and Napoleon was the maddest of the lot. Look towards yon plain and see my cavalry, mounted on valiant chargers—”

Splendor, who had no sense of humor, wrinkled his thin eyebrows and took back the white-satin cocoon. He placed it on his head himself, but asked Reinhart to adjust it dead center, with the hen's-egg ruby and the little shaving brush that rose from it in vertical alignment with his nose. “Next time, Carlo, if you wish. The costumer's will be closed by now.”

From the kitchen Reinhart heard muffled soprano shrieks; Loretta had either damaged herself or been sent hysterical by his act. In either case she was responding to life with more affirmation than her brother, who looked most ill. His turban suggested a bandage rather than the traditional headdress of the seer; his rented dinner jacket jutted high in the back of his neck; and he teetered on tiptoe, as if a giant policeman were plucking him up for vagrancy.

“Do you know something?” asked Reinhart, slouching in synthetic nonchalance. “Since this is the first meeting, you could just as well hold it tomorrow night or next week, for that matter. Besides, it's started to rain again.”

Groaning, Splendor sank to the bottom stair, knees in his face.

Reinhart went on: “Really more sleet than rain, in fact. A cold front is moving down from British Columbia. Yesterday there was five inches of snow in Minneapolis, and a man in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, bent over to tie his shoe and froze in that position. So as I say, since this is the first of your meetings, you don't have any obligation.”

“Except to the truth,” said Splendor, rising manfully. “If it's sleeting here, think what the weather must be in Pocatello, Idaho. Yet you can be sure Dr. Goodykuntz is not letting down for a moment.”

Reinhart was embarrassed when they left the house and met a thick fog, indeed a warm, suffocating one; yet it served his purposes of camouflage, and Splendor, a petty man only to his own family, did not chide him but rather walked mumbling some private catechism of which Reinhart could catch only discrete words, the usual ones: Prime Mover, life force, etc. He was practicing his address, poor fellow, and did not realize that being profound was the easiest thing in the world. You could say anything at all, and it would be, or come, true, because life was everything. This seemed very clear to Reinhart, to whom it had in fact just occurred, and he felt a faint pity towards everybody who didn't know it—which put him in an ease unprecedented that day, and he stalked along suddenly regretting the presence of the fog, for he wouldn't have minded letting people look at the combination of serenity, authority, and compassion that must show upon his face.

He had gone some distance in such a mode before he noticed that his companion had disappeared in thick air. His calls got no answer; his searches, radiating like spokes from the hub of which he was certain—as advised in the
Boy's Guide to the Wilderness
which fortuitously he had lately found among his childhood memorabilia—made no human contact. It was likely that he, and not Splendor, was lost. He heard a purr and felt fur at his ankles, for cats, unlike small dogs, invariably took to him. A soft voice wrapped, as it were, around his neck at the same time: “Daddy, you like to circumvent the globe?” “No thanks,” answered Reinhart. “I'm just lost.” “Ah show you to the promised land,” said the girl. Reinhart declined again with a thank-you no, the cat meowed, and high heels clopped away leaving behind a giggle like Loretta's. This was the kind of thing Reinhart was wont to do in emergencies, he reflected in shame: panicking, to suspect his friends of dishonor; they were Negroes and the time was night; he was disgusting. Nevertheless, when he heard male footsteps in the murky vicinity and had reason to suppose they were Splendor's, he involuntarily groped for his little pocket knife, with its half-inch blade.

“Wadduh you say, Pops?” asked a person, not Splendor yet very familiar to him. Reinhart saw a suggestion of white in the black fog. “Man, this weather
is
hard on the real estay, don't tell me never. Water fallin' from the sky make that Humbold keep to his bed and you can't fight it. And that hincty little chick G. Raven, she give you many a bad time, which ain't nothin to what she do if you get married to one another. Mind me of my second wife, who give me numerous scars. Whyn't you tell me that time I assed you about Bridgwater that you had the gift, man? I coulda made you a better deal than Splendor G. Mainwaring. He what you call a stone, man, and will never sprout.”

“Obviously it's the Maker,” said Reinhart.

“Well it ain't the
Verderber
, which is Dutch for the opposite,” answered the Maker in mock indignation. “As you well know, being Dutch as they come. No wonder you never made my action in Bridg-water. You was in the Pantser division of the Liftwaffle!” He laughed like crazy, and added: “Don't you take no never mind to me, Rudolph, I just been turned on.”

“That's all very well,” said Reinhart, still disturbed at having mislaid his friend, “but how do you know so much about me?”

There was a long silence, and Reinhart, who realized it was quixotic on the West Side, or perhaps anywhere else, to look for causes and effects in geometric progression, had given up and was about to resume his search for the missing nonchemical physician, when the Maker illuminated a pencil-flashlight, opened his great wallet, and withdrew a folded document. He read from it in much the same voice with which, years ago, Splendor had played the magistrate in
Spreading the News:
a Negro's parody of white authority, constipated, effeminate, and unjust, even when, as in this case, granting a right.