Reinhart in Love (49 page)

“For the last time, my dear Genevieve,” Reinhart stated, “I don't know what you're talking about. I did not get any woman to call you up, and if one did, it was to perpetrate a vicious hoax in the interest of my enemies. A man in the public eye attracts all sorts of cranks, willy-nilly.”

“Thank you, kind sir, for confirming my own theory. She insisted you were grief-stricken over my departure, couldn't eat, study, and were on the point of being asked to leave Vetsville—made you out the most miserable wretch this side of a kennel, and all for love. Well I'll say this: not for one minute was I taken in, but I don't believe in cruelty to dumb animals and because of this natural weakness in me was seriously considering returning to you on a trial basis, or at least until you would get up off your alleged bed of pain and begin to resemble an adult man. But now I am relieved to know this was girlish foolishness on my part, and that you are getting on famously, better than when you were tied down with me—what do you mean a man in the public eye?”

Bee, he understood now, had tried to do him a kind turn. Wasn't she nice! He had had little experience with girls in the relation of mere friendship—getting between their legs eventually and on whatever pretext was always in the back of his mind: but in the case of Bee, he was exonerated of that criminal intention before the court of experience, proving he couldn't have her if he tried, which he had. Perhaps that's the kind he should have married instead of this one the thought of whose round behind enchanted him even when listening over the telephone to her obloquy and threats. Love was sometimes crippling.

“That's why I'm calling,” he said. “If you'd be a little more patient, Genevieve. If I had to name one quality above all others that should be cultivated by human beings, it's tolerance. There's always a reason why the other guy acts as he does, Gen. He may still be wrong, of course—”

“I'm warning you,” she said, “that I will disconnect in about ten seconds if you don't cut fish or bait. You are hardly the person I would choose as my moral authority.”

“All right, all right.” He symbolically threw up his hands. “I've just become the success you wanted me to be.” Speaking fast and ruthlessly, he told her about the sewer project.

Only silence from her end. “Are we cut off?” he asked.

A small voice, near tears, answered: “It was the fact that I wasn't there. You consider me a detriment. Well maybe I am. I didn't go to college. But I'm human! I suppose in the years to come you'll forget that I predicted great things for you if you would just go out and get them. At the time I didn't know it was I who you felt held you back. With me out of the picture you soon enough began to make progress by heaps and mounds. Well good luck to you, Carl, and if we meet someday—”

“Gen now don't be asinine. I'm going to give you another piece of news, after which I want you to go and pack up your pants and brassieres again, and I will be there shortly to bring you back here to your rightful abode. It is true that this good fortune came while you were absent, but it was as a result of your galvanizing me into action
by
going away. You must understand that!”

Genevieve constricted her lips and said: “Carl, if this is a type of gag….” She swallowed, loud in his ear; she really was moved. “If you could tender some evidence of good faith….”

“Talk to Claude if you don't believe me,” said Reinhart. “But these crass material matters are not important enough to fake. ‘Come live with me and be my love and we will all the pleasures pruv.'” He burlesqued it a little in acknowledgment of her antisentimentality, but like all clowns was basically sad.

“In that awful hut again?”

“Certainly not!” Reinhart promised wildly, feeling unconditionally powerful at the thought that his love life was to be resumed, as if all the world could be cowed by an erection. “Just for a day or two until we regroup our forces….”

“Carl don't think I won't hold you to it. I'll tell Daddy and it sounds fine, but I'm sure there's more than needs the eye.” But then her voice softened. “Meanwhile, I'll be waiting for you.”

Suddenly Reinhart's pride demanded a more ardent expression than that. He after all had or would become a new person in accordance with her recommendations (and had already long forgotten that his change in fortune owed everything to chance and nought to his own initiative—he was frequently out of spirits but never morbid).

“Is that all?”

She protested:
“Cah-rll
, Othermay's right in the extnay oomray!”

“Well aren't we married?”

“Just
-what should I say?”
she whispered indignantly.
“Something dirty?”

“I don't know, Genevieve, you are a married woman since April and a prospective mother since May, and yet sometimes I believe you haven't changed one iota from the virgin you were in March.”

“May I remind you, dear sir, that smutty talk on the phone is a criminal offense?” She spoke so officiously that for a moment Reinhart took her for the operator and hovered on the brink of a fantastic imposture designed to hoodwink the authorities.

But he disciplined himself and went on to make his point: “What I mean of course is you still can't see that intimacy is perfectly normal.”
Hummmmmmm
, said the dial tone that had replaced a living girl.

Ten minutes later he went to fetch Gen home, just before dinnertime on a summer afternoon. He was sweating like a horse, but made an occasion of it and wore his tan tropical worsted with bow tie. Fortunately, her father turned up missing. Reinhart chose this time to wonder whether his habit of getting on well with women and badly with men meant his masculinity was above average or below: practically any mode of action could be proved queer in the long run. But even when he had difficulties with a woman, as in the case of Gen, it was interesting; trouble is, men are bores.

Having said goodbye to his mother-in-law, an intriguing person in her own way, which she had hinted at in the short conversation on the phone; one day when he found time he must interview her—Reinhart brought his wife to the car, her valise on his other arm. It was novel to have her back again after three days, a combination of alien and familiar. For one, she seemed to stand lower. When he asked why, her answer was New Look.

“The skirt is longer, silly. Therefore the legs look shorter.”

He felt himself blush at the mention of limbs. Face to face, she took the reunion with less wear-and-tear than he. She had a real fiber that he had always lacked. He might do worse than study the girl he had married.

Having fired up the engine, Reinhart asked: “Shall we eat first?”

But she was not amused by the old joke, just looked hurt and said: “I regard that as bad taste.”

Within a fortnight they had moved into a large house two in from the intersection of Buena Vista Lane with Krausmeyer Street, still in the town, approximately two miles from Reinhart's parents in distance and even more in tone, the neighborhood being principally German brick occupied by retired grocers; whereas that of his folks was chiefly one-story shingled, populated by depressed clerks.

The first, or Vetsville phase, was now history, like the Continental Congress or the Beer Hall Putsch. Luckily, Fedder spent moving day at College—not that they transferred anything but a few books and the door knocker; the new place was furnished; the old stuff they simply abandoned—Fedder was not around to take leave of, and Reinhart didn't dare communicate with Bee until, after arriving at the new residence and faking the loss of his fountain pen, he returned to the compound without Genevieve. He really had to thank his friend.

He knocked her up, in the British sense, i.e., pounded on her door and she answered.

“I just have a minute,” he said. “As maybe you didn't realize because we didn't hire a truck, we moved this morning. The point is, my wife came back to me. It's now been about two weeks, and I've never got the chance to thank you for calling her.”

Bee smiled shyly. “Oh that's O.K. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”

“It wouldn't look good,” said Reinhart, “so I'd better not. But listen, what in addition to the obvious I liked about it was—well I am always interested in schemes. It's a personal weakness. How clever of you! I should have thought of that, but didn't have the talent.”

His compliments pleased Bee. She pulled at the leg of her shorts and said: “But I bet you would have been plenty sore if it hadn't worked—me telling her you had a different girl every night!” She looked so wickedly merry at this that Reinhart ceased to believe she had been interested solely in his welfare.

“Is that what you told Genevieve?”

“I know women.”

“I'm beginning to, myself,” said Reinhart. “Oddly enough. I know you really hate one another.”

“Now you be tough on her,” Bee said, with her hip against the door frame. “You
aren't
mad?”

Reinhart shook her hand. “Not me,” he answered. “It worked, didn't it? Oh, and would you please tell Niles: I'm going to get him his sewer. True, not exactly for Vetsville, but I think that just the thought of a new sewer anywhere will be welcome to him. Now I must close your screen door before any more flies get in.” Deciding it was discreet, because on a Monday the other Vetsville wives were all in their back yards with wet wash, he kissed her hand and took off.

Reinhart had one of those electric-eye gadgets that opened his garage door automatically when the Gigantic passed a certain point towards the end of the driveway. He was always a little anxious during this operation: Halloween approached, and it was not unlikely that a juvenile attempt might be made to jam the beam. He planned to let his dog course freely about the yard day and night for the next week, for all the good a dachshund would do.

He was almost disappointed when the door lifted on schedule and with no hands. Genevieve he had already let out of the car at that section of the drive nearest the house, it being negligent to have her walk the enormous distance back from the garage. So extensive was his domain. Such a far cry from Vetsville, so grotesque a change, that there had been nothing for it but to adjust immediately. From the moment Reinhart crossed the threshold of his new abode, he accepted it as his due, and indeed, a moment later glancing through a front window, seeing a poodle micturate against one of his evergreens, he dashed outdoors and stoned that impudent animal (which lived two houses down, and afterwards would have denied to him the sidewalk in front of its own place had he ever offered to walk there, which he didn't; nowadays he walked nowhere except from house to Gigantic and vice versa).

As Reinhart left the garage, the electric eye registered the passing of his burly figure and pulled the doors down. Everything was in perfect working order, for that's the way Claude kept his possessions, and if they went bad he was inclined to get a new replacement rather than have it fixed. Claude Humbold continued to own this house; Reinhart only rented it from him; but the greatest feature was that Cosmopolitan Sewers, Ltd., paid the rent with no charge to the tenant except for the telephone, mere peanuts.

He walked around front, so as to gloat over the facade. Quite a lawn he had on all sides, separated from his neighbors' by the driveway on the left, a mesh fence on the right, and from the street by a hedge the corner elements of which were clipped in the shape of big hand grenades. The design of the house was basically Stratford-upon-Avon, with leaded windows, roof high in the middle and descending at the eaves to four feet from the ground, timbered-and-stuccoed second story; but certain other reminiscences had been thrown in: side porch with New Orleans ironwork between Parthenon columns, and an orange terrazzo floor; atop the ridgepole, a tiny cupola à la mode de Mount Vernon; and two lamps from a Venetian canal, their poles aslant, flanked a front doorway more medieval than Elizabethan, being low, vaulted, and monkish—Reinhart, a Friar Tuck of a man, forgetting to duck, sometimes butted his forehead on the keystone and emitted a lusty oath.

Inside, which is where he now repaired after surveying the world from his stoop and answering a hail from the middle-aged neighbors across the street, who were about to enter their new Shoat V-8 for a Sunday drive—inside, he walked directly into the living room, there being no prefatory hallway of any description. He had remembered to duck for the doorway but not, once in, to look for the cat, which inscrutably had chosen to lie just beyond the threshold. If anything will throw the shivers into you, it is the scream of a cat when you tread upon its tail. The vile sound served to remind Reinhart of Dad's grave charges, another discord.

“Honey,” asked Genevieve, emerging from the first-floor lavatory off the solarium to the left of the living room, “did I hear the telephone ring?”

“No,” he answered curtly, exchanging stares with the moose's head above the fireplace.

“Sorry. Uh, you want to think now or talk?”

“The former, if you don't mind.”

Gen said O.K. and tiptoed through the dining room towards the kitchen. She was always like this at home, sustaining Reinhart's role as lord of the manor. Indeed, he could have been a good deal more magisterial to her taste, but he felt silly when it got too thick. He had discovered that more authority and more possessions paradoxically diminish true responsibility, for a man tends to worry about these rather than himself; thus they stay sleek and he gets flabby.

He dropped into a great green leather chair before the fireplace, so right for the kind of cogitation he must now do that it was almost stultifying. Below the moose's dewlaps hung crossed krises. Claude had had the house decorated with an eye to his own eventual tenancy—he no more shot the moose than he wrested the weapons from a Malay, but rather bought them all from a catalogue of some Monkey Ward of the exotic.