The white Caddy which had passed him earlier on had come to an abrupt stop and was, reverse-gear lights illuminated, backing up at excess speed. This took Reinhart’s attention off his old problem and gave him a new worry. But the car stopped just before running him down, and Helen Clayton got out of the passenger’s side.
The Cadillac accelerated away. Helen came to Reinhart. Never had he been so glad to see anyone. He wasn’t sure what effect this might have on Genevieve. It might even aggravate her problem, but at least he was no longer alone, back to the wall.
“Hi, partner,” said Helen, who was a significant presence even upon a flat sweep of blacktop. The belt of her trench coat was loosely tied, and her green scarf flapped in a breeze he had not hitherto noticed. She came to Reinhart and linked her arm with his, but jovially and not in the raptorial fashion of Genevieve.
She cried: “Back to the old assembly line!”
Reinhart decided against immediately looking back to see what effect this would have on his ex-wife. It might be possible to make some distance without Helen’s identifying the shouting, hysterical woman as being associated with him, though it was true that she had seen Genevieve in the supermarket.
“Well,” he said bluffly, “did you have a nice lunch?”
She elbowed his ribs. “Not really.” She made a snorting kind of laugh, which probably was not mirthful, but listening as he was for obstreperousness from the rear, he could not be as precise in his reactions to Helen as he would have liked.
“I see,” he said, though of course he did not. He was still tensed for a shot in the back and could not believe that he was no longer under fire. But the fact remained that he heard nothing from Genevieve. “Uh, I had a good meal, or a fine dish anyway, at Winston’s. Have you ever been there?”
Helen stopped and turned to him. “She didn’t make a scene, I hope.”
Reinhart shook his head. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice, Helen. I’m sorry.”
“Gosh, Carl, it isn’t your fault.” She took his arm again. “It’s just lousy you have to be embarrassed.”
Now he took the nerve to look for Genevieve. ... She was gone.
Utterly. She must have parked her car over that way, unless she had gone into one of the shops. Was it beyond her to duck down behind the automobiles and stalk them? Could she have slipped behind the buildings, to circle around and arrange an ambush?
“You know,” he told Helen, “this is the first time I’ve laid eyes on her for ten years. I thought I was done with her forever, and I’m sure that would have been true if she had been successful in Chicago—that’s where she’s been for some time.”
“Bad penny, huh?” They resumed their walk.
“No,” said Reinhart, “not really. Genevieve’s a capable person. She’s quite good at business. It’s in her private life that she has difficulties.”
“Now, Carl,” said Helen, squeezing the arm she held, “let’s not hear you speaking without respect for yourself.”
“Was I doing that?”
“Why, sure you were!” Helen said with vigor.
He knew no serious reason why he should have found Helen so reassuring, but he did. Perhaps it was a matter of her physical solidity. From time to time, turning to speak to him, she rested her left breast on his arm. Again she was arousing him. Already they seemed not only old friends, but comfortable lovers—if there was such a thing as the latter: you wouldn’t know from Reinhart’s experience from at least as far back as the end of his Army days. He had not had a girl friend since then. He had never been interested in females whom he had not craved. And when sexual desire came into play, matters of relative power soon took precedence over feelings.
Back at work, an hour passed too swiftly to be believed. More persons than Reinhart would have thought shopped for food in the early afternoon, at least on this day. He had almost exhausted the crepe batter made during the morning session when DePau materialized at the table.
“Say,” he said, “your boss wants to talk to you.”
“On the phone?” Reinhart served hot, sauced, triangulated crepes to three customers. More were waiting. “Could you tell Grace I’ll call back when I get a break?” He looked up the aisle. Still more carts were coming his way. “We’re on a roll.”
There was a spiteful note in the voice of the supermarket manager. “Fella, she wants to talk to you right now.” DePau turned and addressed the crowd: “I’m sorry.” He waved his arms. “That’s all for today. We have to close the stand down now.” He moved so as to block their access to the area of the table occupied by the chafing dish.
Reinhart wiped his hands on a towel and removed his chef’s bonnet. He intended to complain to Grace about DePau’s officious rudeness. Surely, it was his supermarket, or anyway it was managed by him, but he had no call to be so lacking in common courtesy. Besides, another batch of batter had been made just after lunch and put to rest in the portable icebox; it would be almost ready for use now. They weren’t closing up! He considered asking those who had been turned away to wait the few moments he would be on the phone. It grieves a cook to deny an eater.
Helen, selling packets of the instant mix, looked over the bent head of a customer and raised her eyebrows at Reinhart.
“All right,” said DePau to Helen, and he actually snapped his fingers at her, “let’s close up over here too. I’ll have somebody take care of your stock.”
Helen grimaced. “What?”
“You’ll get credit for what you’ve got coming,” DePau said. “Just leave now!” He was clearly in a state of great impatience.
Helen shrugged and, turning from him, tended to something at her table.
“Did you hear me?” DePau’s voice rose an octave.
Reinhart had started away, but he lingered when the manager addressed Helen. At this latest piece of outrageousness he could not restrain himself.
“Listen here,” he said to DePau, moving towards him. “You keep a civil tongue in your head.”
The manager looked as though he might be suffocated by his internal humors. He coughed and spoke in a voice so constricted that much of what he said was unintelligible. “Police... publicity... sue...” Reinhart could distinguish at least these three words, which were menacing in a general way, but nonsensical as to particular application.
“Just calm down,” he said, his emotion changing from outrage to a concern for the man’s sanity.
But DePau seemed even more highly exercised when this had been said. Reinhart determined to get to the bottom of the matter without further delay.
“All right, let’s get to the phone.”
DePau twitched his index finger at Helen. “You too.”
They all marched through the rear to a bleak room walled in cinder block and containing battered office furniture and a remarkable amount of papers. In one corner a thin, blade-nosed woman was punching at a large calculator.
The manager handed Reinhart a telephone handset.
“Hello,” said Reinhart. “Is this Grace?”
He waited for several moments until she came onto the line.
“Carl, I think we’ll wind up the Top Shop demo, O.K.? Take the rest of the day off, and I’ll be in touch. Now give me Clayton.”
“Grace,” he asked, “has something happened?”
“Time to move on, Carl! Now just put Clayton on the line.”
Grace really was hard to withstand when she spoke ex cathedra. Reinhart licked his upper lip and gave the phone to Helen.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. ...O.K., Grace,” Helen said. “Sure.” She hung up and said to Reinhart, smiling: “Not a bad deal, Carl. We got the rest of the day off with pay. C’mon, let’s get lost.”
DePau was hovering near the door. “You can leave by the back.”
A plump young woman appeared. She was dressed in the blue smock that constituted the store’s livery, and she carried what turned out to be the clothing from the locker that Helen and Reinhart shared.
“Listen her
e,” Reinhart told DePau, “some of that kitchen equipment out there is my personal stuff. I’m going out—”
The supermarket manager put a finger into the air. “All of it,” said he, “has already been packed and is on its way to the Epicon office.”
They took their outer clothing from the girl, and DePau led them quickly through a dimly lit, windowless storage area, found a door, and opened it.
Reinhart and Helen emerged onto a potholed patch of blacktop on the southern side of the building. Around the corner came an enormous truck, and to avoid being splashed by it from a pool of standing water, they moved along the sheer cinder-block wall to the corner and a vista of the rest of the shopping center.
“Mind telling me the explanation of this strange episode?” Reinhart asked. “Now that we’ve got a minute? In fact, now that we’ve got all day?”
She was laughing at him. “You’ve still got your apron on!” He undid the strings. Helen was getting into her trench coat.
In the same good-humored way she said: “Some woman called up DePau and bad-mouthed us.”
“What?” He had balled the apron and taken it in one hand while with the other he helped himself get into one sleeve of his jacket.
“Said we were drinking in public and pawing one another.”
Reinhart’s jaw ached. After a moment he realized the pain could be relieved by unclenching his teeth.
Helen went on: “Grace, to give her credit, said she didn’t believe it, but he complained to her, so what could she do?”
With wincing hang of the head, Reinhart said: “You know who that was, don’t you?”
She shrugged generously. “I’ve got an idea.”
“And I was feeling sorry for that bitch.” He finally was able to shift hands on the ball of apron and get into the other sleeve of the jacket. “Ten years! I don’t see her for ten years, and the first time she shows up...”
“Well, hell,” said his genial colleague, “look at it this way, Carl. She got us half a day off.”
The extraordinary thing was that he did not feel as dispirited as he should have. That he was not utterly devastated by this experience was due only to Helen. It was difficult to feel hopeless in her presence. He smiled at her.
“And anybody but DePau would have ignored it,” said she. “But he’s always been a dirty creep.”
“You’ve worked there before?”
“Sure,” said Helen, “and he’s never missed once in sneaking a feel back at the lockers.”
“That guy? I’ll be damned! And he looks like such a prude. In the old movies a man who looked like that would play a preacher or maybe a mortician.” It was amazing: Reinhart couldn’t get over the basic fact that he was in a good mood. As they walked slowly towards the parking lot Helen was usually touching him with hip or shoulder. They formed a unit of affection.
“I don’t know whether he really thinks we’re in cahoots,” said she, “but he wants to get back at me. He’s not my type.” She bumped Reinhart for emphasis.
“Cahoots,” he echoed happily. He had a deep attachment to the slang that predated World War II, probably for the simple reason that he himself was of the same vintage, but there had been a geniality to that language and an ebullience, which so far as he could see had been replaced only by grunts of insolence and anxiety: get it on, hang in there, that’s a turn-off.
“Should we take both cars?” Helen asked. “Probably simpler to leave one here and pick it up on the way back.”
“I don’t have a car,” said Reinhart. “So that’s even simpler. But where are we supposed to be going?”
She swung in against him. “When will we have a better opportunity?”
An erotic interpretation could be made of this, but Reinhart was not yet so old that he had forgotten the frustrated expectations of his youth. In those days, anyway, women conventionally implied much more than they meant to do, and he had been marked for life by such experiences.
Therefore he said, modestly: “We might have a drink.” They were now walking among the ranked cars.
“Thing to do,” said Helen, letting his arm go and plucking into her strap-hung purse, “is to pick up a bottle.” She found some keys and went purposefully to a large, battered, dirty blue automobile parked between two sensible, neat, economical vehicles manufactured by former enemies of the United States. Reinhart had not owned a car in a decade, and he could by now identify few makes. Helen’s chariot looked as though it had been designed for the sheer purpose of squandering fuel.
She entered the front seat on her knees and slid over to lift the peg on the passenger’s door. The interior of the car was in somewhat better shape than the coachwork. It had a homey feeling, though probably only because it was Helen’s. Funny how machines are like that.
Reinhart slipped in. The plastic seat was warm, no doubt from the sun that had penetrated the windshield, though at the moment it was in seclusion behind a barrier of cloud. Helen started the car, making a noise like that of a dishwasher within which a glass has broken, and having driven no more than a hundred yards across the asphalt, she stopped at a liquor store.
Reinhart understood that he was expected to make a purchase. He asked Helen for her choice of beverage, though he was puzzled as to where they were going to drink it: from the bottle, in the car?
“Gee,” said Helen, “I’m partial to Scotch, but it’s pretty expensive—”
Reinhart raised his hand. “Say no more, my lady. Your needs will be answered.” After what should have been a degenerative experience—perhaps his job was gone for good, and would Genevieve stop at that?—he had moved ever closer to exuberance.
He dropped his balled apron on the seat and went into the store and examined the appropriate shelves.
The bulbous man behind the counter said: “Can I help?”
“Just choosing a Scotch,” said Reinhart, “for my friend. She thinks it’s a good way to kill an afternoon.”
“If she’s somebody you’re out to impress,” said the liquor dealer, “may I suggest Chivas?” He turned to the shelves behind him and found a boxed bottle.
“By George,” said Reinhart, playing a role for his own delectation, “I think we ought to spare no expense to please the little lady.” He withdrew his wallet and paid the bill. He assumed that Helen would give him a lift home after their drink: he now no longer had bus fare.
“Where do we give this a belt?” he asked her when he regained the car. “We really ought to have glasses and ice.” He brandished the bag and could not forbear from gloating: “This is the crème de la crème.”
Helen frowned as she started up. “Uh, that’s not like cream dee menth, is it? I don’t go much for cordials, in general.”
He allayed her fears by unbagging, unboxing, and displaying the bottle. “The fact is that I’m not much of a whiskey drinker,” he said. “Not nowadays, anyhow. In view of that, I thought only the best would do.”
She gave the Scotch a loving smile. “Now you’re talkin’.” She gunned the car off the blacktop onto the highway. This was a suburban shopping area in which one mall abutted another for what a local promotional effort sought to have called the Miracle Mile, but it consumed even more space than the name asserted. Beyond the malls began a sequence of motels: the notable names were represented, Ramada, Holiday, Best Western, and a far cry they were from the bleak “tourist courts” Reinhart could remember from childhood trips with his parents, when in fact Dad usually decided he could not afford such luxurious accommodations and instead checked them into that even quainter facility of those times, the “tourist home,” viz., someone’s private house, where Grandma or Sister Sue had to vacate her little bedroom, second floor rear, for the lodging of strangers at one dollar the party, and you had to queue up for a toilet of which the seat never cooled.
But in among the local examples of the famous chains, with the conspicuous landscaping of genuine shrubbery which doggedly persisted in looking like synthetic, the palatial parody of their r
eception areas, the high marquees celebrating the current gathering of men dressed in polyester—tucked into an interstice, as it were, between two of the gaudies was a simple, almost austere rank of discrete little huts, called, remarkably for this day, Al’s Motel.
It was into the forecourt of Al’s that Helen easily swung her car. Reinhart honestly believed, by at least 75 percent, that she was stopping there in the performance of some errand.
Helen slowed to a crawl in the approach to the square little building where respects, and a fee, must be paid before access was gained to the cottages behind, but she now said, with evidence of concern: “This is real private, Carl,” and pressed her foot down. The car gained speed. They descended a slight elevation and turned in back of the little office building. Helen stopped there. “You can check in through the back door if you want.”
Now Reinhart was suddenly soaked to the skin, as it were, with embarrassment, as if God had peeled away the roof of the automobile and poured a bucketful on his head. He sat there grinning as moist heat went everywhere except into his cold toes. As it happened, he had never his life long checked into any public hostelry with a woman who was not his legal spouse, in fact, who was not Genevieve, his only wife. And indeed seldom since their honeymoon had he stayed overnight with her except at their own dwelling. They had rarely traveled in their two decades together. There had never been a sufficiency of money for routine existence, for the two children had arrived in the earliest years (Blaine indeed so soon that Reinhart still might all too easily wonder about the boy’s paternity). His extramarital experiences, most of them with professionals, had been in private places, their own apartments or the hotel bedroom which was his first temporary home after the break with Gen.
“Helen,” he said, “can’t we just be friends for a while? Maybe when we know each other a little better, things will work themselves out.”
“Gee, Carl,” she said, smiling an insinuation, “I guess I misinterpreted. ... Uh, well, you’re a special kind of guy, you know. It’s not easy to figure you out at first.”
Reinhart rubbed his chin. “Do you think I’m gay? Is that what you’re saying?”