“Aw,” sickly laughed the driver, “that was just in the junior play.”
Wonderful the way nature anticipated art. Reinhart had chosen this perversion at random.
“Exactly! And after rehearsals he didn’t take them off but wore them around the house, so that it became a scandal in the neighborhood. His sister just told me they might have to put him away: all her underwear is missing.”
The smallest boy held out longest, saying: “You just want to get into her pants, Fatso!”
“No,” said Reinhart with a hollow laugh, “Kenworthy does, if you get what I mean.”
“What do you know,” the driver muttered, cocking his head. “Much obliged, fellow. We’ll get him. We always guard the honor of the gang.”
“Yes,” Reinhart agreed. “That kind of member lowers the tone. People are pointing your way already.”
The driver stared with blank eyes. “I told you we’d get him, fellow.”
“O.K.,” said Reinhart, “no offense, Chief.” Once again he passed Kenworthy, this time with the springy step of a man who has done the worst he could do to another. On the other hand, Kenworthy already seemed to feel better about him, giving Reinhart the shoulder-twitch and slack tongue that signified tolerance in his jargon.
“You owe me five dollars,” said Genevieve as he got in beside her. “But I must say that you apparently handled it well, for there they go.” The teen-ager’s vehicle roared off the asphalt onto the open highway, with neither backfire nor blue exhaust (they are always ace mechanics).
“Yes, if I do say so myself.” Reinhart was careful to turn his smirk after the vanishing car.
“My brother, poor boy, has many pressures on him. Daddy, so markedly preferring me, is sometimes unfair to Kenny.”
“He seems to give a fair allowance. For God’s sake, five bucks,” said Reinhart, getting back to normal. He started the engine, praying that its wheeze owed to the common cold rather than a lethal malady.
“Oh, that.” She giggled conspiratorially, her true allegiance not clear to Reinhart. “I usually give him that, and say it comes from Daddy. But what I mean is Daddy kids him awfully about playing a girl in the school play, and then in addition he has those pimples.”
“Haven’t we all, metaphorically speaking?” Reinhart answered, in an effort to ignore his growing feelings of sonbitchery. He pulled out of range of the mock cannon and on the highway turned back in the direction whence they had come. “No night club tonight, Genevieve. I haven’t got but four dollars to my name. I’m sorry if you didn’t have a good time.”
She clutched at his wrist, causing the car to swerve across a stretch of gravel shoulder and a motorist behind to make his horn go Waa-waa. Reinhart missed the other driver’s dirty look, though, for he was watching Genevieve cry into a balled Kleenex: She wiped her eyes and added: “Don’t you think?”
Reinhart stopped his vehicle, for they had been running along the shoulder, scattering gravel. His lust had turned to melancholia. “Here’s all I want to say, Gen: did you ever think about time? Isn’t it fascinating? Look at the second hand on your watch, the way it races around the dial ticking off one precious moment after the next.”
“I should have been home hours ago,” she murmured, and smiled hurtfully at the corners of her nose.
“Ah, and then what? Lie in bed and look at the stars so many light years away from us, and think what a small thing is human life and what fools we are to make so much of it. I mean the kind of person who saves something for decades and decades expecting to use it to the best advantage at some future time, but one day dies missing the point.”
“Not me,” she said, cheering up. “I can never keep a cent.”
“Are you religious?” asked Reinhart, being careful not to touch her, and she had let his arm go when he stopped the automobile.
Genevieve gasped, and said: “You’re not a Catholic?”
“Not me,” Reinhart rejoined.
“Well because I was going to say—”
“I read a quotation by George Bernard Shaw that went like this: Use yourself up, so that when you die there’s nothing left but an empty husk to bury.”
She leaned against her door and said: “My, aren’t we being ghoulish? You know what I thought? That you stopped here to try and kiss me. That would surely be rather bold, with the traffic going by. Most boys would drive up to Cherry Wood and park on that road going to the abandoned quarry, where the cops never come.”
Reinhart supposed it was no use; nobody ever listened to him. He returned the car to the highway and tried again, keeping his eyes on the centerline: “Many of the things we attach an enormous importance to really amount to nothing in the long run. The regret in later years is not that you gave yourself, but that you didn’t give enough.”
“Better slow down if you want to make that right turn,” said Genevieve, who had tucked her legs under her bottom on the seat and sat facing him by three-quarters.
Hard after the turn he had to shift into second, to meet a considerable upgrade. He was appalled by the whining of the gears, and tried in his argument to sound another note: “There’s no reason in our day and age for a young, intelligent, vigorous person to protect …” (he was hindered here by a deficiency of the language, and not wanting unobjectively to tip his hand, was forced to choose a collective) “themself against experience. Isn’t it silly to fear what is natural and as old as life itself?” The last was of course rhetorical and he did not look for her reaction, having anyway to watch where they were materially going: up a forested slope void of houses and streetlamps, and his headlights were guttering.
He began to doubt that Genevieve could cope with any degree of subtlety. From the corner of his eye he saw her peering through the windshield at the profound night twelve feet beyond the radiator ornament.
“Could you put on the brights?” she asked.
Silently he tripped the floor switch, and the lights went out absolutely. In a similar movement he brought back what they had, whether brights or dims, and gained the crest. Most of the town, many little glows, was now contained by the rear-vision mirror, and fixed Reinhart’s position in space, the sky being starless.
“Guinevere,” said Reinhart, and caught himself; whenever he tried to make himself understood, he thought irrelevantly of King Arthur. “Genevieve—”
“I guess it’s left here.” Her finger pointed at his nose.
He bumped along a homemade lane of mud wallows, a kind of buffalo trail, saying absently: “Your house is certainly remote.” Creeping through the black forest, again in second gear, he became desperate.
“Gen, I don’t want you to think I’m just coarse. I know every guy gives a pretty girl a line, and I don’t blame you for being careful. But when two people are attracted to each other and do nothing about it, I believe the situation becomes psychopathic.” He and a rabbit in the road ahead saw each other and were mutually startled, though the animal leaped higher. “Huh, you live in a real wilderness.”
“You better not go much farther,” said Genevieve, whispering though he saw no house from which she could be overheard by her old man. “Or you’ll run into the quarry.”
“The quarry?” He stopped the engine and was buffeted weak by the stillness. “This is Cherry Wood! While I’ve been talking, you led me right here.” He reached enthusiastically towards her and missed contact, for she was half out the door.
“How dare you suggest such a thing!” she cried. “And how dare you bring me up here for your foul schemes. I may be ripped by briars and brambles and turn my ankle and freeze, but I’m walking home. If you try to follow, I’ll go in the nearest house and call the law.”
Reinhart left the wheel and dashed after her in some terror; he always felt exactly like what he was accused of being: in this case, a rapist. In addition, he couldn’t see his hand before his face.
“Now you’ve done it,” Genevieve said from the darkness on his left. “I’ve broken my leg.”
 
; “Keep calm,” Reinhart screamed. “Show a light, if you’ve got one.”
But by the time she said “I don’t smoke,” he had found her in some hairy bush. “You want to hang on my arm?” he asked. “I won’t get fresh.”
“I think the most you would do is carry me,” by which she apparently meant the least; whichever it was, he contained her in his arms, the little goof all soft and perfumed and light and solid at the same time, and was her only connection with the earth for twenty-five yards back to the automobile.
“Stay calm,” he nervously entreated. “I served in the medics. I’ll get some sticks and rip up my shirt and make a splint.” He wrenched open the right-hand door.
“Well,” said Gen, “I may not have actually broken it. You know how one thinks the worst in the dark. What I probably need is to stretch out.”
“That’s it!” Reinhart answered in an enthusiasm of relief. “With the affected member elevated higher than the head, so that the blood will recede.” He pulled his nose from her hair, where it had been tickled, and suppressed a sneeze. “The back seat will do, with your foot out the window.” There was insufficient space for him to get both Gen and his shoulders into the rear, Dad’s auto being a far cry from a London taxicab; but while he sought to engineer the problem, she left his support and hopped nimbly in.
“Oh, good,” said he. “Feeling better? Let me get that window open for your foot.”
“Ouch,” Genevieve yelped, and because the dashboard glow showed him so little of her, explained: “It hurts when I bend it.”
“That splint won’t take a minute,” Reinhart offered, peering in over the lowered front seat. In the forest an owl asked its imbecile question.
“Oo,” said Gen in echo, “it is certainly desolate up here.”
“We’ll be home in ten minutes.” He crawled across to the wheel.
“Do you think I should be jolted so soon?”
“I’ll drive easy.”
“Actually no, it’s definitely not broken. You could feel the break if it were, couldn’t you?”
Reinhart preferred to believe she was not badly hurt, for a motive of which he was only half aware and therefore scared of: he had not begun to grow until the sophomore year and thus had known a time when his lusts exceeded his physique and many of the women he desired stood higher than he; his only hope of having them, he was told by his fantasies, lay in their being in some way enfeebled—say with a broken leg. This also explained his attraction to girls who wore glasses.
“Couldn’t you?” Genevieve repeated, in a much stronger voice.
“Can you?” asked Reinhart, keeping his eyes on the speedometer, which at rest still bravely indicated ten miles an hour.
“I don’t know. I feel something … oh, that’s just the clip on my—sorry.”
He turned and mumbled shabbily: “Uh, I was in the medics.”
She rustled, and then answered as if through a woolen scarf: “Then I guess you’d know.”
“Yeah,” said Reinhart, almost surreptitiously opening the door as if it were rather his fly. He clambered awkwardly into the back of the car, and lost all sense of his body when he got there, for technically the rear enclosure of that model would not contain an object of his mass.
“Haha,” he chuckled in his hysterical bedside manner, “Herr Dok-tor Reinhart”—he cleared his throat. “Now where’s the complaint, little lady?” He inadvertently touched her ankle, and it seemed to burn him. He reminded himself that he was the veteran of a good many campaigns in the Pubic Wars. What unnerved him in the present engagement was the captiousness of the foe. Since he didn’t know where he stood, neither was he sure of where he might wilt. Genevieve suddenly stirred and kicked him right in the mouth with her knee. Had he light, he could have looked right up into her secrets.
Rubbing his sore lip, he said: “That’s a relief. The ankle feels okay to me. Probably a pulled tendon.”
As if her teeth were clenched in pain, Genevieve left interstices between her words: “The … other … one.” And when he gingerly touched another ankle, or perhaps the same, for he hadn’t known which he felt the first time, she went on: “Not… the … ankle.”
Somewhere along the route north he must have passed the site in question, where perhaps the damage was negligible. But he heard nothing but two breathings, of which he failed to recognize one as his own, and in truth and with the best intentions, he could not have stopped before the terminus. Having too quickly assessed the driveway, he thought too soon about garaging his vehicle, and proposing to return his hand to the gearshift, he found it trapped. Her two thighs were stronger than his one arm, at least without exhibitionist brutality on the part of the latter. Simultaneously she complained that the bruise was scarcely there, though in an excruciatingly amiable tone. It was hinted that he must go and demanded that he stay. And the owl outside continued to doubt everybody’s identity.
Something of a pants-fetichist, Reinhart resented her wearing a girdle like a married woman: all boilerplate, except at the only point worth protection; Fort Knox with an impregnable wall and open gate would drive the subtle criminal mad.
“Don’t you hate owls?” asked Reinhart, furiously.
She violently started, and his hand had freedom. Yet liberty is cold, lonely, and embarrassing; he immediately sought a more constricting arrangement. Himself temporarily taken care of, he began to worry about Genevieve—as if she were not present. Indeed, in his mind’s eye he saw her in her office person, which was the one he wanted, which explained his remark on the owl: that bird had named his confusion.
“Yes,” said the unknown girl he was involved with on the back seat, and put some pressure on his relevant hand. He had forgotten what she was supposed to affirm, and went looking with his other set of fingers. Nylon, taut elastic, skin, more armor, zipper, more skin; the passage here was tight, but he forced it and encountered a ham-mockful of heavy life.
“Why did you burrow up to my shoulder?” said his apparent friend. “I love you.”
Aw no! Reinhart pleaded to himself, the dear emotions are not what I wish; I just want to win.
“Hear me?” shouted Genevieve with remarkable volume for her size and place. His ears rang. “Love you, love you, love you! … And do you me?”
“Ummmm,” he muttered, and suddenly took heart at the character of her underfurnishings: in the most intimate connection they could both remain fully dressed. Perhaps because of this, life had never seemed stranger to him than at that moment when he worked beneath her skirt. He found room for himself on the narrow seat; he felt warm and thought cool; the rest was art. Genevieve seemed either to be indivisible from him or to have vanished completely, he was not sure until that moment came for the reckoning of other matters, and then it had gone beyond that.
“God, I feel awful,” he said into the juncture of her neck and shoulder, or rather to that portion of her jacket bunched there. The one grand fact established, their knowledge of each other was still limited.
“Mpf, mpf,” said she from beneath him, and when he shifted slightly: “I’m almost suffocated! … No, stay!”
“No point in doing anything else, now,” Reinhart lugubriously observed. “I’m sorry I didn’t take precautions, but if worst comes to worst, I will stick by you.” He was naively afraid of his own fertility.
“You don’t mean—you don’t mean—” With a kind of instinctive judo, using only her universal joint, Genevieve pitched him right off onto the floor. “You aren’t implying we did something?” No tears now; she beat her knuckles on his head.
“Come now!” said Reinhart sardonically. He made a rain hat of his webbed fingers, to catch her blows.
Genevieve pulled down her skirt and looked as good as new, what he could see of her. Her mind, though, was still being ravaged. “Oh, you couldn’t have. You couldn’t have taken advantage of my ignorance. Tell me it was just petting.”
With this, Reinhart’s postcoital sadness degenerated into a boredom in which
he was conscious of every night sound; the owl, his question now answered, was silent, but the trees talked among themselves in their soughing vocabulary, and an internal-combustion engine climbed a distant hill.
“Sure,” he said wearily, “that’s all it was.”
“Because,” said Gen, swinging her spiked heels to the floor and hence, since he covered it, the small of his back, “because we didn’t even have our clothes off.”
Eventually they both reached the front seat, Reinhart again at the wheel, but Genevieve was still looking for reasons. “Because,” she said, “you didn’t even kiss me.”
Taking this as an accusation, he leaned over and put their mouths together. Hers was very tight, no doubt owing to a conviction that if you guard one orifice, you retroactively protect them all.
Meanwhile, behind his back he turned on the ignition and found the starter with his left foot. There was nothing left to delay getting her home forthwith. Thus when he left her lips the motor was purring nicely—and a brute flashlight came through the window as if to poke out his eyes as well as burn them, and a voice foul as a man’s could be ordered: “Leave the car, and keep your hands in sight.”
Hideous apprehensions claimed Reinhart’s fancy as he obeyed: lovers’ lane bandits, etc., and he got ready to risk death before dishonor. But he had to take a minute or two to fetch back his vision, which was momentarily one burning green ball.
“Hi, Reinhart,” said his assailant, in quite another voice from the earlier.
“Capek! I recognize your voice but I can’t see you.”
“Sorry about my light. In approaching a darkened vehicle, carry flashlight in left hand, have weapon accessible to right, take initiative from suspect. I admit I believed it was you, but couldn’t take a chance.”
“Why did you believe it was me?” asked Reinhart in pique.
Capek, whom he was beginning to make out, drew him some paces from the car. “I don’t want to embarrass your lady,” he whispered. “We got a tip you and her were up here. It come from her father.”
Reinhart scowled. “Are we trespassing here, Capek?”