Up went his hands, and he laughed uneasily. “Next thing, you’ll be wanting to show me your poetry, hahaha.”
Genevieve colored and turned her shoulder to him.
“I’m sorry,” said Reinhart. “I didn’t realize you really had poetry.” He dug her in the ribs. “I’ll bet it’s great. Isn’t it? Isn’t it great? Come on now.”
She opened her eyes wide as they would go and said: “I don’t know whether you understand it, but you’re being horrible.”
“Then what do you want?” he shouted. “I thought you were conserving your energy to have a baby, when all the time you’re writing poetry, seeing people on the sly, and God knows what else. I’m just glad we have an electric refrigerator, that’s all.” Trundling the sweeper out the back door, he hurled his Parthian shot: “That’s why you aren’t friends with the ice man!”
Outside, he remembered he had already emptied the dust chamber and in so doing had put down a milder pique. Today Gen was insupportable vis-à-vis, but endearing again when he turned his back on her. What a dog I am, he told himself as he went back inside…. Genevieve stood at the sink with a butcher knife near her wrist.
“Stop, stop!” he cried. “I didn’t know what I was saying!”
She corrugated her lips and asked: “What’s wrong with you? This won’t hurt your damn knife.” She was cutting the pages of a handsome little notebook jacketed in green morocco.
At the strangest moments Reinhart would develop a passion for things: the little book was devilishly cunning, and he could not resist articles made of leather.
He stuck out his hand. “May I see it?”
“No,” she said indignantly. “And laugh at my work?”
“Your poems are in it?”
“I’m cutting room to write more,” she stated snippishly, threw down the blade, went to the card table where he did his written homework, and began to scribble rapidly with a little pencil that issued from the book’s binding on a thin golden chain.
“Darling.” He swooped down without warning and gathered her in his arms. His grasp prohibited her from struggling, but she glared as a cat would under similar circumstances and was actually ready to spit in fury. You never saw anything so cute. He slid his hand onto her breast, which was about the size of a green pepper and the consistency of—well, what would you say in poetry—of flesh, nothing could compare to its feel.
“Damn you!” she screamed. “Just because you’ve got that thing, you believe you’re God.”
“What thing?” he asked incredulously, for naturally he had thrust the carpet sweeper away before embracing her.
“You know what I mean. You act like you’ve got the only one in the universe!” Her little face was all screwed up, very near his. As if she were rabid, he could neither continue to retain her nor let her go. The pencil was dangling from the book on its chain; the pages had closed of their own willfulness, so he could not read the verse. However, he did finally get the reference and was shocked by it into two kinds of reply: wounded and wounding.
“I never heard you object before…. Well, it’s the only one in this house, and don’t you forget it.”
Of course these were both literally false. He had had virtually to rape her the first time; and as to the uniqueness of his position as the only man in her life, or hut, her visiting father nullified that. He let her go and again plunged out the rear door, stumbling on the cinder-block step, into his back yard. What a rotten day! Neither had the grass seed, sown three weeks before, taken hold: the only life in the lawn was the impudent hollow stalks of wild onion, like so many green straws to a subterranean soda. If you pulled them, your hand smelled acrid. There was also a dandelion or two with flowers gone to seed in those tiny powder puffs—he seized one and blew it bald, forgetting to make a wish.
Yes, he knew many of Nature’s secrets but made little use of them, being habitually enmired in human problems. They didn’t see enough other people, he and Gen, especially she. Poets were always turned inward: “If I should die, think only this of me, that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”—the comment of who else but a poet? “When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears”—absolutely inexplicable except as the expression of a poet. He realized at long last that he very likely was not one, in spite of the distant German relative so poetic as to blow out his brains. In Anna Karenina, which he was reading for Comparative Literature (where after two days of Paradise Lost they had concluded their study of the Epic and turned to the Novel), the heroine is represented as thinking always of the same thing: her happiness and her unhappiness. That was a woman for you. Reinhart, on the other hand, a man, was at any given moment trying to define himself.
But he could never accept the passing of time. Half a year earlier he had been a soldier on European duty. As a boy he had never really believed he would grow up, though all the while waiting only to do so, for he never placed much value in juvenility. But how did one grow up? And where did the time go? It was already nine minutes, by his wrist watch, since Gen’s revelation; already the new situation was more feasible.
But when he returned indoors to admit as much to her, his wife was gone. Really gone this time, for he looked behind the partition. And the car had gone from out front as well, though he never knew she could drive. Either that, or both she and the Gigantic had been kidnaped. He must wait for either the divorce papers or a ransom note. Meanwhile, he went to the makeshift bookcase, at last put down The Confessions of a Gentleman, found the old zoology notebook wherein he kept his contemporary lists (without having excised the prewar material, in the early pages, on the euglena, a queer organism half plant, half animal, and armed with a built-in whip, which is how it gets its food: flogs its environment, so to speak). He turned past “Books Read,” impatient to enter Anna Karenina, but he was still only halfway through that novel; reached “Clients—June” and saw the names of all his Vetsville neighbors though no sales. He had flopped at real estate, as well as marriage.
In a supreme effort to find himself, he started a new list of “Women Had,” and counting his age as substantially twenty-two though that birthday was several weeks in the future, his computation came to one for every two years of his life, counting only the complete, standard act and not near misses, virtual victories, and substitute excursions, etc. Also not counting Gen; it seemed pornographic to list a wife.
For example, here was simply: “Anonymous English Girl Met in Pub in Weston Super Mare.” He had never learned her name, yet could still recall that of the pub: The Cock and Bull; the condition of her underwear: woolly, the time being February; her cigarettes: Goldflake; but of her person, nothing beyond a vague sense that like all such, she had been cheery.
Now here was another, one Veronica Leary, an Army nurse he had last been with some two-thirds of a year before; he could hardly forget that she was almost six feet tall, but he had lost all memory of her face! Then there was somebody’s wife, for whom it had been revenge against her permanent partner, and therefore while giving herself she had held her soul aloof: except at the groin, she and Reinhart remained very distant (thus in a way her husband, whoever he may be, had not been cuckolded). All sorts of options were represented in the names, or pseudonyms, of eleven girls; yet the list was far from comprehensive as to the relationships possible between man and woman.
For example, he had twice been desperately in love without ever “making love” to his sweethearts; while on the other hand he had at best neutral, at worst downright repugnant, feelings towards several of the persons on his list. Suddenly he recalled a shameful twelfth entry, an almost middle-aged cook, weary and coarse, from his prewar college-dormitory kitchen—for him the face-saving upshot of some jest.
Then there had been important experiences with girls he could have taken but never did, and time had taught him that some of these were among the most precious of his gains. A consummated love is grand, but one that misses connections is sometimes gl
orious, giving you an imaginative lien on the woman forever.
Thirteen: with the utmost reluctance he remembered that he had not always managed to avoid the kind you paid for; though, true, this had never happened while he was sober. The baker’s dozen was completed by a tart he had encountered when full of cider and wandering through the blackout in, of all places, an English town named Reading, where he had by inebriate error left the London train. He had been not in the least horny when accosted. Like everyone who has ever frequented a streetwalker, he assented to her offer because, ideologically speaking, it was witty and grotesque, being on the order of: “‘ere you go, Yank!” In this case the whole experiment was conducted in the shadows of the railway station. If there were some faces he could not recall, this face he had never even seen!
It is remarkable what you will do because of that which for simplicity’s sake might be called the possession of an external sexual organ—for it was not his belief that women, concave, would do nearly as much. He used to get involuntary erections on public conveyances, because of the motion, no doubt, but also owing to the presence of unknown women, whom however he had no wish to enter, being satisfied to know that he was equipped to do so if need be. There was no reason to believe that a woman could even understand this type of idealism; and for their literalness, as much as anything else, Reinhart pitied them.
“Believe me, knowing only your wife, whom you love, you will know women much better than if you had thousands of them,” says a character in Anna Karenina. Did Reinhart love Genevieve? He would have put his hand into the fire for her, but did he find her interesting? Guiltily he considered whether he should have asked her opinion of whatever the United Nations were doing. He used to jeer at the course in marriage relations offered at his prewar college, but should he have taken it? Perhaps she would like to have her own checkbook. She might be encouraged occasionally to borrow the car, give a bridge party, and gossip over the metaphorical back fence. They would read books together and discuss them, share radio programs, plan an education for the child to come. Going out to dinner would mean little to Gen since Reinhart did the cooking; however, a change of scene might prove salutary.
Home decorating was something women went in for; unless he read his psychology wrong, they considered the house an extension of themselves, rather than, as it was with men, a place to hang the hat. Except it was he, and not she, who kept the place neat. He might have interpreted this, with some self-damage, as effeminacy on his part were not his sexual appetites only too obvious. Speaking of sex, there had been an unfavorable implication in her gibe; he had perhaps gone at it too hot and heavy—he had thought that’s what marriage is for; maybe he was wrong.
All in all, they had both of them made mistakes. In future he must be more elastic, and she less secretive. That, he believed, took care of it, but as he nodded confidently towards the front door, he was already half mad with loneliness. He needed only one person at any given time to conspire against the world with, but he did need that one. Once you were married, not even a friend could fill the role: it had to be a wife, or perhaps a mistress; something to do with sex, though not in the narrow terms of a lay. A pity that when he was on the verge of important discoveries in this area, his wife had to leave him. Feeling stale, he made the fourth trip of the morning into the back yard. There was no place else to go, especially now that he hadn’t the car. Brooding had robbed him of time: the noon whistle groaned from town. Before Monday he had to finish Anna Karenina, two chapters in Psych, and a story in French about the inevitable M. et Mme Morel et leurs enfants, but he had lost his drive in those disciplines.
“Hi fella,” shouted someone across the baked-mud sea between Reinhart’s hut and the next. Without raising his head Reinhart knew the call issued from a neighbor so amicable that he had been avoiding him since moving in. Ordinarily he couldn’t endure people who were that friendly, feeling awful impulses to punch them suddenly in the mouth and see how they would take that: did affection without cause ruin them for reasonable resentment? But now it was as if heaven had sent succor.
“Hi, Fedder.” Reinhart waved to him in the fashion of De Gaulle re-entering Paris. That is, whatever his troubles, he still wished to keep a certain interval between them.
Olympian or not, the greeting more than sufficed for Fedder, who took it as license to troop over in a pair of tennis shoes that were gauchely white and too large, slapping the ground like the flippers of a seal. He also wore Army suntan trousers and a T-shirt stenciled uss TICONDEROGA, followed by the last name of a person not himself: his entire wardrobe was war-surplus.
“Hi fella,” Fedder repeated when he arrived at close quarters. “Buon giorno! How’s the lit major?”
Reinhart cupped a hand at his ear and opened his mouth, not putting his incomprehension into words because of a reluctance to encourage Fedder’s breeziness.
“English lit, no?” asked his neighbor. “Aren’t you in the Comp Lit that meets tennish at one-two-oh Coote? I see you every morning on my way to Econ. I’m pre-law.”
“But I don’t major in it,” Reinhart explained. “I guess you might say I‘m pre-psychiatric.”
“Working your way up to the insane asylum?” boldly joked Fedder; yet his face was shy and he looked at Reinhart’s toes; he wanted so much to be friends that his judgment was warped as how to go about it. Why is acceptance more attractive to him than self-sufficiency? Reinhart wondered, continuing in his analytic mood.
“Listen, Carl,” Fedder blurted, nudging Reinhart’s elbow with his own, his forearm very moist—indeed, Fedder’s whole person ran with sweat, and he whipped out an olive-drab handkerchief and mopped his neck—“Carl, I put you up for membership in the Vetsville branch of Citizens for World Government, and we won’t take no for an answer.”
“I’m afraid you‘ll have to,” Reinhart answered bluntly. He hated to be called by his first name as overture to some plea.
“You’re joking,” said Fedder. “You writers are always interested in the good of mankind.”
For a moment, Reinhart answered internally: That’s right, we are, and warmed himself at the candle Fedder had lighted for his exalted profession. For shame. He pinched himself and asked a question that skirted the issue.
“How do you know so much about me?”
“That’s all right how I know,” Fedder said cutely, simpering and with his head held on the bias. “Never you mind about that.” Fedder’s hair was clotted with damp and plastered to his scalp like that of the ad-buffoon who uses the greasy tonic rather than the product that attracts the broads. What lies were circulated in the interests of commerce! Fedder had the face of a Boston terrier, dressed like a vagrant, sweated like a glass of beer on a muggy day, and yet was intimate with Genevieve—how else would he have known about Reinhart?
Why, why, why? What have I left undone? Reinhart asked himself tragically. I was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, cheerful, thrifty, clean, reverent—he recited the Boy Scout Law in unprecedented self-attack (he had never been a Scout), and detected with the greatest alarm his growing taste for the wry and even the sour.
“That’s all right,” Fedder continued naïvely. “I know all about you. Now what about World Guv? And once we nail you for that, next comes the Vetsville Civic Committee. And have you thought about the AVC—you certainly wouldn’t be the American Legion type. The good people are in the majority here. We’ve a few Yahoos, but a lot fewer than most communities: 90 per cent of our male inhabitants go to college. What a chance for rational community planning, huh? If only we can incorporate on our own. That’s all that’s holding us back at present, but once we break loose on our own—well, we’ll have grad students in government for our town councilors, a philosophy major for our mayor, and each and every one of us will have a direct voice in public affairs, through a sort of Swiss canton arrangement. How about that: Why should we let politicians be contemptible? For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good men do nothing.’” He reapplied the A
rmy handkerchief to his sopping forehead.
What shall I do with my wife’s lover? thought Reinhart. Beat him, kill him, or exchange civilities in the European style? He sees me safely into the Comparative Literature class, then races here to my home. The insolent swine, to confront me like this! However, he is far from nonchalant; look at him sweat.
“How did you know I wrote?” Reinhart asked obsessively, for purposes of espionage disguising it as a light, simply vain enquiry. “Have you read my stuff?”
But Fedder, sucking on an empty pipe, had long left that subject. He shifted his feet, blankly said: “Pardon?” and returned to his own interests. “Have you and Jenny talked over the sewer?”
Now it was remarkable that Reinhart maintained his calm demeanor, but he did. Outwardly, he said only: “Mmm,” and squinted judiciously, in which he was assisted by the blinding sun, Fedder having maneuvered him around till it was directly in his eyes.
“In case she hasn’t fully checked you out,” said Fedder, hooking his thumbs through his Army-surplus web belt, talking through his pipe as it were, “when this was a CCC camp years ago, it was in remote country—five miles from town. Wow, that was roughing it! And those fellows had slit trenches and chemical toilets. Came W.W. Two—well, they didn’t need another reception center with Fort Budge so close, but if you remember your armed forces, you know the way they ran through supplies. Idea! said the bigwigs. Flashing lightbulbs, etc., as in the funny papers. A Q.M. depot! And so it was, manned by only a battalion, but they got their indoor toilets and branch to the main sewer, which by this time, the town having expanded to within two miles, went so to speak right by the door on its way to empty into the Mohawk River.”
Fedder went on talking while breathing in, which of course he did through his empty pipe, as if he were under water and that his sole communication with the air. “Now a sewer that is sufficient, say, for four or five hundred men—however large a quartermasters battalion is—”