“Don’t give me a bad time,” said Reinhart, throwing down his empty pop bottle. “Mrs. Fedder, this is my friend Splendor Mainwaring. Splendor, Mrs. Fedder.”
Splendor took off his white cap and nodded, staying on the bike seat.
Bee Fedder did a gracious thing: gave her slender hand to the Negro and said: “I’m glad to know you” without a trace of condescension.
He hardly touched it, but wryly called attention to their difficulty with the garbage. “Don’t let the park police see that. You’re supposed to use those litter baskets.”
“My friend is a writer,” Reinhart told Bee. “By the way,” he said to Splendor, “I still have a manuscript of yours.”
“Oh,” said Bee in that harsh, almost derisive tone a woman sometimes assumes to indicate she is intelligent. “Oh, is that true. I’d like to read it.”
Reinhart smiled evilly at his friend. “You must get the author’s permission.”
Fedder came up at that moment and shamelessly confessed to Reinhart that now his daughters did want ice cream, now that the man was actually here.
He ordered three chocolate sandwiches from Splendor.
“Right away, boss,” cried Splendor and leaned around in his seat to open the caboose-like refrigerator. “Here you go. That will be twenty-eight cents.”
Reinhart wished them all in hell.
“Twenty-eight?” Fedder complained, showing a new side of his character.
“Seven cents each.” Splendor shrugged. “I just work here.”
The children hung like dogs underneath Fedder’s elbow, looking up at the sandwiches he held; one had begun to melt in a long trickle of brown milk down his pale forearm.
“Oh,” he grumbled, and with his free hand paid him.
Splendor took quick, insolent stock of Mrs. Fedder’s perfect knees and rang his bell. “Eskimo Pies!” he suddenly bawled at the empty clearing.
“So long Splendor,” Reinhart said with no punctuation, as if it were the title of a musical comedy. “Keep up your writing!”
“Oh I will,” Splendor answered. He began slowly to pedal away.
“Huh?” asked Fedder, with a quizzical grin. “You know each other?”
Reinhart felt a strange pawing at his left leg. Looking down, he saw Fedder’s two-year-old wiping chocolate ice cream on his khaki trousers.
“What’s this about writing?” asked Fedder, sticking his wet muzzle in Reinhart’s line of vision.
“I must borrow it from you,” said Beatrice.
Splendor kept going, his jacket-back stained with perspiration, but at twenty yards, he looked back and shouted: “You better get the garbage out of that oven!”
“No, no, honey,” Reinhart was busy telling the tiniest Fedder. But he should have heeded his friend’s warning, for no sooner had Splendor vanished down the trail to the ball field than a surly park policeman came towards them on the same path. Having reached and inspected the clogged oven, he issued to Reinhart—to whom he went without hesitation—a summons which ordered its recipient to pay two dollars’ fine or defend himself in court against a charge of littering public property.
Chapter 16
“I say it was a stinking trick to pull on a friend,” Reinhart shouted into the telephone, his voice echoing through the iron house. “Or do you have the nerve to deny it?”
“Hold on, Carlo,” said Splendor at the other end of the line. “The juke box is so loud here I can’t make out a word. Let me close the door of the booth. Ah. Now what were you asking?”
He it was who had the brass to call Reinhart, rather than the other way around, for when Reinhart was really angry with a person he didn’t want to have anything to do with him; then too, he had never sought out Splendor. Third, the Mainwarings did not have a telephone.
But when he was pushed into it, Reinhart could talk turkey in respect to his indignation. He ignored Splendor’s diversionary tactics now and said: “I’m not the fool I look. No matter what you say, I accuse you of informing on us to the park police.”
“Oh really,” answered the Negro. “Of course it’s O.K. when the shoe is on the other foot.”
“Meaning what?”
“Look, Carlo, I know all about your scheme to resettle the population of the West Side in Andorra.”
Reinhart sighed in despair over the impossibility of getting things straight on the telephone. He could not explain about Andorra unless he had Splendor’s eye. Anyhow, it was pretty far-fetched to describe it that way, and while it was true that Reinhart still felt guilty about having shared the proceeds of the Maker’s sale of fake steamship tickets, they consisted of no more than the amount he had paid out, the night of the lecture, for the benefit of—Splendor Mainwaring, dope fiend, plagiarist, police spy, and false friend.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said into the mouthpiece. “But I’ll tell you this: betraying a friend is one of the baser crimes, and if I recall the Divine Comedy correctly, Dante agrees with me.” He slammed the phone into its cradle, then went to the sink and held his hot face under running water. It was the evening of picnic day, and his present anger had aggravated the aftereffects of the sun. He walked around the house, dripping dry; the night was stifling and he was alone.
He ended up standing before the window that looked towards Fedder’s. No sooner had he exonerated Beatrice from suspicion of infidelity than she gave him reason to suspect her all over again. Yet she stayed with Fedder, and in so doing observed the minimum obligation of a wife.
The telephone rang! He rushed to lift it and say: “Darling, how I’ve missed you.”
Splendor’s voice replied: “Frankly, Carlo, I think your humor is badly misplaced…. And if I wanted to speak of other ways in which you don’t measure up to your exalted idea of yourself—well, we all have peculiarities, but I for one am willing to overlook them and fasten my attention on a man’s merits rather than his foibles. That is, I try to cultivate a little tolerance. But for that, would I be calling you again?”
“For that matter,” asked Reinhart, “why are you? I distinctly gave you to understand that we are no longer on speaking terms.”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Splendor, and no doubt characteristically stretching his neck, swallowed. “We’re even again.” Reinhart had nothing to remark to this, not understanding it, so he waited for the Negro to continue: “You had it nicely planned! Get me out of the way and use my movement for your Andorra scheme.”
Hackles erected, Reinhart answered: “Of course that’s why I spent an hour talking up your courage; why I spent my own money to get you an audience; why I made you slip out the back window and run away—you see how childish you are?”
“You did it subtly,” said Splendor. “You know how to destroy a man’s faith in himself without his realizing what is transpiring. Suddenly, pssst, he collapses.”
“I refuse to reply.”
“Then,” Splendor went on, “why would I take heroin? I never saw any before that night, contrary to your stereotyped image of the Neg—”
“Watch yourself,” warned Reinhart.
“—wouldn’t have known how to use it, even; but a man suddenly darted from an alley, pressed the items into my hand, and vanished quickly as he had appeared. Distraught, ill, I did the natural thing.” It was really unfortunate that Splendor couldn’t find a use for his gifts—a better use, that is, than harassing Reinhart—for among other things he was an excellent narrator, and Reinhart was now sucked into asking: “Yes, yes, then what happened?”
“You informed the police.”
“You absolutely cannot believe that,” cried Reinhart. “You simply cannot…. But I’ll say this: I wish I had.”
The operator broke in at that point to announce the exhaustion of the time purchased by Splendor’s nickel; and Reinhart, whose reflexes were always amiable irrespective of what he was up to consciously, said quickly: “Give me your number. I’ll call you back.”
“I have only one nickel—is
that what you’re saying?” asked Splendor. “Now I should take your petty charity!” He violently hung up, giving his white friend a taste of what Reinhart had handed him earlier. It is not amusing to be on the other end of a slammed telephone.
Reinhart was so angry he thought he might break out in a rash, and when the bell rang again he lifted the instrument and poured through it a gutterful of abuse.
However, the caller this time was Genevieve, who waited patiently for the end of his tirade and, getting it, said with compassion: “Poor boy, you’re not off your rocker.”
“Gen!” Reinhart shouted lovingly from one part of his character, but his rage had been too recent for any kind of integrity, and the next moment he corrected her: “You always get things wrong. If you mean I’m nuts, then I am off my rocker.”
“I already excused you for that reason, but if you’re going to brag about it!”
“Ah, Gen, Gen,” Reinhart wailed pathetically. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Have you thought about your breath?” she responded in a nasty parody of a radio mouthwash commercial. “Carl, I just called to say I forgot my nail-polish remover. It’s the giant size, and it would be too bad to let it go to waste and buy another. Can you mail it? Put adhesive tape around the top so it won’t leak, then wrap the bottle in corrugated paper, then heavy brown. Address it Mrs. Genevieve Reinhart, care of Raven, 25 Hibiscus Terrace, for I haven’t yet made up my mind on you and me. But I must say you’re no help. By the way, we must work out a monetary arrangement: it’s half your child that I am taking calcium pills and drinking extra milk for….” She seemed to shield her mouthpiece, for Reinhart heard a faint “I am being tough, Daddy” after her last loud words.
He answered in angry nobility: “You can have everything I’ve got.”
“Because,” Gen went on in a deliberate, unreflective fashion as if she were repeating what someone was whispering in her ear, “I’d … hate … to take you to … court.”
“That,” said Reinhart, “is the coldest, crudest, most heartless statement I have ever heard. Excuse me”—he wiped the wet earpiece with his handkerchief—“And what it discloses is that you don’t love me and never did. And insofar as the polish remover goes, you forgot to replace the cap on the bottle and it has all evaporated.”
“Carl!” he heard her cry as he put the phone gently into the cradle—he could never slam it down on his estranged wife. Therefore he had nothing to reproach himself for; and despite his fortune’s being at the low-water mark, he had felt worse. All he asked was morally to have one up on the next person—well, it wasn’t really all he asked, but having become a victim, he might as well make the most of it.
Now to get to the homework without further nonsense. He picked up Anna Karenina in fake peppiness and hurled himself onto the couch. At nine o’clock the day was finally dying outside, and the lamp on the end table behind and above him already drew bugs, not mosquitoes yet but rather a sluggish, fat brand of gnat, which was inclined to fall on the book pages and expire of apathy, making little brown stains. No matter how pointless life seems, look at such a creature and feel purposeful.
Anna, in the chapter he had reached, was suffering from puerperal fever. It looked like curtains for her, and Vronsky and Karenin, lover and husband, had reached an understanding through their mutual grief, as people always do in books—Reinhart jotted a note to that effect, in case he was asked for a comment in class, and added: Compare Achilles and Priam at end of Iliad.
Karenin comes off best, being a man of principle. Reinhart was moved by his noble statement to Vronsky, and copied it down: “This is my position: you can trample me in the mud, make me the laughing stock of the world, I will not abandon her, and I will never utter a word of reproach to you.” If the truth were known, Reinhart identified with Karenin at this point, as he had earlier, at the time of Anna’s seduction, associated himself with her lover; but now Vronsky was at a loss, impressed by the “luminous, serene look” in Karenin’s eyes, and “did not understand Karenin’s feeling, but he felt that it was something higher and even unattainable for him with his view of life.” Reinhart also wrote this in his looseleaf notebook, in his own shorthand: “V. no underst. K’s feel’g but f. it higher and unattain’ for own life view.” Turning to it in preparation for an exam, he would find it incomprehensible.
Yet the great thing about literature, as opposed to science, was that if asked about a book you could make up something quite as appropriate as—perhaps even better than—the particulars you had forgotten. And a narrative got better and better as one’s memory of it receded, your distant Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible being as good as any here-and-now Hamlet.
Reinhart lay there on his spine, the book face down on his chest, insects circling the lamp, the metal vault of his cathedral rising on the left, making its apogee overhead, descending on the right. Could he have made Anna Karenina? This was truly the first salacious thought concerning a woman other than his wife that he had had since his marriage. He had never known a Russian broad, but no doubt women everywhere were the same in that they none of them understood history. Precedent was all: a known libertine, having laid everyone, could lay anyone. Women were afraid to oppose a trend. How magnificent, the first man to climb Everest would say, I am all alone up here! Whereas a woman in a like position would cry: How awful that nobody has ever done it but me!
He fell asleep from time to time, from which he kept sweatily waking up and shifting the weight of the book on his chest (Tolstoy wrote them heavy)—but he was startled when the lamp suddenly lost its balance on the edge of the table, to which he had pulled it at the outset, and fell upon his head. For a moment he believed he had been trapped in dreamland and had shot himself before he could get back.
However, he was soon distracted by footsteps upon the little porch and a worry that the visitor might fall off, break his neck, and sue the occupant, for the broken rail had not yet been mended.
“Hold on there!” he shouted for the purpose of establishing legal immunity. One moment he was a mad Russian and the next, his own father, who had an exaggerated concern for the responsibilities of a householder. He clambered off the couch and grouped towards the door, a little blind, for the lamp that fell on him had been the only illumination and he had looked right into it.
“Come in,” he said to the blur standing beyond the screen door. As she passed him, he recognized her scent. It was Fedder’s wife, her bouquet unmistakable: one of those exotic perfumes that erect the hairs of the nose—“Insane,” “Fiendish,” or “Disaster”—smelling rather like oregano in a base of suntan oil.
“Let me put on some lights,” Reinhart said, swallowing with difficulty.
“Oh, not for me,” she answered. “I hate glare: it is so scientific.” She still wore her picnic shorts, and was all brown leg.
Reinhart coughed viciously, to relieve the tension.
Her voice, which was normally regretful, became expectantly buoyant: “Are you sick?”
“No,” said Reinhart. He blurted out the truth. “No, I’m just ill at ease. What will Niles think when he looks over here and sees the place dark?”
She returned to melancholy. “He won’t mind.”
“Really,” said Reinhart. What made him even more uncomfortable was that he had the woman’s lines of dialogue and she the man’s. It seemed unfair that honor should make you effeminate.
“Won’t you sit down.” In his confusion he pointed to a straight-backed chair all the way back in the kitchen.
She pouted.
“I’m sorry.” He indicated the couch. She took it. “Just what did you want?” he asked, still standing.
“Couldn’t we just talk?” She threw her head at a beseeching angle. “Just talk. Tell me about spying.” She had sat down right on top of Anna Karenina; he hated that kind of insensitivity.
“What was Niles in the Navy?”
“Machinist’s mate, second class.” She found the book under her bottom and pulled i
t out, asking: “Is this good?” She riffled through the pages, too fast to read anything but slow enough to lose the fragment of torn newspaper Reinhart had inserted to mark his place: it fluttered behind the couch like a moth.
“I was wondering,” asked Reinhart, “whether I might offer you a drink of brandy—of Courvoisier, in fact. It’s just about the best. I can say that because it wasn’t my choice, though I paid for it. You see—”
“Yes,” said Beatrice Fedder, fixing him with her inquiet eyes, indeed staring him down. She was still wearing the puffy blouse and he suspected she might be flat-chested. Her legs, though, were exquisite and probably even better in high heels; she still was barefoot—in fact, her feet were rather dirty, one big-toenail ragged as a saw tooth.
Reinhart had broader tolerances for women than some men he had known, who were quick to see fat where bone was called for, and vice versa. Skinny girls generally had good legs; fat ones, nice breasts; every one had something—of course, that was always his credo. On the other hand, you sometimes saw a pretty face over thick ankles. There are all sorts of compensations, not all of them obviously to the good. Suddenly he realized that Gen when older might become dumpy and walk like a little squab. Such a woman lived in the next block up from his parents, who sometimes derisively watched her go by from behind the drapes.
Blaine Raven’s assaults on the Courvoisier had left hardly enough to wet one whistle, let alone two. Working in the dusk of the kitchen area, Reinhart watered the stock, counting on the strength of an expensive booze to retain some pretense of warmth. Wrong. On the test-taste the mixture proved insipid. A touch of sugar made it too sweet. A drop of Worcestershire no doubt helped the color, which however he couldn’t see in the dark, and did something odd to the bouquet. No point in testing more, for he had exhausted the possibilities of reinforcement.
“Mmm,” said Beatrice, when he had come back into the light and handed her a glassful over ice. Up went her thin eyebrows as she took a draft. “Mmm, good. You can always tell the best.”