Reinhart's Women by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

dip-mixes, because throughout my married years, which ended more than ten years ago, I was served them whenever we went to any neighborhood party.”
    “You’re showing strong feelings, Carl,” Grace pointed out. “Do you realize that you’re coming alive?”
    “Of course,” said Reinhart, “but it’s nothing new. You know I’m interested in food and cooking.”
    “O.K.!” she cried merrily. “I’m not debating with you, pal. I want to hire you.”
    “Hire me?”
    “You heard it!” said Grace. “Let me sketch it out. I’m convinced that all it would take to get some real action with the gourmet products would be to highlight them with personal demonstrations. Picture this, Carl: you’re in professional apron and big white hat, stainless-steel table on wheels, with whatever implements, gadgets, you need, hot plates, et cetera, preparing dishes that would make use of the products we distribute. Huh?”
    “You’re not joking, are you, Grace?”
    She spoke in brisk reproach: “Carl, I wouldn’t have time.”
    “But, Grace, couldn’t it be that the gourmet line is doing badly because of the recession and inflation?” It had been ever so long since Reinhart had had to think about business, and considering his own lack of success at what in a more gracious time was called “trade,” he did not miss it. Yet an archaic sense of what was quintessentially patriotic in his place and time—he had been one year old when Cal Coolidge said “The business of America is business”—impelled him to put this question.
    But Grace had no sentimental reluctance to put him in his place. “Carl,” she said, “don’t worry your little head about such matters. They’re my responsibility. Just stick to your cooking.”
    Reinhart supposed wryly that he should feel as insulted as women of yore had felt when so disposed of by men—or, to be precise, as militant female publicists insisted that women had felt (his own mild-mannered father had habitually done this to Reinhart’s iron-fisted Maw, and she was wont publicly to applaud him for it)—but at his age it was simpler to admit the truth than to uphold principles for which one had no genuine instinct. And truly, Reinhart had always hated and feared the process of buying and selling. When he was young he told himself that this dread was due to his being a poet, but by early middle age he had had to recognize that his collected verse had yet to be written, whereas he had tried several business ventures (gas station bypassed by a new superhighway, movie house when TV came in strong, etc., not to mention involvements in various schemes with arrant charlatans) all of which had failed: in balance he could have been called, and certainly was by his wife and mother, a complete flop. At which point he came to keep house for Winona and was saved!
    He was now talking to the woman who threatened his sole achievement. Why was he not more resentful? Because he had always known it would come. The irony was that he had assumed he would be deposed eventually by a conventional figure like a husband.
    “This is so sudden,” he said now. “I really do have to think it over. ... I say this without animosity to you, Grace: Winona and I have had a nice life together. I suppose having just me as an intimate hasn’t been sufficient for her, and that’s understandable. I’m after all in my mid-fifties. I want you to know that I have always urged her to get out and circulate—and when she told me, a while ago, about you, I was taken by surprise, I’ll admit. But I’m proud to say I was consistent: I told her one should stick with a good friend.”
    “That would be like you,” Grace said, and he was touched.
    “Thanks. But as to my going back into the world, that’ll take some deliberation.”
    Grace spoke in the tone of a football coach: tough-but-for-the-players’-good: “Dammit, Carl, you’re not an old man. As President you’d be a youngster. There’s more than time