Reinhart's Women

Reinhart was preparing brunch for his daughter and his new girlfriend. He and Winona had lived together since his divorce from her mother, ten years before. The friendship with Grace Greenwood was a recent development.

Grace was not due for another quarter hour, and Reinhart was preparing to blanch the bacon, which Winona had brought home, for it was she who supported them while he served as housekeeper. At that moment, the girl appeared in the doorway.

"Is this OK, do you think, Daddy?" She turned sveltely in her figured dress of turquoise, green and blue. With amber eyes and chestnut hair, and a person that was not less than exquisite in any particular, Winona was as lovely a creature as Reinhart had ever seen.

"Of course, Winona." But, in truth, the two of them saw eye to eye on almost everything, with the notable exception of food.

Winona had been a glutton until the last year or so of her teens, stuffing her then stout person daily with sufficient carbohydrates to sate the sumo wrestler she was on her way to resembling. But when she reformed, her efforts were not niggardly. In fact, what she had done was simply to reverse the coin and eat hardly enough to sustain life. Winona's dwindle in girth was accompanied by her gain in height, and by the time she had finished her 18th year, she stood 5'8" and she weighed 120, and in no time at all she had become a fashion model and supported her father in a style he had never known. Their apartment, for example, was in a high-rise overlooking the river, five rooms furnished with expensive blond wood and chromium and glass, and Reinhart had a kitchen full of appliances.

It was at this time that Reinhart had really begun to take serious interest in food, after having gorged on it mindlessly for half a century. But despite his efforts to prepare such delicious meals that small portions exquisitely flavored would fill the role earlier performed by mountainous servings of sweet and salty blandness, he could claim no great success with Winona. Nowadays, she simply ate almost nothing at all but wheat germ and yogurt. He supposed that it was in his interest not to feed Winona much. Yet cooking was the only thing in life he had ever done well.

The water was boiling and Reinhart plunged the little strips of bacon into it. When the boil returned from its brief setback, he reduced it to a simmer. Winona started away from the kitchen, and then she turned and stepped back. "Dad, I must say, you have not said much about Grace. What's she like? How does she strike you, really?"

Reinhart cocked an eye at his simmering strips of bacon. He turned to Winona. "To begin with, she, while not being quite as young as you, is even further from being as old as I. That is, she is not old enough to be your biological mother, whereas I could, technically speaking, have been her father, if just barely: She is forty." He frowned in thought. "She's a nice-looking woman, but what really matters is she's smart. I don't mean to imply that women aren't usually, but Grace has made a success in a man's world."

He raised his eyebrows. "Grace is all wool, no nonsense. Fact is, it was she who first asked me out. And why not? There we were, in front of the Mexican packaged foods--that's where we met, in the supermarket. 'Say,' she said, 'do you really buy any of this stuff?' She asked it so aggressively that I thought she might be hostile to it herself. 'Not much,' says I.

" 'I am really interested only in the Pancho Villa line,' she said, and she pointed at the cans bearing that label, which carry a picture of a Mexican bandit, or general, Villa himself, I suppose. 'I'm one of the guys who distribute that,' she said, 'and what I'm listening for is public reaction. The opinion testers are more scientific, but I like to get the street reaction on my own. Now, you look like a normal member of the public. Do you think this picture of a bloodthirsty-looking greaser would encourage you to buy, uh'--she chose a can at random and read the label--'uh, retried beans?'

"That's Grace's style, I'm afraid," said Reinhart. "She'll never get the mealy-mouthed award." He laughed heartily, though, in truth, he found that quality the least of Grace's attractions. "It turned out that she was an executive with this food-distributing firm, a vice-president, no less. When she found out I did the cooking at my house, she wouldn't let me go until I had given her a complete rundown on my choices of brands, the types of food I buy, the type of meal my family prefers and the rest of it." Reinhart gestured with his wooden spoon. "And that would have been that, I'm sure, had I not mentioned that I had a daughter who happened to be the foremost model in town."

Winona blushed. "Oh, Dad, come on."

Reinhart chuckled happily. "No, I'm afraid I was just a statistic until then. But I didn't mind, dear. I like nothing better than bragging about you. That was just two days back. We found ourselves having lunch in that restaurant in the shopping center that used to be Gino's." Reinhart winced at a series of unpleasant memories under the old management. "It's a better place now."

At that point, the doorbell sounded. Reinhart opened the door. This was but the third time he had seen Grace, and the first occasion on which he might have called her almost pretty. Something had been done to her hair, and her eyes had been skillfully made up. Although she was wearing a suit, as she had on their second meeting, a dinner date, it now seemed more subtly feminine, somehow: lace blouse underneath, a bit of jewelry, and so on.

"Welcome to the humble abode, Grace," said her host, with an expansive left wrist.

Grace controlled the shake, irrespective of the remarkable difference in fist sizes, and, peering around, she penetrated the living room. "It's hardly humble, Carl," she said in her brisk voice, "But then, why should it be?" She suddenly looked vulnerable, an unprecedented and, Reinhart would have said, a most unlikely phase for Grace Greenwood. She continued to walk about in a military stride.

"Won't you sit down?" he asked. "May I give you a drink?"

She produced an abrupt, barking laugh. "Anything that's wet!"

She strode to the windows and laughed again. "There's the river, huh?" But the view was not sufficiently riveting to remain there for a third second, and she turned and marched to the middle of the room.

Winona slunk almost silently into the room, but if Grace had seen her, it was through the back of her own head, for she, Grace, was still facing Reinhart.

"Aha!" he cried, perhaps too stridently, but he wanted to get beyond this purposelessly awkward moment. "Grace Greenwood, this is my daughter, Winona."

But Grace remained facing him. Was she deaf? Or had she actually suffered an attack of paralysis?

Meanwhile, Winona continued her sneaky approach, which seemed literally on tiptoe. She, as it were, rounded Grace's corner, for Grace had still not moved, and in a special low voice, one Reinhart had never suspected she could produce, she uttered only one word, "Hello," but put a good deal of force into that word and, having said it, she stepped back one pace, and put her hands on her sleek hips, and stared severely at the other woman.

"Winona," said Reinhart, "this is my new friend, Grace Greenwood."

Grace now emerged from her absolute fixity, but only as far as slow motion would take her. It seemed as though she might actually curtsy, but if so, she changed her mind. Instead, she glared at Reinhart.

This was the most remarkable display of something or other that he had ever witnessed. He found Winona's performance to be lacking in graciousness: This was not like her at all.

Alas, it was obvious that she and Grace made a poor mix. He would, of course, stop seeing Grace, but meanwhile, she was his guest and he would feed her.

"Winona," he said with a certain asperity, "I have to go now and work on the meal. Please be hospitable."

His daughter said obediently, sweetly, returning to the old Winona, "Oh, I sure will, Dad. Grace, won't you sit down, please?"

"Where?" asked Grace. She seemed bewildered.

Whatever the state of the world outside, everything made sense when Reinhart was with his pots and pans. He heated butter and oil in a skillet and quickly sautéed mushrooms. When that was done, it was time to poach the eggs in a perfumed bath of wine and stock and bacon and onions and garlic.

He buttered the bowl of a kitchen ladle and broke the first egg into it, held it over the bubbling broth and suddenly slipped it below the surface of the liquid. When the beginnings of the cloudy coagulation had formed, he withdrew the ladle, leaving the egg behind. It trailed some filaments. He gathered them in with a wooden spoon. One by one, he slipped in five more eggs, shaping each against itself.

He had opened a fresh bottle of the same wine that had been used for the poaching, and he had made a simple salad of washed and dried water cress without dressing. To follow was only a sorbet of fresh pears, made of the puréed poached fruit and egg whites. Some light sugar wafers. And no more to the brunch but Mocha Java with heavy cream. Too early in the day for the inky-black infusion of "expresso."

This meal represented Reinhart's ideal of great flavor and no bulk. He was pleased with himself as he carried the plat de résistance into the dining ell off the living room. He went around the corner to fetch Winona and Grace.

The door to the hall was open and the living room was empty.

Before he reached the doorway, Winona came through it from the corridor, scowling inscrutably. When she saw her father, she lowered her head for an instant, then raised it and said wretchedly, "I guess you're ready to shoot me."

Reinhart did nothing for a moment, and then, sighing, he embraced his daughter.

"Daddy---"

"I realize that you felt Grace would alienate my affections toward you," Reinhart said. "Don't think I'm criticizing you, dear." He laughed for effect, but the irony was real enough. "How could I, when you pay the rent?"

Winona made an unhappy expression: She hated him to mention that. She disliked his making reference to anything that could be interpreted as being personally negative. In that attitude, she was unique in all the family.

"Daddy," Winona began once more, "you don't---"

"No," said Reinhart, "of course I'm not angry. But I'm afraid that I feel (continued on page 224)Reinhart's Women(continued from page 120) responsible for what had to be an unpleasant experience for poor Grace."

"Daddy! You're just going to have to listen to me!"

"OK," said Reinhart. "I'm sorry, Winona. I didn't realize--uh, go ahead, please."

She stared at him for a while. Had he not known better, he might have believed her emotion to be self-righteousness: something he had never detected in Winona in all her life.

"Dad, I did not first meet Grace Greenwood in this apartment."

"You didn't?" Reinhart had a premonition that he should be seated.

"The fact is, I know her pretty well, you see."

"I see," said Reinhart.

His daughter grimaced. "But I don't think you do, really.... Anyway, that's why we acted so funny."

"Why couldn't you have just admitted that you knew each other?"

"Oh, Dad...." Winona took her hands away from her damask cheeks. It had more than once occurred to Reinhart, looking at her, that his daughter might singlehandedly inspire all the principal clichés that were applied to beauty: peaches and cream, silken, velvet, and so on. "Daddy, it's how we've known each other."

Reinhart looked toward the windows and enjoyed the glistening floor between the shag rugs: He had himself put that shine on the parquet, with real wax and a rented buffer from the True Value hardware store.

"We've been close friends for a while," Winona went on, biting her underlip. "I didn't quite know how to approach the subject with you, so she had the bright idea of meeting you as if by accident."

"But what was all the skulduggery about? Why should I object to your being friends with a bright, successful and prosperous woman like Grace?"

"Well," said Winona, "there was an idea, you see, of sharing an apartment."

"With Grace?" Reinhart almost shouted. "My gosh. That is some idea. You little matchmaker, you. Were you anticipating that Grace and I would get married, or would it be some up-to-date living in sin?" He was pretending to be in robust good humor, while all the time feeling a looseness at the core.

Winona was softly weeping. "Well, that was the reason, anyway."

"The reason for what, darling?" Reinhart's own eyes were moist. You could not call a life a failure when you produced a child like this.

"The reason why we broke up, Daddy. Grace says she can't go on unless we live together. Daddy," she said, "how could I ever leave you?"

Smiling with all the saintliness he could contrive, Reinhart did not hear the question. He was wondering how long he could conceal from this precious person, whom he loved with all his heart, that she would be the death of him.

•

Of course, Reinhart soon admitted to himself that he was exaggerating in his inner sense of high tragedy. For one, nobody had expired of shame in a good century. Then, sexual deviation had not been regarded by the enlightened as a disgrace since at least the fifth Century B.C., and in our time even the mobile vulgus had succumbed to a tolerance of variants. Nowadays, gay-pride spectacles were commonplace in our major cities. (Good heavens, must he someday salute as Winona and Grace Greenwood marched by?)

He was brooding on those matters as he cleaned up the dining room alter the brunch that had never been consummated. Winona had left.

By the time he had finished the kitchen cleanup, Grace had surely reached home, if, indeed, that had been her destination. He went to his bedroom, sat down on the bed and lifted the phone from the adjacent table. He was amazed to discover that without trying, he had learned Grace's number by heart. He must have had high hopes of some sort. Imagine being cut out, with a woman, by your own daughter!

He fingered the dial.

"Oh, Carl," Grace answered. "I'm sorry I had to run like that, but I guess Win has explained. It was unavoidable, I assure you, just one of those things, and shouldn't be taken as a reflection on yourself. You're a fine fellow."

Reinhart marveled. She was in total command, without a weakness or a doubt. On the other hand, his own situation, if judged according to relative degrees of power, had changed.

"Well, Grace, I might say the same for you! I just regret that you went away without a meal."

Grace grunted almost rudely. He suspected the regrets were all his own. But she spoke in a bright voice: "Listen, Carl, not even Winnie knows about this. I'm bifurcated like all of us: I really am interested in you."

For an instant, Reinhart did not attend to her meaning. But then he became aware of a new and even more beastly element in the woman. She was baldly confessing to be bisexual? She wanted to take on both father and daughter? Was he expected to be tolerant of this, as well?

Grace laughed curtly. "Head and heart!" she said. "I'm always the businesswoman."

Reinhart chuckled in relief: So that was the bifurcation.

Grace said, "Mind giving me your credentials?"

He cleared his throat. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, Grace."

"This cooking of yours. Where were you trained?"

Could he have heard her correctly? No one ever wanted to hear him on his favorite subject.

"Well," said he, swinging himself from a seat to a luxurious full-length stretch on the bed, "I have never taken a lesson in cookery. Years ago, when I was first married, I'd do a turn in the kitchen and maybe take one of those recipes off a can of something. Then---"

"Carl," Grace interrupted, "my idea was not to take you from grilled cheese to gourmet grub with all the steps between. The point is, you seem pretty knowledgeable about the subject. How?"

"Diligence," said Reinhart, "and caring."

"Come on, Carl," Grace said impatiently, "I'm in earnest. I'll tell you why in a minute, but first I want your story, as precise as you can make it."

Reinhart might have taken umbrage at her manner (where'd she get off, being so high and mighty, now?) had the subject not been that which was, after Winona, the dearest to him.

"One improves through trial and error," said he, "but the techniques can be learned easily enough, some of them on the TV cooking shows and others from books."

"Uh-huh," said Grace. "And you've only worked at home? You haven't cooked in a restaurant?"

"Never. I've never even thought of doing any professional work. I really cook for the love of it--and I use the word advisedly. Winona"--for a moment he had forgotten the situation; now he felt strange about pronouncing the name to her friend--"my daughter hardly touches her meals."

"Carl, none of that serves my point," Grace said rudely. "I'm not interested in the personal here, but rather in the public. You know Epicon, my firm. We're expanding in the gourmet area. It's my theory that we're missing some big bucks unless we reach the people who eat fancy food. That's no small market. Carl. Let's talk turkey: If Win moves in with me, where does that leave you? You told me you haven't had a business in some years, or a job."

"By your account, I sound suspiciously like a bum," he said with more wryness than reproach.

"Come on, Carl," said Grace, jollying him in a coarse fashion, "self-pity's not your game, old boy!"

What a grating woman! Why could not Winona have chosen.... But at 54, he should be done with asking questions of fate.

"The fact is that for many years it was my only game," said he, "but you're right about the 'old boy.' "

Grace said, "You're jumping the gun by a long shot in this day and age. But I didn't want to talk about dreary matters, believe me! Everything's going to work out beautifully. Now, here's my proposition." In a supreme effort toward charm, which with men, anyway, would not seem to be easily available to her, Grace said, "And if you don't take it, I'll spit in your eye." Trouble was, she sounded as if she well might.

"You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," said Reinhart, reverting to a time even before his own for this quotation, a favorite of his father's, who, however, always corrupted it in one way or another and sometimes combined it with "the whites of their eyes."

"I don't know whether you've noticed," said Grace, "the existing gourmet shelves in your typical supermarket don't get much traffic and, in fact, in some stores are downright seedy-looking. And this in the face of the greater-than-ever interest in the aforementioned gourmet cooking. Why? The simple reason is that the public is not aware of these products."

"That's not true at all," said Reinhart. With anyone else, he would have felt he was being rude, but, obviously, Grace was immune. "A lot of that stuff is absolute crap! Why buy ready-made sauces, like hollandaise and Béarnaise, when they're inferior yet expensive as hell and when, furthermore, they're quite easy to prepare from fresh materials?"

"OK!" 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, etc., 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."

"This is so sudden," he said. "I really do have to think it over.... But look here, I'm grateful to you for thinking of me!" He thanked her again and hung up. He would not go so far as to say anything about seeing her around with Winona.

Reinhart left his room. Ah, Winona had returned. Her keys and change purse lay on the little foyer table, and he could smell a flower scent. He called her name.

After a long moment, her closed bedroom door opened a crack. "Daddy?"

"The very man," said Reinhart. "What about something to eat?"

"Gee, I don't think I can," Winona said, opening the door sufficiently wide to display her head. She looked carefully at him. "Grace told me about the job. Dad, I hope you know I wouldn't say this if I thought it wouldn't be good for you: I really want you to take it. And if you think she got the idea to please me or something, you're wrong. She was already looking for somebody who would fill the bill. When she heard about you, she was interested, but she was really sold by meeting you and seeing for herself that you have a marvelous personality. You're just the kind of person who can charm the pants off those housewives."

Reinhart felt himself blush. The image was almost indecent for a man of his years--and also exciting, of course. But that his daughter should conjure it up was unsettling, even though she herself.... He asked himself a wretched question: Was she now exempt from the usual rules that governed the association of daughter and father?

"Yes." he said sardonically, "I'm notorious for driving women wild. Your mother could tell you that."

"Oh," said Winona, "by the way, Mother's back in town." She ran her fingers along the lapels of her terrycloth robe, as if this were information that he could accept casually.

There were days on which one was hit with everything at once.

"Has she got in touch with you?"

"Blaine told me."

"You know I can't decently discuss your mother with either you or Blaine...." He went into the kitchen but turned in the doorway. "If she's 'back in town,' then it's more than a visit?"

"I don't know. That's all he said. We were talking about other subjects."

Reinhart said, "I really shouldn't say much about Blaine, either, Winona, but I hope you're not too hurt if he isn't all a brother should be."

"Funny you say that now. He's nicer these days than he has ever been in all my life! I don't like to be cynical, but I do wonder if that's because of his trouble."

" 'Trouble'?"

She raised her hands. "I shouldn't have said that. He asked me not to. Gee."

"Better go the rest of the way, dear, as long as I know there's something I'm not supposed to know."

"Mercer has left him. She simply took off."

"God, how rotten for him." Reinhart made a doleful sound. "Your mother has come to look after the kids, then? I hope they get fed properly." Genevieve was an even viler cook, when she deigned to prepare food at all, than his late mother, whose only culinary technique had been frying to ash. Indeed, it had been the combination of those two women, between whom he had spent more than four decades, that had driven him into the kitchen.

•

Reinhart had been outfitted with a long two-tiered white-enamel table on wheels. On one level or another were implements of the batterie de cuisine: copper chafing dish, virgin pots and pans in stainless steel, a two-ring hot plate, a food processor, a portable mixer and various smaller tools, including that manually operated essential, the long-handled wooden spoon, invented no doubt by the original cave chef for the stirring of aurochs-tail soup.

This unit was placed in the most remote corner of the Top Shop Supermarket, the check-outs being diametrically in the ultimate southwest. But the manager, an elongated, even stringy sort of man with a chin that suggested inherent aggrievement, insisted that no other position was available.

It was obvious that Mr. DePau cared little for the project, which he tolerated only because of Grace Greenwood's arrangements with a higher authority in the Top Shop chain.

"Frankly," he said to Reinhart on the latter's arrival that morning, before the store was open to the public, "the gourmet shelf does not move, and it is my contention that it won't."

Reinhart had yet to don his apron and the billowing chef's hat that Grace Greenwood had insisted he wear. It had been Grace's only prima-facie requirement. He had been on his own as to which of the "gourmet" products distributed by Epicon he would choose for demonstration.

After some deliberation, he had chosen crepes suzette: a name known to all as the quintessence of gourmetism, a dish that was simplicity itself to prepare and a demonstration that could be given a dramatic character, for attracting an audience was the purpose of his job. The particular stimulus for his choice was an Epicon-distributed product called Mon Paris Instant Crepe Suzette Mix: a package containing two envelopes, the larger of which held sufficient powder, when added to a cup of milk, to make a dozen six-inch dessert crepes; the orange-colored dust in the smaller envelope, when mashed into softened butter, became the sauce in which the crepes were to be bathed.

When tested by Reinhart in his home kitchen, the mixture had yielded rubbery pancakes on the one hand and, on the other, a sauce the predominant flavor of which was markedly chemical, though it was obviously intended to be orange. He prepared several batches of crepes, and a number of bowls of sauce, each with another variation of the recipe, but no effort could alter the truth that the product was simply inferior as food and, at $4.75, a swindle as an item of trade, since aside from the chemicals, the packages contained, respectively, only flour and sugar.

At an earlier time of life, Reinhart would probably have presented these bald facts to the appropriate authority; but he was by now sufficiently seasoned to understand that a person like Grace Greenwood had not attained her success in the food business by a devotion to the principles of either nourishment or serious gastronomy. What he determined to do then was to make his own mixture, from the authentic materials, of course, the juice and peel of fresh oranges, orange liqueur and cognac.

Now back at his demonstration kitchen, he assembled the raw materials. His colleague, Helen Clayton, was arranging her pitchwoman's table. She was a robust person in what might be as late as her early 40s or as early as her late 30s, with a coloring of the type he liked least (sandy-red of hair, pale skin) and a self-possessed, even slightly hostile manner.

Earlier in his life, this was the type of woman who would have caused him most discomfiture, and perhaps he would naïvely have believed her seemingly otherwise unmotivated resentment to be caused by a lesbian leaning. But now it seemed likely that matters of relative power, not sex, were in question. Which of them was to be boss? It would be difficult for him to reassure her without being despised for his pains.

When Helen had restacked her little boxes of Instant Crepe Suzette Mix, he asked, "How should we go about this?"

She raised her eyes but not her face. "Huh?"

"You're the professional at demonstrations, aren't you? I'm a raw recruit." He spoke with a certain breeziness of voice: Obsequiousness would not be the note to strike.

She was no warmer as yet. "How long will it take you to make those things?"

"A few minutes, once the batter's ready and the skillet's hot. I mean the crepes themselves. Then to sauce them, only a minute or so more."

Helen winced. "You don't have a stack already made?"

"I thought of doing that," said Reinhart, "but the suzetting isn't all that much, just swishing them around in the sauce a moment or two and then folding them in quarters. Of course, the flaming adds drama. But I thought the demonstration would have more interest if I started from scratch, more or less."

Helen peered at his worktable and then at him. "You're not going to use the packaged sauce mix?"

"Uh, no."

Her eyes were fixed on his mouth. Her own lips were threatening to--yes, definitely--to smile. "You've got a lot of nerve."

Now he smiled in return. "You disapprove?"

She laughed outright. "It's not my affair, is it?"

But why was it so funny? Finally, he asked.

"I don't know," said Helen. She lifted one of the little boxes of instant mix and snorted. "Have you tried these?"

"Yes."

She protruded her lips and pronounced, silently, "Sh-it?"

He nodded. "I suppose I'm being dishonest---"

"Not unless we say you're using the mix," Helen said quickly. "But, look, this can be to our advantage. You show the real way to make the sauce. The crepes will be terrific, and those are the ones they'll taste samples of, right? Then I'll say something like, 'Well, that's the long way. If you want to do it the short way, here's the instant mix!' "

She had lost her coolness. They were coconspirators now. She was really quite a nice-looking woman, tall and full-bosomed.

"Yes, I guess that's fair enough," said he. "Makes me feel better, anyway. I hate to be dishonest about food; but, on the other hand, I don't like the idea of cooking anything that's lousy, merely so as to be honest."

Helen shrugged and said with a pout, "I'll tell you, I myself don't care. I like simple food. Anything fancy makes me sick to the stomach."

There were those who would seek admittance to heaven with no more formidable credentials than a lifelong record of eating beef and potatoes.

"Do you like to cook?"

"Hate it," said Helen. "Of course, we eat a lot of take-out. I can't do this all day and then go home and cook much at night."

"Who's 'we'? You and your husband?"

"Well...." Helen leaned toward him, as if to share a confidence; he sensed that she might have dug him in the ribs had he been close enough. "You didn't think I was one of them, did you?"

"Them?" The question was altogether honest.

Once again she made her lips prominent and silently mouthed a word. It was lesbian.

Reinhart averted his face. "No," he said, "certainly not." He had not yet had time to think of this phase of coping with the problem of Winona: He had first to deal with it himself.

In unwitting cruelty, Helen persisted. "Did you know she was? Grace, I mean."

He mumbled, "I guess so. But I don't much care." He tried to keep from sounding the defiant note.

"I've always kept away from them. They make me feel creepy. But Grace is all right to work for. I've done a number of jobs for Epicon, usually through her, and she's always been a perfect lady with me." Helen laughed coarsely. "But then, I doubt I'm her type. She likes them skinny, and she likes them young. You should see her present friend. My God, she's positively beautiful. I've seen her call for Grace after work in her car. I've seen---"

"Madam," Reinhart desperately called to the young woman, though she was still remote and was at the very moment bending low to poke into a frozen-food compartment, "would you like a crepe suzette?"

Futile as this was, practically--the woman could not hear him--it did serve to distract Helen from her theme.

She said in an undertone, "That's supposed to be my job."

"Sorry," said Reinhart. "I've got beginner's nerves."

"Aw, you'll be just fine." She considered him a buddy now.

All of a sudden, customers appeared in bulk. As he mixed his batter and poured his crepes one by one and turned them, stacked them when finished between precut squares of waxed paper, meanwhile bathing others in the hot sauce in the chafing dish, folding them into triangles and serving them to the members of his audience on paper plates, with forks of plastic, as he went through this sequence as smoothly as his batter flowed, Reinhart was conscious of a feeling that was unique in his more than half a century of life: For the first time, he did not feel as if he were either charlatan or buffoon. Thus, late, but presumably not too, was proved the wisdom of what in his boyhood had been conventional advice but which, alas, he had long ignored: Learn a trade.

And then, suddenly, their corner was devoid of humanity except for Helen and himself. Reinhart scanned the empty aisle, and then lowered the Grand Marnier bottle to the second shelf of the worktable, where he tipped its mouth toward a plastic measuring cup and poured out a drinkable quantity of the orange liqueur. He passed the cup to Helen, below the level of the tabletop.

She lifted it to her mouth and threw down its contents as though it were bar stock, then lowered the glass and said, "I thought you'd never ask."

Reinhart suppressed a wince. He liked delicacy in a woman. Not to mention the fact that Grand Marnier was inappropriately drunk in a rush.

But Helen was pushing the glass across his counter and leering significantly. He felt he had no choice but to offer her another. She laughed in her hearty style. "Say, Carl, if worst comes to worst, we'll just have to drink up the booze, so the prospects aren't all bad."

He asked her for the time, and then he invited her to have lunch with him.

A certain quick transformation in how she thought of him could be seen in her eyes. She looked at her watch and said, "Eleven-twenty!"

"Can it be?" asked Reinhart. "We haven't done much business, but we've got through the morning."

Helen said, with what seemed a hint of shame, "I'd like to take you up on the invitation, but I can't."

"Sure," said he. "Some other time."

"I'll make it up to you." She spoke in an intense whisper. It was a strange thing to say, and an odd style of saying it, and whatever the intended significance, Reinhart was all at once aroused. This happened seldom enough to the sedate middle-aged gentleman he had become.

He turned quickly back to his work. The cooked-crepe supply was not especially low--the stack held at least a dozen--but you could never tell when they might have another run. He put his iron skillet on a burner of the hot plate and turned up the heat. In his right peripheral field of vision he saw a lone, cartless shopper approach from the top of the aisle.

"Carl?"

He had actually recognized her at the instant she had come into sight, and he furthermore had done so from the corner of his eye. But when you had lived with a woman for 22 years, it was no great feat, even a decade later, to see her through the back of your head.

He caught himself just as he was about to burn his hand, instead moving it deftly to take a paper plate to the chafing dish and there choosing a hot crepe. He spooned extra sauce upon it and presented it, with plastic fork, to the mother of his children.

"Free sample," he said. "Bon appétit, Genevieve."

•

It was typical of her to ignore the out-thrust plate.

"Carl," she said again, and neither time was it a greeting, "we have to talk."

Reinhart continued to hold the crepe toward her. He began again, in the proper style. "Hello, Genevieve. It's been a while. How have you been?"

At least some of his shock was due to her altered appearance. When last encountered, she in her early 40s, he in the middle of his fourth decade, Genevieve had been the sort of woman who could be termed handsome: Her features were well cut, with no ragged edges; her eye was clear, her skin uncreased, her hair of a uniform color, her figure as fit as if she were ten years younger.

But now she was not simply a faded snapshot of herself of a decade past; she was the worn and cracked photograph of someone else entirely. Reinhart found he could recognize her better from the corner of his eye than straight on. It would have defied his powers to say in precisely which respect she had not changed; e.g., the cartilage in her nose seemed to have undergone a softening; her eyes flickered behind what strangely suggested peepholes cut through inorganic material rather than living skin; her hair was arranged significantly to lower her once high brow. Not to mention that she was very thin--and not in Winona's sense, the willed emaciation of chic. Genevieve looked as though she simply had not had enough to eat in recent weeks: Her complexion was a mixture of yellow and gray, her posture was none too steady, her clothes were too large.

Reinhart now found himself urging the crepe on her as emergency nourishment, as one would extend warm soup to the starving. And he was joined by an ally.

"Go ahead, ma'am," Helen Clayton said encouragingly, walking toward Reinhart's worktable. "It's free!"

"Get rid of her," Genevieve told her ex-husband, without so much as a glance toward the other woman. "I told you I wanted to talk."

Despite her current disguise, which could have inspired pity, Genevieve's stark spirit was all too familiar.

Reinhart retracted the crepe. Helen shrugged in good-natured indifference and turned away.

His ex-wife continued to stare at him.

At last, he said, "I can't deal with personal matters until I'm off duty."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Genevieve asked, for all the world as if she genuinely did not understand.

"I'm working here. This is a job, to promote the sale of a crepe mix." She frowned. Had she turned mentally incompetent in some fashion? "I'll meet you for lunch if you like."

"Lunch?" Her stare lost coherence. "Oh." She returned her eyes to his. "I'm not looking for a handout."

"You're hardly being offered one," Reinhart answered in a level tone. "I assume you've got something serious to talk about, if you bothered to look me up here. And if so, then lunchtime would seem to be the moment to talk about it, and I at least will be hungry then, having worked all morning."

"All right," she said, "noon." She filtered through the shopping carts.

Reinhart turned to Helen. "I suppose you wonder who that woman is."

"What woman?" asked Helen.

"You're being too diplomatic." He smiled sadly. "But I appreciate it. She's my ex-wife. I haven't seen her in many years."

Helen shrugged and then smiled in return. She had a remarkably sweet temperament.

"Well," he said, "I've got my companion for lunch, and I'm not looking forward to the occasion." He rubbed his chin and added, on what was really an innocent impulse, "I'm sorry it won't be with you."

Helen swallowed visibly. Her reply had a certain intensity, an undue earnestness. "I should be able to make it right after work, if that's all right."

Again he was taken by surprise, but he felt he must apologize. "Oh, I didn't mean---"

"Listen," said Helen, "I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it." More shoppers were coming; she turned to deal with them.

Reinhart poured and cooked more crepes, served them to smiling women. This was more attention than he had got from the female population in decades.

But what did Helen mean? What would she "be able to make right after work"? But more importantly, whatever, why was he apprehensive? What a tame old fellow he had become!

Finally, the batter he had brought from home was coming to an end, and he was about to ask Helen for the time when he saw Genevieve rounding the corner at the head of the aisle. He served the crepes--of which, luckily, there were two more to divvy up than the number of customers who awaited them--and then addressed Helen:

"I guess we can break for lunch now, huh?"

"Sure; have a nice lunch." He was reluctant to leave her company, especially to join Genevieve. He realized that he was thinking of Helen as his protector! But she lost no time in leaving.

On joining Genevieve, he took the initiative. "It's been a good ten years, hasn't it?" He began to walk up the aisle.

She merely shrugged. Time apparently was of no import to her.

Her stride had altered since the old days. It was hard not to see it as a trudge.

They turned at the head of the aisle and went along parallel with the endless shelves of products baked from dough and packaged in cellophane. "I didn't come to talk of old times," said she. "And I don't want any special favors. I didn't come for myself."

"I didn't think you did," said Reinhart. They reached the front doors, which swung open automatically when their weight reached the mats. Across a block of parked cars was the restaurant he thought he'd head for, a place called, merely, Winston's. He simply liked the name. The façade was mall-banal, and he knew nothing of the cuisine, but at least it was not called by some term that evoked unpleasant gastronomical anticipations (like Old something, or any name in the diminutive).

Nor did the place immediately offend upon entrance. They were seated by a young woman who was civil but not falsely enthusiastic. She led them to a table capacious enough for two more persons. The tabletop, though not made of wood, was at least not of mirror gloss, and the disposable mats were not imprinted with patriotic lore, maps of the region or little-known and useless facts intended to entertain. The cutlery was clean and of a goodly heft, and the napkins were of paper but thick and wide.

Reinhart asked Genevieve whether she wanted a drink.

She sat rigid, both forearms pinning down the prone menu. "No," she said. "In fact, I don't really want lunch. I don't want anything from you."

"Having taken it all" is what he might have said at some earlier time, just after the divorce.

Reinhart opened and scanned his own copy of the menu (which was unsullied by thumbprints, grease spots or catsup drippings). Wonder of wonders, there were other foods than shrimp and steak and prime ribs. For example, there was fresh ham. There was meat loaf. There was Irish stew! Reinhart had a good feeling about this place, though, of course, the only proof would be in the eating. He looked at Genevieve over the bill of fare. "You really should eat something."

For the briefest instant, she showed a look of vulnerability, such as he had never before seen. "I'll just have coffee, Carl," she said, and perhaps it was his imagination, but he detected the hint of a softer note than he had ever known her to sound. Suddenly, as if warm water had been poured on him from above, he felt flooded with pity.

He leaned forward and asked, "Are you OK?"

But she bridled at this. "I'm not the problem." She could not resist adding, "I never was."

The waitress came then. Genevieve would not budge from her lonely cup of coffee, but Reinhart had put in a solid morning of labor. He asked whether the stew was of lamb; it was.

"I don't suppose you have Guinness?"

But surely they did. The waitress was a mellow-voiced young woman with neat hair and a clear complexion.

"All right, Gen," he said when they were alone again. "I realize you're showing great patience.... You want to discuss Blaine and Mercer's problem, I'm sure. I don't know what I can do."

Genevieve pointed a finger at him. "Don't worry about our son and daughter-in-law," said she. "That's no big deal."

The waitress arrived with the cup of coffee and Genevieve pushed it aside without tasting it. "It's your daughter. My God almighty, to have something like that in our family. I could just imagine what you'd be saying now if I had raised her. But she's lived with you during these ten years."

"That's right," said Reinhart, "and I'm very proud of her. She has been a wonderful daughter and I love and admire her."

Genevieve's face had become ever more masklike. "I always wondered why she wanted to live with you after the divorce, leave her nice home and room and all, her mother and brother. I really resisted accepting the loathsome suspicion that you and---"

"No, Genevieve," Reinhart said with kindly firmness. "No, you don't want to pursue that line, whatever the malice you still have toward me. No, I have never had a sexual connection with my own daughter. I realize that incest is the current fashionable subject with the quacks of popular psychology and the hacks of TV, but Winona and I would never make case studies."

At that point, the waitress brought him a mug of almost black liquid, surmounted by a good two inches of yellow foam: They knew how to pour Guinness here!

"The fact is," he said to Genevieve, "Winona is doing fine. There's absolutely nothing to talk about with regard to her, unless one wants to praise her for becoming a success. But Blaine is in trouble."

Genevieve breathed with effort and seemed to suppress a cough. "Mercer's just a bit high-strung."

The deft waitress brought his Irish stew. The aroma was the sort that expunges all forebodings. He sat there for a moment while the fragrant vapors warmed his face.

"Gen, why not order something to eat? If you don't feel so well, how about some soup? Or eggs in some form?"

She pulled her black coffee to her and looked bleakly into it. "It's not healthy to eat when you don't feel hungry," she said, and added, with a new vulnerability, "Ask anybody."

"Your coffee's probably cold by now," Reinhart said.

She became the old Genevieve for an instant. "You just stuff your own face. Don't worry about me! I'm doing just fine. I wouldn't be back here at all but for the fact that my children need me." She suppressed another cough.

Reinhart was quite guiltlessly hungry, for the best reason in the world, and with unclouded pleasure he forked up a plump piece of meat and put it between his lips.

"This Irish stew is really first-rate," said he. "Who would have thought that such a place could be found in a suburban mall?"

He told Genevieve, "I doubt your main purpose in looking me up was to talk about Winona." He did not add what he believed to be the truth: that she had no interest whatever in her daughter, irrespective of Winona's sexual arrangements.

"I expected to be insulted," Genevieve said, and took him by surprise when she smiled in a saintly fashion. "And I guess you know it's not easy for me to turn the other cheek, but I'm willing to try, Carl. I understand a lot more than I used to. I got out into the world. I spread my wings."

He continued deliberately to eat the lovely stew. "Yes, Blaine has kept me informed. I know you did well in Chicago, but it was no surprise."

"What's that mean?" she asked suspiciously. "Are you making fun of me?"

Reinhart wearily shook his head. "You'll simply have to accept literally what I say nowadays. I always thought of you as being extremely good at whatever you tried."

She blinked, though whether she had really been appeased was hard to say. She rubbed her hands together. "I doubt you'd include being a wife in your list of my successes."

Reinhart had finished his stew. Now he took the last drink of stout. "I'd be the worst authority on that, considering the kind of husband I was."

"Aw," Genevieve said, "you weren't the world's worst."

This was a sufficiently unrepresentative utterance to distract him from his thoughts of food. "Good God, I wasn't? You could have fooled me."

"Now, now," Genevieve said, waggling a finger at him. She touched her hair behind an ear. "The thing is, we were so young, Carl. So god-awful young. We hadn't lived long enough. There was a great big world out there that we didn't even suspect existed."

She let a moment pass and then said coyly, "I've been waiting for a compliment on my slender figure. Don't you think I'm pretty fantastic for a lady of my age?" She pursed her lips, leaned forward and added, sotto voce, "I had a little help with my face, of course."

Reinhart made a neutral expression, presumably: He could not have characterized it further without a mirror. He suddenly saw the light. "You mean plastic surgery?"

"I'd only admit it to you, Carl. Nobody else knows. If I do say so myself, it looks completely natural."

Poor devil. Reinhart realized that he could probably never be matter-of-fact with regard to Genevieve: She could not fail, her life long, to make him unhappy in some way, even if only in compassion.

"Oh, right," he said, "quite right. You've managed to keep your youth, Gen, but you should be careful not to diet too much. It's not healthy. I tell that to Winona all the time, but I feel I'm talking into the wind. But at least she does stoke up on vitamins. I must admit she's never sick."

This turn of subject met with little favor from his ex-wife. She sniffed disagreeably before resuming her favorite theme. "I don't mind saying that I've fought back against adversity and held my ground. And yet I've never become cynical. Believe me, Carl, despite my sophistication, there's still a lot about me that can still remember that young girl who conquered your heart."

For a moment, he was nonplused. Had she learned about his 1968 "affair" (such as it was) with Eunice Munsing--and approved? ... No, she was talking about herself. He should have understood that from the loving intonations.

"I'm sure there is, Genevieve." He picked up the check. The damages were not severe. Winston's was not out to punish its patrons. He was definitely pleased with this restaurant.

"Don't you get it even yet, Carl?"

He was being stared at with increasing intensity. He hated that in the best of times. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Why, sure I do, Gen," he said with all the amiability at his disposal. "You wanted to show me how great you look and how well you're doing. I'm glad you did. We'll do it again sometime, now that you're back in the area." He found his money and placed a tip on the table. He was aware that Genevieve had stayed where she was and was making no move to depart. Nevertheless, he turned slowly in the direction of the entrance and began, as it were, to mark time.

"Carl."

"I'm afraid I've got to get back to work, if you don't mind. It's my first clay on the job. It's very gratifying to me; I'm self-taught as a cook, you know. I've gone quite a ways beyond the meals I used to make when we were all together."

"We could be all together again," said Genevieve in a low, penetrating voice, a kind of stage whisper.

Standing there in a crowded restaurant, he thrilled with horror. But at last he managed to say, "We really must do this soon again."

Now she cried aloud: "You fool, you Lovable fool, can't you see what I'm saying?" The polite eaters at the nearest table pretended not to hear.

Reinhart foresaw that her next speech might be at sufficient volume to command the attention of the entire room, unless he could placate her with an immediate response. She was quite capable of shaming him publicly, on his first day of work. He thought of something even worse: She might pursue him into the supermarket itself!

"Come along, Gen," he said, trying for a devil-may-care grin. "Let's take a walk."

Wondrously, this worked. At least she left the table. Now the nearby people decided to abandon their discretion and gawked rudely. Reinhart hoped no one who had seen him cooking crepes would recognize him now. That's the kind of thing you could not control once you went among the public. But it bolstered him to think of himself as a celebrity whom everybody was out to get the goods on.

Once they had paid the cashier and passed through the door, he tried discreetly to break Genevieve's hold on his forearm, but she only took a firmer purchase with her talons. This was the woman who, ten years before, had derided and demeaned him in all the classic ways and perhaps invented a new one or two. There had been a time when a moment like this could have occurred only in a desperate fantasy. She was abasing herself before him! He should see it as a triumph. But these reversals traditionally fail to happen at the right moment: When your adversary is at last at your mercy, he is no longer the proper object of revenge.

Moving decisively, Reinhart lifted Genevieve's fingers off him.

"I have to say goodbye," he said with the same firmness. "I'm due back at work."

She was leering at him. This could not have been a successful expression even when she was still pretty. Now it was ghastly.

"Hell," she said in a husky low tone, "you got time." She came close and dug at him with an elbow. "Want to go to a motel?"

"I'm sorry, Gen. You see, I've taken a vow of chastity. It's a religious thing."

A piece of rank cowardice, to be sure, but it was the best he could do on short notice; and if he stayed longer in her presence, he might lose all responsibility for his actions.

As he walked away, she cried in a voice that sounded as though it might have come from a loud-speaker, "You pansy!"

She was really broadcasting her age: That had been an archaic term for ever so long.

•

It was not to be believed. No sooner had he gone back into the world than he encountered his old nemesis. Fate always arranged it so that Genevieve was there to hamstring him at the beginning of any race.

A white Caddy passed him, then came 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 car accelerated away. Helen came to Reinhart. Never had he been so glad to see anyone.

"Hi, partner," said Helen, who was a significant presence even upon a flat sweep of blacktop, and then she linked her arm with his, but jovially and not in the raptorial fashion of Genevieve.

She cried, "Back to the old assembly line!"

He knew no serious reason why he should have found Helen so reassuring, but he did.

Already they seemed not only old friends but comfortable lovers--if there were 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.

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 toque blanche. 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.

"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. 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.

"Listen here," Reinhart said to DePau, moving toward 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...."

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.

DePau handed Reinhart a telephone handset.

"Hello," said Reinhart. "Grace?"

"Carl, I think we'll wind up the Top Shop demo, OK? 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 ... OK, 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."

Reinhart and Helen emerged onto a potholed patch of blacktop on the southern side of the building.

"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.

In the same good-humored way, she said. "Some woman called up DePau and bad-mouthed us."

"What?"

"Said we were drinking in public and pawing each other."

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.

"Should we take both cars?" she 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 brands. Helen's chariot looked as though it had been designed for the sheer purpose of squandering fuel.

Reinhart slipped in. Helen started the car, making a noise like that of a dishwasher within which a glass has broken, and having driven no more than 100 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 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 little 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 consumed even more space than the name asserted. Beyond the malls began a sequence of motels.

In among the local examples of the famous chains was a simple, almost austere rank of discreet 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.

"This is real private, Carl," she said 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 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.

"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?"

Helen raised her hands. "Listen...."

"Well, I'm not." He wondered whether he might have been too defensive.

"It's OK by me, whatever," she assured him. No doubt she meant it: Generosity seemed a basic trait with her. But it was evident that her disappointment was still greater than her tolerance. She smiled wryly and put her car into reverse.

"Wait a minute." Reinhart said this on an impulse, surprising himself. "It would be a shame to waste a perfectly good afternoon."

But perhaps it was in the interest of pride that Helen continued to back out of the slot down behind the motel office.

"I think the moment has passed, Carl," said she, though in as friendly a manner as ever.

"The idea was terrific. I'm sorry I didn't understand it at first."

Helen was now driving up the ascending slope, toward the highway, the old engine laboring. "I think you were kind of shocked, that's what I think."

"I may have been," Reinhart confessed. "I guess time has caught up, maybe even passed me in some respects, Helen. It's funny when you realize that has happened."

The car had reached the entrance to the highway by now, but Helen stayed where she was even after a gap appeared in the traffic.

"Is that your trouble?" she asked. "Is that all?"

Reinhart was a bit annoyed by her scoffing, kind as he knew she meant to be. "It's a real thing," he said, "feeling your age."

"Gosh," Helen said, "I hope I didn't make you morbid. Heck, I've got at least one friend who's older than you, and he still has a lot of fun." She looked at him in what he took to be compassion, and his pride was affected once more.

He said seriously, but with a smile, "Sorry, I really didn't intend to throw myself on your mercy." A thought came to him. He looked back at AI's and saw what he wanted: an outdoor telephone at the corner of the office. "I'm going to use that phone. You want to stay here or back up?"

She did the latter, and he got out and went to the booth.

He dialed his home number and waited until it rang uselessly a dozen times. He remembered that Winona had a modeling assignment that would occupy her all day. Furthermore, the job was about 30 miles from town, at the warehouse of a furniture firm. No doubt she would be depicted sitting at the foot of one of the beds currently on sale. Reinhart suddenly wondered whether there were men who might find this an erotic image.

He returned to Helen's old car.

She immediately asked, "Is the coast clear?"

"Huh?"

"Didn't you just call home to see if anybody was there?"

Reinhart laughed in admiration and a certain embarrassment. "Woman, you scare me! Can you always read minds?"

Helen joined in the laughter. She started the engine.

Reinhart said, "I've never done this before, but I don't see any real reason why it wouldn't be OK." In truth, he (concluded on page 246)Reinhart's Women(continued from page 242) could see several reasons, foremost among them being that he had always considered the apartment Winona's, where he was essentially a guest. "See, I live with my daughter. But she'll be working for several hours yet."

"If she's a good girl," said Helen, driving forcefully along the highway, "she won't begrudge her dad doing what comes naturally, I don't think."

When they reached the apartment building, Reinhart directed Helen to enter the underground garage and find the parking slot that was assigned to Winona.

They boarded the elevator at the level of the garage.

Helen pulled his face to hers and kissed him.

The experience was unprecedented for Reinhart, as far as he could remember. Men of his age and situation were not routinely embraced in elevators.

The door slid away, and they deboarded on the fourth floor. Reinhart was in an equilibrium between wanting vainly to encounter a recognizable neighbor and hoping to sneak in and out undetected. That is, he had a perfect right to bring a woman home, on the one hand, while on the other, furtiveness made for more excitement. He had never gone this far with any nonprostitute of whom he knew less.

But they were alone in the hallway as he unlocked the apartment door.

"This is real nice," said Helen in the foyer.

"There's a river view," said Reinhart.

Suddenly, he saw that she was now as uneasy as he was, rather, as he had been, for this state is oftentimes relieved when it is seen as shared.

He put his hands around her from the rear and lowered his face into her neck. How long had it been since he had last done that sort of thing? This was much too simple an embrace to try on a whore, and too immodest. The complicated ecstasies can easily be purchased, but nobody sells an honestly warm caress.

She took away his hands, but only to pull him by one of them into the short hallway that obviously led to the bedrooms. Her taking of the initiative, in his domicile, excited him. He had always been aroused by sexual rudeness or arrogance on the part of a woman, though in early life he had never understood this.

Until this moment, his bedroom had been a monastic cell. He went to the buttons of Helen's blouse, she to his belt buckle. He would have lingered at the task, but she was impatient, and they were both undressed in no time at all.

He thought of something. There was an outside chance that Winona might come home early; accidental events were always possible. He stepped across his bedside rug and began to close the door. He could hear Helen draw the sheets over herself. Her body was as opulent as he supposed: He was worried about doing justice to it.

Something hard to identify either by outline or by movement entered the hallway. A shadow is exceptionally fearsome when one is naked, and for an instant, Reinhart shrank back. But then he remembered Helen, whom he was obliged to protect as guest and as woman, and he projected his head through the doorway.

The figure had reached him. It was identifiably human by now, and smaller than he, but bent as he was, he looked into its face. It was Mercer, his missing daughter-in-law.

She supported herself with two hands on the doorframe and made a strenuous attempt to speak coherently, but succeeded only in breathing on Reinhart. That such exhaust fumes were not colored blue was a wonder.

"Mercer," said her father-in-law quietly. "You've given us all quite a scare."

"Wwww ... " said she, and spun suddenly about and staggered back up the hall, turned the corner and soon fell.

"I'm sorry," Reinhart said to Helen's face on his pillow. "That's my son's wife. I'll have to do something about her." He opened the closet and took his robe from the hook behind the door.

"Some days," Helen said cheerily, "are like that." She climbed out of bed. Helen was really something to see, and she was lacking absolutely in false or perhaps even real modesty.

"Can't I help?"

"I don't think so," said Reinhart. "But thanks. Listen, I really am sorry."

Helen for the first time turned inscrutable. "Better get out there," she said. "Don't worry about me."

She dressed and left, and Reinhart pondered his fate. It occurred to him that some member of his family, small as it was, had been available to ruin every effort he had made that past week.

"Her body was as opulent as he supposed: He was worried about doing justice to it."