“You’ll get every penny of it,” said Reinhart. “My guest is Mr. Robert Sweet, the well-known tycoon. We are discussing a deal that will be very profitable to me in the near future.”
Gino’s breathing obscured the racket of the air-conditioner. He grasped a bronze paperweight, done in the form of an alligator or crocodile, and broke it into two more or less equal portions. At length he said, as if to himself: “So I kill him and go up for murder. Am I really better off?” Again he closed his eyes, and he whispered hoarsely: “You don’t take another bite, see? You don’t take a sip of ice water or wipe your hands on my napkin. You don’t grab a toothpick or after-dinner mint on the way out. And you leave in five minutes flat.”
Reinhart gathered himself together. “All right, Gino,” he said. “If you want to be that way, I’ll spare mysef a lot of heartburn.” As he passed through the doorway, one half of the bronze crocodile or alligator dented the frame, very near his right shoulder, with the force of a bullet.
Back at the table he said to Sweet, who he saw with relief had finished the meal, “I’m terribly sorry, but a call just came in reminding me of a one forty-five appointment and it is past that already.”
While Sweet, as promised, took care of the bill, Reinhart revisited the toilet and, choosing one urinal to the right of “Chuck’s,” inscribed upon the clean wall above: GINO IS A CROOKED GUINEA. The phraseology, somewhat out of date and thoroughly contrary to Reinhart’s soul—his best friend in the Army had been an Italian-American, and as irony would have it, Reinhart had once joined him in beating up a guy who called him a guinea—the epithet was chosen with a sense of what would wound Gino most to find on his own toilet wall, revenge being futile unless it strikes bone.
Just as Reinhart finished, another customer checked into the stall next door and, reading “Chuck’s” message, stared at Reinhart’s disappearing ball-pen and assumed, you could tell from his steely irises, that Reinhart was the Phantom Faggot.
It would have been useless to explain. Reinhart joined Sweet on the square mile of asphalt outside, the apron of a gigantic shopping center which trapped and intensified, by solar reflection off the white and pastel-colored façades, the tropical heat of July in southern Ohio, to which was added the thermal exhausts of a thousand cars as well as the steamy exhalations of countless cooked consumers.
Sweet glanced at his black-faced Omega, of which Reinhart wore a fifteen-dollar plagiarism. “The work on my aircraft should be finished by now, so I’ll go straight out to the hangars.” He wore a beautiful pearl-gray suit of some zephyrweight material, with working buttonholes at the wrists, which Reinhart had read, in the woman’s-mag reminiscences of a former flunky in the grande luxe hotels of Switzerland, was the true test of a tailor-made garment.
The encounter with Gino and the suffocating heat of outdoors had begun to sweat Reinhart towards sobriety. Already there were blackened areas of damp beneath his armpits, which cooled briefly, nastily, if he lifted his upper extremities. Therefore he put his hand out to Sweet, while keeping the elbow close in.
“Bob, I can’t say how much I have enjoyed this. Let’s do it again soon.”
Sweet’s hand was forceful yet fleeting. He was clearly a man who could not waste time on nugatory routine.
“It’s a pity we were only getting around to the core of things when that phone call pulled you away,” said he. “Carl, I have my sentimental side too. This shopping center depresses me when I think of the fields that were here when we were kids. But things change every sixty seconds in life. I am myself no longer the little mess I was, so if the landscape is lost, the gain is mine. You have to think of things that way or you’ll be drowned by the changes of time. Someone’s always losing, and someone else is winning. There is no standing still for anybody.”
Sobering, Reinhart wished again he had not been so candid. He said: “I’ve had my ups and downs. There’s a kind of rhythm to that too. I drink too much once in a while and lose my sense of proportion. Thanks again, Bob, and I’ll see you around.” If he had had an automobile, he would have jumped in it and gunned off. But his own vehicle had been repossessed and Genevieve used the other one.
“Wait a minute,” said Sweet. “Let’s exchange cards. I’d drop you someplace but you obviously didn’t walk here—”
But he had, at least from the bus stop. “As it happens, my Cad is in the shop. An associate dropped me off here. I was going to catch a cab back.”
“Then that settles it,” Sweet stated. “We’ll have a few minutes more together.” He stared at his watch again and then across the vast parking lot towards the roaring highway.
Reinhart wondered why the tycoon tarried. He asked: “Where is your wagon?” Amid the multicolored hundreds ranked on the plain, through the aisles between which women pushed steel-mesh shopping carts, followed by sturdy, tanned children sucking on Good Humors or chewing wilted pizza slices of flecked yellow on blood-red. Men trundled power mowers, aluminum wheelbarrows, golf carts, and miniature snowplows on which there was a preseason special, virtually a giveaway, a “loss leader” with which to lure customers to blow their wads on other items. Reinhart was painfully familiar with this tactic, having once given it a fling at a gas station he owned.
A husky clerk, good-natured mesomorphic type with melon-dumped biceps, toted a color-TV set from a nearby appliance shop to the purchaser’s station wagon, capacious as a city bus of yore. Farther along, another store enjoyed a run on air-conditioners, stereo hi-fi’s, bathing suits, and whole salamis, to judge from the huge signs which obscured their show windows and the overburdened clients who staggered out the self-opening doors.
Sweet said cryptically: “He’ll be here in a minute.” He nodded his head generally at the mass of consumers and their goods. “Look at that, Carl. That’s money in motion, where we used to play cowboys and Indians.” Sweet replaced his glasses with sun lenses in the same type of frame. A slight balding could be taken, on the other hand, as a high, powerful forehead; each temple wore a splash of gray.
A young mother, plodding along in self-righteous oblivion with two grocery bags and two small children, the type who invariably plowed Reinhart down, yet respectfully circumvented Sweet, dropping a few oranges in the shift of line. Reinhart retrieved them, and the woman thanked Sweet, who had not even noticed the incident.
Reinhart panted from the effort of bending, and momentarily he seemed to be looking through the dark portion of a photographic negative.
Sweet asked impatiently: “Is there a helicopter service out here?”
“I don’t think so,” Reinhart said. “That is just a little private airport.”
Sweet clapped Reinhart’s shoulder. “Call ’em up for me, will you? Somebody should have a chopper he can send over here. I must get to New York without delay.”
Reinhart might have acted on the request, even braving Gino’s again, for the thrilling extravagance of it, the whirlybird clattering down on the blacktop like a deus ex machina to carry off his friend to a financial Olympus, while he, the faithful retainer, stood earthbound in a storm of flying candy wrappers and supermarket checkout slips.
Instead, a silver-gray limousine, with deep maroon fenders, chose that moment to glide through the vulgarity and stop silently before them.
“Good God,” Reinhart blurted. His snobbish anticipation had been tuned too low, to Caddie or Continental or Imperial. “Is that a Rolls?”
“Bentley,” Sweet answered curtly while stiff-arming Reinhart’s attempt to open the door for him. The reason for this appeared when the uniformed chauffeur, an elderly man who was none too spry, came anxiously around the trunk to furnish the service.
In the air-cooled back seat Sweet explained: “You can’t get a young man or Negro to drive for you nowadays. And just as well. Allison is too old to run around in the car while I’m away, and he doesn’t try to drag at lights.”
His buttocks deep in luxury, smelling the bouquet of glove leather, Reinhart sought to compensate f
or the instinctive slavishness with which he had grasped the door handle. “Yes,” said he, “you can’t get any kind of personal service these days. Everybody thinks he’s too good for it—any kind of punk or moron.”
“That’s all right,” Sweet said forcefully. “I don’t knock it when I think it’s the same state of affairs in which I have prospered. You have to be elastic. You can’t get a kid to cut your lawn, so you buy a power mower and do the job yourself. OK, take that one step further: you retail mowers in a seller’s market. Everybody needs one.”
“I see,” said Reinhart.
“Just one example,” said Sweet. There was a glass partition between them and the chauffeur, and below that a polished walnut panel with several discreet little doors, one of which Sweet opened to reveal a telephone. Within a thrice he was talking with New York: “Charlie said his aunt is sick and can’t go to Rome, but there’s always the Pyramids or even Grand Teton National Park, but cigars are available.” Or something on that order. Reinhart gathered it was a sort of code by which Sweet ordered the buying and selling of securities, or perhaps communicated with industrial spies. He was big, oh was he big.
When Sweet hung up he said to Reinhart: “Where can I drop you, Carl? Your office is in the old business district? Hey, you remember Molly Kruger’s candy store? She can’t still be there.”
“Dead long since,” Reinhart said. He found that Sweet, who had left town to make a fortune, was basically much more nostalgic about the landmarks of the old days than he himself. That was a curious difference between them. He yearned for his bygone personal powers; Sweet for architecture and landscape.
“You can let me out on the corner of Allen, if you remember it, then keep straight on to the superhighway entrance, which feeds right out of Main.”
“Right by the American Legion home,” said Sweet.
“That’s gone, too, I’m afraid. The First National built there. A drive-in bank. I don’t think they can handle you if you show up on foot.”
Sweet grimaced sadly and stared through his closed window. “Well, at least this area hasn’t changed much.” Dark-skinned persons were going about their business on the sidewalks in front of discount jewelries and television shops of the old kind. “The West Side still all colored?” He turned to Reinhart. “There’s a new market, Carl. Especially in consumer goods. Always was good, but getting better. The Negro is a bigger per capita spender than the white man.”
“In the mood they’re in these days, they don’t want white enterprise.”
“Nonsense. Don’t be taken in by windy propaganda and PR baloney. Money is money, is colorless and sexless and doesn’t give a damn for age. Shrewd men are making a bundle from the so-called youth revolution. But others are doing even better in the geriatric area.”
Reinhart nodded. “Yes, my mother lives in Senior City and they shake her down for plenty.”
“But the real revolution,” said Sweet, “has been, and continues to be, in science. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that are possible.” Suddenly he was studying Reinhart in a stock-taking manner, as if—how preposterous; Reinhart should not have drunk so much at lunch nor insulted the waitress nor played high-and-mighty with Gino—as if he were a surgeon, no, a mortician estimating how large the coffin need be. But by this stage in his life Reinhart was accustomed to the perversity of his imagination, in which the truly sinister seldom appeared as such, whereas benevolence or even indifference evoked suspicion.
“Do you have extensive interests in technology?” Reinhart asked, because he knew that was one place where the loot was.
Sweet’s inspection had reached his scalp. “I see you still swear by the crew cut.”
Now Reinhart was gratified, because it was a personal observation and Sweet had not made many. “I’d feel like a phony if I changed after all these years. The way I see it—”
Sweet cut him off. “Excuse me, Carl, but we’ll be there in a few minutes. Forgive me if I go straight to the heart of the matter. I used to hate you when we were kids, I’ll admit. You were big and I was small. You used to push me around.”
Reinhart protested. “No, Bob, never. I tell you that was—”
“No, no.” Sweet shook his head. “It’s over and done. Time never returns. The only reality is now. And you’ve convinced yourself that you are on your way out.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Sweet’s hand was impatient. “I can guess. You know, for one thing, you could still look pretty formidable if you stood up straight. You haven’t lost a hair and you don’t need glasses. A little dental work and you’d be set. Then put on a clean shirt and have your suit pressed. That wash-and-wear material really does need an iron, whatever the ads say. Don’t believe what you read in print: that’s for the mob. There are those who say and those who listen. Be sure you’re never among the latter. Don’t believe the current crap to the effect that the punks are aristocrats because of their youth alone and that the middle-aged are senile. That’s the old shell game. There are the same sixty minutes in every hour for everybody. Don’t take the ‘generation gap’ seriously unless you can make money from it. Suckers come in all ages.”
He rapped on the partition and the silver-haired driver eased the car into the curb. “We’re here,” Sweet said to Reinhart, who in desperation tried to scramble out. No good to hear gung-ho talk from a man who had made it. The Sunday supplements always printed inspirational messages from statesmen, industrial giants, and show-biz celebrities. But if you thought about it, as Reinhart had, it stood to reason that successful personages had no motive to raise the level of nonentities. These statements were mere boasts, their purpose to maintain rather than alter a status quo in which the subject continued to amass money and glory and force while the object, a fat unshaven Reinhart, dunking his pastry in Sunday coffee, hopelessly read empty slogans.
Sweet seized his forearm with a Japanese-trained weapon-hand. “One moment. Call me sentimental—”
“Jesus,” said Reinhart, “you’re hurting me.” That was a girl’s line; but true.
Sweet loosened him slightly but did not let go. “You depress me,” he said. “You’re part of my past, after all. And we have reversed positions in thirty years. Look,” he cried urgently, “is your pride too weak to let me help you?”
It was. Reinhart pulled away. “I’m doing all right in my own small way. It might not mean much to you, up top, but I have a nice little business, a home, and a fine family.”
“You are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Sweet said without expression. “And your kids are at the age where they are giving you hell. And your wife—”
“Please,” Reinhart warned, “I’ll have to hit you if you insult my wife.” Then of course he quickly fashioned a flabby grin at the thought of his defenseless honor. “And you might kill me with a karate chop.”
But Sweet was not amused. “While we waited for the car you were staring like a sex maniac at teen-aged girls.”
Now there was no shame left to hide, and Reinhart ceased to strain against Sweet’s grasp. “How about my coming along with you to New York?” he asked obsequiously. “Have you got a driver there? I work cheap.”
“Don’t dodge the issue with fake humility,” said Sweet, releasing him. “And if there’s anything my ego doesn’t need, it’s an old schoolmate working for me as a flunky. I don’t mean that at all. … But why teen-agers? You are in the grip of some sort of fantasy, Carl. They are terrible pieces of tail. They are hard-fleshed and selfish and dry. They are—”
“Please,” said Reinhart, who was discomfited by smutty talk.
Sweet said: “There is no more useless a thing on which to squander yourself than sex. Even drinking is better, because at least it can be pursued alone.”
“What do you think a lech is for me, if not alone?” Reinhart did not say this in self-pity; he was striving for precise nomenclature. Sweet had begun to seem like some wizard or genie, especially since concealing his eyes behind the
sunglasses. Were Reinhart to imagine a god, Sweet would certainly have been a feasible candidate for the role, a man of his own age and background, but apparently omnipotent and all-knowing. Reinhart was proprietary about his deities, like those Mexicans who locate the Virgin in Guadalupe. He could not remember ogling young girls at the shopping center, though long familiar with his disincarnate preoccupation with female teenagers, which by now must have become subliminal, contaminating him secretly while his unsuspecting consciousness grappled with surface reality.
“I meant with dignity,” said Sweet. “Of all the crazes sex is worst because it is dependent on other human beings, and if it gets bad enough, it can’t be satisfied even with them. In the end it becomes completely inhuman. For Christ sake, what is it, finally, but the swelling of tissues? I wager to say you do not have any particular girl in mind, but rather the whole breed—in fact, preferring the total stranger, the anonymous pair of knockers and round behind bobbing through the park.”
“Expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Reinhart remembered.
“Why shame?” cried Sweet. “I take it you don’t molest children. If they’re big enough, they’re old enough. The shame is that you are not getting any. The shame of the rich is felt only by the poor. Shame in oneself is an excuse for failure. When applied to others it is merely a form of envy.”
Reinhart said wistfully “I suppose you get all the teenagers you want?”
Sweet’s reply was harsh. “Age is the last thing I consider in a woman. Quite rightly, they all lie about it anyway. I have yet to get an erection from figures on a birth certificate. But if I have a choice, I steer away from the inexperienced. I haven’t time to train a girl.”
“Well, that’s just it,” said Reinhart urgently. “They all fuck like rabbits nowadays.”
“Bullshit. Don’t you believe it. I warn you, don’t take your sense of reality from the communications media or your will will be paralyzed and your head stuffed with trash that is utterly arbitrary. There is the actual and there is the representation. They have almost nothing in common, except insofar as people begin to act according to what they hear, but they can almost never pull it off properly. Most teen-agers are still sitting alone fingering themselves.”