Crazy in Berlin (12 page)

But there went the music again, and since girls genuinely like to dance—so much so that they will partner another of their own sex rather than sit aside—Reinhart patiently rose and returned to the grappling, this time, however, since he was prepared, getting the initiative before she did, encircling her waist with a tensed forearm the muscle of which, though she did not complain, surely put a rope burn in the small of her back, manhandling her, on the turns raising her whole weight off the floor on just that single arm.

Coincident with her total surrender he went into tumescence and regretted that for the sake of slim hips he had worn the tight OD trousers which would show the most meager change of contour. He must hold his lower body away and cast the mind on some serene subject matter. The phonograph played “Long Ago and Far Away,” from some movie faintly recalled, abominably corny yet sad and sweet. No doubt most of them here were led to thoughts of home, and he was in this mood charitable, retaining for himself an achingly beautiful sense that it was he who was far away and long ago, like someone who lingers in the theater after the performance has ended, amid the discarded programs and slowly vanishing odors and the houselights extinguishing bulb by bulb.

Thus as the hour fled, when the record player broke down and they returned to the couch, Reinhart felt nostalgia for the dance, and when it began again to revolve and they danced, he thought of the distant perfection of the time on the sofa, and was always ready to pull Very one way or the other like a great anthropomorphic balloon, for she had become incredibly light on her feet. In these activities, he got his hands on her in various quasi-legal ways: against the side of a knocker, as they went off the floor; slipping down from the waist and swooping like a swallow across the buttock-swell as they waited, swaying, between records; up her grooved back to the hard metal juncture of the strained brassiere, over which slip, shirt, and jacket provided no more cover than wallpaper over the last tenant’s picture-hooks.

The society of girls is a very delightful thing, as he recalled someone had told David Copperfield, not professional, but very delightful. Reinhart had not for years, excepting café encounters and alleyway contacts with foreigners, which was something else again, had it to enjoy. Those American scents and sounds, one’s own language speaking of nothing, but understood; the thousand familiar references in matter and spirit; the absence of ambiguity—Europe was suddenly squalid, skinny, crooked, and dark, he would not have taken it for
eine Mark
or
cinq francs.
With this Yankee smooth-warm cheek against his he thought of Lori and her little cousin towards whom as late as this afternoon he had had inclinations which, because he saw them now as a product of the time and place rather than himself, could be definitely labeled strange and discordant, the whole business devious and gnarled.

He decided he was in love, or that he would assume he was tonight and decide on its permanence the next morning. This, and the fact that no officer in the company looked disapproval—indeed, in the crush on the floor none could have if he would—the fragrance of cosmetics, the shadows when some excellent person turned down the lights for the dreamy songs, the warm wall of humanity around the tight little cell of their mutual interest, the yielding of his artificial will to the natural magnetism of her mass—in the strength of these he closed with her all the way to the shins, lost false modesty and with his lower-middle, that had become sensitive as the tips of both hands, could feel the very mount of Venus, while his mouth in the movement of the music slowly followed the round of her cheek to the lip-crevice and made entry.

This bliss was disrupted when some bastard inaugurated a series of hot records on the turntable. Reinhart knew as he led Very back to the sofa that it was an opportunity, even an obligation, to take her outside, perhaps in supreme audacity to make a headlong rush through the back yards to his flat just around the corner, taking the tide at its flood. Yet his feeling was more delight than desire; he wished rather to prolong this time which had come fortuitously than replace it with his own initiative, which held no surprises at all.

How marvelous it is to be singled out, and spared the tight-wire balance of establishing favor! But it also makes a man a good deal more cautious than a shy girl would believe, forwardness in small things being a fortress against large. Girls who are bold can better withhold. It is as if the tiger dug the pit, fixed the net, arranged the camouflage, and crouched laughing by while Frank Buck stumbled through and captured himself. The other side of the coin was the pleasant fantasy that you could sit very still, coining banalities when necessary, but nothing coarse or even really interested, it went without saying, sneaking through the requisite time, playing cherry, so to speak, until the girl was so wild with unrequited passion that she would positively drag you to her bed.

On still another hand, Very bore all the moldmarks of a nice girl, the sort whose intimacies were flagrant because her intentions were innocent, like some Samaritan who courts denunciation as a pickpocket by reseating your slipping watch. She could very well get you all the way to the Beautyrest only to repair a loose spring, and nothing upset him more than basing an effort on principles not understood until its miscarriage.

He again could have stood a drink, and Very had just as soon, but a difficult negotiation through the dance-floor athletes who despite their average age of thirty to forty were astonishingly spry at the fast music, discovered only a wet table of empty bottles. He returned to see Very sharing the couch with a gloomy captain whose collar caduceus bore a
D
for Dentist. He was known to Reinhart as a relatively good egg, as well as a painless practitioner, but he now wore the pious look of that partygoer who makes a fetish of his loneliness and searches grimly all evening for fellow worshipers, thus partaking in much more community than the busiest extrovert. Skinny and fuzzy, as if he had been twisted together from pipe cleaners, he sat grumbling in an undertone. However, he had dropped there only in quest of a seat, not trouble, and his scowl of greeting as Reinhart sat on the other end carried no hint of malice.

“You know,” Reinhart said as she moved comfortably against his shoulder, “I used to be air-raid warden in the nurses’ quarters in England. Did you ever see me there?”

“Gosh, I hope you didn’t see me! I’m always a mess around the barracks, especially in England. Wasn’t it awful there! The continual fog and rain, and that horrible tea all blue with milk, and fish and chips, and sausages filled with oatmeal. You know how many times I went to town? Once. Once, and I had enough.”

“Weren’t you ever to London?”

“Oh cripes no. That was dumb of me, wasn’t it?—I should have gone to London, anyway, because as everyone says you’ll never get the chance again. I bet you did, though—were the Piccadilly commandoes really pretty? Go on,” she dug an unbelievably hard elbow into his side, “you can tell
me
.”

At this the captain, whom he could see beyond her, ostentatiously repressed a grin and cast his eyes on the ceiling, and Reinhart was suddenly embarrassed at the public disclosure of her stupidity. A statistical friend once told him that one out of every ten girls is pretty, and one out of every ten girls is intelligent; ergo, one out of every one hundred girls is pretty and intelligent. Pooling the women he knew with those of the statistical friend made a grand total of eighty-five; they had had every expectation that somewhere in the remaining seven and a half to each man would appear the rare combination, but Reinhart had since lost track of the friend, in whose consignment the marvel would have to be, for his own quota was exhausted. As to Very, to balance the proposition she should have had to be a Mme Curie, a George Eliot, for only genius could be commensurate with her beauty, which he realized sitting there finding fault where none was appropriate, had become ever more glorious with use. She was fantastically beautiful, there was no other possible description, and comparable to nothing, lake, sky, gems, or flowers, but an until-now masturbation dream of the female essence.

So he began to lie, not grossly like a politician but subtly like a statesman, referring to his parents’ street as a
road,
and to his college as
school;
spoke familiarly of dinner clothes, of riding boots, fencing, martini cocktails and the sediment of sherry wine, and of the possibility of buying oil paintings from ruined Germans for a song. He talked of love, not particularized but general, yet with a hint that behind him lay the wreckage of a hundred hearts, each keeping with it a piece of his own, for he was more passionate-impulsive than cruel. And finally, of the manly arts: boxing, judo, water polo—and creeping through the poison-gas chamber in basic training.

He was about to bear down on the last—and with justice, for it was quite true that his gas mask had sprung a leak, letting in the smell of deadly chlorine—when he reflected that since nurses had had the same training, Very was not likely to see it as exotic.

“Well,
go on,
” she screamed as the story bogged, flashing the long lashes which had some time earlier—it being, after all, a long evening after a full day’s work—begun to lower.

“It wasn’t really anything—” On the contrary, he sensed, awfully, that it was the only thing for a whole half-hour that
did
interest her, and, to a degree humiliated, he determined almost vengefully for once to give the banal truth.

“Why, the instructor said if we so much as imagined we smelled chlorine to get the hell from the shed. Which I did. There was some sand in the valve of my mask, it turned out.”

“But were there any toxic effects afterwards?” She pressed harder against him and seemed to study his right nostril.

“Just a little dizziness.” Off on another lie.

“But you had a blood count, surely?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“How long ago was this?”

Christ, he could smell it still, that odor of laundries and swimming pools, fiercely clean, implacably antiseptic, inhuman, the same stink outer space must have beyond the farthest planet. Three years ago, when he was a punk recruit, his suntans yet shiny, his fatigues still dark green, his gas mask clotted; it gave him no pleasure to dwell on that era.

“Oh, well then, I guess it wasn’t serious.”

“Of course not, that’s what I said.”

“No mental effects?”

“Mental! You mean
crazy
? I hope not, nuts as I already am—but you can’t be serious. Chlorine attacks the lungs, if it gets you, and you are so busy dying you haven’t got time to go mad.”

“When you’ve been around as many weirdies as I have, kiddy,” she said in a bluff, coarse way that made him recoil, “you would know that many people don’t have time for anything else.”

This was a grisly turn indeed, and his feelings rumbled in his stomach as he pursued it. “Seriously, can chlorine gas—?”

“Oh, you’re not worrying now, after this long? There now, I’ve upset you. Maybe I was joking a little. To tell the truth, I don’t know anything about poison gas except what they told us.” She laughed a little too violently and a touch too long, and if at its peak you had taken a still picture with a very fast camera, you might have seen that she herself for a moment looked deranged. “But are you aware that many kinds of internal medication taken to excess can produce a psychosis? Sulfa drugs, for example.”

“They can!” He said it in so terrible a voice that the dentist, still there on the other side of Very, jerked in professional, hypocritical dismay, as if his drill had slipped and lacerated a tongue.

“Well, only
temporary
.” Into his face she had pushed hers wide with the most glorious grin of the evening, at once splendid and grotesque, and so near that with almost no effort he could have sunk his incisors into her velvet nose. Then she drew back and laughed, laughed, laughed. “Oh, I’ve got you so scared! Now the next time you contract nasopharyngitis you won’t take sulfa, and then you’ll catch pneumonia, blaming it all on me.”

He asked, somewhere between joke and real, “Does that mean I’d be put on your ward?”

“For pneumonia? No.”

“I mean—the other.” He deplored euphemism, but he fancied that her mirth had become briefly acid with malevolence.

“Why not get to know me off duty, instead?” She patted his hand, but it was not in the least provocative. “I’m nicer then. Besides, we don’t need you, we’re all filled up, got more patients now than when the war was on. Bet you thought it would be the other way around. That’s because it’s never the real things that crack people, but the imaginary.”

The music had at last become soft. Because someone tripped over it, lightly cursing, Reinhart crossed his restless, foot-tapping leg over the quiet one; his trunk inclined in a long plastic crescent: a smooth-leather couch would have ejected him to the floor. Very when solemn was not very Very, he said to himself, and to her: “I was always in a funny position.”

He was in enough of one now for her to hesitate and then produce a question he had not heard for three years, an idiotic cuteness nevertheless poignant, fragrant of Tom Collinses floating Maraschino cherries and cheeseburgers dripping catsup but with no onion, because of the necking to come, in some congested, clamorous pleasure palace on the great Midwestern plain.

And when she asked “Funny haha or funny peculiar?” he was caught, with all the force of his past, in the iron fist of love, and would inevitably have been drawn sideways in a most funny uncomfortable position to crush the charming folly against her lips with his own—had not the dentist at that moment peered ugly around her exquisite right breast and called:

“Hey, Reinhart, why don’t you scout around for some hooch! That damned Lovett has some in the kitchen, I know. Do me a favor and go look.”

“Why don’t you go yourself?” Specialist officers would accept almost anything that was simultaneously assured and good-humored.

“That lousy skinflint faggot!” mumbled the dentist, and mixed himself again into the cushions.