Chilly Scenes of Winter (17 page)

“I saw his kids at Malibu. They play with Ryan O’Neal’s kid.”

“What’s he doing hanging out with Cher? ‘Haff-breed.’ Christ.”

She puts her plate and cup in the sink. “I can’t remember what you and I used to talk about,” she says.

“Lesbians,” he says.

“That’s right,” she says. “I was freelancing for that feminist newspaper. Well, I still feel very strongly that lesbianism is a good alternative. Like everything else, it has problems. Having a child, for one. And I
have
decided to have a child. If you have them after thirty they might be monsters. Not really monsters, but what do you call them when they have those oriental eyes?”

“Mongoloid.”

“Of course. Mongoloid. I couldn’t deal with that. For a while Marian’s daughter almost freaked me off the idea, but I think it’s what my body wants. Ultimately.”

He once lent Pamela Smith fifty dollars for an abortion. They got another ten from Sam, and ten from a friend of Sam’s who came over with Sam and saw her crying. Her brother gave her some, and a neighbor in her apartment. And a friend of hers from college who lived twenty-five miles away gave her another fifty. The friend didn’t have a car and Charles’s wouldn’t work, so they borrowed Pete’s. When Pete found out about it a week later he gave Charles twenty dollars to give her. Charles explained that it was not his child. Pete took back a ten. “Give her the rest,” Pete said. He and Pamela Smith ate at a cheap steak restaurant with the remaining ten. Pamela Smith dyed her hair after the abortion and lost a lot of weight, as if to make sure it was really gone. It was, although Pamela Smith was very upset all that summer, thinking that she saw infants’ faces in the clouds.

“Would you do something very kind for me?” Pamela Smith says. “Would you let me stay on your sofa tonight?”

“Sure. Just let me know when you’re tired.”

“Aren’t you even going to question me?” she says.

“No. I don’t mind if you sleep here tonight.”

“I think I’d rather, because it’s a very strange scene at the place I’m staying.”

“You can stay here,” he says.

“You’ve always been so
nice
to me.”

“No I haven’t. I used to beg you to shut up about lesbianism. I burned your Sappho book.”

“We had a good talk once, didn’t we, about Kate Millett?”

“You wrote me a letter about Kate Millett that I didn’t answer.”

“I met her. She’s a brilliant woman.”

“Maybe she is. I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you interested to read
Sexual Politics?
”

“No.”

“Of course there are better books. Would you be interested in reading any feminist writing?”

“Yeah. Send me something.”

“How come you’re interested in feminists, but not Kate Millett?”

“Hell, I was just being polite. I’ll never read anything you send me.”

“I really shouldn’t sleep on your sofa. But it’s an awfully weird scene.”

“If you’re mad at me you can go to bed and then we won’t have to continue this conversation. I’m pretty tired, and I’m going to bed myself.”

“What I like about you is that you’re straightforward. Many men are not straightforward. I think that in business they have to compete, to at least appear very receptive and open, and when they’re relaxing with women—that’s what they think women are
for
—they assert their true self, which is generally not straightforward.”

“Good night, Pamela,” he says. “I’ll bring you a sheet and a blanket.”

“May I make more tea before I go to bed?”

“Sure. I’ll put the stuff on the sofa. Good night.”

“In your own way, you are really very nice.”

He looks at her. Her Wonder Woman T-shirt ripples across her chest. She has gained weight since the abortion. Her hair has grown out. Medium-long, brown hair. Laura told him that medium could be medium-long or medium-short. She confused everything. He used to look at women and think they had medium-length hair. She did more than confuse him, she showed him that nothing was definite—even hair length. He thought that her head must reel with the complexities of everything. “When you say afternoon,” she said, “do you mean early afternoon or late afternoon?”

“What’s two-thirty?” he asked. He accepted her answer for everything. “Mid-afternoon,” she said. He felt that he really needed his apprenticeship. He felt that he really needed her. He didn’t know all that stuff.

“Is there some woman you’re in love with?” Pamela Smith asks.

“Yes,” he says. “But she’s married.”

“Marriage is
dying
. We keep trying to cast the ashes of the dead institution away, but the wind blows them back in our faces. We
will
scatter that traditionalism to the winds.”

“She’ll never divorce her husband,” Charles says.

“So you’re lovers then.”

“I never see her. Since she went back to her husband.”

“Marriage is a retreat. It’s wild animals in the rocks that curl together for protection. The wind will blow the ashes away.”

“Will the ashes blow away tomorrow?” he says. “I’d like to see her tomorrow.”

“If I could bring her to you, I would. I think you’re a very nice person.”

“Call her and tell her I’ve tried to commit suicide.”

“I couldn’t do that. She’s my sister. There can’t be sisterhood founded upon deceit.”

“She’s not your goddamned sister. She’s a housewife in an A-frame across town.”

“We’re united.”

“I want to be united with her. Give her a desperate call.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

“That’ll make it easier not to take me seriously,” he says.

“I’ll get the blankets.”

SEVEN

H
e calls in sick. It’s true that he has a sore throat, but he’s well enough to go to work. He just can’t face it. Reports. Betty. Lunch alone. “What have you got?” The blind man there every day to remind him that, at the close of the day, he has nothing. It adds insult to injury to have to answer, “A peanut-butter cup.”

Pamela Smith left in the morning, deciding to borrow money from her brother and go back to California to become a silversmith. She told Charles this over breakfast, which he fixed for her. He went out and bought eggs, cheese, English muffins, raspberry jam, and sausage. She didn’t eat the sausage, but he did and it tasted good. She told him not to go out, but he said that he wanted to. It was true; he did want to. He wanted her to exclaim again how nice he was. It would give him courage to call Laura. “You’re a bully!” a girl in the sixth grade had once shouted to Charles as he ran by, nearly knocking her over, and he had been so delighted he almost stopped running and started strutting.

“Yon eat all that meat and you get sluggish, and when you’re sluggish you’re depressed. Try eating crisp celery in the morning and only fruits until night, when you can have soup or fish. I know you’ll feel better.”

She washed the Wonder Woman T-shirt before going to bed. She ate breakfast with a towel around her top, giving the shirt an extra few minutes to dry. He noticed a mole above her right breast, one that he didn’t remember. He tried to remember touching her. He couldn’t. But he did remember what she looked like naked, and there was no mole. It must be a melanoma. Inoperable, of course. And if they operate, the cancer may have spread through the lymphatic system or through the blood. Persistent stuff. Laura probably thinks he is too persistent—he is a cancer. A cancer on the Presidency. An inoperable melanoma on the Presidency that occurred, strangely enough, through exposure to darkness. If only he could think of stylish political talk in her presence. Then maybe she would love him. Although she was never very concerned with politics. And he can never think of anything to say; he just talks about how much he loves her. Couldn’t they have been like a Norman Rockwell family if they had met years ago, if they had been adults in the forties? There would have been a small black dog, an older son, younger daughter, a chubby baby on Grandpa’s knee (his father—not Pete) and they would all be seated at the birthday party of his delighted son, Grandma carrying in a strawberry shortcake, the dog running to greet her, everybody slightly overweight and rosy. A white tablecloth, drapes to the floor, an unwrapped present, a bowl of vegetables on the table. Peanut-butter cups. The A-frame. Bob White’s son throwing a brick through a window.

He walks the two miles to the park. It is a cold, sunny day. He has heard that hippies bury grass in this park, that if it ever burned, the firemen would be too stoned to fight it. Hardly anyone is in the park. He sees no hippies, suspicious or otherwise. The park has old wooden swings and a dented slide. The park Laura takes Rebecca to in the spring has orange plastic swings and large metal turtles to climb on. Rebecca will not eat turtle soup. She cries because she thinks that flesh—metal flesh, don’t ask her to explain this—has been gouged out of this particular turtle to make turtle soup. He went to the park last spring, because he knew Laura was taking Rebecca there, and sat on a bench and watched them. He wanted to rush up to Rebecca and say warm, witty things to her that would charm her, but he had a very lazy floating feeling sitting on the bench and didn’t want to change it by moving, so he only sat there, very still, watching them. Laura gave Rebecca a hand-up on the jungle gym (Sam, slapping his mother’s hand …), sat on a bench to smoke a Chesterfield. When he first knew her—no, when he first became her lover—he got out of bed one night and rummaged through the ashtray to find out what kind of cigarettes she smoked, hoping they would be low in tar and nicotine. He shuddered when he lifted out the Chesterfield. He went back to bed and imagined that she was having trouble breathing—all that carbon in her lungs. In the morning, he begged her to have a chest X ray. When the Popsicle truck came, he wanted to buy one for Laura; the most expensive kind—vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone with chocolate and nuts and a cherry frozen on top. Then he would take her to the stone fountain for a drink of water. The next time he went to the park the stone fountain with the two steps had been taken out and there was a red plastic fountain shaped like a boomerang.

Charles is wearing a tweed coat that makes him feel like an old man. Other people his age wear ski jackets, navy-blue ski jackets that have no weight but that are stuffed with miraculously warm fabric, tied on the inside with secret drawstrings, buttoned and zipped on the outside. You can carry Kleenex on your bicep in those jackets. There is a three-inch zipper, just big enough to pull down and stuff a tissue in. He has examined the jackets, decided that his tweed coat from college is good enough. If he stays thin, he can become an old man in the coat, a powerful Yeatsian old man. She read Yeats to him. Swans, hills, valleys, islands. She read him Pound’s parody of Yeats, and he wanted to kill Pound. Dead, she said. He disliked Pound so much that she told stories, trying to make him like Pound. It became important to her that he like Pound, but he could not stand the man. He couldn’t laugh with her at Pound’s rants about usury, and
ABC of Reading
seemed to him pompous. “But it’s so funny,” she said. When it all failed, she told him about Pound being shut in a cage. Now he pities Pound. Does not like him a bit, but pities him. She has made him feel so many ways. Now he feels a way about Ezra Pound and has no one to discuss it with. There is an old man in the park who looks like Pound. Can’t be. The old man is wearing a tan coat and walks with slow steps in highly polished brown shoes. He is the only other stroller in the park. Charles suspects that when the old man’s hand goes in his pocket it is for a peanut or a bit of bread. The old man blows his nose loudly, like a goose, honking. He stuffs the handkerchief in an inside pocket as he passes Charles.

Charles turns down a path that takes him to the main section of the park. There are graffiti on the benches. There are no drinking fountains. A dolphin that gurgles water in the summer has its mouth open to the cold wind. It looks, now, like a terrified caught fish. He never liked to fish. Susan did. She was too small to really fish, but she liked to watch, to jerk her arm as though it held a fishing pole. His father would take Susan fishing with him, and Charles would stay home with his mother. Some Saturdays she baked a cake (that dessert …) and let him frost it, awkwardly, moving around the cake instead of merely turning the plate until she laughed at him and showed him how easy it was to spin the plate. So he made cakes while Susan fished. Liberated children—Charles liberated out of revulsion at seeing fish twitch, Susan liberated because she loved to jerk her arm. She also did it in dancing. She’d stand on the floor, feet shuffling to a record, right arm flapping like a cowboy with a lasso. They said she would be a conductor. Conduct
ress
. Liberation. He hopes Pamela Smith does not waste her money on books.

It is too cold to think intelligently in the park (this is, after all, what he has taken the day off to do), and tea might soothe his throat, so he walks in the direction of the hill, below which lies a street with a coffee shop. It is next to a bakery he used to go to with Laura, one that stayed open very late. They would get there just as the fresh Danish were being taken out of the oven at two
A.M
. The old Italian woman who worked there (guarded by two German shepherds and one Madonna) would make motions—what looked like slapping—with her fingers, lightly touching the tops of the pastries. She would give one pastry to each dog and, if she was in a good mood, one to Laura and Charles before they even gave their order for half a dozen. His throat constricts, not so much from pain as from remembering. Old ladies always thought they were a sweet young couple. You could tell. He passes a bench that a young woman is sitting on, a little boy in her lap, face turned toward her to protect himself from the wind, a little girl pushing a noisy toy in front of her. It is a clear plastic cylinder with marbles inside. Charles stops to say hello. The young woman is very pleasant. They talk about the snow that is expected, and how hard it is to believe that this park is full of people in the summer. She has on a navy-blue ski parka, jeans and boots. Long (medium long) blond hair, a full mouth. Her name is Sandra. She does not give a last name, the way women in whorehouses, or waitresses, automatically state only their first name. He tells her his full name, as he would do with a new business acquaintance (“in business they have to appear very receptive and open …”). There is nothing left to say. He pretends to be amused by the little girl at play, asks her name. It is We-Chi, or something that sounds like that. The woman is obviously an American, the child too. “It means ‘spirit rising from the great lagoon,’ ” the woman says. She smiles. She has very white teeth. He says that the name is very pretty (Laura …), thinking she is crazy. “His name is Mecca,” the woman says, patting the blue bundle curved against her. Charles leans forward a little to see the smaller child’s features. American. And sleeping. Charles nods, backs up a step to leave, and stumbles on We-Chi’s rolling toy. He recovers himself, smiling foolishly, like the comedian deliberately flubbing an exit for laughs. If he had a hat, he could tip it, then trip again and fall on his face. “Good-bye,” he says, and walks away. He has done a lot of walking and is getting tired. Good. If he gets tired, he won’t have to think. Thinking this, he descends the hill. The sky is gray; it looks as though there will be no more sun before darkness. He sings a few words of “Mama You Been On My Mind” to himself as he walks down the hill and jumps over the stone border to the sidewalk. With his sore throat, he sounds very much like Rod Stewart. Tomorrow the sore throat may be worse, and he will have to take another day off from work. What a shame. Laura will call him at the office, a spur-of-the-moment desire to have lunch with him, and will be told that he is home sick. He will open his door and she will be there. She will simply be standing there, suffused in the aroma of chicken soup. Get this one down for posterity, Norman Rockwell. Sam’s dog, who often visited my house, is dead; otherwise she could run yapping to another man’s wife, who has come to bring me chicken soup. Maybe Edward Hopper? Or a cartoon?