Chilly Scenes of Winter (3 page)

“If we stick around, Pete will show up. She looked okay. As long as she’s not hooked up to anything she’s okay.”

Susan walks beside him silently. They push the “down” button for the elevator and wait a long time. A woman in a wheelchair rides past. She has on a flowered bathrobe and pink slippers with embroidered flowers on them. A flowered scarf holds her hair back.

“Let’s do something today,” Charles says.

“What do you want to do? What about Elise?”

“Elise. Hell. I forgot Elise.”

“Couldn’t she come?”

“Sure. Sure she could come. I just forgot about her.”

“You don’t like her, do you?”

“Not much. Do you?”

“She lives on my floor. She came here because her mother’s an alcoholic.”

“
Your
mother’s an alcoholic.”

He opens the car door for Susan. He unlocks his own door, sits down, and laughs.

“I can’t think of anything nice to do today,” he says.

Susan rubs the moisture off the side window with her hand, looks out at the slush.

“In answer to your question,” she says, “I don’t like her very much. One of the guys I used to go with lived with her when they were freshmen.”

“So what’s she doing here?”

“She asked if she could come.”

“Maybe we’ll like Elise better if we can think of something to do with her.”

“Do you think Mom would ever really kill herself?” Susan asks.

“I don’t think so. She always says that.”

“She looked like Esther Williams when she was younger,” Susan says. “She’s been old for so long.”

“She’ll get a lot older. She won’t kill herself.”

“We should have awakened her.”

“We can go back tonight.”

“Maybe we should have called Pete in Chicago.”

“What should we have done? Called every hotel in Chicago? I should say every whorehouse.”

“I don’t think he does that.”

“I don’t care if he does it or not. I don’t know why I said it.”

Charles turns on the radio. Janis Joplin is singing the “la-de-dah, la-de-dah-dah” section of “Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin is dead. Susan is nothing like Janis Joplin. Susan speaks in precise, clipped rhythms, combs her hair into two carefully brushed sections (part down the middle), does what is expected—or what is unexpected behind people’s backs. Susan does not drink Southern Comfort.

“Did you like Janis Joplin?” Charles asks.

“She was okay.”

“She was great,” Charles says. “All that flapping fringe and that wild hair and those big lips …”

“I guess men find her more attractive than women do,” Susan says.

“That was so great—how she left all that money for a party in her honor when she died.”

“I hope she doesn’t kill herself,” Susan says. “We should have awakened her.”

Charles makes a left turn, pulls up in front of a car that is coming out of a parking place.

“I’m taking you to a Mexican restaurant,” Charles says. “It’s a great place.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“Come on,” he says. The song is over. Janis Joplin is dead. Jim Morrison’s
widow
is dead.

The restaurant has round wooden tables and place mats with the sun on them. There is a blue glass vase with dried grasses in it. A hippie in a white T-shirt and jeans gives them menus.

“The
chiles rellenos
are great,” Charles says. “And black beans.”

“Fine,” she says.

“Try to act enthusiastic. She’s not going to kill herself. This is your vacation.”

“This is
your
vacation,” she says.

He is instantly depressed. He orders the first of four Bass Ales with his
chiles rellenos
. After lunch they decide to go to the art gallery, but on the way there they pass a porn movie and park and go there instead. Charles is a little uncomfortable being there with his sister, but he’s also pretty drunk. He spends the first five minutes of the film looking around the audience. It’s maddeningly light in the theater. His attention wavers between two light-haired boys two rows in front of them and the woman on the screen, caressing the neck of a Great Dane. He thinks that it is all predictable—the movie, the audience, the rest of his vacation. He wishes his father were alive; at least, then, somebody could get a few laughs out of him. If he tells Sam that he took his sister to a porn movie Sam will laugh at him. Sam. Elise. Janis. The Great Dane.

“What did you mean before when you said she was an alcoholic?” Susan says, walking up the aisle.

“Can’t anything get your mind off her?” Charles asks.

Susan looks down, watching her feet leaving the theater.

“She’s a heavy drinker,” Charles says. “I was just exaggerating.”

“What do you think happened to her all of a sudden?” Susan asks. “You know—she dyed her hair and started wearing those jersey things.…”

“If you want to know what I really think, I think that one day she just decided to go nuts because that was easier. This way she can say whatever she wants to say, and she can drink and lie around naked and just not do anything.”

“Maybe when my sister died it did something to her.”

“And it took nineteen years to register?”

“How long has she been crazy?”

“She was crazy when you graduated from elementary school, and that was … seven years ago.”

“Maybe when he died …”

“Oh, who the hell knows? I notice you’re not so concerned that you stick around here to go to school. She calls me almost every night. Or every day at work. How can I sleep? How can I work? I don’t know what to do.”

“Doesn’t she talk to Pete?”

“She talks to Pete and then she gets on the horn to me. Sometimes they fight when she calls. She just dials the number and lays the phone on the table, and I pick it up and hear them screaming.”

“We ought to go home. The doctor must be trying to reach us.”

“Let’s go to a bar,” Charles says. “Then we can go back to the hospital.”

“But the doctor won’t be there again. We have to wait for his call.”

Charles acknowledges defeat, but his shoulders feel very heavy when he shrugs them. He stops at a liquor store for a six-pack of beer to drink as he waits. He drives home slowly. He sulks. He realizes, with surprise, that he has forgotten to smoke all day. He decides to give up smoking.

There is laughter as he puts the key in the front door. Sam is laughing. There is a pile of clothes in the living room. Charles looks out the front door for Sam’s car. Sam is laughing. Susan looks embarrassed.

“Goddamn it,” Charles says. He squats and takes a can out of the six-pack, opens it, and has a drink. He offers up the can. Susan stiffens.

“I thought she was leaving today,” Charles says.

“Come on,” Susan says. “I’m not going to stay and listen to this.”

“Well, what are we going to do? Go back to the hospital without having talked to the doctor?”

“I just don’t want to be here.”

“We could go over to Laura’s, and you could tell her what a swell guy I am, and I could get her back.”

“Come on,” Susan says.

“Come where?”

“We can go to a bar. That’ll please you.”

“It would please me to stay here. But your friend is at it with Sam.”

“Sam’s your friend. You always do that.”

Charles rubs his hand across the back of his neck. He is getting tired. He
is
tired. He picks up the rest of the beer and follows Susan out of the house.

“You drive,” he says. “I’m tired.”

“Where shall I go?”

“To the bar. And you’re to blame if it doesn’t make me happy, because you said it would.”

Donovan is singing “Sunshine Superman” on the car radio. Mellow Yellow. Charles’s car is yellow. It is an old yellow car with the trunk bashed in. He has nightmares in which he is thrown forward, into nothing. His car was hit from behind while he was stopped at a red light. A diplomat named Waldemere something-or-other did it. The diplomat was enraged. He showed Charles his license: “American driving license,” he said. “Worthless.” He wrote his name, embassy, and number in huge black letters on a napkin he got out of his car. On the other side of the napkin was a leaping fish. In the nightmare, Charles always screams. When he was hit, he just said, “Ugh.” He and Laura were going to get married. They were going to have a dog from the pound. By now, that dog is dead. She said that she always had cats; now she wanted dogs. He agreed. She said that it was corny, but she wanted to go to Bermuda. He said that he knew how to snorkel and would teach her. They both drank Jack Daniel’s on ice. He kept a bottle in his refrigerator, and when she was at his house they drank it straight. She had brownish-blond hair. Most women get upset if you can’t tell if their hair is brown or blond. She didn’t. He settled on brownish-blond in his own good time. She told him that Lauren Hutton had a wedge she put between her front teeth sometimes when she was photographed, and pointed it out on a Vogue cover photo. For that matter, she told him who Lauren Hutton was. Before Laura he loved three other girls: one of them he stopped loving, one he continues to sort of love, but she was no good for him, and the other one he never thinks about. Laura was the best of them. Laura made a dessert out of cognac and fresh oranges. A soufflé. Her cookbooks are still all over the house. He often craves that dessert, and the recipe is probably in one of those books, but he can’t bring himself to look. He wants to think of it as magic. For the same reason, he never read a book about Houdini that Sam gave him for his birthday. He lies to Sam, says that he has read it. “What an amazing man Houdini was,” he says to Sam. If she had married him and they had gone to Bermuda, he would still have a little tan left now. His arms are winter white. She gave him clogs. They are too loud; he is too conscious of them—he won’t wear them. But he wears the undershirts. He can’t tell them from his old ones. In a fit of depression, he once thought of unraveling the labels in the back because hers had some little gold rooster on the label. He could just throw all those out. And the cookbooks. He will never throw either out. Even the clogs. His house is full of her things. There are toenail scissors in the bathroom, photo-booth pictures of them on the kitchen cabinet. Sam says that he should call her again, too. Houdini miraculously breaks chain! Charles calls Laura! He lacks nerve.

“That bar,” Charles points.

“That looks awful.”

“It’s okay. I’ve been there.”

Susan turns down a side street and coasts along, looking for a parking place. It is almost rush hour. Traffic is heavy. She finds a place at the end of the street.

“Lucky,” she says. She parks the car and gets out. Charles sits there, imitating Susan earlier in the day. She comes to his window. “Out or I kill you,” she says.

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” he says.

They get the last two seats at the bar. It is a long bar with red plastic bar stools and bowls of peanuts.

“What are you majoring in?” he says to Susan, and feels like a fool because a man next to him overheard. He considers following it up by asking Susan to see his etchings. Of course he can’t take her home. Sam is screwing a woman in his bedroom. He had planned on a nap, but now he is balanced on a bar stool, making silly conversation.

“I don’t have one,” Susan says, and the man chuckles.

“It’s my sister,” Charles says, and the man turns away, pretending not to notice.

Charles orders a rum and Coke, figuring that that’s probably what they drink in Bermuda. The rum and Coke tastes just awful. He wishes he had Susan’s plain Coke.

“I’ll tell you who’s going to win the Super Bowl,” a tall man in a black jacket says to a shorter man who is leaning away from him. “I am.” He hits the short man on the back.

“Aw, Christ,” the short man says. His face is sweating.

“You don’t think I’m going to win the Super Bowl? I
am
winning the Super Bowl. Be tuned on Sunday, buddy, because that’s when you’ll see it.”

“Drop dead,” the short man says.

“I won’t drop until I run that last quarter-inch to lead my team to victory,” the tall man says. “Wait until Sunday and then you won’t think I’m just some drunk in a bar. You don’t think I can get in shape before Sunday? Eat steak and drink tomato juice, be in bed by ten.
That’ll
get you in shape.”

“Goddamn,” the short man says. He pushes his empty glass forward.

“I’d better make one more try to reach the doctor,” Charles says. “Do you mind sitting here?”

“No,” she says. “Go ahead.”

Charles walks through the archway to a wall phone. “Carla Delight is outta sight!” is lettered above the phone. There is a phone number, with the last number blacked out. Someone else has written: “Either 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0.” Charles dials information, then the hospital. He finds out that his mother has a private phone, decides to talk to her. The phone rings once and is picked up.

“Hello,” Pete says.

“Hello,” Charles says. “This is Charles.”

“I know my boy,” Pete says. Pete sounds drunk. “How’s my boy?”

“How’s my mother?”

“I’d put her on, but she’s a wee bit groggy now. She’s doing just great, though. There was a little accident in here with the other lady, and she naturally got a little bit excited, but now she’s calmed down just fine.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“The woman fell when she was hooked up to the intravenous,” Pete whispers.

“Oh God,” Charles says.

“Cut up,” Pete whispers.

Charles rubs sweat off his forehead. “We were by earlier, but she was asleep. Tell her that. What you can tell me, if you can now, is what they’re going to do about her.”

“Our girl’s going to go home tomorrow,” Pete booms. “They can’t keep our girl down.”

“That’s good,” Charles says. “She seems okay?”

“She’s a wee bit groggy, but on the road to recovery.”

“Tell her we’ll be down later.”

“Will do. Where are you now? How about dinner?”

“We’re in a restaurant. We just finished eating.”

“Oh,” Pete says. “Well, you kids enjoy yourself. Mommy was just saying how she misses Susan and how she wants her home.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.