Chilly Scenes of Winter (7 page)

“She danced?” Pete says. “Yeah?”

“She seemed to be dancing. I don’t know. I was so spooked that I got out of there fast.”

“She senses that. She senses that we avoid her, and has no incentive to get well.”

“Pete, you ought to try to forget all this for a while if you can and go back to the house and get some sleep.”

“I’m in the house. It’s a mess. I’ve got to clean it up, but I don’t know where to start. She threw stuff all over.”

“Go to sleep and forget it.”

“I’m too loaded to go to sleep. Listen, I want you to know that I didn’t mean what I said before. I’m sorry to have said it.”

“That’s okay,” Charles says.

“I wish I had a boy of my own. I think we’d be more alike than you and me. What you were saying.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“But it’s too late now,” Pete says.

“Yeah,” Charles says. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

He hangs up and feels very guilty that he didn’t offer to go over and help him clean up the mess. In the living room, he looks at Laura’s picture. He is afraid the sun will fade it, so he puts it back in the drawer. He has looked at the picture for so long that when he sees Laura he’s always surprised. Laura, for him, is always wearing a checked shirt, her hair always looks a particular way, she always has a deadpan expression. Not that he sees her much any more to be surprised. He looks down at an open magazine on the rug. “How Seriously Do You Take Yourself?” is printed in big black letters. Susan has taken the quiz, checking off the answers with small, neat checks. Susan doesn’t have fits of depression; she doesn’t buy expensive camera equipment only to discover she prefers skiing. He looks away. At the vase, where the picture was.

“That was Mark on the phone earlier,” Susan says. “He’s probably going to drive down and get me.”

“Mark,” Charles says. “Mark the doctor.”

Her hair is wrapped in a turban. She is wearing slacks and a white shirt. She looks very clean and fresh. She will finish college, marry Mark, have children. Maybe even have an A-frame to vacation in. In Vermont. Or upstate New York. There might even be a maid to cook lamb chops.

“Go, go, go you bastard!” Sam hollers in the bedroom.

“Doesn’t he know if he’s coming or not?” Charles asks.

“He’s coming if he thinks the car will hold out.”

“What’s wrong with his car?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Then how is he going to decide if it’ll hold out?”

She shrugs. “It’s an old Cadillac,” she says. “It eats gas, but it usually holds out. Except that there’s one hose that always breaks.”

“Wooooooo!” Sam shouts.

“I guess he’s not dying,” Charles says.

Susan unwraps the towel from her head, throws her hair forward and begins brushing it.

“Should we call the hospital later? To see how she is when the tranquilizers wear off?”

“She’ll be nuts. That’s how she’ll be.”

“If Mark makes it, he’ll be here tomorrow. We can all go then.”

“No,” Charles says. “Anyway—I’ve got to go back to work.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about work.”

“It was sure a swell vacation,” Charles says. “I can’t complain.”

“Do you get another vacation in the summer?”

“I just have two days left. Except for sick leave.”

“Isn’t it awful to have your life measured out like that?”

“I need the money.”

“Couldn’t you paint? You used to be so good at it.”

“Paint? There’s no money in painting. Maybe I could paint houses. I’ve thought about doing something like that. Sam and I kicked around the idea last summer. He’s really going nuts at the store.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I get out of college.”

“It would help to have a major. But if you’re marrying Doctor Mark, I don’t guess you even need to finish.”

“I want to go to school. I mean, I want to finish. I didn’t go there to get a husband.”

“Now that you’ve got one, why don’t you just quit?”

“He’s not even my husband. He’s just my boyfriend.”

“Propose to him,” Charles says. “I wish I could propose to somebody and have them take care of me.”

“I’m not going to propose to Mark!”

“Why not? Don’t women propose to men now?”

“That’s not why I’m not doing it. I just don’t want to do it.”

“Face it. You want him to marry you.”

“Then he can propose,” Susan says.

“How quaint.”

“You deliberately get me on these subjects so you can goad me,” Susan says.

“I know. I can be so unpleasant. Maybe if somebody took care of me I’d be in a better mood.”

“Get that woman to leave her husband.”

“It’s more than a husband. It’s a daughter and an A-frame.”

“That’s nothing. Women walk out every day.”

“Not for me they don’t.”

“You should keep after her.”

“She’s sick.”

“When she’s well.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“Don’t sound so defeated. You’ll never be persuasive if you sound like that.”

“What should I do? Read a Dale Carnegie book?”

“Who’s that?” Susan says.

“What a generation. Never heard of Amy Vanderbilt. Never heard of Dale Carnegie. And you think Woodstock was a drag.”

“I know it was a drag. It was nothing but mud.”

“And nobody is into drugs any more, huh?”

“Not many people. I don’t know … maybe I just don’t know them.”

“Have you got a lot of friends at school?”

“A couple that Mark knows are pretty nice.”

“I don’t have any friends. I just have Sam.”

“Why don’t you meet people?”

“Next you’ll be telling me to dance.”

Charles goes into the kitchen, looks through the cabinets to see what there is for dinner. Susan is right; he thinks about food too much. He picks up a package of dried peas, drops them back on the shelf. There is a large bottle of vanilla, a package of dried beans, a box of Tuna Helper, no tuna, a can of baby clams, two cans of alphabet soup, a canister with four Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they’re leaving out sugar), a package of Cheese Nabs, and a can of grapefruit juice. There is also a package of manicotti shells. They will have to go out for dinner. It is too cold; it was thirty degrees when he went out early in the afternoon to buy Sam some magazines.

“You don’t have a hair dryer, do you?”

“Of course not. What would I be doing with that?”

“A lot of men blow-dry their hair now.”

“I don’t want all that junk around me. What would I have a hair dryer for?”

He is cantankerous. That’s probably the real reason Susan’s leaving. If Doctor Mark’s Cadillac will start.

“Does Mark use a hair dryer?” he calls.

No answer. The rumble of the television. He looks at the thermometer on the window outside. It is twenty-eight degrees. The thermometer was a Christmas gift from an uncle in Wisconsin. An ornamental squirrel is huddled on top of it. It is made out of some plastic-looking black material. The squirrel looks like it won’t make it. There is a black plastic nut in its paws. Charles goes back to the cabinet, looking for the jar of bird seed. He finds it, shoved to the back of the highest shelf. There is also another box of Tuna Helper there, and a jar of Heinz Kosher Dills. They will definitely be going out for dinner. Charles gets his jacket from the closet in the living room, zips it. Twenty-seven, and he still has trouble zipping his jacket. “You approach it with too much hostility,” Laura told him. “You have to glide it up. You do it all wrong; you jerk it. A zipper will never work if it’s jerked.” Laura used to zip his jacket for him. When she went back to her husband he couldn’t stand to see the jacket. He went out and bought a raincoat, but that wasn’t warm enough, and he had a sentimental attachment to the jacket, so eventually he started wearing it again. One of the girls he had once loved (the one he still sort of loves, but she’s no good for him) gave it to him five years ago as a Christmas present. She got tired of sewing buttons on his blue pea jacket, and on Christmas morning he opened the box with the brown jacket in it. There was a chocolate heart wrapped in red foil inside. Where did she ever find a Valentine’s Day heart in December?

He opens the front door and walks out into the snow with a pie tin full of birdseed. Fearing that the tin will blow away, he goes into the garage and looks for something to weight it down with. The only thing he can find is a shovel, so he takes that out and rests the handle over part of the pie tin. It looks silly—like some socialist emblem. At least now they’ll eat Walking back to the house, he glances over his shoulder. What is he doing in this neighborhood? Who are his neighbors? When he first moved in, a woman a few houses down—he can’t remember any more whether it was the red brick house or the gray one-asked him to a party. He asked whether she’d mind if he brought a friend—the party was on a Friday night, and he always saw Sam on Friday night. He thought that afterwards he and Sam would go out for a few beers. He and Sam went to the woman’s party (her name was Audrey. He’s been trying to remember that for months), and met a couple who lived a few houses across from him (they told him which one—it was either the red brick or the blue with white shutters). They told him to stop by for a drink, but he forgot which house it was and was embarrassed to go knocking on doors. He kept thinking he’d run into them, but he never did, and he never got there for the drink. The party at Audrey’s was pretty nice. At least he enjoyed it, until he began to sense strange looks, until he figured out that Audrey thought he and Sam were queer. Why would she think that? They even sat on opposite sides of the room. Audrey’s husband was very nice. He was in a wheelchair, and had been for five years, after a car accident. He sold books. He also sold life insurance. On Saturday he sold flowers, helped the cashier who was his nephew. “I don’t want to have time to think,” he said. “I’d only come to depressing conclusions.” “He’s the most un-depressed man I’ve ever known,” Audrey said. “He’s a pleasure to be with.” “And it keeps me out of the house,” her husband said. Audrey looked terribly hurt. Later, Charles called (twice) to ask them to dinner, but both times she said they were busy. Once he saw her husband in his wheelchair on the avenue, trying to navigate down a particularly icy stretch of sidewalk that hadn’t been sanded. He wanted to go over and help him, but he was embarrassed. He just went back to his car and drove home.

Charles is in the kitchen, looking out the window. Some children run across the lawn. One child is bundled up like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Charles remembers a picture from
Life
magazine … 
Life
magazine … captioned “John-John, the President’s son, spies his Dad and away he runs.” John Kennedy, Jr. rushes toward the steps leading from the plane. If nobody is into drugs any more, John Kennedy, Jr., won’t be a doper. With that smart father, he no doubt would have, otherwise. The kid will probably be a lawyer or a senator. Like the rest of them, he’ll have car accidents. Charles is still a sucker for tabloids with headlines reading: “Onassis Keeps Skorpios as Haven for Vegetable JFK” and in smaller type: “Jackie Says She Can Never Leave Him.”

He feels his head. He has been having strange visions, remembering strange things. He goes to the bedroom to check on Sam. Sam is asleep. His feet stick out of the covers. He has on thick red and white striped snowmobile socks that he was given at the office Christmas party. Actually, he didn’t go to the office party. When he went back to work there was a note over his punch-in card, fastened with a paper clip. “Stop by for your Xmas Present. I couldn’t buttonhole you at the party. Ed, in Sportswear.” Sam was embarrassed to go ask for his present, but somehow Ed found out who he was and came over and gave him the present in the employees’ cafeteria. “It’s something anybody could use,” Ed said. On Sam’s present was written: “Number 80.” Sam went looking for Ed a week later, to ask him if he’d like to join them for a few beers Friday night, and found out that Ed had been fired.

Charles thinks about turning off the television, but the sudden silence might disturb Sam. Sam’s face is very white. He hopes Sam does not get pneumonia. Once Charles had pneumonia. That’s how he got the sentimental attachment to the jacket. He was in the hospital for three days, and on the second night he got out of bed and got the jacket out of the metal closet and put it over the front of him, over the top of the white sheets. It was nice to have something familiar there. The room was pale green and white. It made him think he wasn’t going to die. The girl kept coming and holding his hand, looking worried. She didn’t want him to die, either. Why exactly had he left her? Why had he left any of them? Surprisingly, he left as many of them as had left him. He even left the first one, fifteen-year-old Pat O’Hara, when she told a mutual friend that he kissed sloppily. Maybe she never even said that—maybe the friend made it up. The friend was a notorious liar. He remembers the friend: Bruce Laframboise, later captain of the football team, first one in high school to get a sports car, a short, muscular boy who, in high school, had blackened his front teeth with ink. His mother took him to the dentist. Mrs. Laframboise used to tell his mother that Bruce was a model child, except for that peculiar thing he had done. Bruce ended up working in a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury—at least according to Bruce, who was a compulsive liar. Either that or his sister was a compulsive liar, because she always swore that Bruce was, and everybody believed her. His next girlfriend was a stringbean named Pamela Byall, who became a veterinarian. He met her on the street the year after he graduated from college, and she said, “I’ve become a veterinarian, no thanks to you.” Then there were the recent ones, the ones of the last four or five years. One of them lasted a year and a half. Pamela again. Pamela Smith, giver of the jacket. She started thinking that she was really a lesbian. He got tired of hearing about it. He’d go to bed with her, and she’d say, “It would be so nice to go to bed with a woman. What does it feel like to go to bed with a woman?” He told her he didn’t think his perspective would help her. She bought a stack of books about lesbianism. Gay women’s newspapers were thrown all over the house. She found all Sam’s girlfriends terribly attractive, and said so to the girls. One night at a pizza house, he said, “I’m not going to have anything more to do with you” and left, leaving Pamela to pay for a green-pepper pizza. Good, he thought That will be something to turn her against men. But she kept calling him, asking if she could come over and talk. “How can you turn your back on me when I’m so undecided?” she said. He always gave in, let her come over, and sat through a boring discussion of the beauty of women before they went to bed. She called him once and asked him to come pick her up at a gay bar because her car wouldn’t start. He refused. She called again after that to get the number of one of Sam’s girlfriends, and he hung up on her. He even got a Christmas card from her, with the female symbol on it, drawn with a red circle and green cross. “Merry Christmas, forgive and forget,” she wrote on the envelope. Then she called him, but he said he wasn’t feeling well. After Pamela there was a girl named Marsha Steinberg that he still has erotic dreams about. Sam introduced them. He forgets how Sam met her. Probably a castoff, although he never wanted to ask on the chance he’d find out he was right. Sam always parts with women on good terms—so good that they call him to refer them to other men. Marsha Steinberg was very mixed-up when he knew her. She took a lot of amphetamine, although later she gave it up entirely and went to law school. She once did a pencil sketch of him that was surprisingly good—or at least it made him look surprisingly good. She had a brown cashmere sweater that she wore with slacks. The sweater shed all over the slacks. She had a dog that shed more. She was always covered with dog hair. Her own hair was very short. Short black hair, black eyes. He definitely loved her. She’s now practicing law in Colorado. One day they went to the park and she fell asleep on his shoulder. It was a hot, noisy day in the park, and he couldn’t believe that she’d fallen asleep. Policemen kept walking by, and he was terrified that she was dead, and that eventually he would have to call out to one of the passing policemen that the woman next to him was dead. But she woke up. He always loved her for that. Once he went to a hair-cutting shop with her and watched an inch get cut off her hair. “If you were sentimental, you’d scoop it up,” she laughed. He should have done it, but it looked so ugly—those little clumps of black hair on the white floor. He couldn’t touch it. He thinks about calling her sister to get her address in Colorado, but what the hell. What good can it do him if she’s in Colorado? The girl he dated after Marsha was just somebody to pass the time with. She wasn’t very pretty or very smart. He never thinks about her.