Chilly Scenes of Winter (9 page)

The woman from typing comes back. “There should be another piece attached to this,” she says. He sits up a little higher so that he can look down at the boots. They are menacing. He wonders why she wears them. She couldn’t think they’re pretty. He reaches in the bottom of the basket on the comer of his desk. “Sorry,” he says.

“First day back,” she says.

“What do you hear from Laura?” he asks.

“Oh. I had dinner there last night. She went back to her husband,” the woman says knowingly.

The A-frame. Ox. Maybe more freshly baked bread. So she’s well.

“What did you have?” He can’t contain his curiosity.

“Lobster Newburg. It was wonderful. I’ve been trying to lose weight, but with the holidays and that dinner, I’m never going to make it.”

“You’re going to think this is terrible, but I don’t think I ever knew your name,” he says.

“Betty,” she says.

“That’s right,” he says. “I did know it.”

He’d had no idea what her name was.

She stands there, smiling. He wants very much to know if she had the orange thing for dessert.

“I get into work and I become a robot,” he says. “It’s awful.”

“I hate it here,” Betty says. “But I’m lucky to have a job. My sister just graduated from Katy Gibbs, and she’s been looking since before Thanksgiving.”

“It’s rotten,” he says. “It’s nice if you can have perspective on ft and be glad you’ve got a job.”

“I just am glad today,” she says. “Most days I come in and hate it.”

“Is your sister looking for work around here?”

“In New York. But if she doesn’t find something soon she’s going to have to come live with me. My parents kicked her out. They don’t think she’s trying, because they sent her to college and then to Katy Gibbs and all.”

“Don’t they read the papers?”

She shrugs. “I guess I’d better start this,” she says, and turns to leave.

She’s very nice, Charles thinks. Why couldn’t you like her? He looks down at the piece of paper again and makes a notation on the pad. He has the eerie feeling that when he looks up Laura and Jim and Rebecca will be there. He throws his pen down. He gets up and picks up the pen, goes back to the desk and sits down. Lobster Newburg. That must have been delicious. That cheeseburger was awful.

He leaves at five-fifteen instead of five-thirty, stopping at the stand on the ground level for two Mr. Goodbars. The man who runs the concession is blind. “What have you got?” he asks.

“Not Laura” seems like the logical answer. He has got to stop thinking about her. It’s true that he wasn’t that wild for her when he had her. If he ever had her. When he
was with
her. Once when he was with her they sat at a drugstore having coffee and she gave him a picture of herself.
Remember something better
he says under his breath. “Two Goodbars,” he says out loud.

“Thirty-two,” the man says. The man reaches into an open metal box and feels around for the change. The blind man is never wrong. Charles looks at the three pennies. Laura, he thinks. He drops the change in his coat pocket and zips the coat. Tries to zip it. He pulls more slowly. Sure enough, it works. He goes through the revolving door and into the cold. His car is a long walk away. He turns on the cassette player he is holding in his other hand and “Folk Fiddling from Sweden” blares out. It is still playing when he gets to his car. The lock is frozen. He kicks it with his foot. Much to his surprise, the lock turns. He drives to a store and buys a big package of pork chops and a bag of potatoes and a bunch of broccoli and a six-pack of Coke. He remembers cigarettes for Sam when he is checking out, in case he’s well enough to smoke. He buys a National Enquirer that features a story about Jackie Onassis’s face-lift. James Dean is supposed to be alive and in hiding somewhere, too. Another vegetable. Not dead at all.
East of Eden
is one of his favorite films. He saw it, strangely enough, on television shortly after he and Laura went to a carnival and rode on a Ferris wheel. He felt so sorry for James Dean. Back then he didn’t feel sorry for himself at all. No reason to. Now he feels sorry for himself. Feeling sorry for himself, he gets back in the car and drives home. He thinks about Rebecca’s bird trapped in his glove compartment. At a stop sign he closes his eyes and inhales, hoping to smell Vol de Nuit. Cold air sears through his nostrils. Turning onto his block, he sees the man from Audrey’s party getting out of his car. Charles stops, rolls down his window. “Hey,” he says. “Hi. Hello.”

“Hello,” the man says. “Cold as a witch’s tit, isn’t it?” The man is wearing a black coat and scarf. He looks menacing.

“Yeah,” Charles says. “Farmer’s Almanac says we’re in for a big storm the eighteenth.”

“You were going to come for a drink,” the man says. “Come for a drink.”

“Okay,” Charles says. “I’ll get over.”

“Any time,” the man says.

“Good. Thanks,” Charles says.

He feels good about that until he realizes that the man’s car was parked far away from either the red brick or the white house with blue shutters and that he still doesn’t know where he lives.

He runs with the grocery bag from the driveway to the front door. Susan opens it.

“It’s awful out,” she says. “How did it go?”

“I got through the day,” he says, then realizes that that was melodramatic. He expects her to inform him that his attitude is wrong, but she doesn’t.

“How are you?” he says. “Doctor desert you?”

“No. He’ll be in later tonight. His car broke down.”

Charles feels sorry for him because his car broke down. He does not want to feel sorry for the man.

“What kind of jackass wouldn’t get rid of a Cadillac anyway?” he says.

He takes the groceries into the kitchen, then goes to the bedroom to see Sam. Sam is asleep, his feet again out of the covers. This time his fly is hanging open and his pajama top is all bunched up around him. Charles is sure that he is getting pneumonia. He backs out of the room, goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of grapefruit juice.

“What makes you so sure he doesn’t have pneumonia?” Charles asks.

“He doesn’t have pneumonia. He was awake for several hours today.”

Charles is glad she’s still there. He wishes the Cadillac would break apart in the middle.

“Would you like me to cook these?” Susan asks, taking the pork chops out of the bag.

He will never have that dessert again. “Sure,” he says.

“After dinner we’ve got to go see her,” Susan says.

He had forgotten. “I know,” he says. “Pete call back?”

“No.”

“I guess I’ll get it in person then.”

Charles checks the thermometer: thirty-two degrees.

“It’s freezing,” he says. He goes into the living room and lies down on the sofa. It reminds him of lying in the hospital bed, no energy to move, his mother sitting at his side, on top of her coat on a chair. The man who shared his room was named somebody-or-other Brownwell. Brownwell, it turned out, had an inoperable melanoma. Charles had no idea what that was, and Brownwell didn’t either, and as hard as he tried not to, hands over his ears, Charles still heard the doctor say “cancer” through the thin screen that was pulled around Brownwell’s bed. It was so depressing there. He’d wake up in the morning and see Brownwell’s head against the pillow; the rest of his body already seemed to have shrunken up, given up, disappeared. Sometimes Charles would raise himself in bed the little he could to make sure that Brownwell was still there below the shoulders. Brownwell sat and stared. Charles’s mother always asked Brownwell if he wanted a glass of water when she came and when she left. Once he did. Charles turns on the couch, trying to get the hospital out of his mind. The sheets were so stiff. Once he woke up a little to see Brownwell, who paced for four days until they discharged him, pacing by his bed. Brownwell stopped to pull Charles’s blanket up. Charles pretended to be asleep and lay very still, but it was all he could do to restrain himself because he wanted to reach out and kiss Brownwell’s hand. He almost did kiss his hand. Not because he straightened the sheets, but just because he felt so damn sorry for Brownwell. Every day when the doctor came to see him, Charles waited to hear the word “melanoma.” He hung on the doctor’s every word. “You’re very alert today, that’s a good sign,” the doctor said. Another time, the doctor asked him if his mother was “emotionally disturbed.” He never found out what his mother had done that made the doctor ask. Pete came every night—damn, he should like that man—and brought
Playboy
and, for some reason, an inflatable plastic pillow he could blow up and put under the one on the bed. Actually, it came in handy. He was too weak to sit up well without calling the nurses to haul him up by his armpits, but with the pillow he was a little higher and could see a little more. Brownwell’s son blew it up for him. The son was a cub scout. Brownwell looked like he could die every night during visiting hours. He looked better when his wife and son left. Charles gets up. He’s going to remember as long as he lies there. He goes out to the kitchen and watches Susan pour Sam’s leftover white wine over the cooking pork chops.

“I hope she’s not so sedated she doesn’t know us,” Susan says.

“She fakes that. She almost always knows us.”

He sits in a chair. The pork chops smell good. He is glad she is there, because he is too tired to cook. He shouldn’t be so tired. He should have a checkup. He doesn’t want to. They will find out he has an inoperable melanoma.

They eat dinner at the table, even though Charles and Susan told Sam that they should bring a tray to him in bed and bring chairs in for them to sit on to keep him company. Charles was secretly glad to see Sam get up, because that would keep pneumonia away. Nothing would keep inoperable melanoma away, but walking would keep pneumonia away. He shakes his head, trying to clear his mind so he can enjoy dinner.

“Did you get the candy bars?” Sam asks. Sam is very hoarse.

“Oh, yeah. They’re in my coat pocket.”

“Probably won’t be able to eat that much, though,” Sam says.

“Sure you will.”

“I’ve got to get back to work tomorrow,” Sam says.

“You’re nuts. You can hardly stand up.”

“Then let them send me to the doctor and send me home. That way I won’t lose my job.”

“Call them and tell them you’re sick.”

“Won’t work.”

“Bastards,” Charles says.

“I’m lucky to have the damned job,” Sam says.

“A Phi Beta Kappa is lucky to be selling men’s jackets. Yeah.”

“The money, I mean.”

“Speaking of which, you’ve still got a twenty of mine for grass.”

Susan looks up, surprised.

“Coming in end of the week,” Sam says. He gets it from a woman whose son gives it to her. She puts it in her lunch pail. The woman works in the “Bath Accessories” shop. She’s a nice woman—a dumb, nice woman. Charles met her once when he came to pick up Sam, and Sam was walking out with her. “I like being dangerous,” she said, swinging the pail. “Only I don’t got the nerve to use it. You boys have a good time. I’m dependable. My boy can get you more.”

“One time Sam got a memo from the boss saying that he should wear a tape measure around his neck to make himself look more official,” Charles says to Susan.

“He didn’t.”

“I did,” Sam says. “God, did I drink a lot that weekend.”

“You don’t wear the thing, do you?” she asks.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Oh, Sam, that’s awful.”

“I sort of think it’s funny now. Another time, when I first started working there, he sent his brother around. His brother was a big fellow. He took forty-two extra long. And the guy told me he wanted a thirty-eight regular. He could hardly squeeze into it. What did I care. I rang it up. Next day the boss came around to congratulate me. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘The customer is always right.’ ”

Susan shakes her head and laughs.

“Laugh while you can. Wait until you get out,” Sam says.

“She’s going to marry the doctor,” Charles says. “She’s got no worries.”

“It’s nuts to get married,” Sam says. “What would you get married for?”

“I never said I was getting married. He did.”

“I should know,” Charles says. “According to you, I’m so smart”

Susan looks at her watch. “I don’t know when visiting hours are, do you?”

“We’re family. I don’t think it matters. It would be good to avoid the regular hours because we’d probably miss Pete that way.”

“We ought to at least say hello to him. He’s awfully upset, you said.”

“We cheer him up a lot. We’re such good-natured kids.”

“We could try to act nice tonight. It could be a sort of rehearsal for you, Charles. For when Mark gets here.”

“I already like him immensely,” Charles says.

“I do too,” Sam says.

“Will you let him in?” Susan says to Sam.

“When he makes his house call, you mean?”

Susan sighs.

“Iffen I don’t shoot at the varmint from behind the moonshine machine,” Sam says. Sam puts down his napkin. “Good dinner,” he says. He walks slowly back to the bedroom.

“Let’s get ready,” Susan says.

“Let’s do the dishes.”

“Come on,” she says. “We don’t want to find her asleep when we get there.”

Charles goes to the closet for his jacket. He takes out the candy bars and takes them in to Sam. Sam is propped up in bed, watching the news.

“Thank you,” Sam says.

“Welcome,” Charles says. “I got you cigarettes, too. Do you want them?”

“Not right now. Thanks, though.”

Charles meets Susan at the front door, and they go outside to the car. He notices that the birds have eaten all the seed, and that he will have to put out more. Predictable: put out birdseed, it disappears, you put out more, it disappears, and so on. Susan is nervous. She wants to drive, and he lets her. He puts on the radio. John Lennon is singing “Mind Games.” John Lennon thinks that “love is the answer.” But John—what if she won’t get out of her A-frame to be loved? The snow that was not predicted until the eighteenth has started to fall lightly.

“Road’s getting slick. Watch it on the turns,” Charles says.

“I drive Mark’s car all the time,” she says. She is in a bad mood. It always upsets her to see Clara in the bin.