Beginners

by Raymond Carver

  “You got away, though? He didn’t come after you, or anything?”

  He didn’t answer, just stared at the empty glass in front of him, and I looked at my watch again. I stretched. I had a small insistent ache behind my eyes. “I guess I’d better be getting out there soon.” I ran my hand over my chin and straightened my collar. “I guess that’s all there is to it, huh? You and mother split up then, and you moved down here to Sacramento. She’s still in Redding. Isn’t that about it?”

  “No, that’s not exactly right. I mean, that’s true, yes, yes, but—” He raised his voice. “You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t really know anything. You’re thirty-two years old, but, but you don’t know anything except how to sell books.” He glared at me. Behind his glasses his eyes looked red and tiny and far away. I just sat there and didn’t feel anything one way or the other. It was almost time to go. “No. No, that’s not all…I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what else happened. If, if he’d just beat her up or something, or else come after me, come looking for me at my home. Anything. I deserved it, whatever he had to dish out…But he didn’t. He didn’t do anything like that. I guess, guess he just broke up and went all to pieces. He just…went to pieces. He lay down on the couch and cried. She stayed out in the kitchen, and she cried too, got down on her knees and prayed to God out loud and said she was sorry, sorry, but after a while she heard the door close and came back out to the living room and he was gone. He didn’t take the car, that was still there in the driveway. He walked. He walked downtown and rented a room there at the Jefferson, down on Third. He got hold of a paring knife at some all-night drugstore and went up to his room and began, began sticking it in his stomach, trying to kill himself…Somebody tried to get in there a couple of days later and he was still alive, and there were thirty or forty of those little knife wounds in him and blood all over the room, but he was still alive. He’d cut his guts all to pieces, the doctor said. He died up in the hospital a day or two later. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for him. He just died, never opened his mouth or asked for anybody. Just died and with his insides all cut to pieces.

  “I feel like, Les, that I died up there. Part of me did. Your mother was right in leaving me. She should’ve left me. But they shouldn’t have had to bury Larry Wain! I don’t want to die, Les, it isn’t that. I guess if you’d get right down to it, I’d rather it was him under the ground and not me. If there was a choice had to be made…I don’t know what any of it’s all about, life and death, those things. I believe you only have one life and that’s that; but, but it’s hard to walk around with that other on my conscience. It keeps coming back to me, I mean, and I can’t get it out of my head that he should be dead for something I caused.”

  He started to say something else, but shook his head. Then he leaned forward slightly across the table, lips parted still, trying to find my eyes. He wanted something. He was trying to involve me in it someway, all right, but it was more than that, he wanted something else. An answer, maybe, when there were no answers. Maybe simply a gesture on my part, a touch on the arm, perhaps. Maybe that would have been enough.

  I loosened my collar and wiped my forehead with my wrist. I cleared my throat, still unable to meet his eyes. I felt a shaky, irrational fear begin to work through me, and the pain behind my eyes grew stronger. He kept staring at me until I began to squirm, until we both realized I had nothing to give him, nothing to give to anyone for that matter. I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness. I was shocked. I blinked my eyes once or twice. My fingers trembled as I lighted a cigarette, but I took care not to let him notice.

  “Maybe you think it isn’t the right thing for me to say, but I think there must have been something wrong with the man to begin with. To do something like that just because his wife was chippying around. I mean, a man would have to be half crazy to begin with to do something like that…But you don’t understand.”

  “I know it’s terrible, having it on your conscience, but you can’t go on blaming yourself forever.”

  “Forever.” He looked around. “How long is that?”

  We sat there for a few minutes longer without saying anything. We’d finished our drinks long ago, and the girl hadn’t come back.

  “You want another one?” I said. “I’m buying.”

  “You got time for another?” he asked, looking at me closely. Then: “No. No, I don’t think we’d better. You’ve got a plane to catch.”

  We got up from the booth. I helped him into his coat and we started out, my hand guiding his elbow. The bartender looked at us and said, “Thanks, fellas.” I waved. My arm felt stiff.

  “Let’s get a breath of air,” I said. We walked down the stairs and outside and squinted in the bright afternoon glare. The sun had just gone behind some clouds and we stood outside the door and didn’t say anything. People kept brushing past us. All of them seemed in a hurry except one man in jeans who carried a leather overnight kit and walked past us with a bloody nose. The handkerchief he held to his face appeared stiff with blood and he looked at us as he passed. A Negro cabbie asked if he could take us somewhere.

  “I’ll put you in a cab, Dad, and send you home. What’s your address?”

  “No, no,” he said and took an unsteady step back from the curb. “I’ll see you off.”

  “That’s all right. I think it’d be better if we said good-bye here, out here in front. I don’t like good-byes anyway. You know how that goes,” I added.

  We shook hands. “Don’t worry about anything, that’s the important thing right now. None of us, none of us is perfect. Just get back on your feet and don’t worry.”

  I don’t know if he heard me. He didn’t answer anyway. The cabbie opened the rear door and then turned to me and said, “Where to?”

  “He’s okay. He can tell you.”

  The cabbie shrugged and shut the door and walked around to the front.

  “Take it easy now and write, will you, Dad?” He nodded. “Take care of yourself,” I finished. He looked back at me out of the window as the cab pulled away, and that was the last I’ve seen of him. Halfway to Chicago, I remembered I’d left his sack of gifts in the lounge.

  He hasn’t written, I haven’t heard from him since then. I’d write to him and see how he’s getting along, but I’m afraid I’ve lost his address. But, tell me, after all, what could he expect from someone like me?

  A Small, Good Thing

  SATURDAY afternoon she drove to the little bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, his favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars at one end of the cake, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in raised green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him Scotty would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then back in front again where they were secured under his big waist. He wiped his hands on the front of the apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry.

  She decided on the space cake, and then gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for Scotty’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the bak
er’s age—a man old enough to be her father—must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her, not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end, and beside the table a metal container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was playing country-western music.

  The baker finished printing the information on the specialorder card and closed up the binder. He looked at her and said, “Monday morning.” She thanked him and drove home.

  On Monday afternoon, Scotty was walking home from school with a friend. They were passing a bag of potato chips back and forth and Scotty was trying to find out what his friend was giving him for his birthday that afternoon. Without looking, he stepped off the curb at an intersection and was immediately knocked down by a car. He fell on his side with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road. His eyes were closed, but his legs began to move back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something. His friend dropped the potato chips and started to cry. The car had gone a hundred feet or so and stopped in the middle of the road. A man in the driver’s seat looked back over his shoulder. He waited until the boy got unsteadily to his feet. They boy wobbled a little. He looked dazed, but okay. The driver put the car into gear and drove away.

  Scotty didn’t cry, but he didn’t have anything to say about anything, either. He wouldn’t answer when his friend asked him what it felt like to be hit by a car. He walked straight to his front door, where his friend left him and ran home. But after Scotty went inside and was telling his mother about it, she sitting beside him on the sofa, holding his hands in her lap and saying, “Scotty, honey, are you sure you feel all right, baby?” and thinking she would call the doctor anyway, he suddenly lay back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and went limp. When she couldn’t wake him up, she hurried to the telephone and called her husband at work. Howard told her to remain calm, remain calm, and then he called an ambulance for Scotty and left for the hospital himself.

  Of course, the birthday party was canceled. The boy was in the hospital with a mild concussion and suffering from shock. There’d been vomiting, and his lungs had taken in fluid which needed pumping out that afternoon. Now he simply seemed to be in a very deep sleep—but no coma, Dr. Francis had emphasized; no coma, when he saw the alarm in the parents’ eyes. At eleven o’clock that Monday night when the boy seemed to be resting comfortably enough after the many X-rays and the lab work, and it was now just a matter of his waking up and coming around, Howard left the hospital. He and Ann had been at the hospital with Scotty since that afternoon, and he was going home for a short while to bathe and to change clothes. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said. She nodded. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be right here.” He kissed her on the forehead, and they touched hands. She sat in a chair beside the bed, looking at Scotty. She kept waiting for him to wake up and be all right. Then she could begin to relax.

  Howard drove home from the hospital. He took the wet, dark streets faster than he should have, then caught himself and slowed down. Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction—college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment firm. Fatherhood. He was happy and, so far, lucky—he knew that. His parents were still living, his brothers and his sister were established, his friends from college had gone out to take their places in the world. So far he had kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man, if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned. He pulled into the driveway and parked. His left leg had begun to tremble. He sat in the car for a minute and tried to deal with the present situation in a rational manner. Scotty had been hit by a car and was in the hospital, but he was going to be all right. He closed his eyes and ran his hand over his face. In a minute, he got out of the car and went up to the front door. The dog, Slug, was barking inside the house. The telephone kept ringing while he unlocked the door and fumbled for the light switch. He shouldn’t have left the hospital, he shouldn’t have, he cursed himself. He picked up the receiver and said, “I just walked in the door! Hello!”

  “There’s a cake here that wasn’t picked up,” said the man’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “What? What are you saying?” Howard asked.

  “A cake,” the voice said. “A sixteen-dollar cake.”

  Howard held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand. “I don’t know anything about a cake,” he said. “Jesus, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t give me that,” the voice said.

  Howard hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and poured himself some whiskey. He called the hospital, but Scotty’s condition remained the same; he was still sleeping and nothing had changed there. While water poured into the tub, he lathered his face and shaved. He had stretched out in the tub and closed his eyes when the telephone began ringing again. He hauled himself out, grabbed a towel, and hurried through the house, saying, “Stupid, stupid,” for having left the hospital. But when he picked up the receiver and shouted, “Hello!” there was no sound at the other end of the line. Then the caller hung up.

  He arrived back at the hospital a little after midnight. Ann still sat in the chair beside the bed. She looked up at Howard and then she looked back at Scotty. The boy’s eyes stayed closed, his head was still wrapped in the bandages. His breathing was quiet and regular. From an apparatus over the bed hung a bottle of glucose with a tube distending from the bottle to the boy’s right arm.

  “How is he?” Howard said. “What’s all this?” waving at the glucose and the tube.

  “Dr. Francis’s orders,” she said. “He needs nourishment. Dr. Francis said he needs to keep up his strength. Why doesn’t he wake up, Howard?” she said. “I don’t understand, if he’s all right.”

  Howard put his hand at the back of her head and ran his fingers through the hair. “He’s going to be all right, honey. He’ll wake up in a little while. Dr. Francis knows what’s what.”

  In a little while he said, “Maybe you should go home and get a little rest for yourself. I’ll stay here. Just don’t put up with this creep who keeps calling. Hang up right away.”

  “Who’s calling?” she asked.

  “I don’t know who, just somebody with nothing better to do than call up people. You go ahead now.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  “Really,” he said. “Go home for a while, if you want, and then come back and spell me in the morning. It’ll be all right. What did Dr. Francis say? He said Scotty’s going to be all right. We don’t have to worry. He’s just sleeping now, that’s all.”

  A nurse pushed the door open. She nodded at them as she went to the bedside. She took the left arm out from under the covers and put her fingers on the wrist, found the pulse, and then consulted her watch. In a little while she put the arm back under the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where she wrote something on a clipboard attached to the bed.

  “How is he?” Ann said. Howard’s hand was a weight on her shoulder. She was aware of pressure in his fingers.

  “He’s stable,” the nurse said. Then she said, “Doctor will be in again shortly. Doctor’s back in the hospital. He’s making rounds right now.”

  “I was saying maybe she’d want to go home and get a little rest,” Howard said. “After the doctor comes,” he added.

  “She could do that,” the nurse said. “I think you should both feel free to do that, if you wish.” The nurse was a big Scandinavian woman with blond hair, and heavy breasts that filled the front of her uniform. There was a trace of an accent in her speech.

  “We’ll see what the doctor says,” Ann said. “I want to talk to him. I don’t think he should keep sleeping like this. I don’t think
that’s a good sign.” She brought her hand up to her eyes and leaned her head forward a little. Howard’s grip tightened on her shoulder, and then his hand moved to her neck where his fingers began to knead the muscles there.

  “Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes,” the nurse said. Then she left the room.

  Howard gazed at his son for a time, the small chest quietly rising and then falling under the covers. For the first time since the terrible minutes after Ann’s telephone call at the office, he felt a genuine fear starting in his limbs. He began shaking his head, trying to keep it away. Scotty was fine, except instead of sleeping at home in his own bed, he was in a hospital bed with bandages around his head and a tube in his arm. But it was what he needed right now, this help.

  Dr. Francis came in and shook hands with Howard, though they’d just seen each other a few hours before. Ann got up from the chair. “Doctor?”

  “Ann,” he said and nodded. “Let’s just first see how he’s doing,” the doctor said. He moved to the side of the bed and took the boy’s pulse. He peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Howard and Ann stood beside the doctor and watched. Ann made a little noise as Scotty’s eyelid rolled back and disclosed a white, pupilless space. Then the doctor turned back the covers and listened to the boy’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope. He pressed his fingers here and there on the abdomen. When he was finished he went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted the time on his watch, scribbled something on the chart, and then looked at Howard and Ann, who were waiting.

  “Doctor, how is he?” Howard said. “What’s the matter with him exactly?”

  “Why doesn’t he wake up?” Ann said.

  The doctor was a handsome, big-shouldered man with a tan face. He wore a three-piece blue suit, a striped tie, and ivory cuff links. His gray hair was combed, and he looked as if he could have just come from a concert. “He’s all right,” the doctor said. “Nothing to shout about, he could be better, I think. But he’s all right. Still, I wish he’d wake up. He should wake up pretty soon.” The doctor looked at the boy again. “We’ll know some more in a couple of hours, after the results of a few more tests are in. But he’s all right, believe me, except for that hairline fracture of the skull. He does have that.”