by Ann Beattie
“That’s profound,” he says, taking off his coat. She hands him hers and sits down on the sofa, pulls the afghan over her.
“Can I say something you won’t want to hear?” Susan says.
“I have to hear things I don’t want to hear all the time. Go ahead.”
“I think you’re an egomaniac.”
Charles laughs. He had been expecting something terrible.
“Yeah. So what?”
“So you dismiss everything, even helpful criticism. You refuse to think.”
“Susan, I think all the time. I shake my head to try to stop the thoughts from coming.”
“What do you think about?”
“Isn’t that a little broad?”
“I know what you think about. You think about that girl. You deliberately make yourself suffer all the time because then you can be aware of yourself.”
“What’s all this?” he says. “Some dollar twenty-five Bantam paperback philosophy? One of those books with multicolored arrows going off in all directions or something?”
“Don’t you think I could have any thoughts of my own?”
“Everybody’s thoughts are acquired. Where did you acquire yours?”
“I don’t know, Charles. I just realized that what I’m saying now is true. You’re infantile.”
“Thanks for coming here to stay with me so you could put me down.”
“It’s not to put you down. I can tell it’s not working. You’re probably thinking of her right this minute.”
“You keep bringing her up. Don’t you notice that, Susan?”
“Just tell me whether I was wrong when I said that. Were you thinking about her?”
“I wasn’t,” he says. He was.
“You’re even a liar. I know you were thinking about her.”
“I was. So what?”
“It proves my point. That you dwell on it; you try to make yourself miserable. You’ve got to snap out of it.”
“What’ll happen to me if I don’t?” he says. He really is curious, but she thinks he’s making fun of her.
“You want me to preach so you can accuse me of preaching. You always have to be in control, like a two-year-old.”
Sam comes into the living room. He has on the same pajamas, the same ski socks.
“She’s giving me hell,” Charles says.
“I heard,” Sam says.
“Hi,” Susan says.
“Hi,” Sam says. “Some woman not Laura called,” he says to Charles.
“How do you know?”
“I know her voice. I’m very good with people’s voices on the phone.”
“A woman … who was it?”
“I should have asked. I was asleep. Wasn’t thinking.”
“Then it might have been Laura.”
“No. I’d know her voice.”
“Did she say she’d call back?”
“Yeah.”
Charles shrugs. Sam sits down on the floor and takes the ashtray off the sofa arm, lights a cigarette and throws the match in the ashtray.
“This thing wiped the shit out of me,” Sam says.
“Mark didn’t call again?” Susan says.
“Nope,” Sam says.
Sam sits with his elbows resting on his knees. He seems to have lost weight. His hair is dirty and stringy. He is still just as hoarse when he talks. Charles no longer thinks that he is dying of pneumonia. He is glad. He has known Sam since fourth grade, when Sam’s family moved to the area. He remembers Sam’s mother holding her son’s hand, leading him into the fourth-grade classroom. Sam whirled and slapped her hand as they came through the door. Sam was a troublemaker. Charles was not. He worshiped Sam. Sam would pretend to have coughing fits so that he’d be excused to get a drink of water, and then he’d go into the bathroom and get the door off the stall before he came back. Sam was quick, and he always had the right tools with him. Once he got the handle off the drinking fountain, and when everybody came in from the blacktop and raced for the fountain, the handle was gone. He was too smart to have it on him when the teacher checked. He had put it in a girl’s desk. After school the teacher watched Sam, so he couldn’t get it. The next morning when the girl opened her desk she found it and gave it to the teacher. Sam waited until the end of fifth grade, but he finally thought of the perfect thing to do: throw a mud ball at her. The girl threw a mud ball back and hit him in the forehead. There was a rock or something in her mud ball, and he still has the scar above his left eyebrow.
Charles picks up a pile of mail and opens first a small blue envelope addressed to him in unfamiliar handwriting. It is a small blue booklet: “Why you didn’t get a Christmas card from us.” He begins reading: “Did you wonder, in all the holiday hassle, why you didn’t get a Christmas card from Carolyn and Bud? The answer can be quickly given: Carolyn and Bud were having problems. But there’s more to the story than that. After all, each could have sent a card. But each was too preoccupied during the season of brotherly love to do so. To wit: Bud told Carolyn a week before Christmas that he was going to divorce her for a blonde cutie. Carolyn cried, agreed. Bud ran off that night with the cutie, and Carolyn ran around in her sweat suit in the cold streets all night, crazy with jealousy. The next morning she found Bud back, but she threw him out. The cutie called: Please, Carolyn, take him back. I know he never loved me. Not on your life (jog, jog). Bud then got irate. Mad at both of them. Would Bud have thought of sending you a Christmas card? Non, mesdames. Non, messieurs. Would Carolyn? Non. But here’s a late wish from her, and a ‘Here’s hoping your New Year is Merry.’ ” On the back page is written: “Sequel: Bud and C. are back together. How tasteless of C. to send this. Wait till Bud finds out. Will you be the one to tell? Love, C.”
“Whew,” Charles says. “Take a look at this, or did you already get one?”
Carolyn works at the store with Sam. Once he and Charles had dinner at their apartment. That was at least a year ago. How did they get his address?
“What do you make of that?” Charles says.
“I’m reading,” Sam says.
“What is it?” Susan says.
“A crazy letter sort of thing from Sam’s friends.”
“Good God,” Sam says, reading. “We went over there for dinner one time. Remember?”
“Good God,” Sam says, tossing it back to Charles. “Isn’t anybody happy? Or even sane?”
“Everybody’s not crazy,” Susan says. “You two are depressed all the time.”
“You’d be depressed too if you felt like I do,” Sam says.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean all the time.”
“You’re not here all the time. How do you know?”
Susan sighs, goes into the kitchen.
“I’m too depressed to apply my usual trenchant wit,” Sam says.
“I wasn’t depressed until she started in,” Charles says.
The phone rings. It is Pete, sounding very drunk.
“You don’t want to hear any more from me tonight, do you?” Pete says. He does not say “Hello.”
“Hello,” Charles says, stalling for time.
“ ‘Hello?’ ” Pete says. “I said hello. Now I’ve got to know the answer to my question.”
“Pete, you profess to love her. You’re not going to do her any good going out and getting juiced the night before she comes home.”
“Don’t criticize me,” Pete says. “Just answer my question.”
“You asked if I was glad to hear from you, didn’t you? I was, Pete, until it turned out that you were drunk.”
“In my day a youngster would never never speak to an old man that way.”
“Pete, you’re not an old man. Try to cheer up. She’s coming home tomorrow and it might work out this time.”
“I’ve got one thing to tell you,” Pete says. “I found the pillow. Do you know where I found it? In the attic. Some birds had gotten into it. It will never, never work out.”
“Pete, maybe some friend of yours not so close to
the problem could advise you better than I can. I don’t really know what to say.”
“What did you say was the worst thing I ever did to you again? I’ve forgotten.”
“Pete, you’re drunk. Where are you?”
“I’m at home. Where do you think my attic is?”
“I’m glad to hear that, because the driving is very dangerous. You’re just drinking at home?”
“If I went nuts,” Pete says, “I wouldn’t have anybody to take care of me. My brother came from Hawaii. Now where is he? Running around an orchid patch. Eating macadamia nuts. I don’t know. I don’t have anybody but myself to depend on.”
“Would you like me to come over?” Charles says.
“That’s very decent of you. But I don’t want you to come.”
“Okay. I hope things go okay tomorrow. Take it easy, Pete.”
“Are there any old people you like a lot?” Pete asks.
Charles does not know any old people. “No,” he says.
“So what you’re saying is that it’s nothing personal,” Pete says. “I’m glad to hear that. You’re a very honest young fellow. Now tell me honestly, Charles, what was it you said was the worst thing I ever did to you?”
“In the bar I told you about the time Susan made the snowman with your wood. You never really did one particularly rotten thing to me, Pete. I don’t hate you, and I never did. I’m not too close to you. That’s all. You never paid any attention to Susan or me. We never talked. How can you expect us to talk now?”
“You mean that if I had a boy he’d talk to me the same way?” Pete says. “My own boy would shoot straight from the hip, too?”
“That’s just an assumption I make, Pete. I don’t know very many people my age who don’t have trouble talking to their parents.”
“That’s kind of you to say,” Pete says. “You mean to console me, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Charles says. He sits in the chair, figuring he’s in for a long talk. Pete hangs up.
“Pete? Hello?”
Charles puts the phone down, shakes his head, goes back to the living room. The phone rings again immediately.
“He’s not making a monkey of me,” Charles says.
Susan gets up.
“I’m not going to talk to him again,” Charles says. It is Doctor Mark, who will be there within the hour.
Sam sighs and goes to bed. Charles sits beside Susan on the sofa and stares across the room. There are tiny cracks in the wall. Fitting, fitting. He takes off his shoes, puts his feet under him. It is cold in the house. Is it less cold or more cold in Laura’s A-frame? Susan files a fingernail. Charles looks through the rest of the mail: a fuel oil bill for $6441, a letter from the Audubon Society, telling him that animals are dying. He can buy a set of “endangered species” glasses, or salt and pepper shakers with cardinals on them. A letter from the Humane Society, telling him that people throw their kittens in trash cans, etc., and asking for money. An overdue notice for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is eleven o’clock. In nine and a half hours he will be sitting at his desk. He wishes he could work at night when nobody was there. He asked his boss about that, and his boss said, “You’re lucky I don’t say anything about your taking off for lunch at five of eleven.” “I only take an hour for lunch,” Charles said. “You can’t work at night,” his boss said. One night his boss asked him if he wanted to be in a poker game “over the line.” Charles said he didn’t know how to play poker. His boss thinks that he is hopelessly dumb. Not the quality of his work, but the personal things he has found out about him: ready for lunch at eleven, wants to work at night, can’t play poker, has a boxwood plant in his window. “What’s the story on that?” his boss said, pointing to the little white plastic container with the little green bush in it. “I bought it in the supermarket,” Charles said. Charles didn’t think he was being evasive. Behind his back, his boss tells people that he is evasive even about small things.
In five years he has had two promotions. He is probably going to get a third promotion. After the first promotion he moved into a different building, the building he is in now and the building he will stay in, even if he gets the third promotion. He has always requisitioned an unusually large number of U. S. Government pens and boxes of paper clips, which he gives away: a box to Susan at school, a box for his mother (“These might come in handy by the telephone”); he even gave Laura a box once, and that was crazy, because she could have requisitioned a box if she had wanted them. When he began working there everyone wore a jacket and tie. Now nobody does. He has a jacket hanging on the coatrack in his office just in case, but he has never had to put it on except for a few days in the summer when the air conditioning got so cold that he needed it. When he heard that he might be getting another promotion he had a nightmare in which his secretary—he would have a secretary if he got the promotion—came into his office and he said to her, “Take a letter. Any letter.” Then he laughed wildly. The woman stood there. In the dream she had been a short, brown-haired woman, not as old as he might have feared. His first building wasn’t bad. It was a ten-story brown brick building, and he walked up to his office on the fifth floor every day to keep in shape. Now he works in a mud-colored glass building and only walks to his office on the twenty-first floor once a week, on Friday. One Friday, walking up, his cassette player going, he saw an employee flatten himself against the wall, wide-eyed, frightened, obviously, of what might have been coming for him. The employee had acted very strangely. It was about the sixteenth or seventeenth floor and Charles was very winded, so he just lifted his hand in greeting. The employee ran under his arm, like an animal running out a gate. There were a lot of nervous people in the building, and it always seemed to him that quite a number of women coming out of the rest room looked as if they had been crying. Laura said that wasn’t so; she had never seen a woman crying in the rest room. He was always surprised that so many people in the employees’ cafeteria kept their plates on the wet brown tray. He always took the dishes off and put the tray in the rack, but most of the people ate right from the tray.
The knock on the door is Doctor Mark. He rushes in when Susan opens the door as if he’s really glad to be there. He is as she described him. Passing him on the street, Charles might have thought he was a musician. His hands, circling Susan’s back, are very large and graceful. In a bar, Charles might have mistaken him for a homosexual.
“How do you do?” Mark says, extending one of the big hands. Susan is still pressed against him with the other.
Charles shakes his hand. “Hello,” he says.
“Mighty cold and snowy,” Mark says. The big hand goes back around Susan.
“Can I get you some coffee?” Charles says.
“I take no artificial stimulants,” Mark says. “But. Thank you.”
“Milk?” Charles says. Is there any milk?
“I’m loaded with calcium for the day, thank you,” Mark says.
Charles revises his opinion of him. He would never work up to Disque Bleu’s. The most he can hope for is Gauloises.
“Sue, Sue, let me look at you,” he says.
Definitely homosexual.
“It’s very nice, you letting me barge in on you tonight,” Mark says.
Charles frowns. Susan hugs Mark’s neck, lets go of him to sit in a chair.
“May I stay the night? I’m afraid I’m. Much too late to start back now.”
“Sure,” Charles says.
“May I ask. How is your mother?”
“She’s going home tomorrow, Mark,” Susan says.
“That’s very lucky,” Mark says, emphasizing the words to convey that it is not.
“Just before you came Pete called, though, and he’s drunk again.”
“That actually kills brain cells,” Mark says.
“I don’t think he cares. He’s so miserable living the way he does now,” Charles says.
“That’s it!” Mark says. “In the final analysis it’s up to the individual. No amount of c
oaxing can make a person care who does not want to care.” Mark’s voice goes up loudly on the last five words.
Charles looks at Mark’s feet. Soaking wet tennis shoes.
“Take your shoes off. I can get you some socks.…”
“No, no,” Mark says, as if Charles had asked to see his penis. “I’m fine. Feet are fine.”
“They’re wet,” Charles says.
Mark frowns. “Rose hips?” he says.
“What?” Charles says, leaning forward.
“Rose hips,” Mark replies.
“He doesn’t have any,” Susan says.
“Ah,” Mark says, as if delighted.
“How was your trip?” Susan asks.
“My trip. Well, I can tell you that it was long and cold, made less so by Brahms. A wonderful station that played much Brahms the last stretch.”
“Are you a musician?” Charles says.
“I play piano. Unprofessionally.”
Charles wants very much to ask if he’s gay.
“How was the car?” Susan asks.
“Well. I can tell you it started off with problems. And a stopover at a service station was necessary because of overheating. Clouds of smoke came out of the car. A small puncture. In. The hose.”
Charles breaks into a smile. That’s it … the guy talks like a J. P. Donleavy character.
“Do you read Donleavy?” Charles asks.
“Donelly?” Marks says. He turns his head to the side. Charles wishes he had a kidskin glove to slap his cheek with.
“No, no, Donleavy! Yes. The Ginger Man.”
Mark looks at Charles, expecting the conversation to go on.
“Of course I don’t read the number of novels I would like to,” Mark says.
“What would you like to read?” Charles asks.
“You’re being obnoxious,” Susan says.
Charles is genuinely curious. He wishes Susan knew that. She misunderstands him, thinks he’s obnoxious every time he’s curious.
“Jane Austen,” Mark says with gravity.
Figures. And probably Thomas Pynchon, too.
“I’ve got a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow I’m done with. Would you like it?” Charles says.
The head turns to the side again. “By …?” Mark says.