Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  Charles laughs.

  “I wish I could sit around in a tub. There’s something comforting about that. Just sitting in all that warm water, nothing to do,” Sam says.

  “It’s very Freudian.”

  “It’s very comforting. The hell with Freud. I’m going to go sit in the tub.”

  “I’ll be talking to you.”

  “Good-bye,” Sam says.

  Charles decides to take a hot shower. Have one more cup of tea—he drinks so much tea he can never sleep—and stand under the hot water. His legs are tired from so much walking. He’s sweated a lot; he should wash his hair too. It would be so nice to lie on a raft, to float off the coast of Bermuda, sun shining, wind blowing, drifting. Rum drinks. White shells. Pink flowers. Bicycles. His parents used to take them to the beach in the summer. It was a crowded beach, Popsicle sticks everywhere, stores that sold dirty sweatshirts, fat women in straw hats, the men in matching straw hats, with miniature beer cans attached to the hatband. Auctioneers who kept shouting for everyone to move in, oriental rug shops, gift shops with naked plastic statues that could be filled with water so they’d pee, drugstores that smelled of fish (they always had tanks of goldfish in the back, and dyed birds), the amusement park with puddles of beer and candy apples half eaten. His father always had him by the hand in the amusement park, guiding him around puddles. He went in a house of mirrors with his father. It was a little too hot in there. His father’s laughter was forced. They bumped their heads against the glass. They kept seeing the same people inside over and over. Everybody groped forward with their hands out, got knocked in the head anyway. The kids ran around laughing, as though they knew where they were going. And on the way out, when they finally found their way out, there was a moving belt they had to walk down, which made them teeter out the door. The railing ended just before you came through the plastic fringe curtain to the outside. His mother bought him a bucket and shovel and several different molds at the grocery store to take to the beach. Two kids in the neighborhood had them and Charles had asked for one. The other kids had a starfish mold, a fish mold, a circle, a square, a triangle mold, and a mermaid mold. Charles’s bucket and shovel came with a bucketful of triangle molds in different colors. “Maybe it’s a different manufacturer?” his mother said. “How should I know?” He took the label down to his friend’s house. Same manufacturer. He reported back to his mother. “How the hell should I know?” she said. “Can’t you use that triangle thing? What’s wrong with it?” He thought she was very stupid for getting the worst one in the store. She didn’t even check. He told his father that, behind his mother’s back. “I’m sure she didn’t check,” his father said. “But she’s awfully busy on grocery day, you know.” Charles hated grocery day. She was always very busy, his sister in the grocery cart, his mother holding his hand and pushing the cart with her other hand. Why did he have to hold her hand? He wasn’t like the other kids: he didn’t pull things off shelves or wander away. And finally she said they were just too much for her and left them with a neighbor when she went shopping. What had they ever done? It never failed—every time she’d get to the checkout counter she’d say to him, “Wait with your sister, I’ll be right back,” and run off for another item, and he’d stand there just knowing that his sister would start crying or that it would get time to unload the cart and pay for the food and he wouldn’t have any money. When he had to start unloading and his mother wasn’t back he was frantic. He dropped cans, couldn’t get a grip on the things to lift them out. She always took so long. He used to think she’d run off and left them, that not only would he have no money to pay for the food, but he’d have to get Susan home, and he didn’t even know for sure in which direction to walk. He used to watch the route his mother drove to the store very carefully. He memorized a couple of street names. Why couldn’t she shop at a closer store? He had asked her that, and she had thrown a fit. “He even criticizes where I shop! Who does he think he is?” His father was always in the middle.

  He picks up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hi. What’s up?” Susan says.

  “What’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. I’ll tell you what I’d like to have up—my hand against Elise’s bubble head. I’d like to slug her. What the hell would you bring a crazy girl like that home for? Why did I have to end up with her? Have you heard from her?”

  “Don’t get excited.”

  “Have you ever dealt with her mother? The woman is nuts. She called and nearly had me crazy because Elise never showed up after she left here. Tonight she called with the news that she was in Vail, Colorado, with my friend Sam the lawyer.”

  “Oh no,” Susan says.

  “Where she really is, I wouldn’t know. But I want you to make it your business to find out and to tell her that she’s not to implicate me in this, or the lawyer and I will beat her to a pulp.”

  “I’ll call Denise. She tells Denise everything.”

  “She should have told you a little more about where she was going.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “That mother of hers is nuts, Susan. I’ve got a nut mother of my own to deal with. And I don’t want to get dragged into this thing.”

  “She probably is in Colorado. She probably picked up somebody and went to Colorado with him.”

  “Find out. I want to know where she really is. And I want word to get to her that she should cool it about how nice my wife was to her and how swell Sam the lawyer is. Tell her to make up lies about somebody else.”

  “I will.”

  “And call me back and let me know where she is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Wait. Before you hang up, how’s Mom?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going over there for dinner this weekend.”

  “She’s cooking again?”

  “Of course not. Pete is.”

  “That’s nice of him.”

  “Yeah. We’ll all have a great time. Especially if we don’t have to haul her out of the tub at dinner time.”

  “I know. Well, I’m sorry about all the trouble Elise caused you, and I’ll call back when I find out something.”

  “By the way, Susan. Is the funny way Mark talks an affectation?”

  “I’ll write you,” she says. “You can’t tell me?”

  “I’ll write you.”

  “He’s right there?”

  “Yes. The sauna was great. I think you would enjoy it.”

  This is just the way Laura would talk to him if he had called—a one-way conversation that made no sense. We have enough brushes. Thank you for calling.

  Charles goes into the bathroom and begins undressing. He has lost weight He has to remember to start grocery shopping again, lay in some food. Too bad Sam had already eaten. Not that he’s hungry. He piles his clothes on the toilet and steps into the shower. It feels very good. It would be nicer to be stretched out, though, on a raft in Bermuda, dangling his fingers in the cool water. Sharks would slice them off. He has always had problems with reality encroaching on his fantasies. One night when he was dreaming, a figure actually stepped into his dream and told him it was time to stop dreaming. Charles woke up and sure enough, the electricity had gone off and the alarm would not have rung. The only problem was that it was six A.M., and he could have slept until seven-thirty. Except that there was no way to set the alarm. So he sat there in bed, reading, for an hour and a half, thinking about the figure who walked into his dream. What to make of the fact that the man looked like Jesus?

  The phone is ringing as he steps out of the shower. For a man with no friends, he thinks, the phone certainly rings a lot.

  “Hello?”

  “Charlie? Hello. Bill.”

  He did not need to identify himself. Only one person calls Charles “Charlie”: his boss. “Hi, Bill. What can I do for you?”

  “What can I do for you? Hear you’re not well.”

  “I’ll probably be back tomorrow.”

  “What is it,
the flu?”

  “I thought so, but it’s just a sick feeling. My throat’s pretty sore.”

  “You ought to drink some whiskey with lemon. Put sugar in if it proves too much for you. Hal”

  “I might take that advice.”

  “My son goes to Dartmouth with a kid—his roommate, actually—who had a sore throat for two months. Finally the doctor sent him to a shrink. The shrink told him his throat was sore because he was deliberately constricting it to stop himself from screaming.”

  “God. That’s awful.”

  “Those shrinks are pretty clever fellows, huh?”

  For some reason, his boss has been trying to find out for a year if he ever went to a shrink. He has not.

  “I guess they are.”

  “But listen, what I called about was this: would you mind if I went through your desk if you’re not there tomorrow? I know I left my silver pen in your office. You probably put it in the drawer.”

  “I don’t remember seeing a silver pen.”

  “Must have left it there. I think I had my pen with me on Monday because I went over that report with you. Well, I wouldn’t make anything of this, but my boy gave me the pen and he’s going to be coming home and he wants to visit my office. My wife put him up to that, to make me feel good. Anyway, it was a present from him for my birthday, and I thought it should be on the desk.”

  “Sure, Bill. I don’t care if you look.”

  “I thought it was only polite to call. It would look bad if you were out sick and I started rummaging through your things.”

  “You could have looked anyway, Bill.”

  “Thanks, Charlie. I was sure you’d be amenable, but wanted to check.”

  “How’s your son doing at Dartmouth?”

  “Very well. He wishes he could be at Harvard, though, and he’s making his mother very unhappy. He writes her the silliest ‘If only’ letters. I don’t know what to say to cheer him up. What can I say? Harvard wouldn’t have him.”

  “Well, Dartmouth is a classy place.”

  Bill loves to hear that things are classy: his son’s college, his shoes.

  “Sure it’s classy. Try to tell him that. He says it’s cold, and he loves Harvard Square. I was at Harvard Square once. Cars and buses and cops. It was a mess.”

  “Well, maybe he can get into graduate school there.”

  “That’s what my wife writes him. I tell her, don’t write that. Drop the whole subject. But he’s her son. You know.”

  “Yeah.”

  I have a son of my own, I should know. Just ask Mrs. Reynolds if I don’t have a son.…

  “So. We’ll be seeing you later. I hope it’s not the flu.”

  “So do I. See you later, Bill.”

  He goes into the bedroom, puts the towel over the lamp, and gets into bed. He is so tired he’s almost dizzy. He gets up again and sets the alarm, then goes back to bed. The hell with the pajamas. He turns out the light.

  He is almost asleep when the phone rings. It couldn’t be Laura. But what if it is? He gets up and quickly walks to the phone. It is Pamela Smith, calling to thank him for his kindness and to say that he is really a very nice person. She is calling from a motel. She got a ride to California. She thanks him for helping her clear out her thoughts. She thanks him for the breakfast. “At one time I was in love with you,” she says. He does not know what to answer. He realizes, standing there, that he should have slept with her. He tells her to have a good trip and to enjoy herself in California. She says that she will make him something out of silver. “I didn’t get you out of bed, did I?” she says. He says she didn’t It’s the truth; Laura did.

  EIGHT

  He stops on the way to work to get gas. It is a self-service station. On the gas pump is a piece of cardboard: “See cashier for transaction settlement.” Why not “Pay cashier”? He is in a bad mood. He was not going to go to work at all, except that he began to feel much sicker and thought that if he got out of the house he might not think about it. In the house, he had thought about weeping in bed, calling Sam at work to tell him to come right over. He had even thought of calling his mother. That’s when he decided it would be best if he went to work.

  When he walked into his office Bill was there, sitting in his chair, going through his desk.

  “Thank God I called you!” Bill said, shooting up, as though he’d been caught doing something terrible anyway. “If I hadn’t called, imagine what you would have thought if you’d come in and found me with my hand in the till!”

  “Find your pen?”

  “I just got here,” Bill says.

  “Try the drawer on the right,” Charles says.

  “How are you feeling, Charlie? Try my home remedy?”

  “Didn’t have any whiskey. I’ll get some on the way home.”

  “You don’t look good,” Bill says.

  “I feel awfully queasy.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I just didn’t feel like lying around the house.”

  “Yeah. It must be rough when you’re sick, not having a wife to take care of you.”

  “Yeah. So I figured I’d come in.”

  “Well, take it easy.”

  “I will.”

  Charles sits in a chair against the wall, waiting for Bill to finish.

  “Sometimes having a wife can present problems, too. Last night she got herself into a state about my boy not being accepted at Harvard. A very paranoid thing about how they would have taken him if he’d been black. I spent an hour calming her down. Her sister married a colored fellow ten years ago, and you should have heard her then. I told her—you don’t have to see your sister. What does it matter to you? She hasn’t seen her sister in ten years.”

  “There’s too much emphasis put on what college you go to,” Charles says.

  “That’s what I tell her. And Dartmouth isn’t the small time. She cries because he’s told her it’s very cold there. She thinks he’s suffering in the cold. She talks about him like he’s a stray cat or something.”

  “That’s too bad. I hope she starts feeling better about it.”

  Bill stands up. “I can’t find it. Thanks for letting me look. If you see it around, let me know.”

  “A silver pen?”

  “A narrow Cross number. My wife gave it to my son to give me for my birthday. You know.”

  Charles looks at the paperwork he has to do. He closes his door and takes out his cassette and earphones and puts on “John Wesley Harding.” He works while he listens. When the tape has finished he clicks it off and stands up and stretches. His head is hot. He walks down the hallway to the library and stands looking at it. He goes in and asks for something he doesn’t need—a financial report from 1970. The new librarian (he thinks, sadly, that she’s not so new any more) writes the information down on a slip of paper and goes into the stacks to get it. He thinks about following her, whispering to her that he loves her, pinning her against the shelves. He shakes his head, smiling. Imagine Bill’s reaction: “Why, I just left his office and he was fine. He’d been sick, you know.…” Imagine the librarian’s reaction. Imagine even thinking of doing such a thing. When he gets the report he thanks the librarian and goes back to his office and gets four aspirin, goes to the drinking fountain and takes them, one at a time, tipping his head back to swallow each time. He reminds himself of a bobbing-bird toy he had when he was young. The birds would dip interminably over a glass of water. One night he felt sorry for them because they weren’t getting any rest and poured the glass of water on the floor and attached the birds to the empty glass. He denied doing it. Not much was made of it. His mother showed his father the wet spot in the rug, his father shrugged and filled the glass again.

  He leaves the office at quarter after eleven, kidding himself that he’s going to meet Laura at school. He even drives to the school and circles the block, but of course Rebecca goes to school a full day now, and Laura won’t be there for her until three. He could go back then. Except that he
doesn’t want to be pushy. Of course she would be polite. And beautiful. But she would think it was in bad taste. Maybe she’ll call. Maybe he will drive over around three.

  Three o’clock comes and goes, and he is still working. At three-thirty Betty comes in for the typing and asks how he’s feeling. He is embarrassed, thinking, with his fever, that she knows he deliberately forgot to ask her number. Renounced. The villain.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Do you need aspirin or anything?”

  “No thanks,” he says.

  If only she would leave him alone and not make him feel guiltier.

  “Okay,” she says, taking the reports out of the basket. “I’ll get these back to you in the morning. Is that soon enough?”

  “Certainly,” he says.

  She leaves. He looks up only briefly, when she is almost out the door. The black boots are back. She has on a red miniskirt and a white sweater. She slumps. He should call her, put a little romance in her life, tell her he loves her, marry her. He still doesn’t know her last name.

  Leaving work early (four twenty-five), he sees Sid from his floor in the elevator.

  “Sid, do you know Betty’s last name? Betty in the typing pool?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  A curious look from Sid. Sid knows. Everything. Both sides of it. That Betty wants him to call, that he is going to call. Well, not without her name or number he isn’t. He could call Laura and ask. That would be loutish; it would be something one of Sam’s old girlfriends would do to him. And Sam wouldn’t mind. Would Laura?

  He remembers, finally, to go grocery shopping. There is nothing in the entire store he wants to eat. He buys two frozen pizzas, some soup, some salami and cheese, a roast beef, and a can of lima beans. He goes to the dairy counter and gets another kind of cheese and a half gallon of milk. A hippie is standing at the far end, a half gallon of milk opened and being poured into his mouth. What if he’s caught? The hippie raises his milk carton in salute. Charles waves back. He leaves immediately, in case a store official thinks he knows the hippie.