Chilly Scenes of Winter

by Ann Beattie

  He has to go. He shouldn’t press his luck. He rubs his shoes back and forth on the rug. He looks at the broken windowpane.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” he says.

  She points. He gets up, legs still shaky as hell, and walks around the corner to the bathroom. It is painted an awful shade of blue. There is a white shower curtain patterned with whiter flowers. Breck shampoo (not Laura’s—unless she’s changed) on the back of the toilet. He closes the door. He sits on the side of the bathtub, the curtain wadded beneath him. He just can’t go. If he stays in here for hours she might come to the door and ask if he is all right. He wants her to show concern. He wants her to act interested in him. When he was a kid, his mother used to ask if he was all right when he stayed in the bathroom too long. That annoyed the hell out of him. Mary Tyler Moore’s water-spattered face smiles up from the cover of People magazine, at his feet. Her roommate is messy. He looks behind him to see if Laura’s shampoo is in the tub. No. Where is Laura’s shampoo? He wants to smell it. He gets up and runs the cold water, puts his hand under it and raises the wet hand to his eyes. His eyes burn when he holds his hand against them. He sits on the small stool against the wall, looking at the toilet and sink. The music goes off in the living room. He hears Laura walk across the floor—the floor creaks—and then the music begins again. It is classical music, but he doesn’t know who. Mournful music. Albinoni, perhaps. It would be nice to bring her some records. She wouldn’t like flowers (he tried that in the past, and it turned out that she felt sorry for them because they had been cut off the plant and would soon die. She has a way of feeling sorry for things, even inanimate things), but she would probably like some records. He could bring wine and records. He could bring a diamond ring if he had the nerve. He could leave the bathroom if he had the nerve, if he could go out there and say good-bye. He cannot. He gets up and stands at the sink, running the cold water again. He holds his hand under it, turns the water off and rubs his hand down his face. After all this time he is seeing Laura again, and he is locked in her bathroom. He shakes his head—not to deny it, but because it’s so ridiculous. As ridiculous as driving to her house and looking at the lights, imagining what room she might be in when she’d already moved. Ox is in the house now, and his daughter, Rebecca. He still has Rebecca’s bird in his glove compartment. He would give it to Laura, but it might make her sad. She’d feel sorry for the bird. To say nothing of the fact that it would remind her of Rebecca. Laura buys plants that are dying in supermarkets—ones that have four or five leaves, marked down to nineteen cents, because she feels sorry for them. Couldn’t she feel sorry for him? Sorry enough to go back to his house tonight? He will never find out standing in the bathroom. But it smells good in the bathroom, and as long as he’s in the bathroom he doesn’t have to leave. He will never tell Sam about this. He probably will tell Sam, hoping for sympathy, since Laura probably isn’t going to give any. The metal fixtures are very bright, the floor is dirty. There is a small red rug, with hairs all over it. He opens the door, goes back and turns off the light, and walks slowly to the living room.

  Laura is lying on the mattress. She sits up when he comes back.

  “I thought you might be sick,” she says. “Why did you think that?”

  “Were you? You look pale.”

  “No,” he says.

  “That’s what I thought. Rebecca was sick so much that the slightest thing makes me think somebody’s sick.”

  “I was just standing around in there.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I was washing my face.”

  She frowns. “But you’re okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  She turns on her side, propped on one elbow. Why did she pluck her eyebrows? She looks constantly quizzical. “What record is that?” he says.

  “I don’t know. One that Frances had on. You can look, if you want.”

  “No,” he says. He sits on the side of the mattress.

  “Would he let you take your things?” Charles says.

  “Jim, you mean?” He nods.

  “I guess so. I don’t think there are bad feelings.” She sighs. “But I don’t really have anything. The furniture isn’t nice. He bought it.”

  “It’s half yours.”

  “I can’t haul it around like a pack rat,” she says. “Might as well leave it. I’m not attached to furniture, anyway. Sometime I’ll get around to going back for my clothes.”

  “You could store anything you wanted at my house.”

  “That’s nice of you. I might.”

  He thinks about having boxes of her clothes near him. He could raise the lid and—better than a genie—Laura’s clothes. They would all smell like Vol de Nuit.

  “Cookbooks,” she says. “I guess I should get them. Most of them are out of print. And the ones the French woman gave me.”

  “It must be strange to walk out and leave all that stuff. It’s sort of the reverse of me walking into my grandmother’s house and being faced with all of it.”

  The half-smile.

  “Can I go to the store for you tomorrow?”

  “I’ll have time,” she says. “And at the moment I can’t think of the ingredients. It’ll come to me in the store.”

  “Would you like me to take you out to dinner first?”

  “Let’s just eat here. I don’t feel like going out right now.”

  “Whatever you want,” he says.

  “I’m going to go to sleep. Come back tomorrow at seven,” she says.

  “Okay,” he says. He does not move. He wants to say: Could I watch you sleep, Laura? He would just sit there and not make a sound all night. He has better sense than to ask—but not enough to leave.

  “Don’t worry about the cab driver,” she says. “I wasn’t interested.”

  “Good,” he says.

  He gets up and looks at the record. It is Albinoni. The crack in the windowpane. At least the apartment is well heated. He remarks on this.

  “You’re as trying as Rebecca. Good night,” she says.

  “Good night,” he says. He even walks to the closet and gets his coat out. She gets up, then, and stands by the door. Without high heels on, she is shorter than he is. He puts his hands on her shoulders. She puts her arms out. He hugs her. He will never be able to let go. But what to do. It’s a gamble, but it’s all or nothing. He picks her up a few inches off the floor (she giggles) and waltzes her into the living room, spinning and dipping, dancing fast around the floor, the old boards creaking like mad. He hums to the music. He has Laura, and they are dancing a beautiful waltz, completely out of time with Albinoni. She is telling him to stop, and he is swirling, remembering, suddenly, Pete asking him what dances he knows. Pete, in the elevator: “Young people dance nowadays, don’t they?”

  “La, la,” Charles sings, and with a final dip deposits her on the floor. He stands back and looks at her, but he doesn’t see her clearly. He had his eyes squeezed shut for the dip, and the light is blinding. Is she happy or angry? She smiles the half-smile.

  “Go,” she says.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and goes to the door. He listens. No floorboards move behind him. If he turns and looks at her, he will never go. She says she wants him to go. He opens the door and walks out into the hallway. He leaves the door open behind him, but he walks all the way to the elevator without hearing it close. It is too silent in the elevator. He worries that it will crash. And where did he park, exactly? The cold air outside makes his face burn and he runs for the car, hoping that the tires aren’t slit. They are not. Neither has he forgotten the key. He gets in the car and starts it, his hand shaking. Someone on the radio is droning the news. He listens and gets more and more depressed until he realizes that he can turn it off. He does not have to hear Henry Kissinger’s well-modulated voice, speaking the words Henry Kissinger always speaks. With the radio off, he feels a little better, but it’s still too silent. Few cars are out this late, and the lights are flashing yellow. That means it’
s after midnight. How did that much time go by? He says Laura’s name out loud a few times, to interrupt the silence. He puts on the heater, and by the time he is halfway home his legs have stopped jerking. He watches the speedometer and the rearview mirror; this is the time of night cops like best, watching for drunks speeding home. He would not want to be given a sobriety test. He knows he could not walk a straight line. He would lurch and weave and stand shaking in front of the policeman. He drives five miles below the speed limit, and has to stop at every light that isn’t just flashing. Well, it wasn’t a bad visit. He can’t tell if anything he did was very right or very wrong. He stayed too long. She kept telling him that. But other than that, he didn’t do too badly. Tomorrow he will do better. And she said the taxi driver didn’t mean anything to her. A taxi driver. Jesus.

  J.D.’s car is still at his house, parked on the street. Charles pulls into the driveway—it seems steeper than usual, or perhaps he’s just a little sick to his stomach—and turns the ignition off and gets out. He walks to the front door and opens it. J.D. is passed out on the sofa, a blanket over him. The dog barks a greeting, and J.D. groans and rolls over to face the back of the sofa, the blanket falling on the rug. Charles picks up the dog, strokes it, and walks through the living room to his bedroom. The light is on in Sam’s room, and Sam gestures for him to come in.

  “What did she do to you?” Sam says.

  “Nothing. It went fine.”

  “I’m surprised. But that’s good.”

  “You look like you don’t believe me.”

  “You look half dead. You don’t look good.”

  Charles shrugs. “Neither does J.D.”

  “J.D. got good and drunk. We walked the dog for a mile, and he still didn’t sober up, so there he lies.”

  “Does he have to go to work or anything?”

  “He’s just working part-time now.”

  “Oh. Well, see you in the morning. You want the dog?”

  Charles puts the dog on the bed. The dog walks up to the other pillow and curls up.

  “Get me up when you get up,” Sam says. “You can drop the dog and me at the animal hospital in the morning. It’s got worms.”

  Charles makes a face. “Worms?”

  “Yeah. All dogs get worms. Drop me at the animal hospital and I’ll only have to pay for a bus home.”

  “Okay. See you.”

  “Hey, Charles?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Those worms don’t crawl out or anything, do they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.” Sam says. “You should have seen the things.”

  That night, as usual, the dog paces (Sam removes the collar at night, but you can hear the dog’s toenails on the floor if you listen carefully) and J.D. groans and goes to the bathroom many times. Charles is glad he isn’t either of them. He is glad to be himself, now that he’s going to get Laura. And he is. He reassures himself of this, and eventually falls asleep. He awakens several times, though (flushing toilet, the dog pacing), from nightmares that he is losing her. In one nightmare he meets Frances, and instead of being a woman, Frances is a tall, handsome man, and Laura is obviously in love with him. They tell him to go away, and he jumps out the window (these nightmares are faithful, down to the last detail: he sees the shattered pane of glass as he crashes through the window), and he awakes spread-eagled on the bed, his face in the pillow. J.D. flushes the toilet. He is now only half glad he’s not J.D. J.D. will vomit a few more times, and eventually it will be over with.

  He calls Laura when he gets to work. If she hasn’t left the apartment, he can at least tell her that he loves her and to have a good day. The phone rings and rings.

  His boss asks him if he will have lunch with him. Charles is sure he is going to be fired. He works diligently until noon, when Bill said he would come for him. Bill does not appear until twelve-fifteen.

  “Kid was on the phone. Sorry to be late.”

  Bill is losing his hair. He is wearing a blue blazer and navy blue shoes—that’s something Charles has never seen before—and he has new glasses.

  “Kid’s going nuts in the cold, wants an electric blanket. Jesus. My kid doesn’t even try to be self-sufficient. I said, ‘I sent you money galore. Can’t you go out and buy a blanket?’ and he says, ‘Do you want me to get into Harvard or not? Getting into Harvard requires that I do a lot of studying.’ So I said—I’ve always wanted to say this—I said, ‘I think you place too much importance on getting into Harvard. I don’t care if you get into Harvard or not, personally!’ That shook him up.”

  “I’d be afraid to sleep under an electric blanket,” Charles says. He thinks of his mother: God—what if that occurs to her? What if she plugs herself in and roasts?

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Bill says. “I’ve been sleeping under number three for years. My wife’s nuts for the thing. She wants to be under number four. As I’m dropping off I hear her click it up a number.”

  Charles smiles, waiting to be fired. The elevator doors open and they walk out of the building.

  “That blind man gives me the creeps,” Bill says, when they are outside the building. “I’m all for hiring the handicapped, but that blind man’s something else.”

  “What is it about him?” Charles says.

  “I don’t know. I just can’t account for it.”

  “Maybe he’s the devil,” Bill says. “Other morning I came in and bought a paper from him and he said, ‘Up late last night, huh?’ As it happens, I was out damned late. Playing cards. You don’t play cards, do you?”

  “No,” Charles says.

  “That’s too bad. I mean—it can be overdone. But an occasional game of cards.” Bill slaps Charles on the back. “That’s what I tell my wife. She doesn’t like me out playing cards. What the hell. An occasional game of cards. Not that it’s always cards exactly.”

  Bill’s face lights up, and what started as a conspiratorial smile ends up a sneer.

  “You play those cards, don’t you, Charlie?” Bill says. “Ha!” Bill says.

  They are crossing the highway. That means either the drugstore or the delicatessen. “How about some hot pastrami?” Bill says. “Fine,” Charles says.

  “You’re a very quiet guy,” Bill says. “Notice that?”

  “I guess so,” Charles says.

  “So’s my kid. And then I get a phone call about an electric blanket. I worry that he’s not getting any action up there at Dartmouth. I was going to say something about that to him, but he’s a great one for confiding in his mother. If he wants an electric blanket, though, that means there’s nothing else to keep him warm, huh?”

  “I guess,” Charles says.

  “That’s a shame,” Bill says. “Nice-looking kid like that. Always work work work.”

  “Yeah. He’s a nice kid,” Charles says.

  “He works so hard he doesn’t remember his mother or his father’s birthday. Top that. You don’t have kids, but when you do you’ll see that things like that matter. I still go out and get his mother a gift and sign his name, and she does the same thing. Sometimes I feel like shoving that pen up his ass.”

  Bill holds open the door. The delicatessen is mobbed. Bill stands in the longest line, the one for “twos.”

  “Reason I asked you to have lunch with me, I thought that you were closer to my son’s age than I am … I’ve got a few years on you, huh? And maybe you’d have some idea what I might say to him to slow him down.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can say if he doesn’t intend to slow down.”

  “Aw, Charlie, there’s got to be some way to tell him to limber up. Are there any poets or singers or people like that I could introduce him to who would, you know, urge him to limber up?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not as up on things as you probably think. Uh—you could get him a Janis Joplin record, one she sings ‘Get It While You Can’ on.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Janis Joplin? You never
heard of her?”

  “I think I’ve heard of her.”

  “She killed herself. She was a singer, at Woodstock? She was very free, you know, hippies identified with her. That one song …”

  “Isn’t my kid going to know she killed herself? Won’t that make him think she’s nobody to listen to?”

  “I don’t know. If he thinks that way.”

  “I don’t know what he thinks, Charlie.”

  “Well, try that one. Get him Pearl.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The name of the record.”

  “I knew you’d come up with something,” Bill says, slapping his back and moving him up in line.

  In a few minutes the hostess seats them. She brings menus and a bowl of bright green pickles. Bill’s hand shoots into the bowl.

  “That record’s going to surprise him,” Bill says. “I’m not going to send it with a note or anything. I’m just going to let him figure the thing out. That song’s plain enough that he’d figure it out?”

  “Couldn’t miss it,” Charles says.

  They eat their sandwiches in silence. Bill looks very pleased with himself. Charles is let down; he expected to be fired. All that adrenalin surging around for nothing. For that asshole kid. He would like to break the record over the kid’s head. Harvard. Just as bad, Dartmouth.

  “Would you send an electric blanket to your kid?” Bill asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Bill says.

  “That’s just a lot of crap. Anybody can pile some stuff on and keep warm in bed.”

  “They’re good things,” his boss says.

  Oh yeah. His boss has one.

  “Maybe you ought to send it, then,” he says.

  “I never know when I’m talking to you exactly what you’re thinking. Tell me honestly, now: should I send an electric blanket?”

  “No. They’re useless crap manufactured to make money.” Bill nods.

  “But that record will go over okay?” he says.

  “I imagine,” Charles says.

  “No poets that you can think of, though?”

  “I don’t know any poets who deal specifically with the problem of not agonizing if you don’t get into Harvard.”