Chilly Scenes of Winter

FOUR

Charles gets up much earlier than necessary to meet Laura at two o’clock. There is a note in the kitchen from Susan, saying that she’s gone shopping. There is also a note from Sam, that he didn’t see the night before, saying “Just get your hand on her thigh and move it up slowly. That drives them wild.” There is no signature. A plate with the remains of a chili dinner is next to the note. Charles puts it in the sink. He does not feel like washing dishes. He decides, instead, to go to the laundromat. He doesn’t feel like going to the laundromat and stops at the front door with the dirty laundry basket to think whether there’s some excuse to get out of it. There is not. He goes out to the car, notices that it has rained during the night. He inhales before he turns on the ignition. The car starts immediately. It delights him that his car is unpredictable. Turtle Wax, he thinks. Laura, he thinks.

He is the only man at the laundromat. His sheets are the only ones without flowers. A little boy sitting on top of the next washing machine drops his toy into the water and Charles has to fish it out for him. The little boy cries when he hands it back. The child’s mother rushes over, picks him up, and disappears to the back of the laundry. The woman is pregnant. Her sheets have pink roses all over them. He looks at his pocket watch and discovers that the dryer is cheating him out of two minutes time. There is no one to complain to. If Laura were there, he could complain to her. Maybe Susan was right. Maybe he criticized her or complained too much. His vacation is almost over. He puts the clean clothes in the back seat of his car and drives to the school three hours early. Of course she is not there. He goes to a restaurant and orders breakfast. He is told that it’s too late for breakfast. He gets mad and, for the first time in days, craves a cigarette. Instead, he orders a ham sandwich. He has finished lunch in twenty minutes. That leaves two hours to kill. He goes out to his car and sits there, shivering. Laura is still in her A-frame. He turns on the car radio to hear the news, but it’s over. He has the opportunity to order a two-record set called “Black Beauty” if he acts now. He turns the dial. Merle Haggard sings about trading all of his tomorrows. He turns the radio off and starts the car. He drives around for almost an hour, then goes to the school and parks, waiting for her. He closes his eyes, remembers taking the Metroliner with Laura to New York, how he gave her a cup of water to hold for him while he got out an Excedrin. He always got headaches on trains. When the pill was on his tongue he reached for the cup and she smiled. She had drained it. The Excedrin was very bitter melting on his tongue as he got up to get another cup of water. The whole trip to New York was rotten. She hadn’t wanted to go, but he had tickets to a play. He didn’t know she didn’t like Ibsen. That was early … when he first knew her. She was separated from Jim then, and living in a crummy apartment she wouldn’t buy any furniture for. She smoked grass with him for the first time. She smoked all the grass, and Sam still hasn’t gotten around to getting him more. Another time in New York he bought two grapefruit at a fruit stand, and the next time he looked at her the grapefruit were under her sweater. It looked very nice. She was very nice. He opens his eyes, convinced that he will fall asleep and scream, that she will walk up to his car and he will be screaming inside. The city is full of diplomats. He has been hit twice by them. Both diplomats were crazy. He gets depressed, sometimes, thinking that everybody is crazy. Except Sam. And then he gets worried that he feels that way about Sam.

He checks his watch. It is a gold watch that belonged to his grandfather. On the day his grandfather killed himself, he also shot two grouse. He went out in the morning for the birds, and in the afternoon for himself. They heard the story over and over when they were growing up about how their grandmother cleaned and cooked the grouse anyway. He studies the face of the watch, wondering whether his grandfather looked at it before he killed himself. She will be here in twenty-four minutes, he says out loud. He doesn’t see her car, but she must already be inside the school. She is a devoted stepmother. She is devoted to everybody but him. He envies Rebecca. He has one of Rebecca’s pictures that Laura left in his car by mistake. It is a crayoned picture of a flying red bird that looks like a flying pig. He takes it out and looks at it. He closes the glove compartment. Glove compartment. When people wore gloves. Years ago. His grandfather. There is a picture of his grandfather on a table in his mother’s house. He was a plain-looking man, with white hair and puckered cheeks and a cravat. He built his own house. Charles got his house from his grandmother, when she died. It was not the same house his grandfather built. With the insurance money she had bought a newer one. His grandmother thought he was the only worthwhile member of the family. In elementary school, Charles had sung in the choir. His grandmother loved music. She left him her house.

Laura should be here. What is he going to say to her? He wants, somehow, to convey to her that her husband is a dull man. Since he is also dull, he wants to point out that she wouldn’t be getting into anything unexpected; she would just be swapping a dull person who doesn’t care much about her for one who does. That sounds awful. He will have to think harder. He puts his watch away. It is heavy in his pocket. He pushes it far into the pocket, not wanting to lose it. What would his old puckered-cheeked grandfather think of his rendezvousing with a woman at an elementary school?

She doesn’t come. She’s five minutes late, then ten. He turns on the radio, hoping to find out that his watch is inaccurate. There is a special report about a child’s oven that blows up. Judy Collins. A financial report. He looks up and sees Laura’s car, a black Volvo. Laura pulls up alongside his car, on the other side of the street. “I’m sick,” she hollers. “I just came to tell you. I called, but you had left.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he says. Wind blows in his face.

“The flu,” she says. “I’m really sick. I’ve got to go back to bed.”

He looks at her stupidly. She looks very sick. Her hair is dirty. No question that it is more brown than blond. He stares into her eyes. They are bright. She has a fever. A car honks in back of her and she drives on. He thinks she is gone and can’t bring himself to start the ignition. Her car pulls up alongside his.

“Hi,” he says.

“I’m sorry I’m sick,” she says, leaning across the seat. “I’ll see you another time.”

“Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

“No. I just want to go back to bed.” She shakes her head. She looks awful.

“You shouldn’t have come out.”

“I thought of you sitting here. I knew you wouldn’t believe I was sick.”

“I would have believed you,” he says, as indignant as she was when she said her husband didn’t open her mail. But he probably wouldn’t have. Even the bread-baking is in question.

“Will you call me?” he says. She nods, rolling the window up. Her car is moving slowly forward.

“I’m going to follow you,” he says. “You’re too sick to drive.”

“I only have a fever,” she says through the crack in the window, but he puts the key in the ignition, and she waits. The car won’t start. It grinds, but nothing happens. When he is about to scream, pound the windshield, holler and curse, it starts. He follows her car. He follows it all the way to her house, which he can barely see from the road. It is a twenty-minute ride from the school, along streets he has never driven. He starts to pull into the drive, but sees another car and backs up, drives on. At the end of the dead-end street he makes a U-turn and coasts slowly past her driveway. What if she is dying? He sees her get out of her car and walk toward the house. He watches her until she disappears, then coasts to the end of the street. There is a lot of traffic, once he leaves her block. He keeps thinking about turning around, going to the house and saying something to her, no matter who’s there. He lacks nerve. He’s not sure what else he lacks, because her husband’s no prize either. He is wondering about that when his car conks out at a stop sign. He tries to re-start it, but nothing happens. Finally, he sits there with the car flooded, cars pulling around him, head on the steering wheel. What the hell — it wouldn’t hurt to grow his hair some.

Eventually the car starts, and he drives back to his house. Sam’s car is out front. Charles pulls into the driveway and gets out, not bothering to put the car in the garage. The piece of junk doesn’t deserve to be covered. He goes up the walk. Sam opens the front door.

“What are you doing here?” Sam says.

“What are you?” Charles says.

“I felt funny. I took off a couple of hours early. The flu’s going around. I hope it’s not that.”

“If you think you’ve got the flu, what are you doing here?”

The wrong thing to say. Sam looks hurt.

“We can take care of you if you get sick,” Charles says. He nods agreement with himself at Sam, whose expression changes.

“What happened to Laura?” Sam says.

“She’s got it. She was awfully sick. I didn’t get to talk to her. I followed her home. That’s all.”

Sam shakes his head. He is drinking wine. A bottle is on the floor by the chair.

“Wine?” Sam says.

“What are you drinking that for if you’re getting sick?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “Where’s Susan?”

“Shopping.”

“I could go out and get food for dinner if there isn’t any,” Sam says.

“What would you go out for if you’re getting sick?”

Sam shrugs. “What are we going to eat?” he says.

Charles gets a glass and pours some wine. It is French wine, instead of the Gallo that Sam used to drink. Sam sympathizes with the boycott. Charles feels sorry that he is getting sick.

“I guess I should call the hospital,” Charles says. He gets up and calls. Pete answers on the first ring.

“Mommy did something that was a little silly,” he says. “She had some laxatives in her purse, and she took them. She hasn’t been feeling well today.”

“Laxatives? What for?”

“She’s going to be just fine, and fit as a fiddle for the Windy City,” Pete says.

“Can I talk to her, Pete?”

“Sure you can. She’s right here, and feeling better by the minute.”

There is a lot of rustling and whispering.

“Hello?” his mother says faintly.

“I’m sorry you had a setback,” Charles says. “You okay now?”

“Charles, I was in awful pain. It was like the night you had to come for me. I was going to kill myself this morning and I went into the bathroom and took the laxatives.”

“Made you weak, huh?” Charles says.

“Charles, the woman in the bed next to me died.”

There is a loud rustling, and Pete’s voice. “Charles? Pay no attention. Mommy’s got her facts confused. The woman was discharged. Mommy’s weak as a kitten from all those laxatives.”

“Don’t they watch her? Don’t they know she’s bats?”

There is a long silence. “We’re looking forward to seeing you soon, too,” Pete says. “I most certainly will tell her.” Pete hangs up.

“Oh Christ,” Charles says, slamming the receiver down.

“What’s the matter?”

“She took herself a bunch of laxatives and she’s talking about death again. He’s there, no doubt telling her to try to foxtrot.” Charles stops. He is surprised to realize that he remembers the name of another dance.

Sam shakes his head, swirls the wine in his glass.

“Nothing goes right,” Sam says.

Charles picks up his coat from the back of the chair. “Come on,” he says to Sam. “We’re going to the store to get some good stuff. Bring those cookbooks with you.”

“All of them?”

“There’s only four or five.”

Sam puts on his coat, picks them up.

“Under desserts,” Charles says, closing the door behind him. “Look up soufflés. See if there’s one that sounds like it’s made out of oranges and cognac.”

Sam cannot find it. Charles looks too, in the parking lot of the Safeway, but nothing even vaguely similar is listed. He ends up buying a Dutch Apple pie.

“I hate that kind,” Sam says.

“I do too. Maybe I’ll save it as a hostess present for Clara’s dinner.”

But on New Year’s Day their mother is in the mental hospital. She is too sedated to have visitors. Pete is there, and Pete’s brother, who flew in from Hawaii. Early in the morning Pete called to say that things were pretty good. The doctor did not think there would be much of a problem, and she’d be back home soon. She was taken to the hospital after she sat propped up in bed crying for an entire night. At noon, when Charles was fixing a bowl of soup to take to Sam on a tray, Pete called again. “You son of a bitch,” Pete said loudly. “I know you don’t like me and you never liked me, and from now on it’s between you and your mother. I’m not calling you again. I’m not feeling guilty any more. You make me feel guilty she’s here, when nobody could have taken better care of her. Talk to the doctors here about that, you son of a bitch.” Charles called the hospital back, but there was no way Pete could be paged, and his mother had no telephone. The soup boiled over on the stove, and Charles tried to dab it up with a sponge, careful not to burn himself on the still-hot burner. The noodles looked disgusting clinging to the sponge. He put a napkin on a tray, the way his mother used to do for him when he was sick in bed, and then the bowl of soup. He could hear Sam coughing in the bedroom. The TV was in there, on a table Charles had moved to the foot of the bed. Even above the noise of the football game, Sam’s coughing could be heard.

“You ought to have me call a doctor,” Charles says, standing in the doorway with the tray. He feels his own nostrils unclogging as the steam from the soup rises.

“Everybody’s got the flu. I don’t need one.”

“That cough sounds awful.”

“Are you bringing me my lunch or not?”

Charles walks into the room. The announcer screams. The Dolphins have the ball. Sam sneezes.

“Don’t get so close to me,” Sam says.

“You’ve got a fever,” Charles says. “I could feel the heat when I leaned over.”

“Too bad the nursie isn’t still here,” Sam says.

“I’ll bet she’d tell you to go to a doctor.”

“I’ll bet she’d jump into bed. Nurses are all amazing. I think nursing students are more remarkable than real nurses.”

“Eat your soup.”

“The last time I went to the doctor I had had a cough for two weeks — I’d shoot up in bed in the middle of the night, choking with it. He could hear me coughing. I coughed the whole time I was there. I told him that nothing worked but streptomycin. Naturally he wouldn’t give me any. He said, ‘Oh! You like that stuff, huh?’ When the cough didn’t get any better, I went back and asked for it again. He gave me some blue pills. That pissed me off, so I said, ‘Isn’t heroin good for coughing? Could you prescribe some of that?’ Doctors. The hell with doctors.”

Sam blows on a spoonful of soup, sips it. “Who was on the phone?”

“Pete. I guess he’s loaded somewhere.”

“Are you still going to have to go over there for dinner?”

“It doesn’t look that way,” Charles says.

“It’s sort of pathetic,” Sam says. “He tries to be nice to you and Susan now, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Charles says. “He tries to be nice.”

Charles is sitting at the foot of the bed. Sam leans around him to watch the huddle.

“You want me to move?”

“No. Stay where you are.”

Charles gets up, wanders out into the hallway. Susan’s clothes are thrown over a chair. She is taking a shower. When she gets out, he’ll have to tell her that the shower had symbolic importance. Right after her boyfriend called she went in there. He picks up her sweater. Purple. Janis Joplin wouldn’t have been caught dead in it. Laura wouldn’t either. If Susan were Laura, he could throw off all his clothes, jump into the shower, say, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He sits down on the clothes-covered chair, thinking that he might be going out of his mind. If she doesn’t call, he probably will. He goes into the living room and opens a drawer where there is a picture of Laura. It has a cheap silver frame around it — the kind that comes with photo-booth pictures. There is a white streak just under her chin. But her face is perfect She has a heart-shaped face. She has large, white teeth that don’t show in the picture. Her mouth is closed. She isn’t smiling. “Why didn’t you smile?” he said when she gave it to him. “I don’t know. Everything’s so complicated. It’s all such a mess.” Susan is right; he should have said how delighted he was to get the picture instead of criticizing her expression. She gave it to him when they were sitting at a drugstore counter, having a cup of coffee. She pulled it out of her wallet without comment. He thought that she was reaching for money, said “No, no.” They never really understood each other. Most people can read signals; they never could. She’d be feeling good, and he’d think she was worried and not talk so she could think it out, when actually she was in a good mood until he stopped talking, and she thought there was something wrong with him. He tries to convince himself that the relationship was always doomed. They didn’t understand each other, they didn’t have a lot in common, she never said she was going to divorce her husband and never changed her mind, even after she said she loved him too.… It isn’t working; he keeps picturing her on the carousel, sitting on a blue and gold horse, her hands tight around the brass pole, smiling at him. Well, he tells himself, that’s a pretty rotten thing, if that’s the best you can remember. It’s not very significant. But it’s as significant as anything else that’s ever happened to him. He puts the picture back in the drawer. There’s something wrong with putting her picture with unpaid bills. He takes it out and puts it on top of another table, against a vase.

“Finished,” Sam calls. Charles goes into the bedroom.

“Sorry to yell,” Sam says. “I didn’t know where to put this.”

“I’ll take it. Is there anything else you want?”

“I feel like puking now. No offense.”

“No,” Charles says. He carries the tray out to the kitchen. The phone rings.

“Hello?” he says. It is Laura. It has to be Laura.

“Hello,” Pete says.

“Leave me alone, goddamn it,” Charles says. “I didn’t put her there either.”

“That’s not why I called,” Pete says. “I called to say that when I called before I was a little upset. I wanted to ask you something.”

“What?” Charles says.

“Do you think she’ll ever get right again?” Pete asks.

“I don’t know. What do the doctors say?”

“I can’t understand them. There’s something wrong with me, but I can’t make any sense out of the things they say. Some young doctor — the one who lifted her wrist and said, ‘What have we got here?’ to her — talked to me all the time we were together about placem, placento, placenta research.”

“You’ve got to be nuts to want to help nuts,” Charles says.

“I think she senses that we all feel that way, so she has no incentive to recover,” Pete says.

“Pete, before you even knew her she’d dance in the kitchen naked with the broom at night.”

“She danced?” Pete says. “Yeah?”

“She seemed to be dancing. I don’t know. I was so spooked that I got out of there fast.”

“She senses that. She senses that we avoid her, and has no incentive to get well.”

“Pete, you ought to try to forget all this for a while if you can and go back to the house and get some sleep.”

“I’m in the house. It’s a mess. I’ve got to clean it up, but I don’t know where to start. She threw stuff all over.”

“Go to sleep and forget it.”

“I’m too loaded to go to sleep. Listen, I want you to know that I didn’t mean what I said before. I’m sorry to have said it.”

“That’s okay,” Charles says.

“I wish I had a boy of my own. I think we’d be more alike than you and me. What you were saying.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“But it’s too late now,” Pete says.

“Yeah,” Charles says. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

He hangs up and feels very guilty that he didn’t offer to go over and help him clean up the mess. In the living room, he looks at Laura’s picture. He is afraid the sun will fade it, so he puts it back in the drawer. He has looked at the picture for so long that when he sees Laura he’s always surprised. Laura, for him, is always wearing a checked shirt, her hair always looks a particular way, she always has a deadpan expression. Not that he sees her much any more to be surprised. He looks down at an open magazine on the rug. “How Seriously Do You Take Yourself?” is printed in big black letters. Susan has taken the quiz, checking off the answers with small, neat checks. Susan doesn’t have fits of depression; she doesn’t buy expensive camera equipment only to discover she prefers skiing. He looks away. At the vase, where the picture was.

“That was Mark on the phone earlier,” Susan says. “He’s probably going to drive down and get me.”

“Mark,” Charles says. “Mark the doctor.”

Her hair is wrapped in a turban. She is wearing slacks and a white shirt. She looks very clean and fresh. She will finish college, marry Mark, have children. Maybe even have an A-frame to vacation in. In Vermont. Or upstate New York. There might even be a maid to cook lamb chops.

“Go, go, go you bastard!” Sam hollers in the bedroom.

“Doesn’t he know if he’s coming or not?” Charles asks.

“He’s coming if he thinks the car will hold out.”

“What’s wrong with his car?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Then how is he going to decide if it’ll hold out?”

She shrugs. “It’s an old Cadillac,” she says. “It eats gas, but it usually holds out. Except that there’s one hose that always breaks.”

“Wooooooo!” Sam shouts.

“I guess he’s not dying,” Charles says.

Susan unwraps the towel from her head, throws her hair forward and begins brushing it.

“Should we call the hospital later? To see how she is when the tranquilizers wear off?”

“She’ll be nuts. That’s how she’ll be.”

“If Mark makes it, he’ll be here tomorrow. We can all go then.”

“No,” Charles says. “Anyway — I’ve got to go back to work.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about work.”

“It was sure a swell vacation,” Charles says. “I can’t complain.”

“Do you get another vacation in the summer?”

“I just have two days left. Except for sick leave.”

“Isn’t it awful to have your life measured out like that?”

“I need the money.”

“Couldn’t you paint? You used to be so good at it.”

“Paint? There’s no money in painting. Maybe I could paint houses. I’ve thought about doing something like that. Sam and I kicked around the idea last summer. He’s really going nuts at the store.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I get out of college.”

“It would help to have a major. But if you’re marrying Doctor Mark, I don’t guess you even need to finish.”

“I want to go to school. I mean, I want to finish. I didn’t go there to get a husband.”

“Now that you’ve got one, why don’t you just quit?”

“He’s not even my husband. He’s just my boyfriend.”

“Propose to him,” Charles says. “I wish I could propose to somebody and have them take care of me.”

“I’m not going to propose to Mark!”

“Why not? Don’t women propose to men now?”

“That’s not why I’m not doing it. I just don’t want to do it.”

“Face it. You want him to marry you.”

“Then he can propose,” Susan says.

“How quaint.”

“You deliberately get me on these subjects so you can goad me,” Susan says.

“I know. I can be so unpleasant. Maybe if somebody took care of me I’d be in a better mood.”

“Get that woman to leave her husband.”

“It’s more than a husband. It’s a daughter and an A-frame.”

“That’s nothing. Women walk out every day.”

“Not for me they don’t.”

“You should keep after her.”

“She’s sick.”

“When she’s well.”

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“Don’t sound so defeated. You’ll never be persuasive if you sound like that.”

“What should I do? Read a Dale Carnegie book?”

“Who’s that?” Susan says.

“What a generation. Never heard of Amy Vanderbilt. Never heard of Dale Carnegie. And you think Woodstock was a drag.”

“I know it was a drag. It was nothing but mud.”

“And nobody is into drugs any more, huh?”

“Not many people. I don’t know … maybe I just don’t know them.”

“Have you got a lot of friends at school?”

“A couple that Mark knows are pretty nice.”

“I don’t have any friends. I just have Sam.”

“Why don’t you meet people?”

“Next you’ll be telling me to dance.”

Charles goes into the kitchen, looks through the cabinets to see what there is for dinner. Susan is right; he thinks about food too much. He picks up a package of dried peas, drops them back on the shelf. There is a large bottle of vanilla, a package of dried beans, a box of Tuna Helper, no tuna, a can of baby clams, two cans of alphabet soup, a canister with four Hydrox cookies (what happened to them? They used to be so good. Sugar. No doubt they’re leaving out sugar), a package of Cheese Nabs, and a can of grapefruit juice. There is also a package of manicotti shells. They will have to go out for dinner. It is too cold; it was thirty degrees when he went out early in the afternoon to buy Sam some magazines.

“You don’t have a hair dryer, do you?”

“Of course not. What would I be doing with that?”

“A lot of men blow-dry their hair now.”

“I don’t want all that junk around me. What would I have a hair dryer for?”

He is cantankerous. That’s probably the real reason Susan’s leaving. If Doctor Mark’s Cadillac will start.

“Does Mark use a hair dryer?” he calls.

No answer. The rumble of the television. He looks at the thermometer on the window outside. It is twenty-eight degrees. The thermometer was a Christmas gift from an uncle in Wisconsin. An ornamental squirrel is huddled on top of it. It is made out of some plastic-looking black material. The squirrel looks like it won’t make it. There is a black plastic nut in its paws. Charles goes back to the cabinet, looking for the jar of bird seed. He finds it, shoved to the back of the highest shelf. There is also another box of Tuna Helper there, and a jar of Heinz Kosher Dills. They will definitely be going out for dinner. Charles gets his jacket from the closet in the living room, zips it. Twenty-seven, and he still has trouble zipping his jacket. “You approach it with too much hostility,” Laura told him. “You have to glide it up. You do it all wrong; you jerk it. A zipper will never work if it’s jerked.” Laura used to zip his jacket for him. When she went back to her husband he couldn’t stand to see the jacket. He went out and bought a raincoat, but that wasn’t warm enough, and he had a sentimental attachment to the jacket, so eventually he started wearing it again. One of the girls he had once loved (the one he still sort of loves, but she’s no good for him) gave it to him five years ago as a Christmas present. She got tired of sewing buttons on his blue pea jacket, and on Christmas morning he opened the box with the brown jacket in it. There was a chocolate heart wrapped in red foil inside. Where did she ever find a Valentine’s Day heart in December?

He opens the front door and walks out into the snow with a pie tin full of birdseed. Fearing that the tin will blow away, he goes into the garage and looks for something to weight it down with. The only thing he can find is a shovel, so he takes that out and rests the handle over part of the pie tin. It looks silly — like some socialist emblem. At least now they’ll eat Walking back to the house, he glances over his shoulder. What is he doing in this neighborhood? Who are his neighbors? When he first moved in, a woman a few houses down — he can’t remember any more whether it was the red brick house or the gray one-asked him to a party. He asked whether she’d mind if he brought a friend — the party was on a Friday night, and he always saw Sam on Friday night. He thought that afterwards he and Sam would go out for a few beers. He and Sam went to the woman’s party (her name was Audrey. He’s been trying to remember that for months), and met a couple who lived a few houses across from him (they told him which one — it was either the red brick or the blue with white shutters). They told him to stop by for a drink, but he forgot which house it was and was embarrassed to go knocking on doors. He kept thinking he’d run into them, but he never did, and he never got there for the drink. The party at Audrey’s was pretty nice. At least he enjoyed it, until he began to sense strange looks, until he figured out that Audrey thought he and Sam were queer. Why would she think that? They even sat on opposite sides of the room. Audrey’s husband was very nice. He was in a wheelchair, and had been for five years, after a car accident. He sold books. He also sold life insurance. On Saturday he sold flowers, helped the cashier who was his nephew. “I don’t want to have time to think,” he said. “I’d only come to depressing conclusions.” “He’s the most un-depressed man I’ve ever known,” Audrey said. “He’s a pleasure to be with.” “And it keeps me out of the house,” her husband said. Audrey looked terribly hurt. Later, Charles called (twice) to ask them to dinner, but both times she said they were busy. Once he saw her husband in his wheelchair on the avenue, trying to navigate down a particularly icy stretch of sidewalk that hadn’t been sanded. He wanted to go over and help him, but he was embarrassed. He just went back to his car and drove home.

Charles is in the kitchen, looking out the window. Some children run across the lawn. One child is bundled up like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Charles remembers a picture from Life magazine … Life magazine … captioned “John-John, the President’s son, spies his Dad and away he runs.” John Kennedy, Jr. rushes toward the steps leading from the plane. If nobody is into drugs any more, John Kennedy, Jr., won’t be a doper. With that smart father, he no doubt would have, otherwise. The kid will probably be a lawyer or a senator. Like the rest of them, he’ll have car accidents. Charles is still a sucker for tabloids with headlines reading: “Onassis Keeps Skorpios as Haven for Vegetable JFK” and in smaller type: “Jackie Says She Can Never Leave Him.”

He feels his head. He has been having strange visions, remembering strange things. He goes to the bedroom to check on Sam. Sam is asleep. His feet stick out of the covers. He has on thick red and white striped snowmobile socks that he was given at the office Christmas party. Actually, he didn’t go to the office party. When he went back to work there was a note over his punch-in card, fastened with a paper clip. “Stop by for your Xmas Present. I couldn’t buttonhole you at the party. Ed, in Sportswear.” Sam was embarrassed to go ask for his present, but somehow Ed found out who he was and came over and gave him the present in the employees’ cafeteria. “It’s something anybody could use,” Ed said. On Sam’s present was written: “Number 80.” Sam went looking for Ed a week later, to ask him if he’d like to join them for a few beers Friday night, and found out that Ed had been fired.

Charles thinks about turning off the television, but the sudden silence might disturb Sam. Sam’s face is very white. He hopes Sam does not get pneumonia. Once Charles had pneumonia. That’s how he got the sentimental attachment to the jacket. He was in the hospital for three days, and on the second night he got out of bed and got the jacket out of the metal closet and put it over the front of him, over the top of the white sheets. It was nice to have something familiar there. The room was pale green and white. It made him think he wasn’t going to die. The girl kept coming and holding his hand, looking worried. She didn’t want him to die, either. Why exactly had he left her? Why had he left any of them? Surprisingly, he left as many of them as had left him. He even left the first one, fifteen-year-old Pat O’Hara, when she told a mutual friend that he kissed sloppily. Maybe she never even said that — maybe the friend made it up. The friend was a notorious liar. He remembers the friend: Bruce Laframboise, later captain of the football team, first one in high school to get a sports car, a short, muscular boy who, in high school, had blackened his front teeth with ink. His mother took him to the dentist. Mrs. Laframboise used to tell his mother that Bruce was a model child, except for that peculiar thing he had done. Bruce ended up working in a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury — at least according to Bruce, who was a compulsive liar. Either that or his sister was a compulsive liar, because she always swore that Bruce was, and everybody believed her. His next girlfriend was a stringbean named Pamela Byall, who became a veterinarian. He met her on the street the year after he graduated from college, and she said, “I’ve become a veterinarian, no thanks to you.” Then there were the recent ones, the ones of the last four or five years. One of them lasted a year and a half. Pamela again. Pamela Smith, giver of the jacket. She started thinking that she was really a lesbian. He got tired of hearing about it. He’d go to bed with her, and she’d say, “It would be so nice to go to bed with a woman. What does it feel like to go to bed with a woman?” He told her he didn’t think his perspective would help her. She bought a stack of books about lesbianism. Gay women’s newspapers were thrown all over the house. She found all Sam’s girlfriends terribly attractive, and said so to the girls. One night at a pizza house, he said, “I’m not going to have anything more to do with you” and left, leaving Pamela to pay for a green-pepper pizza. Good, he thought That will be something to turn her against men. But she kept calling him, asking if she could come over and talk. “How can you turn your back on me when I’m so undecided?” she said. He always gave in, let her come over, and sat through a boring discussion of the beauty of women before they went to bed. She called him once and asked him to come pick her up at a gay bar because her car wouldn’t start. He refused. She called again after that to get the number of one of Sam’s girlfriends, and he hung up on her. He even got a Christmas card from her, with the female symbol on it, drawn with a red circle and green cross. “Merry Christmas, forgive and forget,” she wrote on the envelope. Then she called him, but he said he wasn’t feeling well. After Pamela there was a girl named Marsha Steinberg that he still has erotic dreams about. Sam introduced them. He forgets how Sam met her. Probably a castoff, although he never wanted to ask on the chance he’d find out he was right. Sam always parts with women on good terms — so good that they call him to refer them to other men. Marsha Steinberg was very mixed-up when he knew her. She took a lot of amphetamine, although later she gave it up entirely and went to law school. She once did a pencil sketch of him that was surprisingly good — or at least it made him look surprisingly good. She had a brown cashmere sweater that she wore with slacks. The sweater shed all over the slacks. She had a dog that shed more. She was always covered with dog hair. Her own hair was very short. Short black hair, black eyes. He definitely loved her. She’s now practicing law in Colorado. One day they went to the park and she fell asleep on his shoulder. It was a hot, noisy day in the park, and he couldn’t believe that she’d fallen asleep. Policemen kept walking by, and he was terrified that she was dead, and that eventually he would have to call out to one of the passing policemen that the woman next to him was dead. But she woke up. He always loved her for that. Once he went to a hair-cutting shop with her and watched an inch get cut off her hair. “If you were sentimental, you’d scoop it up,” she laughed. He should have done it, but it looked so ugly — those little clumps of black hair on the white floor. He couldn’t touch it. He thinks about calling her sister to get her address in Colorado, but what the hell. What good can it do him if she’s in Colorado? The girl he dated after Marsha was just somebody to pass the time with. She wasn’t very pretty or very smart. He never thinks about her.

He looks out the window at the thermometer. Twenty-five degrees. He knocks on Susan’s door.

“Do you want to go out for something to eat?”

“Sure,” she says. She comes out. She has on the purple sweater. There is a small bump just above her lip.

“I’m glad you’re not just hanging around waiting for her to call,” Susan says.

He hadn’t thought to do that. It’s a good idea. He should wait. Eventually Laura will call. Maybe when Jim leaves the house for a minute … and who knows when that minute will be?

“I’m going to write Sam a note, in case he wonders what happened,” Charles says. “Poor Sam. I hope he doesn’t have pneumonia.”

“He’s got a good appetite, at least,” Susan says.

“Yeah. We’ll bring something back.”

“I’m glad we’re not setting out for dinner with Pete,” Susan says.

Charles leaves the note on the dresser next to Sam, figures that he’ll never see it, scotch-tapes it to the television screen, over Lauren Bacall’s face. He puts on his jacket again, holds the door open for Susan. It is cold enough to wear his face mask, but his face mask frightens him. It has frightened him ever since he saw a television news program about bank robbers. The bank robbers had on face masks, imprinted with reindeer and diamond shapes. Charles always thinks he’s a bank robber who will be caught when he wears his face mask. He also takes his hands out of his pockets when he passes a policeman. Otherwise — and he knows this is silly — he thinks that the policeman might think that he’s hiding something. Still, his feet move all wrong when he passes a policeman. He weaves and stands too straight, and he’s sure they’ll stop him for questioning. When he drives, if he sees a policeman parked off the road somewhere in back of him, he keeps looking in his rearview minor. Sometimes he even checks the mirror if he passes a steep hill or a curve in the road off which they might be hiding. Once when he was eighteen years old he was pulled over by a policeman for speeding. He stopped so suddenly when he saw the blue light that the police car almost rammed him. The policeman was very jittery when he got out. “Pull over slowly when you see that light,” the policeman said. Charles tried to say “Yes, sir,” but he couldn’t speak. He gave the policeman his license and registration. His hand was shaking wildly. The policeman looked at his hand for a second before he took the two pieces of paper. Then he shined his flashlight in the back seat of the car, and on the passenger’s side. Charles watched the beam, transfixed. The policeman stood there, flashlight shining. Then he said, “Wait here,” and disappeared. He came back with a ticket. Another policeman came with him and shined a light across the back seat again. They both walked away. Charles stuffed the ticket in his pocket without looking at it, turned the key and got ready to pull out. He pulled out right in front of the police car, cutting them off. The blue light went on again, but when Charles pulled over, they only pulled up alongside him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” the policeman hollered. He didn’t wait for an answer. He tore off, blue light still on. Charles sat there, his leg jerking too wildly to drive. “Satisfaction” came on the radio. It was the first time he’d heard the song. It didn’t help to calm him. Nothing did. When the song was over, his leg was still shaking, and he felt too light-headed to drive. He thought about dragging himself from the car somehow and crawling to the pay phone that was right in front of him to call Sam for help. Then he started talking out loud to himself, and that helped: “Okay, okay, it’s just a ticket. They’re not coming back. Take it easy.” In a few more minutes he was able to drive. He had been on his way to an anniversary party for his parents at their best friends’ house. When he got there he went to the bathroom, and without realizing what he was doing ran the water and took a shower. He didn’t realize how strange that was until the host asked, “Were you showering, Charles?” when he came out of the bathroom with his hair soaking wet.

Charles pulls up in front of a Chinese restaurant, The Blue Pagoda. There is hardly anybody inside. Two booths and two tables have been taken. The ashtrays on all the tables are blue. There is a small paper umbrella stuck in the top of the salt shaker. The waiter quickly removes it when he puts down the menus. When he returns he has blue napkins and chopsticks. They order: pork-fried rice, moo-shu pork, spareribs. “No egg drop?” the waiter says. “Egg drop,” Charles says. “No egg drop?” the waiter says. “Wonton?” “That will be fine,” Charles says. Faintly, Charles can hear Donovan singing “Mad John.” It’s so faint that it might be Muzak, not Donovan at all. And Charles might be imagining that the words are being sung. A couple with a child comes in and sits at the booth in back of them. “This is a German restaurant,” the father says to the little girl. “It’s Chinese!” the little girl says. “If they don’t have sauerbrauten, you’ll just have to suffer,” the father says. “Sit up straight,” the mother says.

“Wonton?” the waiter says, putting the bowls in front of them.

“That’s right,” Charles says.

“Just made fresh?” the waiter says.

“Fine,” Charles says. The waiter only knows how to speak in the interrogative.

“You eat Chinese food with Doctor Mark?” Charles asks.

“I don’t think we’ve ever gone to a Chinese restaurant.”

“I thought that was what people who were in love did.”

“What?” Susan says.

“Listen to music, go to Chinese restaurants … that kind of stuff.”

“You always pretend not to know about things. You’re in love with that woman. Do the two of you go to Chinese restaurants?”

“She eats with her husband.”

“When she wasn’t with him. You always pretend that that time didn’t exist.”

“I don’t want to talk about her tonight,” Charles says. “I know she’s not going to call.”

Susan slowly sips soup. “I feel sort of bad about leaving you,” she says.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. That woman’s sort of rotten to you, and I’ll be leaving you with Sam sick. And her in the hospital.”

“Your staying wouldn’t make Laura leave her husband or Sam get well, and it certainly wouldn’t spring her from the bin.” Charles doesn’t want her to leave.

“I guess you’re right. Are you going to be polite to him when he comes?”

“What do you think I’d do? Act like some outraged lover?”

“I’m afraid you’ll make wisecracks. I know you don’t want him to like you.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

“You always put yourself down. You always act dejected.”

“I’m a mess.”

She laughs, sucking spinach into her mouth.

“Hot?” the waiter says, putting the plates in front of them. He puts the dishes on the table, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “Okay?”

“Fine,” Charles says. “Thank you.”

“Thank you?” the waiter says, leaving. He stops at the next table. “You’re not German!” the little girl says.

Once he and Laura went to a Spanish restaurant where the waiters poured a thin stream of white wine into their mouths from a leather wineskin. They ordered saffron rice and mussels and ate large, dark rolls. Laura told him that food started tasting entirely different to her after she stopped wearing lipstick. He wishes he could do something that would make him enjoy his food more. He eats all the time, but most of the time he hardly tastes it. His grandmother used to serve chicken bouillon before the Sunday dinner to “make the tongue buds blossom.” She always invoked strange metaphors: “Think if the earth were a big shoe and all that snow coming down was shoe polish.” To this day, he feels that snow is a call to action.

“I was thinking about Grandma,” Charles says.

“I don’t remember her very well.”

“I remember her smelling things. She always had her nose in the steam from a soup pot, she always thought their cat smelled bad, even when Grandfather had caught it and washed it, she always wore heavy perfume. What do you remember about her?”

“That her drawers were full of magazines she tied together in bundles and that she never untied the bundles. She always had things tied together. She’d tie two packages of paper napkins together with twine and put it on the kitchen shelf.”

“She was nice,” Charles says.

“Yeah. She was very nice. I remember that blue and lavender dress she made me. When it was washed the colors ran and made the lace blue, and she cut it all off and sewed white lace on.”

Their grandmother died in her seat at a movie theater. There was a special movie about Greece. Men were there to show the movie and talk the audience into going to Greece. Everyone in the audience knew that she had died, and afterwards, their mother heard, more people than the men expected signed up on the spot for the trip to Greece. She was sixty-eight when she died. Their grandfather died two years and one day later. He was crossing the street with a bottle in a brown bag and a loaf of bread in another brown bag when a truck hit him. The truck was full of wheelbarrows that it was on the way to deliver to a hardware store.

“Almond cookie?” the waiter says, putting down a plate with four cookies on it.

“Tomorrow we’ve got to go see her, don’t we?”

“Yeah. I’m not looking forward to running into Pete. He called today and told me I was a son of a bitch.”

“He did not.”

“He did. He said that I made him feel guilty. He called back and apologized.”

“Was he drunk or something?”

“I guess so. I don’t blame him.”

“These are good,” Susan says. “Almonds are supposed to keep away cancer.”

“I thought that was apricot pits.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Susan says, crunching into the second cookie.

“I saw a picture in a magazine of some Mexican doctor who injects people with apricot-pit extract. People go there and live in trailers and get injections. I hope if I get sick I don’t get crazy like that.”

“If I had it, I’d do anything. I’d go to Lourdes. I’d do anything.”

“How the hell did we get started talking about this?”

“I probably started it. I’m so used to talking about diseases all the time with Mark.”

“What conclusions has he come to?”

“You’re not going to be nice to him, are you?”

“I told you I was. He’s just a jackass.”

“One of the doctors he knows has a theory that the cells react to music. He’s trying to get a grant to play music to diseased cells.”

“I’m sure hell get it. There are a lot of jackasses out there waiting to give other jackasses money.”

“You’re so smart,” Susan says.

“I’m not so smart. I’m just not a jackass.”

“Are you sure it’s okay for me to leave?”

“Sure,” he says. “What color is the Cadillac?”

“Maroon.”

“Maroon. Jesus Christ.”

They pay the bill and leave The Blue Pagoda. It is bitter cold, and nobody is on the street. Charles drives down to the newsstand across from the train station and gets the late paper. A baby is on the cover: “First of 1975.” He looks at the weather forecast, holding the paper near the floor so that the car light shines on it. Snow. He does not want to go back to work. He wants the car to hurry up and get warm. When they get home Sam is still asleep. On the note on the television is written: “Pete called.”

“I forgot to get him food,” Charles says to Susan.

“He’s out for the night,” Susan says.

“Should we try to wake him up to see if he’s alive?”

“No,” she says. “He’s okay.”

He is glad Susan is there. She doesn’t tell him what to do much, but sometimes she does, and that makes it easier.