Chilly Scenes of Winter

SIX

“You don’t look like you had a very good night,” Betty says to him.

“I didn’t. There was a lot of stuff going on.” In my head, he thinks. I’m going crazy. My mother is crazy, but they’re letting her out of the bin today. This very day. Maybe she’s already out. Maybe at lunchtime I’ll get a phone call.

“This all?” Betty asks, taking two pieces of paper out of his basket.

“So far. More to come.” Looney Tunes: “T-t-t-t-thu-that’s all, folks!”

Betty walks out. She is not wearing the black boots; she has on a pair of brown high-heeled shoes. He is disappointed; he had come to think of the boots as part of an outfit. The boots made her look very … substantial. Damn.

He stops working on the report he has already stopped working on ten times, and fills out a requisition form for Steel City paper clips. In the third grade a boy hit another boy in the nose with a paper clip launched from a rubber band. The paper clip went flying across the room and went up the kid’s nostril. The school doctor got it out. The school doctor was a heavy middle-aged man who told the kids to call him “Doctor Dan.” Nobody called him anything. Once a year he weighed them and looked them over. “Doctor Dan finds nothing wrong with you,” he said. He always called himself Doctor Dan.

He goes back to his report, finishes it, and leans back in his chair before starting another. There are only four more to do. If they’re as easy to do as the last one, he can probably get half of them done before lunch. Of course, if he were going to lunch at eleven o’clock that wouldn’t be true. Damn.

He looks at the next report. He fills out the first line, then drifts away, thinking about what a mistake it will be for his sister to marry Doctor Mark. Why should jerks like that get to tell decent people that they have inoperable melanomas? If neurosurgeons ever get to say that. They must get to say it. Sure. “An inoperable melanoma near the occipital lobe.” He can just hear him saying that. Then he’ll go home and screw Susan. No, he’s probably just marrying her for respectability. He’ll tell some poor jerk he has an inoperable melanoma near the occipital lobe and then run off to a gay bar. Then he’ll run home to Susan. By then she’ll have a lot of kids and not care if he’s there or not. She’ll have a Maytag and probably be so dumb that she’ll let them take a picture of her with it — a green Maytag and several white-faced children. Her hair style will be out of date, her legs a bit too fat. One of the kids will not be looking into the camera. One will be in her arms. Doctor Mark will be to the far left, towering over his family: wife, children, Maytag. He will have a late model Cadillac: the Cadillac Eldorado. Where the hell is Eldorado? Probably some place full of humidity and peasants. Doctor Mark will probably be in one of those Dewar’s profiles:

HOME

: Rye, N.Y.

AGE

: 35

PROFESSION

: Neurosurgeon

HOBBIES

: Squash; attending concerts

MOST MEMORABLE BOOK

: V.

LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT

: Told some poor jerk he had an inoperable melanoma.

QUOTE

: “I think everybody should go to med school and get a high-paying job and get the little woman a Maytag.”

PROFILE

: Keen, aggressive. Plays squash and cuts brains with precision.

SCOTCH

: Dewar’s “White Label”

He looks at the report again. He has been doodling on it. Christ. He gets a fresh form and starts again. Susan is right. He would like it if he were an artist. Then he’d know fascinating people instead of women who cry in bathrooms. Even Sam’s dog was more interesting than anybody that works in this place. Sam’s dog was so smart she could lip-read. “Go in the other room” Sam would mouth to her, and she’d look dejected and walk into the kitchen. “Dinner,” he’d mouth, and she’d run for one of her toys, prance with it in eagerness. One of them was a yellow squeaking bottle with a red dog face on the front called “Pupsie Cola.” Even the names of her dog toys are more interesting than the names of the employees: Stan Greenwall, Bob Charters, Betty … Betty what? Maybe just Betty — Betty of the erotic dreams, the ones it will be difficult to have, since her dresses stick to her. When he sees her later, he will find out her last name. Then he can call her for a date, and maybe when he knows her better he can have erotic dreams about her. Maybe that will even make Laura jealous. She said once that Betty hardly ever had a date. Who would she date? Recently divorced Bob Charters, who flicked the back of his hand against Charles’s shoulder when they were standing side by side at the urinal and told him now that he was divorced, he was looking to go yodeling in the gully? His own boss, who wears a button with the female symbol on it inside his trench coat and shows it to people with a laugh the way men turn over their neckties to reveal a naked woman painted in lurid colors? Or Bob White — he must have taken a lot of kidding about that name — who never says anything except in the elevators, when he says he’s sorry to be there or glad he’s leaving? What happens to girls like Betty if they don’t get married, and how do they ever get a husband? How do they ever get to move to Ohio and have a fantastically reliable Maytag? He proposed to a woman once. She said she was already married. She said it pressed up against a row of books in the library, whispered to him to get away, people would see and think he was crazy. He was always cornering her — in restaurants, when the coat-check girl turned to get their coats, on the Tilt-A-Whirl, pressing her to one side before the machine even started and tilted them there. Well, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Look where his mother and Pete’s marriage ended up: in a corner of the attic, pecked to pieces by birds. But maybe his marrying Laura would have worked out.

He begins to write figures on the piece of paper. He is not making much progress. He will never get a promotion if he doesn’t apply himself. When he was thirteen his mother made him take dancing lessons. They were given in a church basement that was always cold. The girls all had bad breath or big breasts he was afraid to touch. He was an awkward dancer, and he didn’t improve. The dancing instructor hated him. She’d clap her hands together slowly as he and the girl he was dancing with whirled by, meaning for them to get closer. She always showed her bottom teeth when she clapped her hands. The woman refused to give him his diploma. She sent a diploma in the mail about a week after the course was over, but in the space where his name should have been was printed: NOT YOU. “That awful woman,” his mother had said, and he had been flooded with relief that she sympathized with his inability to dance. “Dance with me,” Clara had said. “Let me see whether you can dance.” He told her that he couldn’t, but she still made him. She towered over him — no chance of running into her breasts, thank God. And after a few twirls his mother dropped the subject, except for telling his father that his money had gone down the drain.

Another report finished, he takes off for lunch. He has fried shrimp and a beer and mashed potatoes that can be lifted all in one mound with his fork. He eats part of the potatoes and plays with the rest, pays the bill, and walks back to the office. Passing the typing pool, he sees that Betty is eating at her desk. He goes in and pulls an orange plastic chair up to her desk. Two women at desks in back of her who were talking normally begin to whisper. There is a brown vase on Betty’s desk with four paper flowers in it. There are no pictures. There is a paperweight with a picture of a cat inside. Doctors tell old people, people whose mates have died, to get a pet — something to love. Betty must already have given up.

“Is that your cat?” he says.

“Yes. That was a Christmas present from my nephews.”

“My best friend had a dog that died not long ago,” he says. Why did he say that?

“Did it have heartworms?”

“What’s that?”

“Heartworms. They can cure a dog once, usually, if they get it in time.”

“I don’t know what it died of. It just died.”

Betty shakes her head. “Heartworms, I bet.”

Betty is eating cottage cheese. She is trying. She is trying to lose weight so she will get a husband and not have to rely on her Siamese cat. Poor Betty. If only she were Laura he would love her madly, blindly, forever.

“You’ll only have to type two more from me today,” he says.

“Have you gone to lunch?” she says.

“I’m on my way back.”

“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I’ll be down for them later.”

He leaves, convinced that there’s no possibility of romance. She should have said something witty. She is so dogged. But what could she have said witty? What’s the witty comeback about a dead dog? If she were Hemingway, at least she would have said something strange — that a dead dog lying in the sun was beautiful. But she is Betty. She says Sam’s dog died of heartworms, which can be cured once, usually. Unlike inoperable melanomas. He gets a drink of water at the water fountain, hoping to wash down the glutinous mashed potatoes. They are still right there, even after a long drink.

Why didn’t you even try to be a painter? he asks himself as he sits down to begin another report. Why don’t you paint at night? You could paint primitives — then it wouldn’t matter if they were sort of sloppy.

The sun is in the middle of the window. In the morning it is on the left, at noon in the middle, and to the far right before it gets dark and he goes home. He amuses himself by thinking that the sun rises and sets in his window, that it is confined to this rectangle, that the window is like one of those games they have in bars, with the little squares that beep from left to right. If he doesn’t find out Betty’s last name or her phone number, he will be spending another Friday night in a bar with Sam. He would ask Sam to come along, but the women always fall in love with Sam. Except Laura. She just thought Sam was nice. Sam didn’t fall in love with Laura either. Oh, hell — it was perfect. His best friend didn’t love his girlfriend. The three of them could have knocked around forever.

At the end of the day (4:25 today) he leaves the building. Bob White is in the elevator. He wants to say “Bob White! Bob White!” to him, chirp it at him, and he bites his tongue. Susan is right; he is infantile. “Glad to be going,” Bob White says. “Yeah,” Charles agrees. “Going to juvenile court with my kid tonight,” Bob White says. Charles looks at him for the explanation. “Threw a bottle through a window,” Bob White says. Bob White gets out first, quickly walks through the lobby to the revolving door and disappears. Charles stops at the blind man’s stand and picks up an Almond Joy. “What have you got?” the blind man asks. Sometimes, Charles is convinced, he just stops at the stand because the blind man’s question has such a nice ironic ring. Going out of the building, he wonders if Marsha Steinberg would defend him if he killed Laura’s husband. He has forgotten to ask Betty her last name. Well, all these things we forget are deliberately forgotten. Thanks, Freud. You probably would have forgotten too. The more exotic appealed to you. The more exotic appeal to me. He crunches into his Almond Joy.

At home, he sorts through the day’s mail: a letter from the Humane Society saying that kittens are being thrown in the trash, a note left in the mailbox from Susan, thanking him for “a good time,” a Burpee’s seed catalog. The bed that Sam slept in is a mess in one bedroom. He did not make the bed he slept in the night before. He goes into the bathroom, which is relatively uncluttered, and soaks a washrag in warm water, rubs it over his face. It is quiet in the house. He turns on the television and lies in bed to watch it. Sam’s snowmobile socks are hanging off each side of the bed rail. Like the coquette who forgets her handkerchief, Sam will be back for the snowmobile socks.

The evening news features a plane crash, the parents of a child who was roughed up in a Boston school, and a word about former President Nixon going golfing. There is a picture of the former President He looks like a lean old mafioso.

HOME

: San Clemente, California

AGE

: 62

PROFESSION

: Retired

HOBBIES

: Going out to Bob Abplanalp’s island, playing golf with ambassadors, shooting the breeze with Eddie Cox.

MOST MEMORABLE BOOK

:

Six Crises

.

LAST ACCOMPLISHMENT

: Surviving surgery.

QUOTE

: “Y’know, I love my country.”

PROFILE

: Aging, embarrassed, a crook. This man will not live long.

SCOTCH

: Yes, and pills, too, but don’t tell anyone.

He turns off the television and goes out to the kitchen to fix dinner. The phone rings.

“May I speak to Elise Reynolds?”

“Elise. Elise left a few days ago.”

“She did? To whom am I speaking?”

“Charles.”

“And is Susan there?”

“Susan left, too.”

“Where did they go? This is Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Reynolds. Elise left before Susan did. I thought she said she was going home.”

“This is the home, and I’m in the home, but Elise isn’t in the home. Just where do you think she is?”

“I can’t say, Mrs. Reynolds. Maybe she’s back at school.”

“Maybe you murdered her.”

Charles almost drops the phone. He sits down, eyes wide. Let’s see; she left the day before yesterday.…

“Mrs. Reynolds, get hold of yourself. I’m sure she’s back at school.”

“Did she tell you I was an alcoholic?”

Susan told him she was an alcoholic. “No,” he says honestly.

“I am an alcoholic, but it’s a popular misconception that alcoholics never sober up. They do sober up, and when they sober up they search their nest.”

“Is your husband at home, Mrs. Reynolds?”

“Didn’t she tell you he was dead?”

Oh, Christ, he thinks. She’s flipped out and there’s nobody there.

“Well, he isn’t,” Mrs. Reynolds says. “She exaggerates everything. She’s had him in the grave for five years. He’s considerably older than I am.”

“Okay, okay. I just wondered if somebody was there with you … if you’re worried.”

“I haven’t had anything all day but a Peppermint Schnapps, and I am worried.”

“Elise seemed to have had a fine time here. You know kids. They’re unpredictable. I’m sure she’ll return to your house or to school.”

“Excuse me. I didn’t realize I was speaking to an adult. I think we do understand each other. We know that when I looked in the nest, she had flown.”

“Try not to worry, Mrs. Reynolds. It will work out okay.”

“Where is Susan?” Mrs. Reynolds asks.

“She left this morning with her boyfriend for college.”

He is going to call Susan and yell at her about this. Why did she bring that screwed-up girl to his house? What if Mrs. Reynolds tries to do something — call the police or something?”

“You get back in touch if you get worried, Mrs. Reynolds.”

Please don’t get back in touch. Please leave me alone. I didn’t like your daughter. I’m glad she’s gone. You sound like another crazy woman, and I don’t like you either. I will keep the phone off the hook. Laura. I can’t keep the phone off the hook.

“You can tell that I’m concerned, can’t you, Charles? I am concerned. Do I sound drunk to you, or concerned?”

“Naturally you’re concerned.”

“That’s not what I asked! I asked if I sounded drunk.”

“No. You certainly don’t. You only sound concerned.”

“I am concerned. It’s a popular misconception that alcoholics aren’t concerned. If I weren’t concerned, I wouldn’t be an alcoholic, Charles.”

He has no idea what to say to terminate the conversation.

“Some people are unwilling to carry on a conversation once they find out that someone is an alcoholic, but you’ve been most gracious. Naturally, when we tend an egg, we look beyond the crack in the shell. We look to see the infant bird, to care for it, to care that it is all right. And since I haven’t heard from Elise for so long, naturally I am wondering.”

“Certainly you are. And I’m sure she’ll get in touch.”

You bet she will, that bitch, and Susan will see to it. Somehow.

“You can’t know how reassuring it is to discuss this with an adult,” Mrs. Reynolds says.

“Well, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you, Mrs. Reynolds, but I’m certain that she’s back at school now. She’s okay, I’m sure of that.”

She will be dead somewhere. Twisted and dead. And the police will find his fingerprints on her coat — he lifted her coat from the sofa when she was here — and they will come to work and arrest him.

There will be a scuffle — he will try to keep his balance when he stands to greet the policemen. He will have a bemused, curious look on his face. And one of them — the big one — will misunderstand and think he is preparing to fight his way out. Why else would he lean to one side, why else that rigid spine, prepared for a fight? The big one will pick him up and throw him through the glass, and he will fall twenty-one stories. Braced briefly and miraculously between two snow-cushioned tree limbs, he will scramble for safety, but lose his grip and fall from the tree to the ground, while the policemen look through the hole in the glass and slap each other on the back. A sex pervert; he deserved that fall, O’Hara.

He calls Sam to see if he knows anything about where Elise might be. Sam reports that his temperature is ninety-nine and that he doesn’t know where Elise is. He did give her fifteen dollars though. “All she was worth — at the most.”

“You paid her for it, you paid for it?” Charles says.

Things are really taking a new turn if Sam paid for it.

“It wasn’t that overt. She told me she needed money. I think she said she needed twenty dollars. I gave her fifteen, which is definitely all she was worth.”

Sam sort of paid for it. Things are sort of taking a new turn.

“But she didn’t say anything about where she was thinking of going?”

“The only thing even remotely related to travel that she talked about was how she envied the Kennedys, except for the amputee who has a bit of trouble with it, for being able to go siding.”

“You don’t think she took off for some ski lodge?”

“Not on fifteen bucks.”

“She might have had more.”

“Not in her wallet. Well, she had about ten or fifteen more in there, I guess.”

“You went through her wallet.”

“She was showing me some pictures. I saw a little bit of money in the back.”

“It could have been hundred dollar bills.”

“I don’t think so. She was really grateful when I gave her the fifteen. She should have been. Even with inflation, that was a five-dollar lay.”

“Okay,” Charles says. “You don’t know anything.”

“Maybe you know whether my snowmobile socks are at your place,” Sam says.

“Yeah, they are.”

“I looked all over the place for them before I left. Ended up going to work in a pair of yours.”

“Bring them back.”

“I will. Why would I want a pair of your socks?”

“They’d better not be the ones Laura gave me.”

“How should I know? They’re a pair of navy blue socks.”

“No. She gave me gray ones.”

“Christ, you’re nuts. My dinner’s getting ready to burn.”

“What are you having?”

“Stouffer’s lasagna.”

“It’s good you’re eating. Keep your strength up.”

“You sound like somebody’s grandmother.”

“You’re as testy as I am. Guess you’ve got a right if you’ve still got a fever.”

“I’ve got a right if I have to stand here gassing to you while my lasagna bums up.”

“Okay. Good-bye.”

“Bye,” Sam says.

Charles puts the phone back on the hook, taking his hand away slowly, debating whether it might not be wiser to let it dangle. Might as well let her call again, get it out of her system so she doesn’t start that “You murdered her” stuff again. Murder. Jesus. Elise couldn’t drive anybody to murder. Who would bother? Except all those murderers out there … the ones who’ll wear rubber gloves and not have their fingerprints on her coat. In comes Detective O’Hara, out the window goes Charlie. Then she’ll be sorry. Then, too late, she’ll realize that she didn’t want her husband and Rebecca. She’ll go back to work in the same library, just to be in the building where he once cornered her against the bookshelf. Twice. Three times at least.

He puts a box of taco hors d’oeuvres in the oven and finds a beer in the bottom of the refrigerator that he decides to save to go with the tacos. Laura and her husband and daughter are probably having a nourishing dinner. They are having baked ham, sweet potatoes, asparagus, freshly baked bread, milk, and that dessert. Laura used to come home with him sometimes and cook dinner. She’d take off her stockings and go get a pair of the soft gray socks she had given him and stand in the kitchen in the socks, cooking dinner. In her dress and socks she looked like some bobbysoxer. If he had known her in the fifties they would have jitterbugged. She would have worn a ribbon in her hair, and a long pleated skirt, blazer, and white socks and saddle shoes. The socks would have a funny weave that looked like rivulets when they got twisted around a little. Gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight.

The kitchen clock says five-thirty. That gives him enough time for a shower. But does he want a shower? No. He wants that beer. But doesn’t he want it with the tacos? Yes. People’s problems should end when they get home from work. They don’t. No wonder men go home and knock their kids around. There’s only one beer, which will be great with the tacos, but they want it immediately to cool their throat, so when the kid says that a wheel came off his bicycle the father looks at the wheel, picks it up, and pushes it over the kid’s head, the kid goes around yowling, the wheel like a clown’s ruffle, his wife says he’s a beast, separates from him, divorces him. If only Laura would push a wheel over Rebecca’s head. Not very likely. She goes to parent’s day, is “room mother” for the kindergarten, bakes special gingerbread cookies for the kids, who all love her. “She was such a nice woman, you’d never think she’d push a wheel over her child’s head.” And, in fact, she won’t. She’ll just cook a nice nourishing dinner and then tuck Rebecca in, and what she does after that is too painful to think about. Maybe she will call him, though. She won’t.

The phone rings as he is finishing dinner.

“This is a voice from the past,” the caller says.

He swallows the last quarter inch of beer. It tastes foul.

“I have pretty eyes and long hair, and I call you every time I’m in trouble. Who am I?”

“Pamela Smith,” he says, his voice gloomy.

“That’s right!” Pamela Smith says.

“What kind of trouble are you in, Pamela?”

“Spiritual trouble.”

He repeats this.

“I was in California. I got back just a couple of days ago. I called you last night.”

“You were in spiritual trouble last night too.”

Twenty-four hours of spiritual trouble. More or less.

“Was I ever. I’ve been out in Mendocino, working in a canning factory.”

“That sounds like a drag.”

“The whole California thing — I thought it would be wild, but there’s no way to get money in California. I got a ride out with a dyke who ditched me in a bar in San Francisco. She crawled out a toilet window. Women are no better than men. Women are worse. You should have seen the beasts I worked with in the canning factory.”

“Yeah. That sounds awful.”

“I mean, there were some nice things about California. When you order a sandwich out there they bring you fresh fruit with it instead of potato chips. You order a roast beef sandwich, you’re likely to get half a peach and a strawberry. In some ways it’s very civilized. I don’t think I’ll ever eat junk food again.”

He thinks of Laura’s nourishing dinner. The tacos are now sitting in his stomach with the mashed potatoes. That last quarter inch of beer was revolting.

“Yoko Ono was in Mendocino. Not in the canning factory. But around.”

(“… I think John should stay in the U.S.A., because he’s a groovy musician.…”) “Yoko,” he says.

“It’s quitsville for John and Yoko, and believe me, with a woman like that I don’t blame him. Women are yecch. It took me a long time to realize that.”

Silence.

“But how are you? How are you, Charles?”

(“… What have you got?” …)

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve been running around a lot over the holidays and I’m pretty wiped out.…”

He hopes to avoid being asked either to go out or to have her come over.

“I was wondering if I could come over?”

“Sure,” he says.

“Good. I can be there in about an hour.”

“Good.”

Good. He can take a shower. Brace himself. He hangs up, goes into the bathroom and runs the water. He takes his clothes off and looks at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Stubble. A double chin? No — he was looking down. His hair is dirty. Why bother to wash it for Pamela Smith? But it has to be washed before work tomorrow. Okay, okay. He drapes his clothes over the toilet seat and gets in the shower.

“I’m singing’ in the tub, just singin’ in the tub, a glorious feeling, I’m showering again …”

He learned that song from Sam. Sam does it complete with twirls and kicks. Charles is sure he’s going to fall in the bathtub and break his legs. Charles holds on to the soap dish and gives a kick. Sam is crazy.

He gets out of the shower in time to answer the phone. It is cold in the kitchen. He jumps off the floor, jogs in place to stop his feet from freezing. “Yeah?” he says. “Hello?”

“Hello, my boy. How are things with you tonight?”

“Hi, Pete. I’ll call you back. Just got out of the shower.”

“You do that, then,” Pete says.

They did not talk long enough for Charles to be able to tell if Pete was drunk. Shivering, Charles goes into the bedroom and throws his towel over a floor lamp he never uses. He puts on a pair of gray socks, a pair of corduroy pants, and a blue button-down shirt. Over that he pulls a sweater with an antelope standing on top of a mountain. He bought the sweater because he thought it was funny: a very realistically knitted antelope on top of a pointed brown mound. Very stark, very ugly. “Hello, little fellow,” the salesman writing up the sale said, stroking the antelope. Charles has not liked the sweater since then, rarely puts it on. He tried to give it to the dog, but she was only interested in sleeping on it once.

He looks around him. His room has looked just the same since the day he moved in. His mother used to have winter and summer bedspreads, winter and summer curtains. When he lived at home, his winter bedspread had been a yellow and brown plaid, a cheap, itchy bedspread that he didn’t like to sit on. The summer bedspread was beige and green crinkle crepe with a large dust ruffle. He had said that he wasn’t having a bedspread with any damn ruffle. She had said that it was a “dust ruffle,” as though that excused it. He had threatened to cut it off. His father had been sent to his room. His father said that it was a bedspread in good taste, one that he wouldn’t mind having on his own bed. “Then take the thing!” Charles had shouted. His father nodded. He removed the bedspread and carried it into the master bedroom, took the bedspread off their double bed and handed it to Charles. Charles was embarrassed; he felt as if he was holding a jar of tonsils, or the blown-off head of a friend. He held the big bedspread reverently. He watched his father put the single bedspread on the double bed. Of course it did not fit. It looked silly. “Do you want me to have this bedspread on my bed?” his father asked. Charles quickly gave him back his own bedspread, left in defeat and humiliation, trailing his green and beige bedspread with him. He put it back on his bed. “I didn’t think you’d want my room to look like that,” his father said, passing his room. His father never fought with him. He played dumb, as he did with the bedspread exchange, or explained patiently (which his mother was incapable of) why something had to be a certain way. Most logical men live a long time, but Charles’s father dropped dead at thirty-nine. He would have been logical in his old age, but there was no old age.

Charles stands in the doorway of his room, thinking about how the room could be changed. Instead of being against the wall, the desk could be moved against the window. And the bed could be moved from the back wall to the side wall. There would be a little more space in the room that way. He no longer even questions that the room must be changed. He takes the things off the top of his bureau and puts them on the bed, shoves the bureau where his desk used to be, at the same time shoving the desk into the middle of the room. A lamp falls over, does not break. He stands it upright on the floor. He moves the dresser into place. He puts all the things back on top, shoved together: a picture of his mother and father on their first anniversary, a picture of him holding Susan when she was an infant (he can still remember his mother arranging the baby in his arms; he had thrust her forward, his arms straight out, so that she blocked his face in the lens, and his mother had rushed to him and crooked his arm and lowered her into it), a glass bowl with pennies, a hairbrush, a dirty ascot that got dirty not from wear but from dust settling on it over a two-year period, a dried-up philodendron, a fountain pen and bottle of ink, several magazines, and a flashlight. He pushes the desk across the rug. Maybe now that it faces the window he will enjoy sitting at it more. What will he ever use it for? He could figure out the bills there. He won’t. He could do what his mother always did with useless pieces of furniture — put a tablecloth over it He does not own a tablecloth. Maybe a sheet. No, that would look silly, to have a desk with a sheet over it. Everybody would know it was a desk. Sam would demand an explanation. Moving the bed is a bigger problem. He pushes hard, bunching the rug underneath the bed. He lifts the bottom of the bed and pushes the rug with his foot. He hopes that he does not get a hernia. There was a boy in the sixth grade who had a hernia that had to be operated on. The class sent him a card. Nobody knew what message to write, so almost everybody wrote: “I am sorry you have a hernia. See you soon.” Some people asked how the food was. One girl refused to sign the card. She told the teacher that her mother would write a note saying she didn’t have to. The teacher said that it wasn’t necessary.

He gives the bed a final shove. The rug is a little bunched up, but so what? Sam can help him the next time he’s over. He backs up, sweating, and looks over his work. He picks up the lamp and puts it back on the desk. The room looks much better. He should rearrange the whole house. Except that there is hardly any other furniture. He sold most of it to an antique dealer, a frail old man who went from room to room exclaiming “Staffordshire! Hepplewhite! A gateleg table!” Charles just wanted all the ugly, smelly stuff out of there. The antique dealer gave him a lot of money. At least at the time he thought it was a lot of money. He opened kitchen cabinets. “Peacock Feather!” the old man said, holding a bowl to his chest. He went away and returned with his “assistant,” an enormously fat asthmatic woman who followed him from room to room repeating “Hepplewhite! A gateleg!” reverently. For a while Charles was afraid they’d just keep wandering like some poor damned souls in Dante, but after wheezing and exclaiming through the rooms they went away and came back with a blue truck and a terrier that ran yapping through the house. They did not allude to the dog. Charles could not figure out why it was there. When they did not summon the dog to leave, and it just appeared and ran out the door, Charles thought he might have been hallucinating. The fat woman lowered the antiques into piles of newspapers that she quickly wrapped around them, and the man removed drawers from dressers and tossed cushions onto the floor. “Any Sandwich?” the woman asked breathlessly, and Charles had thought that she was asking for food. She sang Billie Holiday songs as she worked; glass dishes were lowered into crates as she sang “God Bless the Child”; an oil lamp disappeared into a mound of paper as she crooned “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me.” Charles didn’t know what room to stand in — whether he should appear not to notice what was happening or whether he should offer to help. Shouldn’t they discuss money before the things were wrapped in newspaper? “You can help yourself, but don’t take too much,” the woman sang huskily, occasionally breaking off to get her breath. “Oh, Grandma!” she shouted with glee sometimes, when she saw a painted dish or a small colored photograph. The old man worked silently and very quickly. “I need your help, young fellow,” he said, and Charles helped him carry the things out. “I want to tell you something,” he said as they raised a love seat into the blue van. “That woman is my sister.” Charles waited for what he was going to be told. The man nodded once, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let’s go.” They carried more things out. Later, in the kitchen, the woman talked about her “husband,” saying that the work was getting too rough for him. Their names were Bess and Bert, and their antique business was known as “Best Bird Antiques.” There was a cluster of flying birds painted across the back door of the van with white paint. “Best Bird Antiques” was lettered above the clouds. In three hours they were gone, and Charles had one thousand four hundred dollars. The woman climbed into the back of the van and slammed the door behind her. She was singing “A Fine Romance.” The old man gave him the money in cash. “She can’t bear to see me actually part with money,” the old man said. “I buy antiques on Mondays, if there’s more you want to part with. Can’t tell what you’ll find that you want to part with. Things to part with in the attic, probably. We don’t go into attics. But come to our store on Mondays, which is buying day. She makes that grocery day, because she can’t bear to see me fork over money for antiques! Well, thanks mighty much, and here you go.” He shoved a wad of money into Charles’s outstretched hand. Charles’s hand had been extended to shake the man’s hand good-bye. In all the confusion, he had forgotten about getting paid. The little dog barked in the front seat. The man touched his fingers to his forehead in a salute as the van pulled away. Charles waved. He later took several hand-painted plates he found to the man’s antique store. Sure enough, the fat woman wasn’t there. “Don’t look around the place, the inflated prices will make you sick,” the man said. Charles took his advice, left with twenty dollars. There was a sign in an ornate frame over the cash register that said, “Best Bird Antiques is Your Best Bet.” “We used to have a racehorse named that,” the man said, noticing that Charles was looking at the sign. “It broke its leg. I said, ‘No more racehorses,’ My sister was amenable.”

Charles goes into the kitchen and dials Pete’s number.

“What are you panting for?” Pete asks.

“I just moved some furniture around.”

“Oh,” Pete says. “Well, I’ve been straightening up around here the last couple of days, too. Furniture seems to creep forward in the room for some reason. I shoved it all back against the walls. Not right against them because of the paint, but about an inch away.”

“How’s Mom?” Charles asks.

“She’s doing just fine. I know she’d want to talk to you, except that she’s having a bath right now.” Pete whispers, “Door’s open.”

“Christ, Pete, she’s probably got a heating pad plugged in that she’ll electrocute herself with.”

“No she doesn’t,” Pete says, sounding hurt. “I told you the”—he lowers his voice—“the door’s open.”

He can picture it: she is sitting in hot water. She does not put any bubble bath in the water. She just sits there, sinks down in the tub until the hot water is collarbone level. She plays the radio. If she stays long enough (she takes many of these baths a day) she reads movie magazines, and if she stays for a very long time she starts to imagine pains and she cries. Someone has to haul her out. Charles and Pete have told the doctors about her dips. They think it’s a good idea to “soak to relax.” Even when they are told what really happens, they still say that there’s nothing wrong with a hot bath. They think she is clever to have thought of that “to relax.” She used to take Seconal and fall asleep with her chin on her collarbone, the magazines drowned in the tub, heating pads plugged into several sockets, radio blaring. If only one of them was home, they couldn’t lift her. She was angry when they appeared in the bathroom and shook her awake. “I was relaxing! I have no privacy! I had a pain in my back — I was warming the heating pad for that!” The towels always smell bad and need to be washed. There is bath powder all over the bath rug. Movie magazines with moldy covers and curled edges are stacked on the back of the toilet The bathtub and toilet are blue; the tile is brown and white-small brown and white tiles covered with a film of bath powder.

“What I called about,” Pete says, “is that I thought it might be nice to have a little welcome home celebration for Mommy.”

“Pete, you always put on that phony diction. When you’re not thinking you call her by her name, or you say, ‘your mother.’ That sounds more dignified.”

“How I wish I had a flesh-and-blood son I could kill for talking that way,” Pete says. “But you’re all I’ve got. I thought you and I were getting along better now after the — after the drink we had. The very nice time we just had.”

“Yeah. That was nice. I only mention it, Pete, because I think we might get along better if you knew about the things that bothered me. Then I know you wouldn’t do them and we’d get along even better.”

“There’s too wide a gap. I don’t think we’d ever get along very well. Maybe if you were my own flesh and blood you’d be indebted to me.”

“I don’t want you to take offense, Pete. I just want you to know that that’s a little thing that annoys me.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something that annoyed me. You never even asked me to be a scoutmaster, and you knew I built birdhouses and did stuff like that. All the other kids asked their fathers, and you never even approached me.”

“I never thought you’d be interested, Pete. We didn’t talk much, so I didn’t think you’d want to deal with a whole troop of boys my age.”

“Maybe we would have talked more if we had had things to talk about. Birdhouses and things like that. I knew how to build stuff. I would have been a good leader for you boys.”

“I’m sorry I never asked, Pete. I just assumed wrong.”

“Well, it’s too late now,” Pete says.

“Don’t worry about it, then. Just don’t worry about it.”

“That’s right. What’s that saying? ‘Lord give me patience to change the things I can change and not worry about those I can’t,’ or something like that.”

“Yeah.”

“I find it very hard to talk to you on the phone, Charles. When I make a comment it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.”

“I don’t know what else to say, Pete. You remember the saying better than I do, so I don’t have anything to add.”

“You’re a very impatient person, I think,” Pete says. “But I want to get back to the reason for this call. You’ve got me so flustered I can’t remember if I already said this, but I wanted to ask whether you couldn’t come over on Saturday night for dinner to welcome Clara home.” He punches the “Clara.”

“Pete … you know she won’t get a dinner together.”

“I can get the dinner. I’m cooking. All you’ve got to do is grace us with your presence. If I can be blunt, I don’t even want you for dinner myself after this bad phone conversation, but your mother mentioned the idea. I’m going to get a chicken. Anybody can cook chicken.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Okay,” Pete says. “Don’t forget.”

“It’ll be on my mind all week, Pete.”

“Talk nice to me! I’m sixty-three years old.”

“I’ll see you then, Pete.”

“I hate to hang up this way. I feel like you’ve insulted me, yet I’m on the defensive.”

“Somebody’s at my door, Pete.”

“I know you’re just saying that. You always get me in some corner and make me stay there. What can I do but hang up if somebody is knocking at your door? Yet nobody is.”

The knocking continues.

“Somebody is, Pete. It’s somebody I was expecting. I’ll see you for dinner.”

“Aw, good-bye,” Pete says, and hangs up.

Charles goes to the front door and opens it for Pamela Smith.

“Charles!” she says. “Plus ça change.”

“Hi,” he says. “Come in.”

“I will come in. I feel like I’m home now. You’re the only person I know who’s still living in the same place. People I left in poverty have got glass-topped Parsons tables now. It’s all changed so much.”

“It’s the same here, all right.”

“How about family problems? Oh, well, I shouldn’t rush into that.”

She hands him her coat. A black, long coat. She is wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt and black corduroy jeans and work boots. A knee is torn out of her jeans. The work boots have white paint on them. Why did he wash his hair? He could have washed it for work when she left.

“Would you like a drink or some coffee or tea?”

“You don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

“Cheese,” he says. Does he have cheese?

“Oh, could I have some cheese?”

“Sure.”

He leaves her standing in his living room and goes into the kitchen. She follows him out.

“I’ve become a vegetarian, and I feel so much better. When I ate meat a week ago, just to try it again, I actually stank afterwards. I could smell myself.”

“There’s Muenster and Swiss,” he says. “Some of both?”

“That would be good,” she says.

The phone rings. Charles picks it up.

“Hell,” Pete says. “That was nuts of me to say there was nobody at your door. I’m sure there was, and I called back to say that it was just my nuttiness.”

“That’s okay, Pete. It was a friend of mine from a couple of years ago, just back from California. I was getting her something to eat.”

“I’d really be a fool if I thought you were making that up,” Pete says. “If I thought the knock and the food was imaginary, all to brush me off.”

Charles hands the phone to Pamela Smith. “Please say hello to my stepfather,” Charles says. Pamela Smith looks taken aback, holds the phone to her ear as if expecting an explosion, then says a tentative, “Hello.”

“Why, hello,” Pete says. “Charles says that you’re here from California.”

“Yes. I just got back.”

Charles takes the phone away from her. She looks even more surprised.

“I’ll see you on Saturday, Pete.”

“Hell,” Pete says. “Down with the phone and off with the pants.”

“Oh my God,” Charles says, and hangs up.

“It’s a long story,” Charles says to Pamela Smith. “To make a long story short, he gets his feelings hurt very easily, and he thought I was hanging up on him before when I said there was a knock on the door.”

“Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “That’s sad.”

“He’s a sad case. I try to be nice to him, but it’s just not in me.”

“He might feel better in general if he cleaned out his system. Saunas and a fresh vegetable regime.”

“He’s stuck in his rut. He’ll never get out of it. My mother is nuts, and he spends all his time coping with that and getting slowly crazier himself.”

“Have they tried Gestalt?”

“No. She won’t go out of the house.”

“Wow,” Pamela Smith says. “Even if she stayed in … she might try eating more fruits and vegetables and so forth.”

Charles puts the cheese and some crackers on a plate, turns on the water to make coffee. He motions her to the kitchen table.

“So things are pretty much the same here,” he says.

“All in all, things are pretty much the same with me, too. I feel a whole lot better, but things are otherwise the same. I’ve got to get a job. I don’t know. Anything beats canning cauliflower in Mendocino. I mean, I just don’t want to can at all any more.”

“What else were you doing out there?” Charles asks.

“For a while I was living with this creep. He played the jew’s-harp and had an imitation of Elton John doing ‘Benny and the Jets.’ It really got to me after a while. It was always raining in Mendocino, and I’d go home and he’d be on the bed, naked, twanging the jew’s-harp, going ‘Benny, Benny, Benny aaaaaand the Jets …’ ”

Charles laughs.

“I sort of had a thing with a woman out there, who turned me on to curried rice. She was older than me. Forty. Except around the eyes, she looked twenty. She had an amazing body. She fasted on Sunday and ate nothing but curried rice the next day. She was a silversmith.”

Pamela Smith holds out her hand. There is a silver ring on her middle finger.

“That’s very nice,” Charles says.

“For a while I thought I’d be staying with her. She was going to teach me how to be a silversmith, get me out of that factory. She had a daughter. It was a weird scene.”

Charles nods. He is sure it was. He does not want to hear.

“The daughter thought Dylan was coming for her. She had substantial proof from the last two records. She played them all the time. I was glad to get out to go to the factory some days.”

“Is everybody crazy out there?”

“No. I think everybody’s pretty relaxed. There are a lot of nice things about California. Her daughter, though, was always looking out the window, actually expecting Dylan. Her mother was shooting pictures of her in various stances by the window. She had been a student of Diane Arbus’s. Things were really getting pretty tense when I split. And that’s when I ended up with the guy who did the Elton John imitation. We both needed a place to stay. Marian — that was her name — came over one night with her daughter, and she spent the whole night at the window. It was getting sort of weird.”

“Do you want coffee?” Charles asks.

“I’d prefer tea, please.”

He goes to the cabinet for cups. The cups are very cold from the cabinet. He rinses them in tepid, then warm water before putting the boiling water in.

“Actually, the daughter had a daughter too, but it was with its father. Its father was some hot shit San Francisco stockbroker.”

“You mean that this girl was an adult?”

“She was twenty-one. She claimed she screwed Peter Fonda on the kitchen floor in an all-night health food restaurant, but I don’t believe it.”

“It probably happened,” Charles says.

“Well, she says the same thing happened with Ahmet Ertegun, so I don’t believe it.” Charles nods.

“But it’s not all that crazy out there. Burbank is awfully ugly. I don’t know … I think about going back, but I wouldn’t want to go back to Mendocino.”

“What did you come back East for?”

“Oh, I … started to feel I was expanding too quickly — that I’d end up like stretched taffy or something. I came back to compress.”

Charles nods.

“But it’s not all that crazy out there. And now it seems so unreal to me here. I think I may be going back there. Work some shit job for a little while and go back.”

Charles nods.

“How’s your job?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Money,” he says.

“Do you wear a suit to work?” she says.

“No.”

“That’s Charles — a rebel at heart.”

“Nobody wears them,” he says. “What kind of people work there?”

“Most of them are older than me. Family people. They’re all sort of numb. They’re what everybody says they are.”

“I guess it could be worse. You should see the conditions in the canning factory in Mendocino.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to work in a canning factory.”

“I’m lucky to have my fingers,” she says. “After a while it’s hard to tell your own fingers from the cauliflower flowerets.”

She takes a sip of tea.

“One day when Marian’s daughter was looking out the window Yoko Ono walked by.”

Charles nods.

“I really don’t have much interesting news. Tell me what’s new with you.”

“Nothing.”

“Do you ever get away to go skiing?”

“I don’t ski,” Charles says.

“Oh. I must be thinking of George Nimkis.” Charles nods.

“Did you know Nimkis? Wanda’s husband?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Totally forgettable. Cared about nothing but skiing. He taught Wanda to ski on their honeymoon, had skis hung on their living room wall. There was even an old pair of them in back of the toilet. She finally left him for a skiing instructor. God knows, she was expert enough at skiing, but the ski instructor didn’t talk about skiing all the time. I don’t know what happened to George. How could I have gotten you confused with George? He had ski masks in all colors, and he’d pull them over the lamp shades. It looked like an evil jack o’lantern. I’m glad she got away from George. I wonder where she is now.…”

“You knew a lot of people around here, didn’t you?”

“I went to school here for four years and worked here for a year after that. I was a silly little secretary. Well, you knew me then. You know.”

“I should think that would beat the canning factory.”

“It did, it did. I had to gouge out the centers of cauliflowers with a knife. It was a wicked thing, and it never got dull. I can’t imagine what that knife was made of. I was terrified of it. I never worked fast enough.”

“So you’re going to go back to Mendocino, huh?”

“I don’t know what to do with myself. I really think I could get interested in that woman if it weren’t for her daughter. Besides being crazy, she’s so piggish. She lies on the rug all day, and she eats anything that’s put in front of her, and believe me, she expects regular meals down there. Sonny Bono wrote her a couple of letters. I don’t know how she knew him.”

“I heard that Dylan showed up at some party with Cher. I wonder what’s gotten into Dylan?”

“I saw his kids at Malibu. They play with Ryan O’Neal’s kid.”

“What’s he doing hanging out with Cher? ‘Haff-breed.’ Christ.”

She puts her plate and cup in the sink. “I can’t remember what you and I used to talk about,” she says.

“Lesbians,” he says.

“That’s right,” she says. “I was freelancing for that feminist newspaper. Well, I still feel very strongly that lesbianism is a good alternative. Like everything else, it has problems. Having a child, for one. And I have decided to have a child. If you have them after thirty they might be monsters. Not really monsters, but what do you call them when they have those oriental eyes?”

“Mongoloid.”

“Of course. Mongoloid. I couldn’t deal with that. For a while Marian’s daughter almost freaked me off the idea, but I think it’s what my body wants. Ultimately.”

He once lent Pamela Smith fifty dollars for an abortion. They got another ten from Sam, and ten from a friend of Sam’s who came over with Sam and saw her crying. Her brother gave her some, and a neighbor in her apartment. And a friend of hers from college who lived twenty-five miles away gave her another fifty. The friend didn’t have a car and Charles’s wouldn’t work, so they borrowed Pete’s. When Pete found out about it a week later he gave Charles twenty dollars to give her. Charles explained that it was not his child. Pete took back a ten. “Give her the rest,” Pete said. He and Pamela Smith ate at a cheap steak restaurant with the remaining ten. Pamela Smith dyed her hair after the abortion and lost a lot of weight, as if to make sure it was really gone. It was, although Pamela Smith was very upset all that summer, thinking that she saw infants’ faces in the clouds.

“Would you do something very kind for me?” Pamela Smith says. “Would you let me stay on your sofa tonight?”

“Sure. Just let me know when you’re tired.”

“Aren’t you even going to question me?” she says.

“No. I don’t mind if you sleep here tonight.”

“I think I’d rather, because it’s a very strange scene at the place I’m staying.”

“You can stay here,” he says.

“You’ve always been so nice to me.”

“No I haven’t. I used to beg you to shut up about lesbianism. I burned your Sappho book.”

“We had a good talk once, didn’t we, about Kate Millett?”

“You wrote me a letter about Kate Millett that I didn’t answer.”

“I met her. She’s a brilliant woman.”

“Maybe she is. I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you interested to read Sexual Politics?”

“No.”

“Of course there are better books. Would you be interested in reading any feminist writing?”

“Yeah. Send me something.”

“How come you’re interested in feminists, but not Kate Millett?”

“Hell, I was just being polite. I’ll never read anything you send me.”

“I really shouldn’t sleep on your sofa. But it’s an awfully weird scene.”

“If you’re mad at me you can go to bed and then we won’t have to continue this conversation. I’m pretty tired, and I’m going to bed myself.”

“What I like about you is that you’re straightforward. Many men are not straightforward. I think that in business they have to compete, to at least appear very receptive and open, and when they’re relaxing with women — that’s what they think women are for—they assert their true self, which is generally not straightforward.”

“Good night, Pamela,” he says. “I’ll bring you a sheet and a blanket.”

“May I make more tea before I go to bed?”

“Sure. I’ll put the stuff on the sofa. Good night.”

“In your own way, you are really very nice.”

He looks at her. Her Wonder Woman T-shirt ripples across her chest. She has gained weight since the abortion. Her hair has grown out. Medium-long, brown hair. Laura told him that medium could be medium-long or medium-short. She confused everything. He used to look at women and think they had medium-length hair. She did more than confuse him, she showed him that nothing was definite — even hair length. He thought that her head must reel with the complexities of everything. “When you say afternoon,” she said, “do you mean early afternoon or late afternoon?”

“What’s two-thirty?” he asked. He accepted her answer for everything. “Mid-afternoon,” she said. He felt that he really needed his apprenticeship. He felt that he really needed her. He didn’t know all that stuff.

“Is there some woman you’re in love with?” Pamela Smith asks.

“Yes,” he says. “But she’s married.”

“Marriage is dying. We keep trying to cast the ashes of the dead institution away, but the wind blows them back in our faces. We will scatter that traditionalism to the winds.”

“She’ll never divorce her husband,” Charles says.

“So you’re lovers then.”

“I never see her. Since she went back to her husband.”

“Marriage is a retreat. It’s wild animals in the rocks that curl together for protection. The wind will blow the ashes away.”

“Will the ashes blow away tomorrow?” he says. “I’d like to see her tomorrow.”

“If I could bring her to you, I would. I think you’re a very nice person.”

“Call her and tell her I’ve tried to commit suicide.”

“I couldn’t do that. She’s my sister. There can’t be sisterhood founded upon deceit.”

“She’s not your goddamned sister. She’s a housewife in an A-frame across town.”

“We’re united.”

“I want to be united with her. Give her a desperate call.”

“I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

“That’ll make it easier not to take me seriously,” he says.

“I’ll get the blankets.”