Chilly Scenes of Winter

SEVEN

He calls in sick. It’s true that he has a sore throat, but he’s well enough to go to work. He just can’t face it. Reports. Betty. Lunch alone. “What have you got?” The blind man there every day to remind him that, at the close of the day, he has nothing. It adds insult to injury to have to answer, “A peanut-butter cup.”

Pamela Smith left in the morning, deciding to borrow money from her brother and go back to California to become a silversmith. She told Charles this over breakfast, which he fixed for her. He went out and bought eggs, cheese, English muffins, raspberry jam, and sausage. She didn’t eat the sausage, but he did and it tasted good. She told him not to go out, but he said that he wanted to. It was true; he did want to. He wanted her to exclaim again how nice he was. It would give him courage to call Laura. “You’re a bully!” a girl in the sixth grade had once shouted to Charles as he ran by, nearly knocking her over, and he had been so delighted he almost stopped running and started strutting.

“Yon eat all that meat and you get sluggish, and when you’re sluggish you’re depressed. Try eating crisp celery in the morning and only fruits until night, when you can have soup or fish. I know you’ll feel better.”

She washed the Wonder Woman T-shirt before going to bed. She ate breakfast with a towel around her top, giving the shirt an extra few minutes to dry. He noticed a mole above her right breast, one that he didn’t remember. He tried to remember touching her. He couldn’t. But he did remember what she looked like naked, and there was no mole. It must be a melanoma. Inoperable, of course. And if they operate, the cancer may have spread through the lymphatic system or through the blood. Persistent stuff. Laura probably thinks he is too persistent — he is a cancer. A cancer on the Presidency. An inoperable melanoma on the Presidency that occurred, strangely enough, through exposure to darkness. If only he could think of stylish political talk in her presence. Then maybe she would love him. Although she was never very concerned with politics. And he can never think of anything to say; he just talks about how much he loves her. Couldn’t they have been like a Norman Rockwell family if they had met years ago, if they had been adults in the forties? There would have been a small black dog, an older son, younger daughter, a chubby baby on Grandpa’s knee (his father — not Pete) and they would all be seated at the birthday party of his delighted son, Grandma carrying in a strawberry shortcake, the dog running to greet her, everybody slightly overweight and rosy. A white tablecloth, drapes to the floor, an unwrapped present, a bowl of vegetables on the table. Peanut-butter cups. The A-frame. Bob White’s son throwing a brick through a window.

He walks the two miles to the park. It is a cold, sunny day. He has heard that hippies bury grass in this park, that if it ever burned, the firemen would be too stoned to fight it. Hardly anyone is in the park. He sees no hippies, suspicious or otherwise. The park has old wooden swings and a dented slide. The park Laura takes Rebecca to in the spring has orange plastic swings and large metal turtles to climb on. Rebecca will not eat turtle soup. She cries because she thinks that flesh — metal flesh, don’t ask her to explain this — has been gouged out of this particular turtle to make turtle soup. He went to the park last spring, because he knew Laura was taking Rebecca there, and sat on a bench and watched them. He wanted to rush up to Rebecca and say warm, witty things to her that would charm her, but he had a very lazy floating feeling sitting on the bench and didn’t want to change it by moving, so he only sat there, very still, watching them. Laura gave Rebecca a hand-up on the jungle gym (Sam, slapping his mother’s hand …), sat on a bench to smoke a Chesterfield. When he first knew her — no, when he first became her lover — he got out of bed one night and rummaged through the ashtray to find out what kind of cigarettes she smoked, hoping they would be low in tar and nicotine. He shuddered when he lifted out the Chesterfield. He went back to bed and imagined that she was having trouble breathing — all that carbon in her lungs. In the morning, he begged her to have a chest X ray. When the Popsicle truck came, he wanted to buy one for Laura; the most expensive kind — vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone with chocolate and nuts and a cherry frozen on top. Then he would take her to the stone fountain for a drink of water. The next time he went to the park the stone fountain with the two steps had been taken out and there was a red plastic fountain shaped like a boomerang.

Charles is wearing a tweed coat that makes him feel like an old man. Other people his age wear ski jackets, navy-blue ski jackets that have no weight but that are stuffed with miraculously warm fabric, tied on the inside with secret drawstrings, buttoned and zipped on the outside. You can carry Kleenex on your bicep in those jackets. There is a three-inch zipper, just big enough to pull down and stuff a tissue in. He has examined the jackets, decided that his tweed coat from college is good enough. If he stays thin, he can become an old man in the coat, a powerful Yeatsian old man. She read Yeats to him. Swans, hills, valleys, islands. She read him Pound’s parody of Yeats, and he wanted to kill Pound. Dead, she said. He disliked Pound so much that she told stories, trying to make him like Pound. It became important to her that he like Pound, but he could not stand the man. He couldn’t laugh with her at Pound’s rants about usury, and ABC of Reading seemed to him pompous. “But it’s so funny,” she said. When it all failed, she told him about Pound being shut in a cage. Now he pities Pound. Does not like him a bit, but pities him. She has made him feel so many ways. Now he feels a way about Ezra Pound and has no one to discuss it with. There is an old man in the park who looks like Pound. Can’t be. The old man is wearing a tan coat and walks with slow steps in highly polished brown shoes. He is the only other stroller in the park. Charles suspects that when the old man’s hand goes in his pocket it is for a peanut or a bit of bread. The old man blows his nose loudly, like a goose, honking. He stuffs the handkerchief in an inside pocket as he passes Charles.

Charles turns down a path that takes him to the main section of the park. There are graffiti on the benches. There are no drinking fountains. A dolphin that gurgles water in the summer has its mouth open to the cold wind. It looks, now, like a terrified caught fish. He never liked to fish. Susan did. She was too small to really fish, but she liked to watch, to jerk her arm as though it held a fishing pole. His father would take Susan fishing with him, and Charles would stay home with his mother. Some Saturdays she baked a cake (that dessert …) and let him frost it, awkwardly, moving around the cake instead of merely turning the plate until she laughed at him and showed him how easy it was to spin the plate. So he made cakes while Susan fished. Liberated children — Charles liberated out of revulsion at seeing fish twitch, Susan liberated because she loved to jerk her arm. She also did it in dancing. She’d stand on the floor, feet shuffling to a record, right arm flapping like a cowboy with a lasso. They said she would be a conductor. Conductress. Liberation. He hopes Pamela Smith does not waste her money on books.

It is too cold to think intelligently in the park (this is, after all, what he has taken the day off to do), and tea might soothe his throat, so he walks in the direction of the hill, below which lies a street with a coffee shop. It is next to a bakery he used to go to with Laura, one that stayed open very late. They would get there just as the fresh Danish were being taken out of the oven at two A.M. The old Italian woman who worked there (guarded by two German shepherds and one Madonna) would make motions — what looked like slapping — with her fingers, lightly touching the tops of the pastries. She would give one pastry to each dog and, if she was in a good mood, one to Laura and Charles before they even gave their order for half a dozen. His throat constricts, not so much from pain as from remembering. Old ladies always thought they were a sweet young couple. You could tell. He passes a bench that a young woman is sitting on, a little boy in her lap, face turned toward her to protect himself from the wind, a little girl pushing a noisy toy in front of her. It is a clear plastic cylinder with marbles inside. Charles stops to say hello. The young woman is very pleasant. They talk about the snow that is expected, and how hard it is to believe that this park is full of people in the summer. She has on a navy-blue ski parka, jeans and boots. Long (medium long) blond hair, a full mouth. Her name is Sandra. She does not give a last name, the way women in whorehouses, or waitresses, automatically state only their first name. He tells her his full name, as he would do with a new business acquaintance (“in business they have to appear very receptive and open …”). There is nothing left to say. He pretends to be amused by the little girl at play, asks her name. It is We-Chi, or something that sounds like that. The woman is obviously an American, the child too. “It means ‘spirit rising from the great lagoon,’ ” the woman says. She smiles. She has very white teeth. He says that the name is very pretty (Laura …), thinking she is crazy. “His name is Mecca,” the woman says, patting the blue bundle curved against her. Charles leans forward a little to see the smaller child’s features. American. And sleeping. Charles nods, backs up a step to leave, and stumbles on We-Chi’s rolling toy. He recovers himself, smiling foolishly, like the comedian deliberately flubbing an exit for laughs. If he had a hat, he could tip it, then trip again and fall on his face. “Good-bye,” he says, and walks away. He has done a lot of walking and is getting tired. Good. If he gets tired, he won’t have to think. Thinking this, he descends the hill. The sky is gray; it looks as though there will be no more sun before darkness. He sings a few words of “Mama You Been On My Mind” to himself as he walks down the hill and jumps over the stone border to the sidewalk. With his sore throat, he sounds very much like Rod Stewart. Tomorrow the sore throat may be worse, and he will have to take another day off from work. What a shame. Laura will call him at the office, a spur-of-the-moment desire to have lunch with him, and will be told that he is home sick. He will open his door and she will be there. She will simply be standing there, suffused in the aroma of chicken soup. Get this one down for posterity, Norman Rockwell. Sam’s dog, who often visited my house, is dead; otherwise she could run yapping to another man’s wife, who has come to bring me chicken soup. Maybe Edward Hopper? Or a cartoon?

He sits at the counter next to an old woman who smells of mint. Her hair rolls away from her face in even waves. A shopping bag is wedged between her feet. There is a dirty white towel over whatever is in the shopping bag. The woman is drinking black coffee, into which she empties three packs of “Sweet ’n Low.” She is humming “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Charles orders tea with lemon. A priest comes in and greets the old woman enthusiastically. She moves from the counter to a booth with him, knocking Charles as she draws out her shopping bag. Something moves under the towel: a cat. A striped cat.

“Say ‘I love you,’ ” the woman says, dangling the cat in front of the priest.

The priest laughs merrily. He’d do well in a Santa Claus audition, except that his eyes look mad — too many years squeezed in that collar. He orders a second cup of tea. The waitress says that he can use the same tea bag if he wants, but she will have to charge him twenty cents for water all the same. He says that’s fine — and as he is sipping, the woman from the park comes in. She is carrying her son, who is still asleep. Or maybe he is dead. He always has fantasies of disaster. Squirrels crossing the street end up writhing and bloody in his mind, even if they make it safely across; sleeping people in public places are always dead; a knock on the door means machine-gun fire when he opens it to peek out.

“You look very upset,” the woman says.

What did she say her name was? Betty … but last name what? Must remember to ask Betty her last name. This woman’s name is something ordinary. Anne? Jane? Sandra! He says it out loud, victoriously.

“You had the right idea. It’s cold today. It will snow.”

“Is your little boy okay?” he says.

“Yes. He’s had shots. For going abroad. They make him conk out. They don’t bother you at all, do they, We-Chi?”

The little girl shakes her head. Her mother puts her on a stool beside Charles, unzips her jacket.

“Do you want hot chocolate?” she asks.

The little girl does.

“Where are you going?” Charles asks.

The Paris McDonald’s …

“Turkey,” the woman says. “My husband is working there.”

“Do you remember Daddy?” the woman says to the little girl.

The little girl does not.

“She’s just saying that. You get cranky in the afternoon, don’t you, We-Chi?”

“Is your husband Turkish?” Charles asks. The children are so blond …

“Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” the woman sighs. She orders one hot chocolate with whipped cream, one black coffee. There is a ring with a large sapphire on her left hand. Her hands look old, but the woman looks no older than thirty. The little girl spins around on the stool to look at the cat sitting on the table, licking its paws. The waitress looks as if she wouldn’t say anything if someone brought an elephant in. Glassy-eyed, she shuffles over to the table to get the priest’s order. “Sure the slaw is made with mayo,” Charles hears her say.

“I want vegetable soup,” the little girl says as the waitress lowers the cup in front of her.

“You’re having that for supper,” Sandra says. “Drink this now to make yourself warm.”

The little girl turns away from the counter to look at the cat. The priest waves to her and she smiles shyly and swivels to face the counter again.

“Are you a student?” the woman asks.

“No. I’m playing hooky from my job.”

“I played hooky all through college,” the woman says. “I flunked out. Then I got married.”

“What were you studying?” Charles asks.

“Math. After two years, when we get back from Turkey, I’m going back.”

“Do you want to teach math?”

“No. I just like getting lost in calculations. I actually enjoy balancing my checkbook.”

“I read somewhere that they were using calculators in elementary school instead of teaching arithmetic,” Charles says.

“That’s bright,” the woman says. “My sister’s got a kid in school down south and there are pictures in his textbook of black people in shanties, out on the front porch chewing watermelon. Educators are very bright.”

Watermelon. Spring. In the park with Laura. “When you get done serving all the kids, take one of those ice cream cones to the woman on the bench and another one for her little girl,” Charles had said, handing the ice cream man five dollars.

“The bright people are always in control,” the woman says. “They’re so bright that they sent my husband to Turkey, when he didn’t know as much as the man already there that they sent back here to work in Wisconsin.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Five months. I have trouble remembering his face. I’ve got a friend whose husband died two years ago, and she says she has no idea at all what he looked like. He just looks like the picture on the piano. She says the picture was actually a consolation. It was taken when he graduated from college, so it was about ten years old. And she says now that’s it — that’s her husband.”

Charles squirms.

“Here’s my husband,” the woman says, holding open the picture folder in her wallet. Her husband is a blond haired, ordinary-looking man, tie knotted at his throat.

Charles nods.

“I’m bothering you,” the woman says. “No. You’re not bothering me.”

“I went to the park today because if I had stayed in that house another minute I was going to go nuts. My only friend is the woman I was telling you about, and she works all day. I don’t know what to do with nobody to talk to.”

“It’s nice to talk to you,” Charles says.

“I never thought I was that boring. I don’t know why I don’t have any friends. The only friends I had were his friends, and when he went to Turkey, good-bye friends. I’ve had to make arrangements to rent the house, take the kids to the doctors, I don’t know. I’m always running around. There’s always something to do. The days just get eaten up.”

The woman finishes the last of her cold coffee, puts the spoon in the cup.

“We have to charge for second cups,” the waitress says when she appears.

“That’s all right. We-Chi, do you want another hot chocolate?”

We-Chi shakes her head. She watches the cat, curled on the table, swings her legs against the base of the stool.

“Does your wife work?” Sandra says. “I’m not married.”

“Man, there’s days I’d like to be single. I might as well not be married, with my husband in Turkey.”

We-Chi sneezes, rubs her nose on the back of her hand.

“Well,” Charles says. “Soon you’ll see your husband.”

“It’s a good thing. I’ve forgotten what he looks like.”

Charles reaches in his pocket for change to leave a tip. The woman stirs her black coffee.

“I’ll give you my phone number,” the woman says. “You can come over some night for dinner. Would you do that?”

“Oh, that’s very nice of you. Sure.”

He wouldn’t.

She writes her name and number on a napkin with a black felt-tip pen. Tiny lines wave off the letters. Her name is Sandra Ribert.

“Sandra Ribert,” he says, folding the napkin.

“Ribert. Like the bread.”

“Ribert,” he repeats.

“I’d ask you for dinner tonight, but I just think that seems too bold, to be honest with you. So if you’d like to come, call. I’d like to have you.”

“I was going somewhere tonight,” he says. “But I will give you a call. Looks like your son is really sacked out,” he says.

The woman nods. Leaving, he trips over a woman’s umbrella. He pays at the cashier, sure that Sandra Ribert is staring at him. It makes him nervous, the way he always felt in high school, showering with everybody else. He always kept his eyes straight ahead, in case any of the boys thought he was looking at them. But they didn’t, and that made it doubly hard to keep his eyes straight. Gym. Mr. Franklin was his gym teacher. He called everybody “you sons of bitches,” even when he was addressing them individually. His wife taught girls’ gym. She got pregnant twice and then quit. She called the girls “ladies.” Every month the girls would compete against the boys at volleyball. Mr. Franklin would stand on the girls’ side, blowing his whistle, and his wife would stand in back of the boys, blowing hers. Whistles blew and blew. It made it very exciting. Everybody thought the Franklins were pretty nice. After the second baby Mrs. Franklin didn’t come back. Franklin was there, still shouting at the “sons of bitches.” Once when Franklin was going around the track with them he grabbed his chest and fell in the gravel. Everybody rushed to him. Franklin smiled. “I just wanted to see if you sons of bitches really cared about me,” he said. “I’ll remember it at grading time.” Nobody ever got less than a B from Franklin. Even the fat boys and the boy there was something wrong with got Bs. Franklin wrote a recommendation for Charles when he was applying to the state college. Charles had heard that a recommendation from a gym teacher would be a big help. He didn’t know why. But he asked Franklin to write the recommendation and Franklin did it. He handed it to Charles the next gym period. Franklin had spelled the name of the month wrong, and he had commas where there shouldn’t be any. Charles felt very sorry for Franklin and had trouble looking at him after that.

Back on the street, Charles decides to climb over the stone wall and go through the park to get home. He was going to take the bus, but the buses are probably getting crowded by this hour, and since he’s tired he might as well get exhausted. Nothing else to do. He crosses the street and pulls himself over the wall, walks up the slippery hill and back into the park. It is getting dark, and there is no one in the park. He jogs across the flat grass and doesn’t slow down until he is ready to descend the hill at the opposite side of the park. He is panting. He doesn’t even smoke. He swallows and realizes that his throat is much worse. He swallows again, to retest. It is much worse. He swallows again, fascinated with the soreness of his throat. He has to stick his chin out and swallow very hard to do it. Maybe he is getting the flu. He is sweating, too, but that might just be from jogging. He reaches in his pocket and takes out a tissue. Wait — that’s not a tissue. It’s Sandra Ribert’s phone number. He puts the napkin against his forehead anyway, but stops before rubbing. Who knows. Maybe he will call her some day. She seemed okay. To be honest, she seemed better than Betty. He’s not exactly sure what Betty lacks — other than not being Laura — but he’s sure he deliberately forgot to get Betty’s phone number. He even feels sorry for Betty. He feels sorry for himself, coming down with the flu. He thinks about something Susan said to him. She said, in effect, that everybody wasn’t pitiful. Why did he feel sorry for all of them? Who’s not pitiful? Sam, selling jackets? His mother, with her imaginary pains? Pete, stuck with her? Pamela Smith isn’t pitiful. Sandra Ribert isn’t pitiful. But Betty is. The blind man. Is the blind man pitiful? On general principles, sure. His boss? Nah — he’s not pitiful. He has a summer cottage on Chesapeake Bay and a rich wife, and his son goes to an ivy league college. Sam’s dead dog is pitiful. Only eight years old, and dead. It was such a good dog. Everything excited it: taking a ride in the car, going for a walk, dinner time, bedtime, playtime. Shit. He should have been nicer to the dog.

He walks all the way through the park without seeing anyone. Back on the sidewalk it’s crowded, though. He starts jogging, wanting to be home sooner. He’s too winded — can’t do it. He resolves to jog more, to get in shape. He will have the flu, then get better and jog.

It gets dark too early in the winter. The streetlights are on when he gets to his house. He fishes in his pocket for his key. He has forgotten it. There is a spare in his car. He opens the car door and reaches around under the floor mat. Aha! The key and twenty-five cents. He lets himself in, walks across the living room and into the kitchen to start water boiling. There is a note from Sam: “Stopped by. Phone rang when I was here. Somebody named Pauline Reynolds. Will call you later myself.—S.” Sam has gone away and left his own key to the house on the drainboard.

Charles puts up the thermostat before he takes off his coat. He rubs his throat, strokes downward, as though his throat might get soothed the same way a cat does. He is sipping his tea at the kitchen table, debating whether to go out to the grocery store for some food, when the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Charles? This is Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Yes,” he says.

He forgot to call Susan. Elise is dead. Mrs. Reynolds is going to send hired killers after him.

“I have called to set your mind at rest. I knew you must be worried sick over my little Elise, although you were remarkably and reassuringly calm the other evening.”

“Oh. She’s okay. I knew she’d be okay, Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Guess where she is?” Mrs. Reynolds says.

“There with you?”

“No. Guess again.”

“At college.”

He hates Elise. She bored him to death. This conversation bores him to death. It is better than being gunned to death by hired killers.

“No. Try again.”

“I give up, Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Guess! You have to guess!”

“New York?”

“No. Not New York.”

Christ. Does he have to guess again?

“Guess again,” Mrs. Reynolds says.

“Paris? I don’t know. I have no way of knowing.”

“I knew you’d never guess. Elise is in Vail, Colorado.”

“That’s good. I knew she’d be okay.”

“I knew it too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have let you placate me so easily on my last phone call to you. I was not drunk on that phone call, Charles, and it was not just flippancy, drunken flippancy, that made me terminate the conversation.”

“I didn’t think you were drunk, Mrs. Reynolds.”

“I’m not drunk tonight either, but I will have to tell my husband I was because otherwise he sees no excuse for making long distance calls.”

“I see,” Charles says.

Charles thinks of a joke his father told him, the first joke he can remember: “ ‘I see,’ said the blind man. ‘You do not,’ said the deaf one.” At the time, Charles had not understood. It was years before he could understand jokes. Jokes would be told to him tentatively, his father’s face earnest and worried, knowing he would fail, much the way a doctor must set his face before telling his patient he has an inoperable melanoma, expecting, of course, that the man will never have heard the word “melanoma” before.

“What’s she doing in Vail?” Charles says. Did Sam give her more than he said? Did he pay a lot for it and just not want to admit it? Maybe Sam has been down on his luck.…

“Skiing,” Mrs. Reynolds says. “And here’s another surprise. She’s with your friend.”

“My friend?” Charles says.

“Sam McGuire, the lawyer!” Mrs. Reynolds says.

Charles looks at Sam’s note, at the key, at his cup of tea. Christ.

“You didn’t know,” Mrs. Reynolds says. “I’ve called with a surprise. They were going to send you a postcard, I’m sure, and I spoiled it.”

“That’s okay.” Charles says. “I was wondering where Sam was.”

“In Vail, Colorado. I’m so glad she’s met a nice man. A lawyer. Is your friend very nice, Charles?”

A lawyer. Christ. Sam, who sells size thirty-eight regular jackets to men who wear forty-two extra long and gets commended for being made a monkey of. A lawyer. He didn’t have the money to go to law school. He’ll never have the money to go to law school, or to go skiing in Vail, Colorado.

“He’s my best friend,” Charles says.

“I’m sure he’s a nice person if he took Elise skiing. That’s where the President goes, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Do you ski, Charles?”

She must be mistaking him for George Nimkis.

“No, I don’t. It was very nice of you to call with this good news, Mrs. Reynolds, but I was just preparing my dinner.”

“Wasn’t your wife preparing dinner?”

“She usually does, but tonight I’m cooking.”

“That’s so nice of you. You and your wife must be such nice people. Was it your son who answered the phone earlier?”

“Yes. My son.”

“It sounded like a grown-up.”

“Oh, he’s getting to be a big boy. Well, thanks again for calling.”

He will call Susan and give her hell. He is getting pulled in deeper and deeper. If Sam the lawyer impregnates Elise, he will be held accountable. That’s when she’d run home to her mother. The hired killers, after all.

“You’re certainly welcome. And I appreciate you and your wife having Elise there. I think it’s good for teen-agers to be around young couples. My own husband is quite elderly. Elise always jokes that he’s dead! Well, that isn’t quite so. Elise said your wife was most gracious.”

“She is. Good-bye, Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Good-bye, Charles.”

Charles picks up the phone again so soon after having hung up that there is no dial tone. He puts it down a few seconds, then picks it up again. He does not have her number. He hangs up and gets his name book, dials. Doctor Mark answers.

“Mark? Charles. How are you? Is Susan there?”

“Charles. How are you? I want to thank you for your hospitality of the other night. It was. Very nice of you to have me sleep over.”

“I would have given you the bed, but I was in a bad mood. I’m still in a bad mood. May I speak to Susan?”

“She’s at a sauna right now.”

Christ. She’s getting in the spirit of the bourgeoisie.

“Tell her to call me, please, when she gets back.”

“Nothing wrong — not family trouble? If I may ask.”

“Trouble with her bubbleheaded girlfriend. She’s run off and told her parents Sam is with her. The guy who was sleeping at my place the night you were there.”

“Ah. And it wasn’t Sam, you mean. If I understand.”

“That’s right. And I don’t want to get involved in this mess. So tell Susan to call me.”

“So. How are things with you otherwise?”

“I think I’m getting the flu.”

“That’s been going around. Sorry I can’t help you. That sounds. Like what a doctor would say. Ha-ha.”

“Yeah. Well, tell Susan to call.”

“Right,” Mark says.

A sauna. Jesus Christ Elise ought to be in the sauna. Trapped in it for good.

Charles dials Sam. Sam gets it on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Guess where you are tonight.”

“What do you mean guess where I am?”

“You think you’re at home, don’t you?”

“Are you drinking?”

“No. I’m on the rebound from a phone call with Mrs. Reynolds, who has turned up Elise. She’s with you. You’re both in Vail, Colorado.”

Sam snorts.

“Guess what you are?” Charles says. “You mean my profession?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. What?”

“A lawyer.”

“That bitch. I told her I wanted to go to law school.”

“No sooner said than done.”

“You sound funny still, Charles. You feeling okay?”

“Sore throat.”

“I came by earlier. Did you see my note?”

“Yeah. You left the key here, too.”

“Oh, yeah. I was wondering what happened to that.”

“What did you come by for?”

“To see if you’d already eaten.”

“Oh. Have you eaten?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Three hot dogs and a can of beans.”

“Ugh.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Then how were you going to go out to eat?”

“You were going to take me.”

“Oh. Well, sorry I missed you.”

“Where were you?”

“I took the day off from work and wandered around. Went to the park.”

“Feed the birds and feel sorry for yourself?”

“No. Forgot to take anything for the birds and felt guilty.”

The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees …

“They’ve been laying people off at work.”

“They have? Are you worried?”

“Sure I’m worried. Where am I going to find another job.”

Sam doesn’t ask it as a question.

“You could find another one.”

“You said that with the same enthusiasm you give your mother pep talks with: ‘You can find better things to do than sit in the tub.…”

Charles laughs.

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

“It’s very Freudian.”

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

“I’ll be talking to you.”

“Good-bye,” Sam says.

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

He picks up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hi. What’s up?” Susan says.

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

“Don’t get excited.”

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

“Oh no,” Susan says.

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

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

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

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

“I will.”

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

“Okay.”

“Good-bye.”

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

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

“She’s cooking again?”

“Of course not. Pete is.”

“That’s nice of him.”

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

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

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

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

“I’ll write you.”

“He’s right there?”

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

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

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

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

“Hello?”

“Charlie? Hello. Bill.”

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

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

“I’ll probably be back tomorrow.”

“What is it, the flu?”

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

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

“I might take that advice.”

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

“God. That’s awful.”

“Those shrinks are pretty clever fellows, huh?”

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

“I guess they are.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You could have looked anyway, Bill.”

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

“How’s your son doing at Dartmouth?”

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

“Well, Dartmouth is a classy place.”

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

“So do I. See you later, Bill.”

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

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