Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

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

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

“That cough sounds awful.”

“Are you bringing me my lunch or not?”

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

“Don’t get so close to me,” Sam says.

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

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

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

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

“Eat your soup.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You want me to move?”

“No. Stay where you are.”

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

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

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

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

“I feel like puking now. No offense.”

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

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

“Hello,” Pete says.

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

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

“What?” Charles says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She danced?” Pete says. “Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

“Go to sleep and forget it.”

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

“That’s okay,” Charles says.

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

“Yeah,” Charles says.

“But it’s too late now,” Pete says.

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

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

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

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

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