Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“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 Her hair style will be out of date, her legs a bit too fat.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.