Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“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.”

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.