Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“What did you mean before when you said she was an alcoholic?” Susan says, walking up the aisle.

“Can’t anything get your mind off her?” Charles asks.

Susan looks down, watching her feet leaving the theater.

“She’s a heavy drinker,” Charles says. “I was just exaggerating.”

“What do you think happened to her all of a sudden?” Susan asks. “You know — she dyed her hair and started wearing those jersey things.…”

“If you want to know what I really think, I think that one day she just decided to go nuts because that was easier. This way she can say whatever she wants to say, and she can drink and lie around naked and just not do anything.”

“Maybe when my sister died it did something to her.”

“And it took nineteen years to register?”

“How long has she been crazy?”

“She was crazy when you graduated from elementary school, and that was … seven years ago.”

“Maybe when he died …”

“Oh, who the hell knows? I notice you’re not so concerned that you stick around here to go to school. She calls me almost every night. Or every day at work. How can I sleep? How can I work? I don’t know what to do.”

“Doesn’t she talk to Pete?”

“She talks to Pete and then she gets on the horn to me. Sometimes they fight when she calls. She just dials the number and lays the phone on the table, and I pick it up and hear them screaming.”

“We ought to go home. The doctor must be trying to reach us.”

“Let’s go to a bar,” Charles says. “Then we can go back to the hospital.”

“But the doctor won’t be there again. We have to wait for his call.”

Charles acknowledges defeat, but his shoulders feel very heavy when he shrugs them. He stops at a liquor store for a six-pack of beer to drink as he waits. He drives home slowly. He sulks. He realizes, with surprise, that he has forgotten to smoke all day. He decides to give up smoking.

There is laughter as he puts the key in the front door. Sam is laughing. There is a pile of clothes in the living room. Charles looks out the front door for Sam’s car. Sam is laughing. Susan looks embarrassed.

“Goddamn it,” Charles says. He squats and takes a can out of the six-pack, opens it, and has a drink. He offers up the can. Susan stiffens.

“I thought she was leaving today,” Charles says.

“Come on,” Susan says. “I’m not going to stay and listen to this.”

“Well, what are we going to do? Go back to the hospital without having talked to the doctor?”

“I just don’t want to be here.”

“We could go over to Laura’s, and you could tell her what a swell guy I am, and I could get her back.”

“Come on,” Susan says.

“Come where?”

“We can go to a bar. That’ll please you.”

“It would please me to stay here. But your friend is at it with Sam.”

“Sam’s your friend. You always do that.”

Charles rubs his hand across the back of his neck. He is getting tired. He is tired. He picks up the rest of the beer and follows Susan out of the house.

“You drive,” he says. “I’m tired.”

“Where shall I go?”

“To the bar. And you’re to blame if it doesn’t make me happy, because you said it would.”

Donovan is singing “Sunshine Superman” on the car radio. Mellow Yellow. Charles’s car is yellow. It is an old yellow car with the trunk bashed in. He has nightmares in which he is thrown forward, into nothing. His car was hit from behind while he was stopped at a red light. A diplomat named Waldemere something-or-other did it. The diplomat was enraged. He showed Charles his license: “American driving license,” he said. “Worthless.” He wrote his name, embassy, and number in huge black letters on a napkin he got out of his car. On the other side of the napkin was a leaping fish. In the nightmare, Charles always screams. When he was hit, he just said, “Ugh.” He and Laura were going to get married. They were going to have a dog from the pound. By now, that dog is dead. She said that she always had cats; now she wanted dogs. He agreed. She said that it was corny, but she wanted to go to Bermuda. He said that he knew how to snorkel and would teach her. They both drank Jack Daniel’s on ice. He kept a bottle in his refrigerator, and when she was at his house they drank it straight. She had brownish-blond hair. Most women get upset if you can’t tell if their hair is brown or blond. She didn’t. He settled on brownish-blond in his own good time. She told him that Lauren Hutton had a wedge she put between her front teeth sometimes when she was photographed, and pointed it out on a Vogue cover photo. For that matter, she told him who Lauren Hutton was. Before Laura he loved three other girls: one of them he stopped loving, one he continues to sort of love, but she was no good for him, and the other one he never thinks about. Laura was the best of them. Laura made a dessert out of cognac and fresh oranges. A soufflé. Her cookbooks are still all over the house. He often craves that dessert, and the recipe is probably in one of those books, but he can’t bring himself to look. He wants to think of it as magic. For the same reason, he never read a book about Houdini that Sam gave him for his birthday. He lies to Sam, says that he has read it. “What an amazing man Houdini was,” he says to Sam. If she had married him and they had gone to Bermuda, he would still have a little tan left now. His arms are winter white. She gave him clogs. They are too loud; he is too conscious of them — he won’t wear them. But he wears the undershirts. He can’t tell them from his old ones. In a fit of depression, he once thought of unraveling the labels in the back because hers had some little gold rooster on the label. He could just throw all those out. And the cookbooks. He will never throw either out. Even the clogs. His house is full of her things. There are toenail scissors in the bathroom, photo-booth pictures of them on the kitchen cabinet. Sam says that he should call her again, too. Houdini miraculously breaks chain! Charles calls Laura! He lacks nerve.

“That bar,” Charles points.

“That looks awful.”

“It’s okay. I’ve been there.”

Susan turns down a side street and coasts along, looking for a parking place. It is almost rush hour. Traffic is heavy. She finds a place at the end of the street.

“Lucky,” she says. She parks the car and gets out. Charles sits there, imitating Susan earlier in the day. She comes to his window. “Out or I kill you,” she says.

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” he says.

They get the last two seats at the bar. It is a long bar with red plastic bar stools and bowls of peanuts.

“What are you majoring in?” he says to Susan, and feels like a fool because a man next to him overheard. He considers following it up by asking Susan to see his etchings. Of course he can’t take her home. Sam is screwing a woman in his bedroom. He had planned on a nap, but now he is balanced on a bar stool, making silly conversation.

“I don’t have one,” Susan says, and the man chuckles.

“It’s my sister,” Charles says, and the man turns away, pretending not to notice.

Charles orders a rum and Coke, figuring that that’s probably what they drink in Bermuda. The rum and Coke tastes just awful. He wishes he had Susan’s plain Coke.

“I’ll tell you who’s going to win the Super Bowl,” a tall man in a black jacket says to a shorter man who is leaning away from him. “I am.” He hits the short man on the back.

“Aw, Christ,” the short man says. His face is sweating.

“You don’t think I’m going to win the Super Bowl? I am winning the Super Bowl. Be tuned on Sunday, buddy, because that’s when you’ll see it.”