Ann Beattie - Chilly Scenes of Winter

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is Laura there?”

“Not right now.”

“Is she expected back?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure when. Who is calling?”

“Charles.”

“I’ll tell her you called.”

“Are you a friend of Laura’s?”

“I live here.”

“Oh.”

“Good-bye,” the woman says. “Good-bye,” Charles says.

He walks over to the sink, where Sam is doing the dishes. “She’s living with some woman,” he says. “Huh,” Sam says.

“I wonder what’s going on,” Charles says. “She said Laura would call back.”

Sam shrugs; Sam thinks that his affection for Laura is disproportionate.

At eleven o’clock the phone has still not rung. He calls again. The same voice answers.

“May I speak to Laura?”

“Just a minute.”

A long time passes, and then Laura says hello. Her voice is very faint. He wants to shout at her to get her mouth closer to the phone. She always does this; she’s impossible to talk to on the phone.

“Laura. What’s going on?”

“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

She answered him! He didn’t blow it by shouting that he loved her!

“Talk to me. What’s happening?” Charles says. “Well, as you’ve somehow found out, I’ve left Jim. I’m … living here.”

“You’re living with some woman,” he prompts her.

“Yes. She’s also leaving the man she lived with. She just started graduate school.”

“What about you? What … what are you doing?”

“I was getting ready to go out for a drink with a friend.”

“But have you left him? You’ve left for good?”

“Yes. Look, this isn’t a very good time for me to talk to you. I have to think about some things. I can call you.…”

“When?” he says.

“Well, another time. When I’m feeling more like talking.”

“Who are you having the drink with? You’ll be talking then.”

She laughs. No answer.

“Laura, I couldn’t believe it when I found out you’d moved. I didn’t believe it had happened. Are you okay? Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Nothing very mysterious. I wish there was something I could say.…”

“Say anything!”

“How did you get this number?”

“From Betty.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

“You’re okay?” she says.

“Okay? I don’t know how to feel. I’ve got to see you. You’ve got to tell me exactly what’s going on.”

“Charles, I don’t. I don’t mean to sound nasty, but I’m not in the best mood now, and I don’t feel like sorting everything out in a second just so you can know.”

“When would you … when are you going to call me?”

“Soon.”

“You mean not tomorrow?”

“A second was just a convenient way to put it. I’ll call you when I can call you.”

“Laura, shit! I’m sorry if I made you mad, but I’ve got to see you. I stayed away when you went back to him, but now I’m coming over there.”

“If you come over tonight I won’t be here,” she says.

“Then tomorrow. All right?”

“If it means that much to you.”

“It does.”

“I don’t think you’re thinking of me . I think you’re thinking about what’s best for you.”

“I love you!”

Silence.

“I know,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Where do you live?” he says.

“On Wicker Street—140 Wicker. A small building,”

“Okay. I’ll see you then.”

She hangs up. What went wrong? What’s happening? Where is Wicker Street?

That night he dreams that he is launched in a spaceship to the stars. His mother is there. She is taking a bath on a star. He gets back in the rocket. Mechanical failure! That strange jingling! He sits up in bed, eyes wide open. The dog is walking again, his collar jingling. By now it is clear; the dog has insomnia.

J.D. and Sam are sitting in the living room, listening to “It’s Only Rock and Roll” and drinking Bass Ale. Charles had one beer with them when he came home, but wants to be perfectly sober when he sees Laura. He slept only four or five hours the night before, thinking about her, wondering what had made her move, what had stopped her from calling, why he seemed so incapable of impressing upon her, why he had always — almost always — been incapable of impressing upon her that he loved her and had to have her, and when the dog jumped on his bed in the early morning he was actually glad to see it. By now, the dog responds to the name “Dog.” There is something wrong with his mind if he can’t think of a name for the dog. He should get referred to a psychiatrist. “I can’t name my dog, Doc.” So many situations he finds himself in remind him of the beginning of a good joke. “And the doctor said …” He should forget about a conventional shrink and let the people in Arica work on him, become a different person. Of course he won’t. It’s going to be all he can do to get up the courage to tell Laura that they must set out for Bermuda. Fly, or take a boat? Die in the air, or sink in the ocean?

J.D. says, “She must have been some chick.” Charles had just told him the outline of his relationship with Laura.

“She’s messed up,” Sam says. “I hope she doesn’t fuck you over tonight.”

“She was okay on the phone,” Charles says.

She was mad at him on the phone. He went too far. Somehow.

For a while, when things were going very well, he’d be talking to Laura and he’d forget she hadn’t been with him all his life. He’d mention kids from grade school and assume she knew them, too, talk to her about how he lied his way out of the Army and forget that he’d never before mentioned the Army to her. She never told him much about her past. Her mother died when she was in high school. He has no idea what happened to her father, whether he is dead or alive. And he can’t remember where she went to high school. In Virginia, but what part of Virginia? She worked as a waitress in high school. A man on the street in New York, where they went for their class trip, gave her his card and told her he wanted to sign her for his modeling agency. She was scared to call him, and is glad that she was. She jumped on the trampoline in high school, wanted to be an acrobat. She was a waitress. Did she ever tell him what waitressing was like, though? Or even a funny story? Doesn’t seem like it. She has a brother who runs a hunting lodge. She has not seen him for years and years. One Christmas he sent her a deer head. She wrote asking for a bearskin rug for Rebecca and got no answer. She met Ox when he was in the Marines, dated him a few times. He remembers, in fact, that they went dancing, and then she forgot about him. By chance, she saw him again a year later. He was married, then, and unhappy. He called her a year after that and said that his wife was in the bin. Then his wife got out of the bin. She lost contact with him. Then he called again, and she went to the house for dinner and never left. Rebecca loved her. That was that Then how could she mind his calling and putting her on the spot a little?

And what else, what else about Laura? That she jumped on the trampoline because somebody told her that she would drive her shinbones into her feet and she wouldn’t grow any taller. She worried that she was too tall. She took photography lessons, but was never very good at it, and there never seemed to be a convenient photo lab to develop the film, so.… And she took dancing lessons, and paid a French woman ten dollars a week to let her stand around her kitchen on the weekends and watch her cook. The French woman was always pregnant, and always out of some spice. Laura tried to have a baby and never did. No, no tests. That was that She went to college for a while. Some day she might go back, to study botany. She could model to make money, but she’d really have to go to New York to do that, and anyway — she was old now, too old to model. The French woman made things with fish heads. None of her professors tried to pick her up, none of them even knew her by name. She said once that she would like to meet Ox’s wife. They became friends. His wife married him because he was captain of the football team. He married her because she was crazy and funny. Laura went to see her, taking food and perfume. Ox drank, had another woman once — at least once — and stopped building houses, lost a lot of business, drank some more, she left. She left for a lot of reasons.