Chilly Scenes of Winter Read online

  “You don’t have a hair dryer, do you?”

  “Of course not. What would I be doing with that?”

  “A lot of men blow-dry their hair now.”

  “I don’t want all that junk around me. What would I have a hair dryer for?”

  He is cantankerous. That’s probably the real reason Susan’s leaving. If Doctor Mark’s Cadillac will start.

  “Does Mark use a hair dryer?” he calls.

  No answer. The rumble of the television. He looks at the thermometer on the window outside. It is twenty-eight degrees. The thermometer was a Christmas gift from an uncle in Wisconsin. An ornamental squirrel is huddled on top of it. It is made out of some plastic-looking black material. The squirrel looks like it won’t make it. There is a black plastic nut in its paws. Charles goes back to the cabinet, looking for the jar of bird seed. He finds it, shoved to the back of the highest shelf. There is also another box of Tuna Helper there, and a jar of Heinz Kosher Dills. They will definitely be going out for dinner. Charles gets his jacket from the closet in the living room, zips it. Twenty-seven, and he still has trouble zipping his jacket. “You approach it with too much hostility,” Laura told him. “You have to glide it up. You do it all wrong; you jerk it. A zipper will never work if it’s jerked.” Laura used to zip his jacket for him. When she went back to her husband he couldn’t stand to see the jacket. He went out and bought a raincoat, but that wasn’t warm enough, and he had a sentimental attachment to the jacket, so eventually he started wearing it again. One of the girls he had once loved (the one he still sort of loves, but she’s no good for him) gave it to him five years ago as a Christmas present. She got tired of sewing buttons on his blue pea jacket, and on Christmas morning he opened the box with the brown jacket in it. There was a chocolate heart wrapped in red foil inside. Where did she ever find a Valentine’s Day heart in December?

  He opens the front door and walks out into the snow with a pie tin full of birdseed. Fearing that the tin will blow away, he goes into the garage and looks for something to weight it down with. The only thing he can find is a shovel, so he takes that out and rests the handle over part of the pie tin. It looks silly—like some socialist emblem. At least now they’ll eat Walking back to the house, he glances over his shoulder. What is he doing in this neighborhood? Who are his neighbors? When he first moved in, a woman a few houses down—he can’t remember any more whether it was the red brick house or the gray one-asked him to a party. He asked whether she’d mind if he brought a friend—the party was on a Friday night, and he always saw Sam on Friday night. He thought that afterwards he and Sam would go out for a few beers. He and Sam went to the woman’s party (her name was Audrey. He’s been trying to remember that for months), and met a couple who lived a few houses across from him (they told him which one—it was either the red brick or the blue with white shutters). They told him to stop by for a drink, but he forgot which house it was and was embarrassed to go knocking on doors. He kept thinking he’d run into them, but he never did, and he never got there for the drink. The party at Audrey’s was pretty nice. At least he enjoyed it, until he began to sense strange looks, until he figured out that Audrey thought he and Sam were queer. Why would she think that? They even sat on opposite sides of the room. Audrey’s husband was very nice. He was in a wheelchair, and had been for five years, after a car accident. He sold books. He also sold life insurance. On Saturday he sold flowers, helped the cashier who was his nephew. “I don’t want to have time to think,” he said. “I’d only come to depressing conclusions.” “He’s the most un-depressed man I’ve ever known,” Audrey said. “He’s a pleasure to be with.” “And it keeps me out of the house,” her husband said. Audrey looked terribly hurt. Later, Charles called (twice) to ask them to dinner, but both times she said they were busy. Once he saw her husband in his wheelchair on the avenue, trying to navigate down a particularly icy stretch of sidewalk that hadn’t been sanded. He wanted to go over and help him, but he was embarrassed. He just went back to his car and drove home.

  Charles is in the kitchen, looking out the window. Some children run across the lawn. One child is bundled up like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Charles remembers a picture from Life magazine … Life magazine … captioned “John-John, the President’s son, spies his Dad and away he runs.” John Kennedy, Jr. rushes toward the steps leading from the plane. If nobody is into drugs any more, John Kennedy, Jr., won’t be a doper. With that smart father, he no doubt would have, otherwise. The kid will probably be a lawyer or a senator. Like the rest of them, he’ll have car accidents. Charles is still a sucker for tabloids with headlines reading: “Onassis Keeps Skorpios as Haven for Vegetable JFK” and in smaller type: “Jackie Says She Can Never Leave Him.”

  He feels his head. He has been having strange visions, remembering strange things. He goes to the bedroom to check on Sam. Sam is asleep. His feet stick out of the covers. He has on thick red and white striped snowmobile socks that he was given at the office Christmas party. Actually, he didn’t go to the office party. When he went back to work there was a note over his punch-in card, fastened with a paper clip. “Stop by for your Xmas Present. I couldn’t buttonhole you at the party. Ed, in Sportswear.” Sam was embarrassed to go ask for his present, but somehow Ed found out who he was and came over and gave him the present in the employees’ cafeteria. “It’s something anybody could use,” Ed said. On Sam’s present was written: “Number 80.” Sam went looking for Ed a week later, to ask him if he’d like to join them for a few beers Friday night, and found out that Ed had been fired.

  Charles thinks about turning off the television, but the sudden silence might disturb Sam. Sam’s face is very white. He hopes Sam does not get pneumonia. Once Charles had pneumonia. That’s how he got the sentimental attachment to the jacket. He was in the hospital for three days, and on the second night he got out of bed and got the jacket out of the metal closet and put it over the front of him, over the top of the white sheets. It was nice to have something familiar there. The room was pale green and white. It made him think he wasn’t going to die. The girl kept coming and holding his hand, looking worried. She didn’t want him to die, either. Why exactly had he left her? Why had he left any of them? Surprisingly, he left as many of them as had left him. He even left the first one, fifteen-year-old Pat O’Hara, when she told a mutual friend that he kissed sloppily. Maybe she never even said that—maybe the friend made it up. The friend was a notorious liar. He remembers the friend: Bruce Laframboise, later captain of the football team, first one in high school to get a sports car, a short, muscular boy who, in high school, had blackened his front teeth with ink. His mother took him to the dentist. Mrs. Laframboise used to tell his mother that Bruce was a model child, except for that peculiar thing he had done. Bruce ended up working in a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury—at least according to Bruce, who was a compulsive liar. Either that or his sister was a compulsive liar, because she always swore that Bruce was, and everybody believed her. His next girlfriend was a stringbean named Pamela Byall, who became a veterinarian. He met her on the street the year after he graduated from college, and she said, “I’ve become a veterinarian, no thanks to you.” Then there were the recent ones, the ones of the last four or five years. One of them lasted a year and a half. Pamela again. Pamela Smith, giver of the jacket. She started thinking that she was really a lesbian. He got tired of hearing about it. He’d go to bed with her, and she’d say, “It would be so nice to go to bed with a woman. What does it feel like to go to bed with a woman?” He told her he didn’t think his perspective would help her. She bought a stack of books about lesbianism. Gay women’s newspapers were thrown all over the house. She found all Sam’s girlfriends terribly attractive, and said so to the girls. One night at a pizza house, he said, “I’m not going to have anything more to do with you” and left, leaving Pamela to pay for a green-pepper pizza. Good, he thought That will be something to turn her against men. But she kept calling him, asking if she could come over and talk. “Ho
w can you turn your back on me when I’m so undecided?” she said. He always gave in, let her come over, and sat through a boring discussion of the beauty of women before they went to bed. She called him once and asked him to come pick her up at a gay bar because her car wouldn’t start. He refused. She called again after that to get the number of one of Sam’s girlfriends, and he hung up on her. He even got a Christmas card from her, with the female symbol on it, drawn with a red circle and green cross. “Merry Christmas, forgive and forget,” she wrote on the envelope. Then she called him, but he said he wasn’t feeling well. After Pamela there was a girl named Marsha Steinberg that he still has erotic dreams about. Sam introduced them. He forgets how Sam met her. Probably a castoff, although he never wanted to ask on the chance he’d find out he was right. Sam always parts with women on good terms—so good that they call him to refer them to other men. Marsha Steinberg was very mixed-up when he knew her. She took a lot of amphetamine, although later she gave it up entirely and went to law school. She once did a pencil sketch of him that was surprisingly good—or at least it made him look surprisingly good. She had a brown cashmere sweater that she wore with slacks. The sweater shed all over the slacks. She had a dog that shed more. She was always covered with dog hair. Her own hair was very short. Short black hair, black eyes. He definitely loved her. She’s now practicing law in Colorado. One day they went to the park and she fell asleep on his shoulder. It was a hot, noisy day in the park, and he couldn’t believe that she’d fallen asleep. Policemen kept walking by, and he was terrified that she was dead, and that eventually he would have to call out to one of the passing policemen that the woman next to him was dead. But she woke up. He always loved her for that. Once he went to a hair-cutting shop with her and watched an inch get cut off her hair. “If you were sentimental, you’d scoop it up,” she laughed. He should have done it, but it looked so ugly—those little clumps of black hair on the white floor. He couldn’t touch it. He thinks about calling her sister to get her address in Colorado, but what the hell. What good can it do him if she’s in Colorado? The girl he dated after Marsha was just somebody to pass the time with. She wasn’t very pretty or very smart. He never thinks about her.

  He looks out the window at the thermometer. Twenty-five degrees. He knocks on Susan’s door.

  “Do you want to go out for something to eat?”

  “Sure,” she says. She comes out. She has on the purple sweater. There is a small bump just above her lip.

  “I’m glad you’re not just hanging around waiting for her to call,” Susan says.

  He hadn’t thought to do that. It’s a good idea. He should wait. Eventually Laura will call. Maybe when Jim leaves the house for a minute … and who knows when that minute will be?

  “I’m going to write Sam a note, in case he wonders what happened,” Charles says. “Poor Sam. I hope he doesn’t have pneumonia.”

  “He’s got a good appetite, at least,” Susan says.

  “Yeah. We’ll bring something back.”

  “I’m glad we’re not setting out for dinner with Pete,” Susan says.

  Charles leaves the note on the dresser next to Sam, figures that he’ll never see it, scotch-tapes it to the television screen, over Lauren Bacall’s face. He puts on his jacket again, holds the door open for Susan. It is cold enough to wear his face mask, but his face mask frightens him. It has frightened him ever since he saw a television news program about bank robbers. The bank robbers had on face masks, imprinted with reindeer and diamond shapes. Charles always thinks he’s a bank robber who will be caught when he wears his face mask. He also takes his hands out of his pockets when he passes a policeman. Otherwise—and he knows this is silly—he thinks that the policeman might think that he’s hiding something. Still, his feet move all wrong when he passes a policeman. He weaves and stands too straight, and he’s sure they’ll stop him for questioning. When he drives, if he sees a policeman parked off the road somewhere in back of him, he keeps looking in his rearview minor. Sometimes he even checks the mirror if he passes a steep hill or a curve in the road off which they might be hiding. Once when he was eighteen years old he was pulled over by a policeman for speeding. He stopped so suddenly when he saw the blue light that the police car almost rammed him. The policeman was very jittery when he got out. “Pull over slowly when you see that light,” the policeman said. Charles tried to say “Yes, sir,” but he couldn’t speak. He gave the policeman his license and registration. His hand was shaking wildly. The policeman looked at his hand for a second before he took the two pieces of paper. Then he shined his flashlight in the back seat of the car, and on the passenger’s side. Charles watched the beam, transfixed. The policeman stood there, flashlight shining. Then he said, “Wait here,” and disappeared. He came back with a ticket. Another policeman came with him and shined a light across the back seat again. They both walked away. Charles stuffed the ticket in his pocket without looking at it, turned the key and got ready to pull out. He pulled out right in front of the police car, cutting them off. The blue light went on again, but when Charles pulled over, they only pulled up alongside him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” the policeman hollered. He didn’t wait for an answer. He tore off, blue light still on. Charles sat there, his leg jerking too wildly to drive. “Satisfaction” came on the radio. It was the first time he’d heard the song. It didn’t help to calm him. Nothing did. When the song was over, his leg was still shaking, and he felt too light-headed to drive. He thought about dragging himself from the car somehow and crawling to the pay phone that was right in front of him to call Sam for help. Then he started talking out loud to himself, and that helped: “Okay, okay, it’s just a ticket. They’re not coming back. Take it easy.” In a few more minutes he was able to drive. He had been on his way to an anniversary party for his parents at their best friends’ house. When he got there he went to the bathroom, and without realizing what he was doing ran the water and took a shower. He didn’t realize how strange that was until the host asked, “Were you showering, Charles?” when he came out of the bathroom with his hair soaking wet.

  Charles pulls up in front of a Chinese restaurant, The Blue Pagoda. There is hardly anybody inside. Two booths and two tables have been taken. The ashtrays on all the tables are blue. There is a small paper umbrella stuck in the top of the salt shaker. The waiter quickly removes it when he puts down the menus. When he returns he has blue napkins and chopsticks. They order: pork-fried rice, moo-shu pork, spareribs. “No egg drop?” the waiter says. “Egg drop,” Charles says. “No egg drop?” the waiter says. “Wonton?” “That will be fine,” Charles says. Faintly, Charles can hear Donovan singing “Mad John.” It’s so faint that it might be Muzak, not Donovan at all. And Charles might be imagining that the words are being sung. A couple with a child comes in and sits at the booth in back of them. “This is a German restaurant,” the father says to the little girl. “It’s Chinese!” the little girl says. “If they don’t have sauerbrauten, you’ll just have to suffer,” the father says. “Sit up straight,” the mother says.

  “Wonton?” the waiter says, putting the bowls in front of them.

  “That’s right,” Charles says.

  “Just made fresh?” the waiter says.

  “Fine,” Charles says. The waiter only knows how to speak in the interrogative.

  “You eat Chinese food with Doctor Mark?” Charles asks.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever gone to a Chinese restaurant.”

  “I thought that was what people who were in love did.”

  “What?” Susan says.

  “Listen to music, go to Chinese restaurants … that kind of stuff.”

  “You always pretend not to know about things. You’re in love with that woman. Do the two of you go to Chinese restaurants?”

  “She eats with her husband.”

  “When she wasn’t with him. You always pretend that that time didn’t exist.”

  “I don’t want to talk about her tonight,” Charles says.
“I know she’s not going to call.”

  Susan slowly sips soup. “I feel sort of bad about leaving you,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. That woman’s sort of rotten to you, and I’ll be leaving you with Sam sick. And her in the hospital.”

  “Your staying wouldn’t make Laura leave her husband or Sam get well, and it certainly wouldn’t spring her from the bin.” Charles doesn’t want her to leave.

  “I guess you’re right. Are you going to be polite to him when he comes?”

  “What do you think I’d do? Act like some outraged lover?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll make wisecracks. I know you don’t want him to like you.”

  “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

  “You always put yourself down. You always act dejected.”

  “I’m a mess.”

  She laughs, sucking spinach into her mouth.

  “Hot?” the waiter says, putting the plates in front of them. He puts the dishes on the table, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “Okay?”

  “Fine,” Charles says. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you?” the waiter says, leaving. He stops at the next table. “You’re not German!” the little girl says.

  Once he and Laura went to a Spanish restaurant where the waiters poured a thin stream of white wine into their mouths from a leather wineskin. They ordered saffron rice and mussels and ate large, dark rolls. Laura told him that food started tasting entirely different to her after she stopped wearing lipstick. He wishes he could do something that would make him enjoy his food more. He eats all the time, but most of the time he hardly tastes it. His grandmother used to serve chicken bouillon before the Sunday dinner to “make the tongue buds blossom.” She always invoked strange metaphors: “Think if the earth were a big shoe and all that snow coming down was shoe polish.” To this day, he feels that snow is a call to action.