Chilly Scenes of Winter (13 page)

The knock on the door is Doctor Mark. He rushes in when Susan opens the door as if he’s really glad to be there. He is as she described him. Passing him on the street, Charles might have thought he was a musician. His hands, circling Susan’s back, are very large and graceful. In a bar, Charles might have mistaken him for a homosexual.

“How do you do?” Mark says, extending one of the big hands. Susan is still pressed against him with the other.

Charles shakes his hand. “Hello,” he says.

“Mighty cold and snowy,” Mark says. The big hand goes back around Susan.

“Can I get you some coffee?” Charles says.

“I take no artificial stimulants,” Mark says. “But. Thank you.”

“Milk?” Charles says. Is there any milk?

“I’m loaded with calcium for the day, thank you,” Mark says.

Charles revises his opinion of him. He would never work up to Disque Bleu’s. The most he can hope for is Gauloises.

“Sue, Sue, let me look at you,” he says.

Definitely homosexual.

“It’s very nice, you letting me barge in on you tonight,” Mark says.

Charles frowns. Susan hugs Mark’s neck, lets go of him to sit in a chair.

“May I stay the night? I’m afraid I’m. Much too late to start back now.”

“Sure,” Charles says.

“May I ask. How is your mother?”

“She’s going home tomorrow, Mark,” Susan says.

“That’s
very lucky,
” Mark says, emphasizing the words to convey that it is not.

“Just before you came Pete called, though, and he’s drunk again.”

“That actually
kills
brain cells,” Mark says.

“I don’t think he cares. He’s so miserable living the way he does now,” Charles says.

“That’s it!” Mark says. “In the final analysis it’s up to the individual. No amount of coaxing can make a person care who does not want to care.” Mark’s voice goes up loudly on the last five words.

Charles looks at Mark’s feet. Soaking wet tennis shoes.

“Take your shoes off. I can get you some socks.…”

“No, no,” Mark says, as if Charles had asked to see his penis. “I’m fine. Feet are fine.”

“They’re wet,” Charles says.

Mark frowns. “Rose hips?” he says.

“What?” Charles says, leaning forward.

“Rose hips,” Mark replies.

“He doesn’t have any,” Susan says.

“Ah,” Mark says, as if delighted.

“How was your trip?” Susan asks.

“My trip. Well, I can tell you that it was long and cold, made less so by Brahms. A wonderful station that played much Brahms the last stretch.”

“Are you a musician?” Charles says.

“I play piano. Unprofessionally.”

Charles wants very much to ask if he’s gay.

“How was the car?” Susan asks.

“Well. I can tell you it started off with problems. And a stopover at a service station was necessary because of overheating. Clouds of smoke came out of the car. A small puncture. In. The hose.”

Charles breaks into a smile. That’s it … the guy talks like a J. P. Donleavy character.

“Do you read Donleavy?” Charles asks.

“Donelly?” Marks says. He turns his head to the side. Charles wishes he had a kidskin glove to slap his cheek with.

“No, no, Donleavy! Yes.
The Ginger Man.
”

Mark looks at Charles, expecting the conversation to go on.

“Of course I don’t read the number of novels I would like to,” Mark says.

“What would you like to read?” Charles asks.

“You’re being obnoxious,” Susan says.

Charles is genuinely curious. He wishes Susan knew that. She misunderstands him, thinks he’s obnoxious every time he’s curious.

“Jane Austen,” Mark says with gravity.

Figures. And probably Thomas Pynchon, too.

“I’ve got a copy of
Gravity’s Rainbow
I’m done with. Would you like it?” Charles says.

The head turns to the side again. “By …?” Mark says.

“Pynchon.”

“Ah! Pynchon. V.”

Susan is filing a fingernail.

“Thank you, but I have little time to read novels.”

“I guess med school is really rough,” Charles says. “Susan says you plan to specialize in surgery.”

“Neurosurgery, yes,” Mark says.

“I read a thing in some newspaper about a doctor in some South American country who pulled a woman’s eyes out of the socket and cleaned them and picked off tumors and put the eyes back. T
O
cure her of migraines and double vision.”

“God!” Marks says. “That’s revolting. That’s not possible, I’m sure.”

“Oh God,” Susan groans.

“No wonder people are afraid of doctors when they read things like that,” Mark says.

“That’s sickening,” Susan says. “Did you make that up?”

“No. It’s in the same paper that has a denial from representatives of Frank Zappa that Frank Zappa had a bowel movement on stage.”

“Oh God,” Susan says.

“I follow those rags for kicks,” Charles says. “You know, they’re still full of JFK gossip. JFK jumping out of women’s windows when he was President, JFK a vegetable on Onassis’s island.…”

Susan puts down the fingernail file. “I’m going to have something to drink,” she says. “Is anyone else?”

“Oh. No.” Mark says.

“Maybe I’ll go to bed,” Charles says. “It’s been another long, though glorious, day.”

Mark stands. “Thank you very. Much for your kindness,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” Charles says.

“Good night,” Susan says, going into the kitchen.

“Good night,” Charles says.

In his dream that night Charles is sitting behind a desk—in his office, presumably—and Mark is standing in front of him. “Take a letter. Any letter,” Charles says, and wakes up laughing. The house is silent. He hopes they didn’t hear him. He lies there with his eyes open for some time, listening to the silence.

What if JFK
is
a vegetable somewhere? He closes his eyes and pictures Kennedy, round-faced and thick-haired, then sees him as a dancing green pepper, his smiling round face a little knob on top. He opens his eyes. Blackness. Kennedy’s favorite fiction writer was Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming was turned into a neurotic by his crazy mother. He closes his eyes and pictures Sean Connery driving a broad-nosed sports car that metamorphoses into a corncob. He opens his eyes again. He is hungry. He imagines dancing apples. There is nothing good in the house to eat. Tomorrow he will go to the Grand Union and buy all his favorite foods. Grand. Holden Caulfield hated that word. He thought it was phony. That cover illustration of
Catcher In The Rye:
Holden in a big gray overcoat, hat turned around, pointing down his back. Saw a movie once starring William Holden that was scary. Can’t remember the title or the plot, just the name William Holden. The dancing apples. “Aw, c’mon now, Mama.…” “Geoooooooorge Stevens!” George Washington. Famous portrait of Washington left unfinished because artist took on more than he could handle. Very ambitious artist. Washington who chased his slaves or Jefferson? Laura. Chasing Laura. “I’m gonna get you, Laura.” Cornered in the library. “Are you crazy, Charles?” Government employees. If I were a carpenter, if Laura were a lady. First of 1975. Guy Lombardo waving his stick around, head moving more energetically than the stick, old Guy up there, shaking his stick. Guy Fawkes Day. Firecrackers. Fanne Foxe, The Argentine Firecracker. “Ya-hoo, I’m just a country girl from Argentina.” The girl from the north country. She once was a true love of mine. Laura. Laura against the bookshelf: “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” “Aw, now, Sapphire, I can explain …”

SIX

“Y
ou 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.