Chilly Scenes of Winter (29 page)

“We don’t encourage each other. You should urge me to try something,” Sam says.

“It’s 1975, Sam. I urge you to try pizza with green pepper, the way I like it.”

“Hell, you’re paying,” Sam says.

“You really are sounding defeated. I thought you couldn’t stand anything but cheese.”

“I’m not complaining. You’re paying.”

“Shit,” Charles says. “I’m going to order it half plain, half with peppers.”

They drive in silence to the restaurant: a small brick pizza house with the Parthenon jutting out over the front door. It’s a good, cheap place. A large pizza is $3.80. If this were a food store, Charles would be in a panic with only six dollars.

“Maybe I should try green pepper,” Sam says. “I should try again and see if I like something like that”

“Why would you try it? You don’t like it. You can have it plain.”

“I want to try green pepper.”

“Jesus. What am I arguing for? What do I care how you eat your pizza?”

“You’re mad at me,” Sam says.

“Well, what am I supposed to think when you suggest we let Susan straighten us out? She’s my kid sister. She’s so straight it’s pathetic. She doesn’t even drink.”

“She screws,” Sam says.

“That’s straight,” Charles says. “Screwing a doctor is straight.”

“Keep your voice down.” The waitress stands at their booth.

“A large pizza, half green pepper, the other half mozzarella only, and a Coke for me. What do you want?”

“A draft,” Sam says.

“One Coke and one draft,” the waitress says. “Thank you.”

“You missed my point before,” Sam says. “I meant that she seems normal and happy. She must know something.”

“She’s nineteen. She doesn’t know shit. You could be happy too, Sam, if you were nineteen in 1975 and you hadn’t had your eyes opened in the sixties.”

“She was alive then.”

“In 1968 she was twelve years old.”

“Oh,” Sam says, “1968 was the best year. That’s the time I was the happiest.”

“In 1965 when ‘Satisfaction’ came out she was nine.”

“Okay, okay,” Sam says.

“The goddamn sixties,” Charles says. “How’d we ever end up like this?”

The waitress brings a Coke and a draft.

“Who gets the Coke again?” she says.

“The clergyman,” Sam says, pointing.

“He stutters,” Charles says. “She wrote me a note explaining that he speaks so haltingly sometimes because he’s swallowing the stutter.”

“C-c-c-clever,” Sam says.

Charles laughs. Even when Sam is down, he is still funny. Sam even used to make his mother laugh. His mother used to laugh at jokes. “It’s not dirty, is it?” she used to ask Sam. “Filthy,” he’d say, and start in. It was never dirty. His mother used to like Sam. Now she never asks about him. Now she doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s her own joke.

“I’ve got a load of books at my apartment that I’ve got to get out of there,” Sam says. “Drive me to work and you can have the car.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“You don’t think the battery on yours can be charged?” Charles asks. “It’s dead.”

“I swear this is the last time I’ll bring this up, but do you ever think about getting another dog?” Charles says.

“Yeah. I think about it.”

“Why don’t you go to the pound tomorrow and get a dog?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d have a lot of fun with it.”

“It would crap all over your place.”

“Put down newspapers. Keep it in the bedroom with them for a while.”

“I’ve got to sleep in there.”

“How many times a day can it shit?”

“I’ll think about it.”

The waitress puts the pizza down.

“Let me just have a slice with green pepper,” Sam says.

“Take it”

Sam cuts a piece with his knife. He bites off the end.

“Well?”

“I don’t like it. Here.”

Charles takes the piece of pizza and begins eating.

“She’s a good cook, isn’t she? Pamela Smith, I mean.”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

“I mean, she’s not
Laura
,” Sam says, “But …”

“Shut up about Laura.”

“That’s what you were thinking when I mentioned Pamela Smith’s cooking. You got that Laura look on your face.”

“I don’t want to hear about Laura.”

“You brought up my dog again.” Charles sighs.

“The new Dylan isn’t on the jukebox, is it? It might be there even if it isn’t in the stores.”

“I doubt it,” Charles says, flipping through. “You want to hear ‘Lay Lady Lay?’ That’s on here.”

“I don’t want to think about screwing.”

“I was just offering,” Charles says, breaking off another piece of pizza.

“I really don’t have any luck with women any more,” Sam says.

“Maybe when you get older you don’t have luck with them.”

“You really think that’s it? My age?”

“No.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. You’re not going to meet any, in the first place, sitting around the house.”

“In 1968 I could pick up the prettiest girl in the park just by walking through.”

“I met a woman in the park the other day. I can’t remember her name.”

“Wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.”

“Yeah,” Charles says. “She was okay.”

“You mean just okay?”

“Yeah,” Charles says. “And she was married.”

“Who cares if they’re married or not?” Sam says. The waitress frowns down at him. “Do you want another draft?” she says. “Oh. Please.” She takes the glass away.

“Nice one,” Charles says, shaking his head. “Glad she didn’t hear the clergyman saying that.”

“Did I tell you Pete called?” Sam says. “Say what he wanted?”

“No. But he sounded okay. Sounded cheerful.”

“Maybe she sank in the tub.”

“Do you think he’d be happy if she died?”

“According to him, what would make him happy would be to have his own kid.”

“I don’t guess he’ll be getting one of those now,” Sam says. “That’s what he says,” Charles says.

“Well, that’s sad, I guess. If you want a kid and you don’t have it.”

“If we don’t get married and have kids we’re going to be up shit creek. What’s going to happen when we’re old?” Charles says.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’m serious.”

“If we had kids they’d probably have to be taken care of in their old age by us.”

“If we had a lot we might get one good kid.”

“Great. You pull off shitted diapers for years, hoping for one good kid.”

“It’s just an idea,” Charles says.

“Talk about your sister being straight,” Sam says. “That’s what straight people do—pump ’em out, change the diapers, and sit back waiting for the payoff.”

Sam takes a drink from his new mug of beer. “This is a miserable topic of conversation,” he says.

“How did we get onto it?” Charles says.

“I said that Pete called.”

“That’s right I wonder what he wanted.”

“Maybe he got the chicken cooked.”

“He said he was going to forget about it. He didn’t want her to see it and start again.”

“That must be hell on earth, living with your mother.”

“I feel pretty sorry for him lately.”

Charles takes his money out of his wallet and puts it all on top of the bill. The waitress takes it away.

“Listen. Would you mind riding over to Laura’s?”

“That’s pathetic!” Sam says. “What do you want to do something that pathetic for? What’s the point of it?”

“I’ll drop you at home.”

“Oh, shit, Charles. It’s not that I won’t ride over. I just think it’s pointless.”

“She might be outside.”

“Just walking around at the end of the drive, soaking up the cold air?”

“The light might be on.”

“Of course the light will be on. She wouldn’t be in bed this early.”

“Then I want to see the light.”

“What’s this,
The Great Gatsby
or something?”

“Shut up. I said I’d take you to the house.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come for Christ’s sake.”

They get up and walk out of the restaurant. The waitress doesn’t look at them. She is standing in front of the cashier, talking.

“Take me home,” Sam says, “I can’t bear to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

“It’ll take ten minutes longer than driving straight home.”

“This is ridiculous,” Sam says.

“I just want to see what’s going on over there.”

“All you can see is a house! A lit-up house.”

Charles heads for Laura’s. He hopes that she will be outside the house. Maybe she went out because … she heard a noise. She wouldn’t, though. She’d mention it to her husband and he’d go outside. Ox. To drive all the way over there to see Ox.

Eric Clapton on the radio. Layla. Laura. Ox. Ox had better not be in sight. Sam slides down in the seat, sighing and shaking his head.

“You’re nuts, this is completely nuts,” Sam says.

Once he and Laura made a fruitcake. It took them all afternoon. They were going to give it to a friend of Laura’s who was sick, but they wanted it when it was done and ate it themselves. It cost a fortune to buy all the things that went into it. They bought a bag of walnuts and he cracked them. They joked—how did that joke start?—about sending the shells to the Smithsonian, writing a letter claiming to be archaeologists, saying that they found these peculiar things on a dig in the Blue Ridge, and did they think it might be petrified caveman shit? He showed her the trick with the Land O’ Lakes butter box—how you could make it look as if the squaw had big tits. They ate the fruitcake and drank the brandy they had bought to use in the fruitcake. It was so rich and delicious that they were almost sick, but they couldn’t stop eating. He put candied cherries in their brandy. In the morning she went out and got a get-well card for the friend. They ate the fruitcake for lunch and after dinner. Weekends were so nice with Laura. The time seemed to go so fast. She had a calendar hung in the kitchen that he insisted she get rid of. He didn’t even want to look at it. “But where will I write down appointments and things?” she said, and he gave her an engagement calendar. “I’m half flattered and I half think you’re crazy,” she said. He wonders if she has a calendar in the A-frame. If she and Ox ever do things like making fruitcake. He would like to soak Ox in brandy and beat him well and shove him in the oven. Ox wears size extra-large undershirts. Charles wears medium. Ox would pick him up by the collar and put
him
in the oven. Does Ox know about him? And if he knows, does he know about the fruitcake they made, about all the giggling they did in Laura’s kitchen? It would take her years to fill him in on all that. He couldn’t know it all. He might even get bored hearing all of it: we baked fruitcake, he showed me a trick with a butter box, we went to the movies, we did the laundry, we ate at a Japanese restaurant and didn’t like the soup, we cleaned his kitchen, we … Maybe Laura left because she was bored. Maybe that was one of the many things. She wouldn’t have been bored in Bermuda. He should have taken off from work, made her go to Bermuda with him. He should have cleaned the kitchen himself. He could go tap on her kitchen window: “Another chance, Laura.” Ox would be in the kitchen. He would walk outside and kill him.

“I mean it,” Sam says. “This is pathetic. It’s not like you call her and write her and make yourself obnoxious. All you do is slink over there to look at the lights on in her house. If she killed somebody you’d take the rap for her, wouldn’t you? The whole Gatsby trip.”

“She wouldn’t ever kill anybody.”

“Yeah, but what if she was driving your roadster along and a woman ran out in front of it?”

“Okay, okay. Enough.”

“What can I say that will talk you out of this dreary driving by her house?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s no point to it. What does driving by her house prove?”

“Nothing.”

“You just intend to do it anyway.”

“I just intend to do it anyway.”

“Goddamn it,” Sam says. “You remember how we used to double-date in college, and how we even had girlfriends in elementary school?”

“I never had a girlfriend in elementary school. You had Bess Dwyer.”

“Are you still denying that you had a crush on Jill Peterson?”

“I never liked Jill Peterson. That was always just something in your mind.”

“You’re still denying it. I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe that you’re still going on about it, I never liked her.”

“Then you’re just not admitting it to yourself.”

“You’ve brought her up for years. I’m not even clear on which one Jill Peterson was. Was she the scrawny blond kid?”

“Exactly! You remember just which one she was.”

“What made you think I liked her?”

“You bought her a special valentine, don’t you remember that?”

“She transferred into our school just before Valentine’s Day. I remember that. My box of valentines had all been addressed, and then she showed up, and I thought I’d better …”

“I’ll be damned! You’re still rationalizing!” Sam breaks in.

“I’m not rationalizing. I’m trying to set you straight. It doesn’t matter to me if you want to think I liked her, but I never did.”

“Everybody knew you did.”

“Even if I did—which I didn’t—she wasn’t a girlfriend.”

“You’ve always liked thin blondes. Laura is just like Jill Peterson! Didn’t you ever think that?”

“Laura is twenty-nine. Jill Peterson was a kid I knew in the fifth or sixth grade.”

“You
know
it was the sixth.”

“Okay, I knew it was the sixth. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Because you always try to pretend to be vague about her. Actually, every woman you’ve liked has been thin like Jill Peterson.”

“They were all different. All the girls were different. You’re talking nonsense.”

“Okay, even if they were. Laura is just what Jill Peterson would look like grown up.”

“You sound like my sister. This is incredible.”

“She might be right You really might not understand yourself.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

But they are already on Laura’s block.

“There are a million girls with blond hair. Skinny blond girls. Is that all you see by way of similarity?” Charles says.