Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie Page A

all.”
    “Don’t they read the papers?”
    She shrugs. “I guess I’d better start this,” she says, and turns to leave.
    She’s very nice, Charles thinks. Why couldn’t you like her? He looks down at the piece of paper again and makes a notation on the pad. He has the eerie feeling that when he looks up Laura and Jim and Rebecca will be there. He throws his pen down. He gets up and picks up the pen, goes back to the desk and sits down. Lobster Newburg. That must have been delicious. That cheeseburger was awful.
    He leaves at five-fifteen instead of five-thirty, stopping at the stand on the ground level for two Mr. Goodbars. The man who runs the concession is blind. “What have you got?” he asks.
    “Not Laura” seems like the logical answer. He has got to stop thinking about her. It’s true that he wasn’t that wild for her when he had her. If he ever had her. When he was with her. Once when he was with her they sat at a drugstore having coffee and she gave him a picture of herself. Remember something better he says under his breath. “Two Goodbars,” he says out loud.
    “Thirty-two,” the man says. The man reaches into an open metal box and feels around for the change. The blind man is never wrong. Charles looks at the three pennies. Laura, he thinks. He drops the change in his coat pocket and zips the coat. Tries to zip it. He pulls more slowly. Sure enough, it works. He goes through the revolving door and into the cold. His car is a long walk away. He turns on the cassette player he is holding in his other hand and “Folk Fiddling from Sweden” blares out. It is still playing when he gets to his car. The lock is frozen. He kicks it with his foot. Much to his surprise, the lock turns. He drives to a store and buys a big package of pork chops and a bag of potatoes and a bunch of broccoli and a six-pack of Coke. He remembers cigarettes for Sam when he is checking out, in case he’s well enough to smoke. He buys a National Enquirer that features a story about Jackie Onassis’s face-lift. James Dean is supposed to be alive and in hiding somewhere, too. Another vegetable. Not dead at all. East of Eden is one of his favorite films. He saw it, strangely enough, on television shortly after he and Laura went to a carnival and rode on a Ferris wheel. He felt so sorry for James Dean. Back then he didn’t feel sorry for himself at all. No reason to. Now he feels sorry for himself. Feeling sorry for himself, he gets back in the car and drives home. He thinks about Rebecca’s bird trapped in his glove compartment. At a stop sign he closes his eyes and inhales, hoping to smell Vol de Nuit. Cold air sears through his nostrils. Turning onto his block, he sees the man from Audrey’s party getting out of his car. Charles stops, rolls down his window. “Hey,” he says. “Hi. Hello.”
    “Hello,” the man says. “Cold as a witch’s tit, isn’t it?” The man is wearing a black coat and scarf. He looks menacing.
    “Yeah,” Charles says. “Farmer’s Almanac says we’re in for a big storm the eighteenth.”
    “You were going to come for a drink,” the man says. “Come for a drink.”
    “Okay,” Charles says. “I’ll get over.”
    “Any time,” the man says.
    “Good. Thanks,” Charles says.
    He feels good about that until he realizes that the man’s car was parked far away from either the red brick or the white house with blue shutters and that he still doesn’t know where he lives.
    He runs with the grocery bag from the driveway to the front door. Susan opens it.
    “It’s awful out,” she says. “How did it go?”
    “I got through the day,” he says, then realizes that that was melodramatic. He expects her to inform him that his attitude is wrong, but she doesn’t.
    “How are you?” he says. “Doctor desert you?”
    “No. He’ll be in later tonight. His car broke down.”
    Charles feels sorry for him because his car broke down. He does not want to feel sorry for the man.
    “What kind