by John Cheever
Now Moses knew that women can take many forms; that it is in their power in the convulsions of love to take the shape of any beast or beauty on land or sea—fire, caves, the sweetness of haying weather—and to let break upon the mind, like light on water, its most brilliant imagery, and it did not dismay him that this gift for metamorphosis could be used to further all kinds of venal and petty schemes for self-aggrandizement. Moses had learned that it was wise to keep in mind the guises most often taken by the women he loved so that when a warmhearted woman appeared suddenly, for some reason of her own, to have become a spinster he would be prepared and in not much danger of losing the hopefulness that sustained his patience, for while women could metamorphose themselves at will he found that they could not sustain these impersonations for long and that if he could endure, patiently, a disguise or distemper or false modesty, it would soon wear thin. Now he watched the changes that had come over his golden-skinned wife, trying to discover what it was that she represented.
She represented chastity—an infelicitous and implacable chastity. She represented an unhappy spinster. She glanced scornfully at where he had let his clothes drop to the floor, averting her eyes at the same time from where he stood in his skin. “I wish you would learn to pick up your things, Moses,” she said in a singsong voice that he didn’t recognize at all. It had in it the forced sweetness of a lonely and a patient woman, forced by a reduction of circumstances to take care of a dirty boy. When she had done what she could to take the softness out of her hair she stood and moved in little steps toward the door.
“I’m going down.”
“If you’ll wait a minute, darling.”
“I think if I go down now I might be able to help. After all, the poor servants have a great deal to do.” Her smile was pure hypocrisy. She drifted out of the room.
Moses’ determination to see through this clumsy disguise put him into a position that verged on foolishness and while he dressed his lined face shone with false cheer. She would have exhausted the part by midnight, he thought, so his yearning would have to wait until then; but there it was, a sense of fullness and strength that seemed to increase in the lamplight. When he went down to the hall he noticed that the bottles he had foolishly left there had been appropriated by Justina and that he would never see them again. He had a glass of bad sherry and a peanut. Melissa was among the lemon trees, twisting off the dead leaves. Even as she did this she seemed to sigh. She was a poor relation now, a shadowy figure, not meant to play a large part in life but philosophically resigned to small things. When she had finished cleaning up the lemon trees she took an ash tray off the table and emptied it—conspicuously—into the fire. When the chimes rang she pushed the general’s chair to the door, first tucking the blanket tenderly around his legs, and at the table she picked at her food and talked about the dog-and-cat hospital.
They played bridge until ten, when Melissa yawned daintily and said that she was tired. Moses excused himself and was disheartened to see with what small steps she preceded him down the hall. At the stairs he put his arm around her waist—he had to feel for it in the folds of her drab dress—and kissed her cheek. She did not try to move out of his arm. Up in their room when he closed the door, shutting out the rest of the house, he watched to see what she would do. She went to a chair and picked up a circular sent from a dry-cleaning firm in the village and began to read this. Moses lifted the paper lightly out of her hands and kissed her. “All right,” she said.
He took off his clothes, jubilantly, thinking that in another minute she would be in his arms, but she went instead to her dressing table, tipped many pins out of a small gold box, separated a strand of hair with her fingers, coiled it, laid it flat against her skull and pinned it there. He hoped that she would make only a few curls and he looked at the clock, wondering if it would be ten or fifteen minutes. He liked her hair to be full and he watched with a feeling of foreboding as she took strand after strand, coiled it and laid it flat with a pin against her skull. This did not delay or alter his hopefulness or lessen his need, and trying to distract himself he opened a magazine and looked at some advertisements, but with the kingdom of love so soon to be his the pictures had no meaning. When the hair over her brow was all secured to her skull she started on the sides and he saw that he had a considerable wait ahead of him. He sat up, swung his feet onto the floor and lighted a cigarette. The sense of fullness and strength in his groin was at its apex, and cold baths, long walks in the rain, humorous cartoons and glasses of milk would not help him—she had begun to pin up the hair at the back of her neck—when the feeling of fullness changed subtly to a feeling of anguish that spread from his loins deep into his bowels. He put out his cigarette, drew on some pajama pants and wandered out onto the balcony. He heard her close the bathroom door. Then, with a sigh of real misery, he heard her start to run the water for a bath.
It never took Melissa less than three quarters of an hour to bathe. Moses could often wait cheerfully for her, but his feelings that night were painful. He remained on the balcony, picking out by name the stars that he knew and smoking. When, three quarters of an hour later, he heard her pull the plug in the tub he returned to the room and stretched out, his yearning rising to new summits of purity and happiness, on the bed. From the bathroom he could hear the clink of bottles on glass and the opening and closing of drawers. Then she opened the bathroom door and came out—not naked but dressed in a full, heavy nightgown and busily running a piece of dental floss between her teeth. “Oh, Melissa,” he said.
“I doubt that you love me,” she said. It was the thin, dispassionate voice of the spinster and it reminded him of thin things: smoke and dust. “I sometimes think you don’t love me at all,” she said, “and of course you put much too much emphasis on sex, oh much too much. The trouble is that you don’t have enough to think about. I mean you’re really not interested in business. Most men are intensely interested in their business. J. P. used to be so tired when he came home from work that he could hardly eat his dinner. Most men are too tired to think about love every morning and every afternoon and every night. They’re tired and anxious and they lead normal lives. You don’t like your job and so you think about sex all the time. I don’t suppose it’s because you’re really depraved. It’s just because you’re idle.”
He heard the squeaking of chalk. His bower was replaced with the atmosphere of a schoolroom and his roses seemed to wither. In the glass he saw her pretty face—opaque and wanton—formed to express passion and sweetness, and thinking of her capabilities he wondered why she had put them down. That he presented difficulties—the flights and crash landings of a sentimental disposition—that he sometimes broke wind and picked his teeth with a kitchen match, that he was neither brilliant nor beautiful belonged in the picture—but he did not understand. He did not understand, picking back over her words, what right she had to make the love that kept his mind open, and that made even the leaking of a rain gutter seem musical, a creation of pure idleness.
“But I love you,” he said hopefully.
“Some men bring work home from the office,” she said. “Most men do. Most of the men that I know.” Her voice seemed to dry as he listened to it, to lose its deeper notes as her feelings narrowed. “And most men in business,” she went on thinly, “have to do a lot of traveling. They’re away from their wives a lot of the time. They have other outlets than sex. Most healthy men do. They play squash.”
“I play squash.”
“You’ve never played squash since I’ve known you.”
“I used to play.”
“Of course,” she said, “if it’s absolutely necessary for you to make love to me I’ll do it, but I think that you ought to understand that it’s not as crucial as you make it.”
“You’ve talked yourself out of a fuck,” he said bleakly.
“Oh, you’re so hateful and egotistical,” she said, swinging her head around. “Your thinking is so crude and mean. You only want to hurt me.”
&
nbsp; “I wanted to love you,” he said. “The thought of it has made me cheerful all day. When I ask you tenderly you go to your dressing table and stuff your head with pieces of metal. I felt loving,” he said sadly. “Now I feel angry and violent.”
“And I suppose all your bad feelings are directed towards me?” she asked. “I’ve told you before that I can’t be all the things you want. I can’t be wife, child and mother all at once. It’s too much to ask.”
“I don’t want you to be my mother and my child,” he said hoarsely. “I have a mother and I will have children. I won’t lack those things. I want you to be my wife and you stuff your head with pins.”
“I thought we had agreed before,” she said, “that I can’t give you everything you want. . . . ”
“I have no stomach for talk,” he said. He took off his pajamas and dressed and went out. He walked down the driveway and took the back road to the village of Scaddonville. It was four miles and when he got there and found the streets dark he turned back on a lane that went through the woods where the mildness of a summer night seemed at last to replace his vexation. Dogs in distant houses heard his footsteps and went on barking long after he had passed. The trees moved a little in the wind and the stars were so numerous and clear that the arbitrary lines that form the Pleiades and Cassiopeia in her chair seemed nearly visible. There seemed to be some indestructible good health in a dark path on a summer night—it was a place and a season where it was impossible to cherish bad feeling. In the distance he saw the dark towers of Clear Haven and he returned up the driveway and went to bed. Melissa was asleep and she was asleep when he left in the morning.
Melissa was not in their room when he returned in the evening and looking around him hopefully for some change in her mood he saw that their room had been given a thorough cleaning. This in itself might have been a good sign but he saw that she had taken the perfume bottles off her dressing table and thrown out all the flowers. He washed and put on a soft coat and went down. D’Alba was in the hall, sitting in the golden throne, reading a Mickey Mouse comic and smoking a big cigar. His taste in comics was genuine but Moses suspected that the rest of the picture was a pose—a nod toward J. P.’s tradition of near-illiterate merchant princes. D’Alba said that Melissa was in the laundry. This was a surprise. She had never gone near the laundry since Moses knew her. He went down that shabby hall that cut away from the rest of the house like a backstage alley and down the dirty wooden stairs into the basements. Melissa was in the laundry, stuffing sheets into a washing machine. Her golden hair was dark with steam. She didn’t reply when Moses spoke to her and when he touched her she said, “Leave me alone.”
She said that the bedding in the house had not been washed for months. The maids kept drawing from the linen closets and she had found the laundry chute full of sheets. Moses knew enough not to suggest that she send the sheets to a laundry. He could sense that cleanliness was not her purpose. She had successfully discredited her beauty. She must have found the dress she was wearing in a broom closet and her golden-skinned arms were red with hot water. Her hair was stringy and her mouth was set in an expression of extreme distaste. He loved her passionately and when he saw all of this his face fell.
Other than the dark brown photograph of her mother, sitting in a carved chair, holding a dozen roses head down, he did not know her family. The parents, the aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters to whom we can sometimes trace a change of character were unknown to him and if she was overtaken now by the shadow of some aunt it was an aunt he had never seen. Watching her stuff sheets into the washing machine he wished briefly, for once, that her status had not been that of an orphan. Her energies seemed penitential and he would let it go at that. He had not fallen in love with her because of her gift with arithmetic, because of her cleanliness, her reasonable mind or any other human excellence. It was because he perceived in her some extraordinary inner comeliness or grace that satisfied his needs. “Don’t you have anything to do but sit there?” she asked sorely. He said yes, yes, and went up the stairs.
Justina met him in the hall with great cordiality. Her eyes were wide and her voice was an excited whisper when she asked if Melissa was in the laundry. “Perhaps we should have told you before you married,” she said, “but you know that Melissa has been very, very—” the word she wanted was too crude and she settled for a modulation—“she has never been very tractable. Come,” she said to Moses, “come and have a drink. D’Alba has some whisky, I think. We need something more than sherry tonight.” The picture she evoked was cozy and although Moses felt the naked edge of her mischievousness he had nothing better to do than walk in the garden and stare at the roses. He went down the hall at her side. D’Alba produced a bottle of whisky from underneath the throne and they all had a drink. “Is she having a breakdown?” D’Alba asked. They were halfway through the soup when Melissa appeared, wearing her broom-closet dress. When she came to the table Moses stood but she did not look in his direction and she did not speak during the meal. After dinner Moses asked if she would like to take a walk but Melissa said that she had to hang out the sheets.
Justina met Moses at the door the next night with a long and an excited face and said that Melissa was ill. “Indisposed perhaps would be a better word,” she said. She asked Moses to have a drink with her and D’Alba but he said that he would go up and see Melissa. “She’s not in your room,” Justina said. “She’s moved to one of the other bedrooms. I don’t know which one. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.” Moses looked first into their bedroom to make sure she was not there and then went down the hall, calling her name loudly, but there was no reply. He tried the door of the room next to theirs and looked into a room with a canopied bed but at some time in the past a large piece of the ceiling had fallen and fragments of plaster hung from this cavity. The curtains were drawn and the damps of the room were sepulchral—ghostly he would have said if he had not had such a great scorn for ghosts. The next door that he opened led into an unused bathroom—the tub was filled with newspapers tied into bundles—and the room was lighted luridly by a stained-glass window, and the next door that he opened led into a storeroom where brass bedsteads and rocking chairs, oak mantelpieces and sewing machines, mahogany chiffoniers with rueful lines and other pieces of respectable and by-passed furniture were stacked up to the ceiling, antedating, he guessed, Justina’s first glimpse of Italy. The room smelled of bats. The next door opened into an attic where there was a water tank as big as the plunge and there was an aeolian harp attached to the next door that he opened and asthmatic and airy as the music was it made his flesh rough when it began to ring as it would have been roughened by the hissing of an adder. This door led to the tower stairs and he climbed them up and up to a large raftered room with lancet windows and no furniture and over the mantelpiece this motto in gold: LOOK AWAY FROM THE BODY INTO TRUTH AND LIGHT. He ran down the tower stairs and had opened the door of a nursery—Melissa’s, he guessed—and another bedroom with a fallen ceiling before the foolish music of the aeolian harp had died away. Then with so much stale air in his nose and his lungs he opened a window and stuck his head out into the summer twilight where he could hear, way below him, the sounds of dinner. Then he opened a door into a room that was clean and light and where Melissa, when she saw him, buried her face in the pillows and cried when he touched her, “Leave me alone, leave me alone.”
Her invalidism, like her chasteness, seemed to be an imposture, and he reminded himself to be patient, but sitting at a window, watching the lawns darken, he felt very forlorn at having a wife who had promised so much and who now refused to discuss with him the weather, the banking business or the time of day. He waited there until dark and then went down the stairs. He had missed his dinner but a light was still burning in the kitchen, where a plump old Irishwoman, who was mopping the drainboards, cooked him some supper and set it on a table by the stove. “I guess you’re having trouble with your sweetheart,” she said kindly. “Well, I was married myself to
poor Mr. Reilly for fourteen years and there’s nothing I don’t know about the ups and downs of love. He was a little man, Mr. Reilly was,” she said, “and when we was living out in Toledo everybody used to say he was runty. He never weighed over a hundred and twenty-five pounds and look at me.” She sat down in a chair opposite Moses. “Of course I wasn’t so heavy in those days but towards the end I would have made three of him. He was one of those men who always look like a little boy. I mean the way he carried his head and all. Even now, just looking out of the train window sometimes in a strange city I see one of these little men and it reminds me of Mr. Reilly. He was a menopause baby. His mother was past fifty when he was born. Why, after we was married sometimes we’d go into a bar for a beer and the barkeep wouldn’t serve him, thinking he was a boy. Of course as he got old his face got lined and towards the end he looked like a dried-up little boy, but he was very loving.
“He never seemed to be able to get enough of it,” she said. “When I remember him that’s the way I remember him—that sad look on his face that meant he was loving. He always wanted his piece and he was lovely—lovely things he’d say to me while he caressed and unbuttoned me. He liked a piece in the morning. Then he’d comb his hair on the left side, button up his britches and go off to a good day’s work in the foundry, so cheerful and cocky. In Toledo he was coming home for his dinner in the middle of the day and he liked a piece then and he couldn’t go to sleep without his piece. He couldn’t sleep. If I woke him up in the middle of the night to tell him I heard burglars downstairs there was no use my talking. The night Mabel Ransome’s house burned down and I stayed up watching the fire until two in the morning he never listened to what I said. When thunderstorms woke him at night or the north wind in winter he’d always wake up in a very loving mood.
“But I didn’t always feel like loving,” she said sadly. “Heartburn or gas would get me down and then I had to be very careful with him. I had to choose me words. Once I refused him without thinking. Once when he commenced to gentle me I spoke roughly to him. Forget about it for a little while Charlie, I says. Helen Sturmer tells me her husband don’t do it but once a month. Why don’t you try to be like him? Well, it was like the end of the world. You should have seed the way his face got dark. It was terrible to behold. The very blood in his veins got dark. I never seed him so crossed in my whole life. Well, he went out of the house then. Come suppertime he isn’t home. I went to bed expecting him to come in but when I wakes up the bed is empty. Four nights I wait for him to come home but he don’t show up. Finally I put this advertisement in the paper. This was when we was living in Albany. Please come home Charlie. That’s all I say. It cost me two-fifty. Well, I put the advertisement in on Friday night and on Saturday morning I hear his key in the lock. Up the stairs he comes all smiles with this big bunch of roses and one idea in his mind. Well it’s only ten o’clock in the morning and my house-work isn’t half done. The breakfast dishes are in the sink and the bed isn’t made. It’s very hard for a woman to be loving before her work is done but even with the dust all over the tables I knew my lot.
