by John Cheever
“That’s a funny word, icebox,” he said. “I never heard it before. It’s a funny thing to call a frigidaire. But you speak differently, you know—people like you. You say lots of different things. Now, you say divine—you say lots of things are divine, but, you know, my mother, she wouldn’t ever use that word, excepting when she was speaking of God.”
Frightened by the chart in the hallway, she wondered if there was anything else incriminating in the house, and remembered the gallery of family photographs in the upstairs hall. Here were pictures of her in school uniforms, in catboats, and many pictures of her playing on the beach with her son. While he put the groceries away, she went upstairs and hid the pictures in a closet. Then they walked down the bluff to the beach.
It was surprisingly warm for that time of year. The wind was southerly; in the night it would probably change around to the southwest, bringing rain. All along the beach, the waves from Portugal rolled in. There was the noise of a detonation, the roar of furling water, and then the glistening discharge fanned out on the sand, faded and sank. Ahead of her, at the high-water mark, she saw a sealed bottle with a note inside and ran to pick it up. What did she expect? The secret of the Spada treasure, or a proposal of marriage from a French sailor? She handed Emile the bottle and he broke it open on a stone. The note was written in pencil. “To whomever in the whole wide world may read this I am a 18 yr old college boy, sitting on the beach at Madamquid on Sept. 8. . . .” His sense of the act of setting his name and address adrift on the tide was rhapsodic, but the bottle must have returned to where he stood a little while after he had walked away. Emile asked if he could go swimming, and then bent down to unlace his new shoes. One of the laces knotted and his face got red. She dropped to her knees and undid it herself. He got out of his clothes hurriedly in order to display his youth and his brawn, but he asked her earnestly if she minded if he took off his underpants. He stood with his back to her while he did this, and then walked off into the sea. It was colder than he had expected. His shoulders and his buttocks tightened and his head shook. Naked and shivering, he seemed pitiful, vain and fair—a common young man trying to find some pleasure and adventure in his life. He dove into a wave and then came lunging back to where she stood. His teeth were chattering. She threw her coat over him and they went back to the house.
She had been right about the wind. After midnight or later, it came out of the southwest, spouting rain, and as she had done ever since she was a child, she got out of bed and crossed the room to close the windows. He woke and heard the sound of her bare feet on the wooden floor. He couldn’t see her in the dark, but as she came back toward the bed her step sounded heavy and old.
It rained in the morning. They walked on the beach, and Melissa cooked a chicken. Looking for a bottle of wine, she found a long-necked green bottle of Moselle, like the bottle she had set out in her dream of the picnic and the ruined castle. Emile ate most of the chicken. At four they took a cab to the airport, and flew back to New York. In the train out to Proxmire Manor he sat several seats ahead of her, reading the paper.
Moses met her at the station and was pleased to have her back. The baby was awake; and Melissa sat in a chair in their bedroom singing, “Sleep, my little one, sleep. Thy father guards the sheep. . . .” She sang until both the baby and Moses were asleep.
CHAPTER XIV
In the meantime things at the Wapshots’ in Talifer were very gloomy. There were no checks from Boston and no explanation and Betsey was complaining. One Sunday afternoon after Coverly had cooked some lunch and washed the dishes Betsey returned to her television set. Their little son had been crying since before lunch. Coverly asked the boy why he cried but he only went on crying. Would he like to take a walk, would he like a lollipop, could Coverly build him a house of blocks? “Oh, leave him alone,” Betsey said and turned up the volume. “He can watch TV with me.” The boy, still sobbing, went to his mother and Coverly put on a jacket and went out. He took a bus to the computer center and walked across the fields to the farmland. It was late in the season, purple asters bloomed along the path and the air was so heavy with pollen that it gave him a not unpleasant irritation in his nostrils; the whole world smelled like some worn and brilliant carpet. The maples and beeches had turned and the moving lights of that afternoon among the trees made the path ahead of him seem like a chain of corridors and chambers, yellow and gold consistories and vaticans, but in spite of this show of light he seemed still to hear the music from the television, to see the lines at Betsey’s mouth and to hear the crying of his little son. He had failed. He had failed at everything. Poor Coverly will never amount to anything. He had heard it said often enough by his aunts from behind the parlor door. He will marry a bony woman and beget a morbid child. He will never succeed at anything. He will never pay his debts. He stooped to tighten a shoelace and at that exact moment a hunting arrow whistled over his head and sank into the trunk of a tree on his right.
“Hey,” Coverly shouted, “hey. You damned near killed me.” There was no reply. The archer was concealed by a screen of yellow leaves and why should he confess to his nearly murderous mistake? “Where are you,” Coverly shouted, “where the hell are you?” He ran into the brush beside the path and in the distance saw an archer, all dressed in red, climbing a stone wall. He looked exactly like the devil. “You, you,” Coverly called after him but the distance was too great for him to catch the brute. There was no reply, no echo. He startled a pair of crows who flew off toward the gantries. That the arrow would have killed him had he not stopped to tighten his shoelace exploded in his consciousness, accelerated the beating of his heart and made his tongue swell. But he was alive, he had missed death at this chance turning as he had missed it at a thousand others and suddenly the color, fragrance and shape of the day seemed to stir themselves and surround him with great force and clarity.
He saw nothing unearthly, heard no voices, came at the experience through a single fact—the deathly arrow—and yet it seemed the most volcanic, the most like a turning point, in his life. He felt a sense of himself, his uniqueness, a raptness that he had never felt before. The syllables of his name, the coloring of his hair and eyes, the power in his thighs seemed intensified into something like ecstasy. The voices of his detractors behind the parlor door—and he had listened to them earnestly all the years of his life—now seemed transparently covetous and harmful, the voices of people loving enough but whose happiness would best be served if he did not make any discoveries of himself. His place in the autumn afternoon and the world seemed indisputable, and with such a feeling of resilience, how could anything harm him? The sense was not that he was inviolate but headstrong and that had the arrow struck him he would have fallen with the brilliance of that day in his eyes. He was not the victim of an emotional and a genetic tragedy; he had the supreme privileges of a changeling and he would make something illustrious of his life. He examined the arrow and tried to pull it out of the tree but the shaft broke. The feathers were crimson and he thought that if he gave the broken arrow to his son the boy might stop crying, and when the boy saw the crimson feathers he did.
Coverly’s resolve to do something illustrious settled on a plan to diagnose the vocabulary of John Keats, a project that in turn depended upon a friend named Griza. Most of the employees lunched in the subterranean cafeteria but Coverly usually took the elevator up and ate a sandwich in the sunlight. This choice was odd enough to serve as the basis for a friendship. One of the technicians in the computer room also ate a sandwich in the sun, and this and the fact that they both came from Massachusetts made them fast friends. In the spring they threw a baseball; in the autumn they spiraled a football back and forth with a conspicuous sense of simpler things than the gantry line on the horizon. Griza was the son of a Polish immigrant but he had been raised in Lowell and his wife was the granddaughter of a Yankee farmer. He was one of the technicians who serviced the big computer and might have been recognized as one. There were no mandates for dress in the comp
utation center and no established hierarchies but over the months the outlines of a society and a list of sumptuary laws had begun to emerge, expressing, it seemed, an inner love of caste. The physicists wore cashmere pullovers. The senior programmers wore tweeds and colored shirts. Coverly’s rank wore business suits and the technicians seemed to have settled on a uniform that included white shirts and dark ties. They were separated from the rest of the center by the privilege of manipulating the console and by the greater privilege of technical knowledge and limited responsibility. If a program failed repeatedly, they could be sure it was not their fault, and this gave them all the briskness and levity that you sometimes see in the deck hands on a ferry boat. Griza had never been to sea but he walked as if he walked on a moving deck and looked somehow as if he slept in a bunk, kept watches and did his own laundry. He was a slight man with less than a stomach—that whole area seemed limber and concave; he used a fixative on his hair and combed it in a careful cross-hatch at the nape of his neck, a style that had been popular with street boys ten years earlier. Thus he seemed to have one foot in the immediate past. Coverly expected him, sooner or later, to confess to some eccentric ambition. Was he building a raft in his cellar for a trip down the Mississippi? Was he perfecting a machine for compressing empty beer cans? A simplified contraceptive? A chemical solvent for autumn leaves? A project like this seemed necessary to settle the lines of his character, but Coverly was mistaken. Griza hoped to work at the site until the retirement age, when he planned to invest his savings in a parking lot in Florida or California.
From his position at the computer Griza seemed to know a great deal about the politics at the site. He did not seem to have the disposition of a gossip and yet Coverly came away from their lunch hours each day with a wealth of information. The receptionist at the security center was pregnant. Cameron, the director of the site, wouldn’t last six weeks. The top brass were bitterly divided in their opinions. They quarreled over whether or not coherent radio signals had been received from Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, they disputed the existence of other civilizations in the solar system, they challenged the intelligence of dolphins. Griza passed along his news indifferently but there was always plenty of it. Coverly cultivated Griza with the hope that Griza might help him. He wanted Griza to put the vocabulary of Keats through the computer. Griza seemed undecided but he did invite Coverly to come home with him for supper one night.
When they finished work they took a bus to the end of the line and began to walk. It was a part of the site that Coverly had never seen. “We’re in the emergency housing section,” Griza explained. It was a trailer camp although most of the trailers stood on cement block foundations. Some of them were massive and had two levels. There were street lights, gardens, picket fences and inevitably a pair of painted wagon wheels, a talisman of the rural and mythical past. Coverly wondered if they had come from the farm near the computation center. Griza stopped at the door of one of the more modest trailers, opened the door and let Coverly in.
There was one long and pleasant room that seemed to serve a number of purposes. Griza’s mother was standing at the stove. His wife was putting a fresh diaper on their daughter. Old Mrs. Griza was a heavy, gray-haired woman who wore a Christmas tree ornament on her dress. Christmas was far away and this ornament had the appeal of those farmhouses you pass, coming down from the ski trails in the north where the colored Christmas lights burn way past Epiphany and are sometimes not dismantled until the snow melts, as if Christmas had been unself-consciously enlarged to embrace the winter. Her face was broad and kindly. Young Mrs. Griza wore a torn man’s shirt and a pair of tartan slacks that she had outgrown. Her face was large, her long hair pretty and disheveled, her eyes were beautiful when they were open wide, which they seldom were that evening. The cast of her eyes and her mouth was downward, suggesting sullenness, and it was this sullenness, so swiftly contradicted by the light and authority of her smile, that made her face compelling. Gentling and dressing the baby she seemed nearly imperious. Griza opened two cans of beer and he and Coverly sat down at the end of the room farthest from the stove.
“We’re a little crowded in here now,” the old lady said. “Oh, I wish you could have seen the house we had in Lowell! Twelve rooms. Oh, it was a lovely house; but we had rats. Oh, those rats. Once I went down cellar to get a stick of wood for the stove and this big man rat jumped at me, jumped right at me! Well, he missed me, thank God, went right over my shoulder but ever after that I was afraid of them. I mean when I saw how fearless they was. We used to have a nice centerpiece in the dining room. Fruit, you know, or wax flowers, but I come down one morning and there was this nice centerpiece all chewed up. Rats. It broke my heart. I mean it made me feel I didn’t have anything I could call my own. Mice too. We had mice. They used to get into the pantry. One year I made a big batch of jelly and the mice chewed right through the wax tops and spoiled the jelly. But the mice was nothing compared to the termites. I always noticed the living-room floor was kind of springy and one morning when I was pushing the vacuum cleaner a whole section of the floor give way and sagged into the cellar. Termites. Termites and carpenter ants. It was a combination. The termites ate the underpinnings of the house and the carpenter ants ate the porch. But the worst was bedbugs. When my cousin Harry died he left me this big bed. I didn’t think anything about it. I felt funny in the night, you know, but I’d never seen a bedbug in my life and I couldn’t imagine what it was. Well, one night I turned on the light good and quick and there they were. There they were! Well, by this time they’d spread all over the house. Bedbugs everywhere. We had to have everything sprayed and, oh, my, the smell was dreadful. Fleas too. We had fleas. We had this old dog named Spotty. Well, he had fleas and the fleas got off him into the rugs and it was a damp house, the fleas bred in the rugs and you know there was one rug there when you stepped onto it there would be a cloud of fleas, thick as smoke, fleas all over you. Well, supper’s ready.”
They ate frozen meat, frozen fried potatoes and frozen peas. Blindfolded one could not have identified the peas, and the only flavor the potatoes had was the flavor of soap. It was the monotonous fare of the besieged, it would be served everywhere on the site that night, but where were the walls, the battering rams, where was the enemy that could be accounted for this tasteless porridge? Coverly was happy there and they talked about New England during the meal. While the women washed the dishes Coverly and Griza spoke about running the Keats vocabulary through the computer. Griza’s invitation to dinner seemed to have been a gesture of trust or assent and he agreed to run the vocabulary through the hardware if Coverly would make the preparations. They drank a glass of whisky and ginger ale and Coverly went home.
On the next night Coverly arranged his life along these lines. He left the computation center at five, cooked supper, bathed and put his son to bed. Then he returned to the computation center with his soft leather copy of Keats and began to translate this, on an electrical typewriter, into binary digits. “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” he began, “the air was cooling, and so very still. . . .” It took him three weeks to get through it all including King Stephen. It was half-past eleven one night when he typed: “To feel forever its soft fall and swell,/Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,/Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,/And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”
CHAPTER XV
Griza said that if everything went on schedule he would run the tape through late on a Saturday afternoon. He telephoned Coverly on Friday night and told him to come in at four. The tape was stored in Coverly’s office and at four he brought it up to the room where the console stood. He was very excited. He and Griza seemed to be alone in the center. Somewhere an unanswered telephone was ringing. His instructions, converted into binary digits, asked the machine to count the words in the poetry, count the vocabulary and then list those words most frequently used in the order of their usage. Griza put the instructions and the tape into a pair of towers and pulled some switches on
the console. He was in that environment where he felt most like himself and swaggered around like a deck hand. Coverly was sweating with excitement. To make some conversation he asked Griza about his mother and his wife but Griza, ennobled by the presence of the console, did not reply. The typewriter began loudly to clatter and Coverly turned. When the machine stopped Griza tore the paper off its rack and passed it to Coverly. The number of words in the poetry came to fifteen thousand three hundred and fifty-seven. The vocabulary was eight thousand five hundred and three and the words in the order of their frequency were: “Silence blendeth grief’s awakened fall/The golden realms of death take all/Love’s bitterness exceeds its grace /That bestial scar on the angelic face/Marks heaven with gall.”
“My God,” Coverly said. “It rhymes. It’s poetry.”
Griza was going around turning off the lights. He didn’t reply.
“But it’s poetry, Griza,” Coverly said. “Isn’t that wonderful? I mean there’s poetry within the poetry.”
Griza’s indifference was implacable. “Yuh, yuh,” he said. “We better get out of here. I don’t want to get caught.”
“But you see, don’t you,” Coverly said, “that within the poetry of Keats there is some other poetry.” It was possible to imagine that some numerical harmony underlay the composition of the universe, but that this harmony embraced poetry was a bewildering possibility and Coverly then felt himself to be a citizen of the world that was emerging; a part of it. Life was filled with newness; there was newness everywhere! “I guess I’d better tell somebody,” Coverly said. “It’s a discovery, you know.”
