The Wapshot Scandal

by John Cheever

  “I will pay for my lunch,” Cameron said. “And please bring me a drink.”

  “The courtesy of cocktails is not extended to tourist passengers,” the waitress said.

  “I will pay for my drink and I will pay for my lunch,” Cameron said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” the waitress said, “if you go into the other dining room.”

  “Does it look to you as if I couldn’t pay for my lunch?” Cameron asked.

  “I am just trying to explain to you,” the waitress said, “that the airline is responsible for your meals.”

  “I understand,” said Cameron. “Now please bring me what I have ordered.”

  After lunch he watched a television play in his hotel room and rang for a bottle of whisky at four. At six the airline called to say that the flight was scheduled for midnight and that they would board the bus in front of the hotel at eight o’clock. He ate some supper in a restaurant around the corner and joined the other passengers, whom he had begun to detest. They boarded the plane at half-past eleven and were airborne on schedule but the plane was old and noisy and flew so low that he could clearly see the lights of Nantucket when they passed the island. He had his whisky bottle with him and he sipped at this until he fell asleep to suffer an excruciating dream about Luciana. When he woke it was dawn and they were coming in for a landing but it was not Rome; it was Shannon, where they made an unscheduled stop for motor repairs. He cabled Luciana from Shannon but it was five before they took off again and they didn’t reach Rome until a little after dawn the next day.

  The airport bar and restaurant were shut. He telephoned Luciana. She was asleep, of course, and cross at being waked. She had not received his cable. She could not see him until evening. She would meet him at Quinterella’s at eight. He pleaded with her to let him see her sooner—to let him come to her then. “Please, my darling, please,” he groaned. She broke the connection. He took a cab into Rome and got a room at the Eden. It was still early in the morning and the people on the streets were dressed for work and hurrying, with that international sameness of people hurrying to work on a hot morning anywhere. He took a shower and lay down on his bed to rest, yearning for her and cursing her but his anger did nothing to palliate his need and the crudeness of his thinking seemed like one of the realities of hell. Oh, the wind and the rain and to hold in one’s arms a willing love!

  There was the day to kill. He had never seen the Sistine Chapel or any of the other sights of the city and he thought he could do that. It might clear his head. He dressed and went out onto the street looking for one of those famous museums or churches about which one heard so much. Presently he came to a square where there were three churches that looked old. The doors of the first and the second were locked but the third was open and he stepped into a dark place that smelled heavily of spices. There were four women in a front pew and a priest in soiled lace was celebrating mass. He looked around him, anxious to appreciate the art treasures, but there seemed to be a roof leak above the chapel on his right and while he guessed that the painting there must be valuable and beautiful it was cracked and stained with water like the wall of any furnished room. The next chapel was decorated with naked men blowing on trumpets and the next was so dark that he could see nothing. There was a sign in English saying that if you put ten lire in the slot the lights would go on and he did this, revealing a large and bloody picture of a man in the death agonies of being crucified upside down. He did not ever like to be reminded of the susceptibilities of his flesh to pain and he quickly left the church for the smashing light and heat of the square. There was a café with an awning and he sat there and drank a campari. A young woman, crossing the street, reminded him of Luciana, but even if she was a tart it was Luciana and not her he wanted. Luciana was a tart but she was his tart and somewhere in the crudeness of his drives was a touching strain of romance. Luciana, he thought, was the kind of woman who could make the simple act of stepping into her pumps seem as if she had slammed a door on time.

  Oh, the wind and the rain and to hold in one’s arms a willing love! Why should life seem so pitilessly to harry him, why should the only reality seem to be obscene? He thought of the quantum theory, of Mittledorf’s Constant, of the discovery of helium in the tetrasphere, but they had no bearing on his sorrow. Are we all unmercifully imbedded in time, insensate, purblind, vain, cold to the appeals of love and reason and stripped of our gifts for reflection and self-assessment? Had the time come for him, and was his only reminder of reasonableness, of the stalwart he had been, a smell of vomit? He had seen brilliant colleagues orbit off into impermeable foolishness and vanity, claiming discoveries they had not discovered, discarding useful men for sycophants, running for Congress, circulating petitions and uncovering international and imaginary networks of enemies. He was no less interested in cleanliness and decency than he had ever been, but he seemed less well equipped to honor these interests. His thinking had the disgusting crudeness of pornography. He seemed to see some image of himself, separate and distant like a figure in a movie, forlorn and unredeemable, going about some self-destructive business in the rainy back streets of a strange city. Where was his goodness, his excellence, his common sense? I used to be a good man, he thought piteously. He shut his eyes in pain and in that movie that played interminably across the fine skin of his eyelids he saw himself stumbling over wet cobblestones under old-fashioned street lamps, falling, falling, falling from usefulness into foolishness, from high spirits into crudeness. Then he was tormented by that cretinous and sordid cylinder in the head or mind on which are inscribed old hymns and dance tunes, that musical junkyard, that territory where campfire songs, singing commercials, marches and fox trots gather and fester in their idiotic repetitiousness and appear at will, their puerile verses and their vulgar melodies in a state of perfect preservation. “Got those racetrack blues,” sang this chamber of his mind. It was a tune he had heard forty years ago on a crank-up phonograph and yet he could not stop the singing:

  Got those racetrack blues,

  I’m feelin’ blue all the time.

  Got those racetrack blues,

  With all my dough on the line.

  He left the café and started back to the Eden but his mind went on caroling:

  But the track is muddy, and I don’t mean maybe,

  And I’ll never get the money to buy shoes for baby.

  He climbed up the Via Sistina and the song went on:

  I’ve got those racetrack blues,

  I’m feelin’ blue all the time. . . .

  A young man was waiting for him in the lobby; one of those elegantly barbered youths who hang around the Pincio. He introduced himself at Luciana’s brother and said she must pay her dressmaker for the costume she would wear that evening. He took an envelope from his pocket and presented Cameron with a note in Luciana’s hand and a bill for a hundred thousand lire. Cameron returned it to the stranger and said he would pay the bill that evening. “Shesa no comea if you don’ta paya,” the youth said. “Tell her to call me,” Cameron said. He took the elevator up and the telephone was ringing when he entered his room. She was herself. He could imagine her twisting the telephone cord in her fingers. “You paya the bill,” she said, “or I no see you. You givea him the money.” For a second he thought of breaking the connection, breaking off the affair, but the noise of Roman traffic in the Roman streets reminded him of how far he was from home, that in fact he had no home, no friends, and that an ocean lay between him and his usefulness. He had come too far, he had come too far. Conduct and time were linear and serial; one was hurled through life with the bitch of remorse nipping at one’s hocks. No power of reason or justice or virtue could bring him to his senses.

  There was a soft knock on the door and her soft-eyed agent stepped into the room. Cameron made him wait but the noises outside his window spelled his doom. After an hour with her he would be his high-minded and magnanimous self again but in order to achieve this he must be swindled, humiliated and gulled.
She had jockeyed him into a position of helplessness. “All right,” he said, and they walked through the heat down to the Banco di Santo Spirito, where he cashed a draft for three hundred thousand lire and gave the boy his money. Then, and it was the only kind of disdain or self-expression left to him, he walked past the youth and out of the bank.

  The day passed miserably. He took a shower at seven and went out to the Via Veneto for a campari. She was always late, he had never known a woman who wasn’t, and it would probably be nine before she got to Quinterella’s. She might, for once, play it safe; she might guess that his patience was not inexhaustible and that he had a mind of his own. But had he? If she asked him to drop to his knees and bark like a dog would he dare to refuse? He stayed at the café until eight and then started down the hill. His feelings were heavy —lustful and melancholy—and it dismayed him that in thinking of Luciana his mind could display such foulness. He started across the Piazza del Popolo. Somewhere a church bell rang. The discordant iron bells of Rome had always surprised him, carrying on, with their contemporaries the fountains, a losing battle against the noise of traffic. Then from the hills there was a peal of thunder. The explosion seemed to ring back from the excitements of his youth, and what a strong, fine youth he had been. A second later the air of Rome was filled with a dense, gray rain. It seemed to fall with a wicked vehemence.

  He was stuck by the fountain in the middle of the square. By the time there was a halt in the traffic he was as wet as if he had plunged into the fountain; but he ran across the square to the shelter of a church porch. The porch was crowded with Romans and he had to push to find a place among them. There was no delicacy or shyness in the way in which the crowd jostled one another but he held himself with as much probity as he could muster. When the rain let up, and it let up as suddenly as it had fallen, he stepped back into the piazza and looked down at his clothes. His shirt clung to his skin, his tie had lost its shape, there was no press left in his pants and when he pulled the folds of his jacket away from his shoulders he saw that his pocket had been picked.

  This was a blow. It stopped him short. What he felt was too violent for indignation. It was the enormous sadness of having lost some lights or vitals—six inches of intestine, a gall bladder or a group of back teeth—the melancholy and enfeebling shock of surgery. His wallet could be replaced, there was plenty of money where that had come from, but for a moment the loss seemed stinging and irreplaceable and he felt guilty. Neither absent-mindedness nor drunkenness nor any other fault of his had helped the thief and yet he felt gulled and foolish, an old idiot who had come into a time of life when he would begin to mislay his possessions, lose his tickets and money and become a burden to the world. Somewhere a bell struck the half-hour and the crude iron note reminded him of Luciana, of the crudeness and fitness of the bounding act of love. The thought of her overtook his feeling of loss, he straightened up in spite of his wet clothing. Oh, the wind and the rain and to hold in one’s arms a willing love! He stepped into a large pile of dog manure.

  It took him nearly five minutes to scrape this off his shoe and like the boy’s sickness on the plane it had a tonic effect on his feelings; it aroused some momentary misgivings. It was the sum of obstacles—the delayed flight, the sick child, the thunderstorm—that might in the end cure his ardor. But the restaurant was only a step away and in a few minutes he would be with his swan, his swan who would lead him off to a paradise all laced with green and gold. He strode up to the door of the restaurant, but it was locked. Why were the windows dark? Why did the place seem abandoned? Then on the door he saw a photograph of Enrico Quinterella framed in a boxwood wreath with a bow, who, that very afternoon somewhere in Rome, surrounded by his wife and children had received extreme unction and departed this life.

  Death had shut up the place; put out the light. Signore Quinterella was dead. Then he felt an exalting surge of deliverance, a return to himself; his mind seemed to fill with the astringency of all decent things. Luciana was a slut, her bed a pit and he was free to live sensibly, free to judge right from wrong. Here was a sense of pureness without the force of repression and his gratitude to the contingencies that had liberated him was pious. He walked back to the Eden like a new man, slept deeply and felt in the depths of sleep that he had been granted some bounty. He took a New York plane in the morning and was back in Talifer that afternoon, convinced that there was some blessedness in the nature of things.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Coverly, without having been given a clue to his usefulness, packed and left for Atlantic City one evening with Cameron and his team. The ambiguity of his position was embarrassing. One of the team told Coverly that Cameron was to speak to a conference of scientists on a detonative force that was a million times the force of terrestrial lightning and that could be produced inexpensively. It was all that Coverly was able to grasp. Cameron sat apart from the others and read a paper-back which, Coverly saw, by craning his neck, was called Cimarron: Rose of the South West. It was the first time that Coverly had associated with men of this echelon and he was naturally inquisitive but he couldn’t understand their point of view, indeed he couldn’t understand their language. They talked about thermal runions, tolopters, strabometers, trenchions and podules. It was another language and one that seemed to him with the bleakest origins. You couldn’t trace here the elisions and changes worked by a mountain range, a great river or the nearness of the sea. Coverly supposed that the palest of them could smite a mountain but they were the most unlikely people to imagine as being armed with the powers of doom-crack. They spoke of lightning in their synthetic language but with the voices of men—strained from time to time with nervousness, broken with coughing and laughter, shaded and colored a little with regional differences. One of them was an aggressive pederast and Coverly wondered if this sexual cynicism had anything to do with his attitude as a scientist. One of them wore a suit coat that bunched around his shoulders. One of them—Brunner—wore a necktie painted with a horseshoe. One of them had a nervous habit of pulling at his eyebrows and they were all heavy smokers. They were men born of women and subject to all the ravening caprices of the flesh. They could destroy a great city inexpensively, but had they made any progress in solving the clash between night and day, between the head and the groin? Were the persuasions of lust, anger and pain any less in their case? Were they spared toothaches, nagging erections and fatigue?

  They checked into the Haddon Hall, where Coverly was given a room of his own. Brunner, who was friendly, suggested that Coverly might like to attend some of the open lectures and so he did. The first was by a Chinese on the legal problems of interstellar space. The Chinese spoke in French and a simultaneous translation was broadcast through transistor radios. The legal vocabulary was familiar but Coverly couldn’t grasp its application to the cosmos. He could not easily apply phrases like National Sovereignty to the moon. The following lecture dealt with experiments in sending a man into space in a sack filled with fluid. The difficulty presented was that men immersed in fluid suffered a grave and sometimes incurable loss of memory. Coverly wanted to approach the scene with his best seriousness—with a complete absence of humor—but how could he square the image of a man in a sack with the small New England village where he had been raised and where his character had been formed? It seemed, in this stage of the Nuclear Revolution, that the world around him was changing with incomprehensible velocity but if these changes were truly incomprehensible what attitude could he take, what counsel could he give his son? Had his basic apparatus for judging true and false become obsolete? Leaving the lecture hall he ran into Brunner and asked him to lunch. His motive was curiosity. Compared to Brunner’s high-minded scientific probity the rhythms of his own nature seemed wayward and sentimental. Brunner’s composure challenged his own disciplines and his own usefulness and he wondered if his pleasure in the unscientific landscape of the Atlantic City boardwalk was obsolete. On his right were the singing waves and on his left a generous show of that mysterio
us culture that springs up at the edges of the sea and that, with its overt concern with mystery—seers, palmists, fortunetellers, gambling games and tea-leaf diviners—seems like a product of the thunderous discourse between the ocean and the continent. Seers seemed to thrive in the salty air. He wondered what Brunner made of the scene. Did the smell of fried pork excite his memory or what he called his playback? Would the sighing of the waves present him with a romantic vision of the possibilities of adventure? Coverly looked at his companion but Brunner stared out so flatly, so impassively, at the scene that Coverly didn’t ask his question. He guessed that Brunner saw what was to be seen—brine, a boardwalk, some store fronts—and that if he went beyond the moment, which seemed unlikely, he would have seen the store fronts demolished and replaced by public playgrounds, ball fields and picnic groves. But who was wrong? The possibility that Coverly was wrong made him very uncomfortable. Brunner said that he had never eaten a lobster and so they went into an old matchboard lobster palace at a turn in the walk.

  Coverly ordered a bourbon. Brunner sipped a beer and whistled loudly at the prices. He had a very large head and a heavy but not a dark beard. He must have shaved that morning, perhaps carelessly, but the outlines of his brown beard were, by noon, clearly defined. He was pale and his pallor seemed heightened by the largeness and the redness of his ears. The redness stopped abruptly at the point where his ears joined his head. The rest of him was all pallor. It was not a sickly or a dissipated pallor, it was not a Levantine or a Mediterranean pallor—it was probably an inherited characteristic or the product of a bad diet—but it was, to give him credit, a virile pallor, thick-skinned and lit by those flaming ears. He had his charms, they all had, and it was Coverly’s feeling that these were based on the possession of a vision of surmountable barriers, a sense of the future, a means for expressing his natural zeal for progress and change. He drank his beer as if he expected it to incapacitate him and here was another difference. With a single exception they were all temperate men. Coverly was not temperate but his intemperance was his best sense of the abundance of life.