The Wapshot Scandal

by John Cheever

  “You live in Talifer?” Coverly asked. He knew that Brunner did.

  “Yes. I have a little pad on the west side. I live alone. I was married but that was no go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Coverly said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. The marriage was no go. We couldn’t optimize.” He tackled his salad.

  “You live alone?” Coverly asked.

  “Yes.” He spoke with his mouth full.

  “How do you spend your evenings?” Coverly asked. “I mean, do you go to the theater?”

  Brunner laughed kindly. “No, I don’t go to the theater. Some of the team have outside interests but I can’t say that I have.”

  “But if you don’t have any outside interests what do you do in the evenings?”

  “I study. I sleep. Sometimes I go to a restaurant on Route 27 where you can get all the chicken you can eat for two-fifty. I’m keen on chicken and when I get my appetite dialed up I can put away a very satisfactory payload.”

  “You go with friends?”

  “Nope,” he said with dignity. “I go alone.”

  “Do you have any children?” Coverly asked.

  “Nope. That’s one of the reasons my wife and I couldn’t finalize. She wanted children. I didn’t. I had a bad time when I was a kid and I didn’t want to put anybody else through that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, my mother died when I was about two and Dad and Grandma brought me up. Dad was a free-lance engineer but he couldn’t hold a job for long. He was a terrible alcoholic. You see, I felt more than most people, I think I felt more than most people that I had to get away. Nobody understood me. I mean, my name didn’t mean anything but the name of an old drunk. I had to make my name mean something. So when this lightning thing turned up I felt better, I began to feel better. Now my name means something, at least to some people it does.”

  Here then was the lightning, a pure force of energy, veined when one saw it in the clouds as all the world is veined—the leaf and the wave—and here was a lonely man, familiar with blisters and indigestion, whose humble motives in inventing a detonative force that could despoil the world were the same as the child actress, the eccentric inventor, the small-town politician. “I only wanted my name to mean something.” He must have been forced more than most men to include in the mystery of death the incineration of the planet. Waked by a peal of thunder he must have wondered more than most if this wasn’t the end, hastened in some way by his wish to possess a name.

  The waitress brought their lobsters then and Coverly ended his interrogation.

  When Coverly got back to the hotel there was a note for him in Cameron’s hand. He was to meet Cameron outside a conference room on the third floor at five o’clock and drive him to the airport. He guessed from this that he had been attached to Cameron’s staff as a chauffeur. He spent the afternoon in the hotel swimming pool and went up to the third floor at five. The door to the conference room was locked and sealed with wire and two secret servicemen in plain clothes waited in the corridor. When the meeting ended it was announced to them by telephone and they broke the seals and unlocked the door. The scene inside was disorderly and bizarre. The doors and windows of the room had been draped, as a security precaution, with blankets. Physicists and scientists were standing on chairs and tables, removing these. The air was cloudy with smoke. It was a moment before Coverly realized that no one was speaking. It was like the close of an especially gruesome funeral. Coverly said hello to Brunner but his lunch companion didn’t reply. His face was green, his mouth set in a look of bitterness and revulsion. Could the tragedy and horror of what Cameron had told them account for this silence? Were these the faces of men who had just been told the facts of the millennium? Had they been told, Coverly wondered, that the planet was uninhabitable; and if they had, what was there to cling to in this hotel corridor with its memories of call girls, honeymoon couples and old people down for a long weekend to take the sea air? Coverly looked confusedly from these pale, these obviously terrified faces down to the dark cabbage roses that bloomed on the rug. Cameron, like the others, passed Coverly without speaking and Coverly followed him obediently out to the car. Cameron said nothing on the trip to the airport nor did he say good-bye. He boarded a small Beechcraft—he was going on to Washington—and when the plane had taken off Coverly noticed that he had forgotten his briefcase.

  The responsibilities attached to this simple object were frightening. It must contain the gist of what he had said that afternoon and from the faces of his audience Coverly guessed that what he had said concerned the end of the world. He decided to return to the hotel at once and unload the briefcase on one of the team. He drove back to the city with the briefcase in his lap. He asked at the desk for Brunner and was told that Brunner had checked out. So had all the others. Looking around him at the shady or at least heterogeneous faces in the lobby he wondered if any of them were foreign agents. To behave inconspicuously seemed to be his best course of action and he went into the dining room and had some dinner. He kept the briefcase on his lap. Toward the end of his dinner there was a series of percussive explosions from outside the hotel and he thought that the end had come until the waitress explained that it was a display of fireworks put on for the entertainment of a convention of gift-shop proprietors.

  With the briefcase secured under his armpit he stepped out of the hotel to see the fireworks. It seemed fitting to him that a meeting that had dealt with detonative powers should end with such a spendthrift, charming and utterly harmless display. Folding chairs had been set up on the boardwalk for the audience. The display was fired from a set of mortars on the beach. He heard the sound of a projectile dropped into a shell, followed its trajectory by a light trail of cinders as it mounted up past the evening star. There was a blast of white light—it took the sound a moment to reach them—and then there was a confusion of gold streamers, arced like stems, ending in silent balls of colored fire. All this was reflected in the window-panes of the hotels, and the faces of the gift-shop proprietors, turned up to admire this ingenuous show, seemed excellent and simple. There was a scattering of applause, a touching show of politeness and enthusiasm, the sort of clapping one hears when the dance music ends. The black smoke could be seen clearly against the twilight, changing shapes as it drifted off to sea. Coverly sat down to enjoy himself, to hear the walls of the mortar shell ring again, to follow the trajectory of cinders, the arc of stars, the blooming colors, the sighs of hundreds and the decencies of applause. The show ended with a barrage, a gentle mockery of warfare, demonic drumming and all the thousands of hotel windows flashing white fire. The last explosion shook the boardwalk harmlessly, there was a shower of dancing-school applause and he started back for his hotel. When he entered his room he wondered if it hadn’t been rifled. All the drawers were open and clothing was scattered over the chairs; but he had to measure this chaos against the fact that he was not a neat traveler. He slept with the briefcase in his arms.

  In the morning Coverly, carrying the briefcase against his chest the way girls carry their schoolbooks, flew from Atlantic City to an International Airport where he waited for a plane to the west. There was, on one hand, the railroad station in St. Botolphs, with its rich aura of arrivals and departures, its smells of coal gas, floor oil and toilets, and its dark waiting room, where some force of magnification seemed brought to bear on the lives of the passengers waiting for their train to arrive; and on the other hand, this loft or palace, its glass walls open to the overcast sky, where spaciousness, efficiency and the smell of artificial leather seemed not to magnify but to diminish the knowledge the passengers had of one another. Coverly’s plane was due to leave at two, but at quarter to three they still waited at the gate. A few of the passengers were grumbling, and two or three of them had copies of an afternoon paper that reported a jet crash in Colorado with a death list of seventy-three. Was the jet that had crashed the one they were waiting for? Had they, standing in the dim sunli
ght, received some singular mercy? Had their lives been saved? Coverly went to the information desk to ask about his flight. The question was certainly legitimate, but the clerk reacted sullenly, as if the purchase of a plane ticket was a contract to walk humbly and in darkness. “There is some delay,” he said, unwillingly. “There may be some motor trouble or the connecting flight from Europe may be delayed. You won’t board until half-past three.” Coverly thanked him for this favor and went up some stairs to a bar. On a gilt easel at the right of the door was a photograph of a pretty singer in evening clothes, a delegate of all those thousands who beam at us from the thresholds of bars and hotel dining rooms; but she didn’t go on until nine and would probably be asleep or taking her wash out to the laundromat.

  Inside, there was piped-in music and the bartender wore military livery. Coverly took a stool and ordered a beer. The man beside him was swaying comfortably on his stool. “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Denver.”

  “Me, too,” the stranger exclaimed, striking Coverly on the back. “I’ve been going to Denver for three days.”

  “That’s right,” the bartender said. “He missed eight flights now. Isn’t it eight?”

  “Eight,” the stranger said. “It’s because I love my wife. My wife’s in Denver, and I love her so much I can’t get on the plane.”

  “It’s good for business,” the barkeeper said.

  In the gloom at the end of the bar two conspicuous homosexuals with dyed yellow hair were drinking rum. A family sat at a table eating lunch and conversing in advertising slogans. It seemed to be a family joke.

  “My!” the mother exclaimed. “Taste those bite-sized chunks of white Idaho turkey meat, reinforced with riboflavin, for added zest.”

  “I like the crispy, crunchy potato chips,” the boy said. “Toasted to a golden brown in health-giving infrared ovens and topped with imported salt.”

  “I like the spotless rest rooms,” said the girl, “operated under the supervision of a trained nurse and hygienically sealed for our comfort, convenience and peace of mind.”

  “Winstons taste good,” piped the baby in his high chair, “like a cigarette should. Winstons have flavor.”

  The dark bar had the authority of a creation, but it was a creation evolved independently from the iconography of the universe. With the exception of the labels on the bottles, there was nothing familiar in the place. Its lights were cavernous, its walls were dark mirrors. There was not even a truncated piece of driftwood or a coaster shaped like a leaf to remind him of the world outside. That beauty of sameness that makes the star and the shell, the sea and the clouds all seem to have come from the same hand was lost. The music was interrupted for the announcement that Coverly’s flight was boarding, and he paid for his beer and grabbed his briefcase. He stopped in the men’s room, where someone had written something exceedingly human on the wall, and then followed the lighted numbers down the long corridor to his gate. There was still no plane in sight, but none of the passengers had been moved by the delay or the news of the crash to change their plans. They stood there passively as if the sullen clerk had in fact sold them humility with their tickets. Coverly’s topcoat was too warm for that climate, but most of the other passengers had come from places that were colder or warmer than here. From a duct directly overhead, the continuous music poured gently into their ears. “It’s going to be all right,” an old lady beside Coverly whispered to an even older companion. “It isn’t dangerous. It isn’t any more dangerous than the trains. They carry millions of passengers every year. It’s going to be all right.” The fingers of the older, knobbed like driftwood, touched her cheeks, and in her eyes was the fear of death. Death was what the scene meant to her—the frisky mechanics in their white coveralls, the numbered runways, the noise of an incoming 707. A baby cried. A man ran a comb through his hair. The objects and sounds around Coverly seemed to group themselves into some immutable statement. These were the facts—this music, the fear of death endured by the old stranger, the flatness of the field, and way in the distance the roofs of some houses.

  The plane came in, they boarded, and the stewardess seated Coverly between an old lady and a man whose breath smelled of whisky. The stewardess wore high-heeled shoes, a raincoat and dark glasses. Coverly saw under her raincoat the skirts of a red silk dress. As soon as she had closed the plane, she went to the toilet and reappeared in the gray skirt and white silk blouse of her profession. Her eyes, when she took off her glasses, were haggard, and she peered out of them in pain. “Joe Burner,” said the man on Coverly’s right, and Coverly shook his hand and introduced himself. “I’m pleased to meet you, Cove,” the stranger said. “I have a little present here I’d like to give you.” He took a small box from his pocket, and when Coverly opened it he found a gilt tie clip. “I travel a lot,” the stranger explained, “and I give away these tie clips wherever I go. I have them manufactured for me in Providence. That’s the jewelry capital of the United States. I give away two or three thousand clips a year. It’s a nice way of making friends. Everybody can use a tie clip.”

  “Thank you very much,” Coverly said.

  “I knit socks for astronauts,” said the old lady on Coverly’s left. “Oh, I know it’s silly of me, but I love those boys, and I can’t bear to think of them having cold feet. I’ve sent ten pairs of socks down to Canaveral in the last six weeks. They don’t thank me, it’s true, but they’ve never returned them, and I like to think that they use them.”

  “I’m taking a few days off, to see an old friend who’s dying of cancer,” said Joe Burner. “I have at this date twenty-seven friends who are dying of cancer. Some of them know it. Some of them don’t. But not a one of them has more than a year to live.”

  They were wrapped then in a heard and unheard convulsion of sound and pushed roughly back against their seats by the force of gravity as the plane went down the strip and began its strenuous push for altitude. A large panel fell out of the ceiling and crashed into the aisle, and the glasses and bottles in the pantry rattled noisily. When they had risen above the scattered clouds, the passengers unbuckled their seat belts and resumed their lives, their habits. “Good afternoon,” said the loudspeaker. “This is Captain MacPherson welcoming you to Flight 73, nonstop to Denver. We have reports of a little turbulence in the mountains but we expect it to clear by scheduled landing time. We are sorry about the delay, and wish to take this occasion to thank you all for your patience in not doing nothing about it.” The speaker clicked off.

  Coverly could not see that anyone else was perplexed. Was he mistaken in assuming that navigational competence implied a rudimentary grasp of English? Joe Burner had begun to tell Coverly the story of his life. His style was nearly bardic. He began with the characters of his parents. He described his birthplace. Then he told Coverly about his two older brothers, his interest in sandlot baseball, his odd jobs, the schools he had attended, the wonderful buttermilk pancakes that his mother used to make and the friends that he had won and lost. He told Coverly his annual grosses, the size of his office staff, the nature of his three operations, the wonderfulness of his wife and the amount of money it had cost him to landscape his seven-room, two-bath house on Long Island. “I have something very unique,” he said. “I have this lighthouse on my front lawn. Four, five years ago, this big estate on Sands Point was auctioned off for taxes, and Mother and I went down there to see if there was anything we could use. Well, they had this little lake with a lighthouse on it—just ornamental, of course—and when it came time to buy the lighthouse, the bidding was very slow. Well, I bid thirty-five dollars, just for the heck of it, and you know what? That lighthouse was mine. Well, I have this friend in the trucking business—you have to know the right people—and he went down there and got it off the lake. I don’t know to this day how he did it. Well, I’ve got this other friend in the electric business, and he wired it up for me, and now I’ve got this lighthouse right on my front lawn. It makes the place look real nice. Of course
, some of the neighbors complain—you find clinkers in every gang—so I don’t turn it on every night, but when we have people in to play cards or watch the television, I turn it on, and it looks beautiful.”

  The sky by then was the dark blue of high altitudes, and the atmosphere in the plane was as genial as a saloon. The white blouse the hostess wore came loose whenever she bent over to serve a cocktail. She tucked it in each time she straightened up. The seat backs were as high as the walls of an old box pew, and the passengers had a limited degree of privacy and a limited view of one another. Then the bulkhead door opened, and Coverly saw the captain come down the aisle. His color was bad, and his eyes were as haggard as the eyes of the stewardess. Perhaps he was a friend of the pilot and crew who had crashed a few hours earlier in Colorado. Would he, would anyone else, have the fortitude to face this disaster calmly? Would the charred bones of seventy-three bodies mean any less to him than they did to the rest of the world? He nodded to the stewardess, who followed him aft to the pantry. They did not exchange a word, but she put some ice into a paper cup and poured whisky into it. He carried his drink forward and closed the door. The old lady was dozing, and Joe Burner, having finished with his autobiography, had begun to tell his stock of jokes. Without any warning, the plane dropped about two thousand feet.