The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  I went on eating and listening. I waited for the stranger's companion to enter into the conversation, to make some sound of sympathy or assent, but there was none, and I wondered for a moment if he wasn't talking to himself. I craned my neck around the edge of the booth, but he was too far into the corner for me to see. "She has this money of her own," he went on. "I pay the tax on it, and she spends it all on clothes. She's got hundreds and hundreds of dresses and shoes, and three fur coats, and four wigs. Four. But if I buy a suit she tells me I'm being wasteful. I have to buy clothes once in a while. I mean, I can't go to the office looking like a bum. If I buy anything, it's very wasteful. Last year, I bought an umbrella, just so I wouldn't get wet. Wasteful. The year before, I bought a light coat. Wasteful. I can't even buy a phonograph record, because I know I'll catch hell for being so wasteful. On my salary—imagine, on my salary, we can't afford to have bacon for breakfast excepting on Sundays. Bacon is wasteful. But you ought to see her telephone bills. She has this friend, this college roommate. I guess they were very close. She lives in Rome. I don't like her. She was married to this very nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and she just ran him into the ground. She just disposed of him. He's a wreck. Well, now she lives in Rome, and Vera keeps calling her on the telephone. Last month my telephone bills to Rome were over eight hundred dollars. So I said, 'Vera,' I said, 'if you want to talk with your girl chum so much, why don't you just get on a plane and fly to Rome? It would be a lot cheaper. 'I don't want to go to Rome,' she said. 'I hate Rome. It's noisy and dirty.'

  "But you know when I think back over my past, and her past, too, it seems to me that this is a situation with a very long taproot. My grandmother was a very emancipated woman, she was very strong on women's rights. When my mother was thirty-two years old, she went to law school and got her degree. She never practiced. She said she went to law school so she'd have more things in common with Dad, but what she actually did was to destroy, really destroy the little tenderness that remained between them. She was almost never at home, and when she was she was always studying for her exams. It was always 'Sh-h-h! Your mother's studying law...' My father was a lonely man, but there's an awful lot of lonely men around. They won't say so, of course. Who tells the truth? You meet an old friend on the street. He looks like hell. It's frightening. His face is gray, and his hair's all falling out, and he's got the shakes. So you say, 'Charlie, Charlie, you're looking great.' So then he says, shaking all over, 'I never felt better in my life, never.' So then you go your way, and he goes his way.

  "I can see that it isn't easy for Vera, but what can I do? Honest to God sometimes I'm afraid she'll hurt me—brain me with a hammer while I'm asleep. Not because it's me, but just because I'm a man. Sometimes I think women today are the most miserable creatures in the history of the world. I mean, they're right in the middle of the ocean. For instance, I caught her smooching with Pete Barnstable in the pantry. That was the night she lost the earring, the night when I came back from Minneapolis. So then when I got home, before I noticed the earring was gone, I said what is this, what is this smooching around with Pete Barnstable? So then she said—very emancipated—that no woman could be expected to limit herself to the attentions of one man. So then I said what about me, did that work for me, too? I mean, if she could smooch around with Pete Barnstable, didn't it follow that I could take Mildred Renny out to the parking lot? So then she said I was turning everything she said into filth. She said I had such a dirty mind she couldn't talk with me. After that I noticed she'd lost the earring, and after that we had the scene about how sapphires are such cold stones, and after that..

  His voice dropped to a whisper, and at the same time some women in the booth on the other side of me began a noisy and savage attack on a friend they all shared. I was very anxious to see the face of the man behind me, and I called for the check, but when I left the booth he was gone, and I would never know what he looked like.

  When I got home, I put the car in the garage and came into the house by the kitchen door. Cora was at the table, bending over a dish of cutlets. In one hand she held a can of lethal pesticide. I couldn't be sure because I'm so nearsighted, but I think she was sprinkling pesticide on the meat. She was startled when I came in, and by the time I had my glasses on she had put the pesticide on the table. Since I had already made one bad mistake because of my eyesight, I was reluctant to make another, but there was the pesticide on the table beside the dish, and that was not where it belonged. It contained a high percentage of nerve poison. "What in the world are you doing?" I asked.

  "What does it look as if I were doing?" she asked, still speaking in the octave above middle C.

  "It looks as if you were putting pesticide in the cutlets," I said.

  "I know you don't grant me much intelligence," she said, "but please grant me enough intelligence to know better than that."

  "But what are you doing with the pesticide?" I asked.

  "I have been dusting the roses," she said.

  I was routed, in a way, routed and frightened. I guessed that meat heavily dosed with pesticide could be fatal. There was a chance that if I ate the cutlets I might die. The extraordinary fact seemed to be that after twenty years of marriage I didn't know Cora well enough to know whether or not she intended to murder me. I would trust a chance deliveryman or a cleaning woman, but I did not trust Cora. The prevailing winds seemed not to have blown the smoke of battle off our union. I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful. The blue walls of the room seemed to be some link in the chain of being that I would offend by driving up to the club and eating an open steak sandwich alone in the bar.

  I ate one of the cutlets at dinner. It had a peculiar taste, but by this time I couldn't distinguish between my anxieties and the facts involved. I was terribly sick in the night, but this could have been my imagination. I spent an hour in the bathroom with acute indigestion. Cora seemed to be asleep, but when I returned from the bathroom I did notice that her eyes were open. I was worried, and in the morning I made my own breakfast. The maid cooked lunch, and I doubted that she would poison me. I read some more Henry James in the garden, but as the time for dinner approached I found that I was frightened. I went into the pantry to make a drink. Cora had been preparing dinner, and had gone to some other part of the house. There is a broom closet in the kitchen, and I stepped into it and shut the door. Presently I heard Cora's footsteps as she returned. We keep the pesticides for the roses in a cabinet in the kitchen. I heard her open this cabinet. Then she stepped out into the garden, where I heard her dusting the roses. She then returned to the kitchen, but she did not return the pesticide to the closet. My field of vision through the keyhole was limited. Her back was to me as she spiced the meat, and I couldn't tell if she was using salt and pepper or nerve poison. She then went back to the garden, and I stepped out of the broom closet. The pesticide was not on the table. I went into the living room, and entered the dining room from there when dinner was ready. "Isn't it hot," I asked when I sat down.

  "Well," said Cora, "we can't expect to be comfortable, can we, if we hide in broom closets?"

  I hung on to my chair, picked at my food, made some small talk, and got through the meal. Now and then she gave me a serene and wicked smile. After dinner I went into the garden. I desperately needed help, and thought then of my daughter. I should explain that Flora graduated from the Villa Mimosa in Florence, and left Smith College in the middle of her freshman y
ear to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak. I send her an allowance each month and have promised to leave her alone, but, considering the dangerousness of my position, I felt free to break my promise. I felt that if I could see her I could persuade her to come home. I telephoned her then and said that I must see her. She seemed quite friendly and asked me to come to tea.

  I had lunch in town the next day, and spent the afternoon at my club, playing cards and drinking whiskey. Flora had given me directions, and I went downtown on the subway for the first time in I don't know how many years. It was all very strange. I've often thought of going to visit my only daughter and her own true love, and now at last I was making this journey. In my reveries the meeting would take place in some club. He would come from a good family. Flora would be happy; she would have the shining face of a young girl first in love. The boy would be serious, but not too serious; intelligent, handsome, and with the winning posture of someone who stands literally at the threshold of a career. I could see the fatuity in these reveries, but had they been so vulgar and idle that I deserved to have them contravened at every point—the scene changed from a club to the city's worst slum and the substitution of a freak with a beard for an earnest young man? I had friends whose daughters married suitable young men from suitable families. Envy struck me in the crowded subway, then petulance. Why had I been singled out for this disaster? I loved my daughter. The power of love I felt for her seemed pure, strong, and natural. Suddenly I felt like crying. Every sort of door had been open for her, she had seen the finest landscapes, she had enjoyed, I thought, the company of those people who were most free to develop their gifts.

  It was raining when I left the subway. I followed her directions through a slum to a tenement. I guessed he building to be about eighty years old. Two polished marble columns supported a Romanesque arch. It even had a name. It was called the Eden. I saw the angel with the flaming sword, the naked couple, stooped, their hands over their privates. Masaccio? That was when we went to visit her in Florence. So I entered Eden like an avenging angel, but once under the Romanesque arch I found a corridor as narrow as the companionway in a submarine, and the power of light over my spirits—always considerable—was in this case very depressing, the lights in the hall were so primitive and sorry. Flights of stairs often appear in my dreams, and the stairs I began to climb had a galling look of unreality. I heard Spanish spoken, the roar of water from a toilet, music, and the barking of dogs.

  Moved by anger, or perhaps by the drinks I had had at the club, I went up three or four flights at a brisk clip and then found myself suddenly winded; forced to stop short in my climb and engage in a humiliating struggle for breath. It was several minutes before I could continue, and I went the rest of the way slowly. Flora had tacked one of her calling cards to the door. I knocked. "Hi, Daddy," she said brightly, and I kissed her on the brow. Oh, this much of it was good, fresh, and strong. I felt a burst of memory, a recollection of all the happiness we had shared. The door opened onto a kitchen and beyond this was another room. "I want you to meet Peter," she said.

  "Hi," said Peter.

  "How do you do," I said.

  "See what we've made," said Flora. "Isn't it divine? We've just finished it. It was Peter's idea."

  What they had made, what they had done was to purchase a skeleton with an armature from a medical supply house and glue butterflies here and there to the polished bone. I recognized some of the specimens from my youth and recognized that I would not at that time have been able to afford them. There was a Catagramme Astarte on the shoulder bone, a Sapphira in one eye socket, and a large cluster of Appia Zarinda at the pubis. "Marvelous," I said, "marvelous," trying to conceal my distaste. Compared to the useful tasks of life, the thought of these two grown people gluing expensive butterflies to the polished bones of some poor stranger made me intensely irritable. I sat in a canvas chair and smiled at Flora. "How are you, my dear?"

  "Oh, I'm fine, Daddy," she said. "I'm fine."

  I kept myself from remarking on either her clothing or her hair. She was dressed all in black, and her hair was straight. The purpose of this costume or uniform escaped me. It was not becoming. It did not appeal to the senses. It seemed to reflect on her self-esteem; it seemed like a costume of mourning or penance, a declaration of her indifference to the silks that I enjoy on women; but what were her reasons for despising finery? His costume was much more bewildering. Was its origin Italian? I wondered. The shoes were effeminate, and the jacket was short, but he looked more like a street boy in nineteenth-century London than someone on the Corso. That would be excepting his hair. He had a beard, a mustache, and long dark curls that reminded me of some minor apostle in a third-rate Passion Play. His face was not effeminate, but it was delicate, and seemed to me to convey a marked lack of commitment.

  "Would you like some coffee, Daddy?" Flora asked.

  "No, thank you, dear," I said. "Is there anything to drink?"

  "We don't have anything," she said.

  "Would Peter be good enough to go out and get me something?" I asked.

  "I guess so," Peter said glumly, and I told myself that he was probably not intentionally rude. I gave him a ten-dollar bill and asked him to get me some bourbon.

  "I don't think they have bourbon," he said.

  "Well, then, Scotch," I said.

  "They drink mostly wine in the neighborhood," Peter said.

  Then I settled on him a clear, kindly gaze, thinking that I would have him murdered. From what I know of the world there are still assassins to be hired, and I would pay someone to put a knife in his back or push him off a roof. My smile was broad, clear, and genuinely murderous, and the boy slipped into a green coat—another piece of mummery—and went out.

  "You don't like him?" Flora asked.

  "I despise him," I said.

  "But, Daddy, you don't know him," Flora said.

  "My dear, if I knew him any better I would wring his neck."

  "He's very kind and sensitive—he's very generous."

  "I can see that he's very sensitive," I said.

  "He's the kindest person I've ever known," Flora said.

  "I'm glad to hear that," I said, "but let's talk about you now, shall we? I didn't come here to talk about Peter."

  "But we're living together, Daddy."

  "So I've been told. But the reason I came here, Flora, is to find out about you—what your plans are and so forth. I won't disapprove of your plans, whatever they are. I simply want to know what they are. You can't spend the rest of your life gluing butterflies to skeletons. All I want to know is what you plan to do with your life."

  "I don't know, Daddy." She raised her face. "Nobody my age knows."

  "I'm not taking a consensus of your generation. I am asking you. I am asking you what you would like to make of your life. I am asking you what ideas you have, what dreams you have, what hopes you have for yourself."

  "I don't know, Daddy. Nobody my age knows."

  "I wish you would eliminate the rest of your generation. I am acquainted with at least fifty girls your age who know precisely what they want to do. They want to be historians, editors, doctors, housewives, and mothers. They want to do something useful."

  Peter came back with a bottle of bourbon but he did not return any change. Was this cupidity, I wondered, or absent-mindedness? I said nothing. Flora brought me a glass and some water, and I asked if they would join me in a drink.

  "We don't drink much," Peter said.

  "Well, I'm glad to hear that," I said. "While you were out, I talked with Flora about her plans. That is, I discovered that she doesn't have any plans, and since she doesn't I'm going to take her back to Bullet Park with me until her thinking is a little more decisive."

  "I'm going to stay with Peter," Flora said.

  "But supposing Peter had to go away?" I asked. "Suppose Peter had some interesting offer, such as six months or a year abroad—what would you do then?"

  "Oh, Daddy," she asked, "you w
ouldn't do that, would you?"

  "Oh yes I would, I most certainly would," I said. "I would do anything on heaven or earth that I thought might bring you to your senses. Would you like to go abroad, Peter?"