The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  It was the bartender who had first identified this couple as a “Roman businesswoman” and her secretary. Then, when it appeared that she spoke a crude mixture of Spanish and Italian, the bartender decided that she was a Brazilian—although the purser told me that she was traveling on a Greek passport. The secretary was a hard-faced blonde, and the businesswoman was herself a figure of such astonishing unsavoriness—you might say evil—that no one spoke to her, not even the waiters. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes were made up to look like the eyes of a viper, her voice was guttural, and whatever her business was, it had stripped her of any appeal as a human being. These two were in the bar every night, drinking gin and speaking a jumble of languages. They were never with anyone else until Brimmer joined them that evening.

  This new arrangement excited my deepest and my most natural disapproval. I was talking with the Southern family when, perhaps an hour later, the secretary strayed into the bar alone and ordered whiskey. She seemed so distraught that rather than entertain any obscene suspicions about Brimmer, I lit up the whole scene with an artificial optimism and talked intently with the Southerners about real estate. But when I went below I could tell that the businesswoman was in Brimmer’s cabin. They made quite a lot of noise, and at one point they seemed to fall out of bed. There was a loud thump. I could have knocked on the door—like Carrie Nation—ordering them to desist, but who would have seemed the most ridiculous?

  But I could not sleep. It has been my experience, my observation, that the kind of personality that emerges from this sort of promiscuity embodies an especial degree of human failure. I say observation and experience because I would not want to accept the tenets of any other authority—any preconception that would diminish the feeling of life as a perilous moral adventure. It is difficult to be a man, I think; but the difficulties are not insuperable. Yet if we relax our vigilance for a moment we pay an exorbitant price. I have never seen such a relationship as that between Brimmer and the businesswoman that was not based on bitterness, irresolution, and cowardice—the very opposites of love and any such indulgence on my part would, I was sure, turn my hair white in a moment, destroy the pigmentation in my eyes, incline me to simper, and leave a hairy tail coiled in my pants. I knew no one who had hit on such a way of life except as an expression of inadequacy—a shocking and repugnant unwillingness to cope with the generous forces of life. Brimmer was my friend and consequently enough of a man to make him deeply ashamed of what he was doing. And with this as my consolation I went to sleep.

  He was in the bar at twelve-thirty the next day, but I did not speak to him. I drank my gin with a German businessman who had boarded the ship at Lisbon. It may have been because my German friend was dull that I kept scrutinizing Brimmer for some telling fault—insipidity or bitterness in his voice. But even the full weight of my prejudice, which was immense, could not project, as I would have liked, traces of his human failure. He was just the same. The businesswoman and her secretary rejoined one another after dinner, and Brimmer joined the Southern family, who were either so obtuse or so naďve that they had seen nothing and had no objection to letting Brimmer dance with Sister and walk her around in the rain.

  I did not speak to him for the rest of the voyage. We docked at Naples at seven o’clock on a rainy morning, and when I had cleared customs and was leaving the port with my bags, Brimmer called to me. He was with a good-looking, leggy blonde who must have been twenty years younger than he, and he asked if they could drive me up to Rome. Why I accepted, why I arose with such agility over my massive disapproval, seems to have been, in retrospect, a dislike of loneliness. I did not want to take the train alone to Rome. I accepted their offer and drove with them to Rome, stopping in Terracina for lunch. They were driving up to Florence in the morning, and since this was my destination, I went on with them.

  Considering Brimmer’s winning ways with animals and small children—they were all captivated—and his partiality (as I was to discover later) to the Franciscan forms of prayer, it might be worth recounting what happened that day when we turned off the road and drove up into Assisi for lunch. Portents mean nothing, but the truth is that when we begin a journey in Italy to a clap of thunder and a sky nearly black with swallows we pay more emotional attention to this spectacle than we would at home. The weather had been fair all that morning, but as we turned off toward Assisi a wind began to blow, and even before we reached the gates of the town the sky was dark. We had lunch at an inn near the duomo with a view of the valley and a good view of the storm as it came up the road and struck the holy city. It was darkness, wind, and rain of an unusual suddenness and density. There was an awning over the window where we sat and a palm tree in a garden below us, and while we ate our lunch we saw both the awning and the palm tree picked to pieces by the wind. When we finished lunch it was like night in the streets. A young brother let us into the duomo, but it was too dark to see the Cimabues. Then the brother took us to the sacristy and unlocked the door. The moment Brimmer entered that holy place the windows exploded under the force of the wind, and it was only by some kind of luck that we were not all cut to pieces by the glass that flew against the chest where the relics are stored. For the moment or two that the door was opened, the wind ranged through the church, extinguishing every candle in the place, and it took Brimmer and me and the brother, all pulling, to get the door shut again. Then the brother hurried off for help, and we climbed to the upper church. As we drove out of Assisi the wind fell, and looking back I saw the clouds pass over the town and the place fill up and shine with the light of day.

  We said goodbye in Florence and I did not see Brimmer again. It was the leggy blonde who wrote to me in July or August, when I had returned to the United States and our farm in New Hampshire. She wrote from a hospital in Zurich, and the letter had been forwarded from my address in Florence. “Poor Brimmer is dying,” she wrote. “And if you could get up here to see him I know it would make him very happy. He often speaks of you, and I know you were one of his best friends. I am enclosing some papers that might interest you since you are a writer. The doctors do not think he can live another week…” To refer to me as a friend exposed what must have been the immensity of his loneliness; and it seemed all along that I had known he was going to die, that his promiscuity was a relationship not to life but to death. That was in the afternoon—it was four or five—the light glancing, and that gratifying stillness in the air that falls over the back country with the earliest signs of night. I didn’t tell my wife. Why should I? She never knew Brimmer and why introduce death into such a tranquil scene? What I remember feeling was gladness. The letter was six weeks old. He would be dead.

  I don’t suppose she could have read the papers she sent on. They must have represented a time of life when he had suffered some kind of breakdown. The first was a facetious essay, attacking the modern toilet seat and claiming that the crouched position it enforced was disadvantageous to those muscles and organs that were called into use. This was followed by a passionate prayer for cleanliness of heart. The prayer seemed to have gone unanswered, because the next piece was a very dirty essay on sexual control, followed by a long ballad called The Ups and Downs of Jeremy Funicular. This was a disgusting account of Jeremy’s erotic adventures, describing many married and unmarried ladies and also one garage mechanic, one wrestler, and one lighthouse keeper. The ballad was long, and each stanza ended with a reprise lamenting the fact that Jeremy had never experienced remorse—excepting when he was mean to children, foolish with money, or overate of bread and meat at table. The last manuscript was the remains or fragments of a journal. “Gratissiino Signore,” he wrote, “for the creaking shutter, the love of Mrs. Pigott, the smells of rain, the candor of friends, the fish in the sea, and especially for the smell of bread and coffee, since they mean mornings and newness of life.” It went on, pious and lewd, but I read no more.

  My wife is lovely, lovely were my children, and lovely that scene, and how dead he and his dirty words seemed in the summer lig
ht. I was glad of the news, and his death seemed to have removed the perplexity that he had represented. I could remember with some sadness that he had been able to convey a feeling that the exuberance and the pain of life was a glass against which his nose was pressed: that he seemed able to dramatize the sense of its urgency and its deadly seriousness. I remembered the fineness of his hands, the light voice, and the cast in his eye that made the pupil seem like a goat’s; but I wondered why he had failed, and by my lights he had failed horribly. Which one of us is not suspended by a thread above carnal anarchy, and what is that thread but the light of day? The difference between life and death seemed no more than the difference between going up to see the landfall at Lisbon and remaining in bed with Mme. Troyan. I could remember the landfall—the pleasant, brackish smell of inshore water like my grandfather’s bathing shoes—distant voices on a beach, villas, sea bells, and Sanctus bells, and the singing of the priest and the faces of the passengers all raised, all smiling in wonder at the sight of land as if nothing like it had ever been seen before.

  But I was wrong, and set the discovery of my mistake in any place where you can find an old copy of Europa or Epoca. It is a Monday and I am spear-fishing with my son off the rocks near Porto San Stefano. My son and I are not good friends, and it is at our best that we seem to be in disagreement with one another. We seem to want the same place in the sun. But we are great friends under water. I am delighted to see him there like a figure in a movie, head down, feet up, armed with a fishing spear, air streaming from his snorkel—and the rilled sand, where he stirs it, turning up like smoke. Here, in the deep water among the rocks, we seem to escape the tensions that make our relationships in other places vexatious. It is lovely here. With a little chop on the surface, the sun falls to the bottom of the sea in a great net of light. There are starfish in the colors of lipstick, and all the rocks are covered with white flowers. And after a festa, a Sunday when the beaches have been crowded, there are other things so many fathoms down—bits of sandwich paper, the crossword-puzzle page from Il Messaggero, and water-logged copies of Epoca. It is out of the back pages of one of these that Brimmer looks up to me from the bottom of the sea. He is not dead. He has just married an Italian movie actress. He has his left arm around her slender waist, his right foot crossed in front of his left and in his right hand the full glass. He looks no better and no worse, and I don’t know if he has sold his lights and vitals to the devil or only discovered himself. I go up to the surface, shake the water out of my hair, and think that I am worlds away from home. THE GOLDEN AGE

  Our ideas of castles, formed in childhood, are inflexible, and why try to reform them? Why point out that in a real castle thistles grow in the courtyard, and the threshold of the ruined throne room is guarded by a nest of green adders? Here are the keep, the drawbridge, the battlements and towers that we took with our lead soldiers when we were down with the chicken pox. The first castle was English, and this one was built by the King of Spain during an occupation of Tuscany, but the sense of imaginative supremacy—the heightened mystery of nobility—is the same. Nothing is inconsequential here. It is thrilling to drink Martinis on the battlements, it is thrilling to bathe in the fountain, it is even thrilling to climb down the stairs into the village after supper and buy a box of matches. The drawbridge is down, the double doors are open, and early one morning we see a family crossing the moat, carrying the paraphernalia of a picnic.

  They are Americans. Nothing they can do will quite conceal the touching ridiculousness, the clumsiness of the traveler. The father is a tall young man, a little stooped, with curly hair and fine white teeth. His wife is pretty, and they have two sons. Both boys are armed with plastic machine guns, which were recently mailed to them by their grandparents. It is Sunday, bells are ringing, and who ever brought the bells into Italy? Not the vaca in Florence but the harsh country bells that bing and bang over the olive groves and the cypress alleys in such an alien discord that they might have come in the carts of Attila the Hun. This urgent jangling sounds over the last of the antique fishing villages—really one of the last things of its kind. The stairs of the castle wind down into a place that is lovely and remote. There are no bus or train connections to this place, no pensioni or hotels, no art schools, no tourists or souvenirs; there is not even a postcard for sale. The natives wear picturesque costumes, sing at their work, and haul up Greek vases in their fishing nets. It is one of the last places in the world where you can hear shepherds’ pipes, where beautiful girls with loose bodices go unphotographed as they carry baskets of fish on their heads, and where serenades are sung after dark. Down the stairs come the Americans into the village.

  The women in black, on their way to church, nod and wish them good morning. “Il poeta,” they say, to each other. Good morning to the poet, the wife of the poet, and the poet’s sons. Their courtesy seems to embarrass the stranger. “Why do they call you a poet?” his older son asks, but Father doesn’t reply. In the piazza there is some evidence of the fact that the village is not quite perfect. What has been kept out by its rough roads has come in on the air. The village boys roosting around the fountain have their straw hats canted over their foreheads, and matchsticks in their teeth, and when they walk they swagger as if they had been born in a saddle, although there is not a saddle horse in the place. The blue-green beam of the television set in the café has begun to transform them from sailors into cowboys, from fishermen into gangsters, from shepherds into juvenile delinquents and masters of ceremonies, their bladders awash with Coca-Cola, and this seems very sad to the Americans. E colpe mia, thinks Seton, the so-called poet, as he leads his family through the piazza to the quays where their rowboat is moored.

  The harbor is as round as a soup plate, the opening lies between two cliffs, and on the outermost, the seaward cliff, stands the castle, with its round towers, that the Setons have rented for the summer. Regarding the nearly perfect scene, Seton throws out his arms and exclaims, “Jesus, what a spot!” He raises an umbrella at the stern of the rowboat for his wife, and quarrels with the boys about where they will sit. “You sit where I tell you to sit, Tommy!” he shouts. “And I don’t want to hear another word out of you.” The boys grumble, and there is a burst of machine-gun fire. They put out to sea in a loud but not an angry uproar. The bells are silent now, and they can hear the wheezing of the old church organ, its lungs rotted with sea fog. The inshore water is tepid and extraordinarily dirty, but out past the mole the water is so clear, so finely colored that it seems like a lighter element, and when Seton glimpses the shadow of their hull, drawn over the sand and rocks ten fathoms down, it seems that they float on blue air.

  There are thongs for oarlocks, and Seton rows by standing in the waist and putting his weight against the oars. He thinks that he is quite adroit at this—even picturesque—but he would never, even at a great distance, be taken for an Italian. Indeed, there is an air of criminality, of shame about the poor man. The illusion of levitation, the charming tranquility of the day—crenellated towers against that blueness of sky that seems to be a piece of our consciousness—are not enough to expunge his sense of guilt but only to hold it in suspense. He is a fraud, an impostor, an aesthetic criminal, and, sensing his feelings, his wife says gently, “Don’t worry, darling, no one will know, and if they do know, they won’t care.” He is worried because he is not a poet, and because this perfect day is, in a sense, his day of reckoning. He is not a poet at all, and only hoped to be better understood in Italy if he introduced himself as one. It is a harmless imposture—really an aspiration. He is in Italy only because he wants to lead a more illustrious life, to at least broaden his powers of reflection. He has even thought of writing a poem—something about good and evil.

  There are many other boats in the water, rounding the cliff. All the idlers and beach boys are out, bumping gunwales, pinching their girls, and loudly singing phrases of canzone. They all salute il poeta. Around the cliff the shore is steep, terraced for vineyards, and packed with wild rosemary, an
d here the sea has beaten into the shore a chain of sandy coves. Seton heads for the largest of these, and his sons dive off the boat as he approaches the beach. He lands, and unloads the umbrella and the other gear.

  Everyone speaks to them, everyone waves, and everyone in the village but the few churchgoers is on the beach. The Setons are the only strangers. The sand is a dark-golden color, and the sea shines like the curve of a rainbow-emerald, malachite, sapphire, and indigo. The striking absence of vulgarity and censoriousness in the scene moves Seton so that his chest seems to fill up with some fluid of appreciation. This is simplicity, he thinks, this is beauty, this is the raw grace of human nature! He swims in the fresh and buoyant water, and when he has finished swimming he stretches out in the sun. But now he seems restless, as if he were troubled once more about the fact that he is not a poet. And if he is not a poet, then what is he?

  He is a television writer. Lying on the sand of the cove, below the castle, is the form of a television writer. His crime is that he is the author of an odious situation comedy called “The Best Family.” When it was revealed to him that in dealing with mediocrity he was dealing not with flesh and blood but with whole principalities and kingdoms of wrongdoing, he threw up his job and fled to Italy. But now “The Best Family” has been leased by Italian television—it is called “La Famiglia Tosta” over here—and the asininities he has written will ascend to the towers of Siena, will be heard in the ancient streets of Florence, and will drift out of the lobby of the Gritti Palace onto the Grand Canal. This Sunday is his debut, and his sons, who are proud of him, have spread the word in the village. Poeta!