The Stories of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  “Thank you, Beatrice.”

  He had dragged her good name through a hundred escapades, debauched her excellence, and thrown away her love, but she had never imagined that he would betray her in their plans for the end of the world. She poured what was left of the bishop’s cocktail into a glass. She hated the taste of gin, but her accumulated troubles had grown to seem like the pain of an illness, and gin dimmed this, although it inflamed her indignation. Outside, the sky darkened, the wind changed, it began to rain. What could she do? She couldn’t go back to Mother. Mother didn’t have a shelter. She couldn’t pray for guidance. The bishop’s apparent worldliness had reduced the comforts of heaven. She couldn’t contemplate her husband’s foolish profligacy without drinking more gin. And then she remembered the night—the night of judgment when they had agreed to let Aunt Ida and Uncle Ralph burn, when she had sacrificed her three-year-old niece and he his five-year-old nephew; when they had conspired like murderers and had decided to deny mercy even to his old mother.

  She was quite drunk by the time Charlie came in. “I couldn’t spend two weeks in any hole in the ground with that Mrs. Flannagan,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I took the bishop down to show him the shelter and he—”

  “What bishop? What was a bishop doing here?”

  “Stop interrupting me and listen to what I have to say. Mrs. Flannagan has a key to our shelter, and you gave it to her.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Mrs. Flannagan,” she said, “has a key to our shelter, and you gave it to her.”

  He went back out through the rain to the garage and jammed his fingers in the door. In haste and rage he stalled the car, and, waiting for the carburetor to drain, was faced, in the headlights, with the backstage of his wasteful domestic life which had accumulated in the garage. Here was a fortune in broken garden furniture and power tools. When the car started, he slammed out of his driveway and passed a red light at the first intersection, where, for a moment, his life hung by a thread. He didn’t care. Slamming up the hill, he clutched the wheel as if he already had his hands on her plump and silly neck. It was his children’s honor and peace of mind that she had damaged. It was his children, his beloved children, that she had harmed.

  He stopped the car at the door. The house was lighted, and he could smell wood smoke, but the place was quiet and, peering through the glass pane, he couldn’t see any signs of life or hear anything but the rain. He tried the door. It was locked. Then he pounded on the frame with his fist. It was a long time before she appeared, from the living room, and he guessed she must have been asleep. She was wearing the peignoir he had bought her. She straightened her hair. As soon as she opened the door, he pushed his way into the hall and shouted, “Why did you do it? Why did you do such a damn fool thing?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about.”

  “Why did you tell my wife you had the key?”

  “I did not tell your wife.”

  “Then who did you tell?”

  “I did not tell anyone.”

  She worked her shoulders and looked down at the tip of her slipper. Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying. He saw then that he could not get the truth out of her, that he could not shake it out of her with all the strength in his arms, and that her confession, if he had it, would have done him no good.

  “Get me something to drink,” he said.

  “I think you had better go away and come back later, when you are feeling better,” she said.

  “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired. Oh, God, I’m tired. I haven’t sat down all day.”

  He went into the living room and poured himself a whiskey. He saw his hands, blackened by the trains and the banisters, the doorknobs and the papers, of a long day, and in the mirror he saw that his hair was soaked with rain. He went out of the living room and through the library to the downstairs bathroom. She made a little noise, scarcely a cry. When he opened the bathroom door, he found himself face to face with an absolutely naked stranger.

  He shut the door, and then there was that nearly metronomic stillness that precedes a howling confrontation. It was she who broke the silence. “I do not know who he is, and I have been trying to make him go away… I know what you are thinking, and I do not care. It is my house, after all, and I did not invite you into it, and I do not have to explain everything that goes on to you.”

  “Get away from me,” he said. “Get away from me or I’ll break your neck.”

  He drove home through the rain. When he let himself in, he noticed the noise and the smell of cooking from the kitchen. He supposed that these signs and odors must have been one of the first signs of life on the planet, and might be one of the last. The evening paper was in the living room, and, giving it a shake, he shouted, “Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who’s boss!” And then, falling into a chair, he asked softly, “Dear Jesus, when will it ever end?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” said Mrs. Pastern quietly, coming in from the pantry. “I’ve been waiting nearly three months now to hear just that. I first began to worry when I saw that you’d sold your cuff links and your studs. I wondered what was the matter then. Then, when you signed the contract for the shelter without a penny to pay for it, I began to see your plan. You want the world to end, don’t you? Don’t you, Charlie, don’t you? I’ve known it all along, but I couldn’t admit it to myself, it seemed so ruthless—but then one learns something new every day.” She walked past him into the hallway and started up the stairs. “There’s a hamburger in the frying pan,” she said, “and some potatoes in the oven. If you want a green vegetable, you can heat up the leftover broccoli. I’m going to telephone the children.”

  We travel with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few place names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all. The rest of the story was recounted by my mother, whose letter caught up with me in Kitzbühel, where I sometimes stay. “There have been so many changes in the last six weeks,” she wrote, “that I hardly know where to begin. First, the Pasterns are gone and I mean gone. He’s in the county jail serving a two-year sentence for grand larceny. Sally’s left college and is working at Macy’s, and the boy’s still looking for a job, I hear. He’s living with his mother somewhere in the Bronx. Someone said they were on home relief. It seems that Charlie ran through all of that money his mother left him about a year ago and they were just living on credit. The bank took everything and they moved to a motel in Tansford. Then they moved from motel to motel, traveling in a rented car and never paying their bills. The motel and the car-rental people were the first ones to catch up with them. Some nice people named Willoughby bought the house from the bank. And the Flannagans have divorced. Remember her? She used to walk around her garden with a silk parasol. He didn’t have to give her a settlement or anything and someone saw her on Central Park West in a thin coat on a cold night. But she did come back. It was very strange. She came back last Thursday. It had just begun to snow. It was a little while after lunch. What an old fool your mother is but as old as I am I never cease to thrill at the miracle of a snowstorm. I had a lot of work to do but I decided to let it go and stand by the window awhile and watch it snow. The sky was very dark. It was a fine, dry snow and covered everything quickly like a spread of light. Then I saw Mrs. Flannagan walking up the street. She must have come out on the two-thirty-three and walked up from the station. I don’t suppose she can have much money if she can’t afford a cab, do you? She was not very warmly dressed and she had on high heels and no rubbers. Well, she walked up the street and she walked right across the Pasterns’ lawn, I meant what used to be the Pasterns’ lawn, to their bomb shelter and just stood there looking at it. I don’t know what in the world she was thinking of but the sh
elter looks a little like a tomb, you know, and she looked like a mourner standing there with the snow falling on her head and shoulders and it made me sad to think she hardly knew the Pasterns. Then Mrs. Willoughby telephoned me and said there was this strange woman standing in front of her bomb shelter and did I know who it was and I said that I did, that it was Mrs. Flannagan who used to live up on the hill, and then she asked what I thought she should do and I said the only thing to do I guessed was to send her away. So then Mrs. Willoughby sent her maid down and I saw the maid telling Mrs. Flannagan to go away and then in a little while Mrs. Flannagan walked back through the snow to the station.. A VISION OF THE WORLD

  His is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. The light is dim. On the wall there is a colored lithograph of a kitten wearing a flowered hat, a silk dress, and white gloves. The air is musty, but I think it is a pleasant smell—heartening and carnal, like bilge water or the land wind. The tide is high, and the sea below the bluff slams its bulkheads, its doors, and shakes its chains with such power that it makes the lamp on my table jump. I am here alone to rest up from a chain of events that began one Saturday afternoon when I was spading up my garden. A foot or two below the surface I found a small round can that might have contained shoe polish. I pried the can open with a knife. Inside I found a piece of oilcloth, and within this a note on lined paper. It read, “I, Nils Jugstrum, promise myself that if I am not a member of the Gory Brook Country Club by the time I am twenty-five years old I will hang myself.” I knew that twenty years ago the neighborhood where I live had been farmland, and I guessed that some farmer’s boy, gazing off to the green fairways of Gory Brook, had made his vow and buried it in the ground. I was moved, as I always am, by these broken lines of communication in which we express our most acute feelings. The note seemed, like some impulse of romantic love, to let me deeper into the afternoon.

  The sky was blue. It seemed like music. I had just cut the grass, and the smell of it was in the air. This reminded me of those overtures and promises of love we know when we are young. At the end of a foot race you throw yourself onto the grass by the cinder track, gasping for breath, and the ardor with which you embrace the schoolhouse lawn is a promise you will follow all the days of your life. Thinking then of peaceable things, I noticed that the black ants had conquered the red ants and were taking the corpses off the field. A robin flew by, pursued by two jays. The cat was in the currant hedge, scouting a sparrow. A pair of orioles passed, pecking each other, and then I saw, a foot or so from where I stood, a copperhead working itself out of the last length of its dark winter skin. What I experienced was not fright or dread; it was shock at my unpreparedness for this branch of death. Here was lethal venom, as much a part of the earth as the running water in the brook, but I seemed to have no space for it in my considerations. I went back to the house to get the shotgun, but I had the misfortune then to meet up with the older of my two dogs, a gun-shy bitch. At the sight of the gun she began to bark and whimper, torn unmercifully by her instincts and anxieties. Her barking brought the second dog, a natural hunter, bounding down the stairs, ready to retrieve a rabbit or a bird, and, followed by two dogs, one barking in joy and the other in horror, I returned to the garden in time to see the viper disappear into a stone wall.

  After this I drove into the village and bought some grass seed and then went out to the supermarket on Route 27, to get some brioches my wife had ordered. I think you may need a camera these days to record a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. Our language is traditional, the accrual of centuries of intercourse. Except for the shapes of the pastry, there was nothing traditional to be seen at the bakery counter where I waited. We were six or seven, delayed by an old man with a long list, a scroll of groceries. Looking over his shoulder I read, eggs, hors d’oeuvres. He saw me reading his document and held it against his chest like a prudent card player. Then suddenly the piped-in music changed from a love song to a cha-cha, and the woman beside me began to move her shoulders shyly and to execute a few steps. “Would you like to dance, madam?” I asked. She was very plain, but when I held out my arms she stepped into them, and we danced for a minute or two. You could see that she loved to dance, but with a face like that she couldn’t have had many chances. She then blushed a deep red, stepped out of my arms, and went over to the glass case, where she studied the Boston cream pies. I felt that we had made a step in the right direction, and when I got my brioches and drove home I was elated. A policeman stopped me at the corner of Alewives Lane, to let a parade go by. First to come was a young girl in boots and shorts that emphasized the fineness of her thighs. She had an enormous nose, wore a busby, and pumped an aluminum baton. She was followed by another girl, with finer and more ample thighs, who marched with her pelvis so far in advance of the rest of her that her spine was strangely curved. She wore bifocals and seemed terribly bored by this forwardness of her pelvis. A band of boys, with here and there a gray-haired ringer, brought up the rear, playing “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.” They carried no banners, they had no discernible purpose or destination, and it all seemed to me terribly funny. I laughed all the way home.

  But my wife was sad.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” I asked.

  “I just have this terrible feeling that I’m a character in a television situation comedy,” she said. “I mean, I’m nice-looking, I’m well-dressed, I have humorous and attractive children, but I have this terrible feeling that I’m in black-and-white and that I can be turned off by anybody. I just have this terrible feeling that I can be turned off.” My wife is often sad because her sadness is not a sad sadness, sorry because her sorrow is not a crushing sorrow. She grieves because her grief is not an acute grief, and when I tell her that this sorrow over the inadequacies of her sorrow may be a new hue in the spectrum of human pain, she is not consoled. Oh, I sometimes think of leaving her. I could conceivably make a life without her and the children, I could get along without the companionship of my friends, but I could not bring myself to leave my lawns and gardens, I could not part from the porch screens that I have repaired and painted, I cannot divorce myself from the serpentine brick walk I have laid between the side door and the rose garden; and so, while my chains are forged of turf and house paint, they will still bind me until I die. But I was grateful to my wife then for what she had said, for stating that the externals of her life had the quality of a dream. The uninhibited energies of the imagination had created the supermarket, the viper, and the note in the shoe-polish can. Compared to these, my wildest reveries had the literalness of double-entry bookkeeping. It pleased me to think that our external life has the quality of a dream and that in our dreams we find the virtues of conservatism. I then went into the house, where I found the cleaning woman smoking a stolen Egyptian cigarette and piecing together the torn letters in the wastebasket.

  We went to Gory Brook that night for dinner. I checked the list of members, looking for Nils Jugstrum, but he wasn’t there, and I wondered if he had hanged himself. And for what? It was the usual. Gracie Masters, the only daughter of a millionaire funeral director, was dancing with Pinky Townsend. Pinky was out on fifty thousand dollars’ bail for stock market manipulation. When bail was set, he took the fifty thousand out of his wallet. I danced a set with Millie Surcliffe. The music was “Rain,”

  “Moonlight on the Ganges,”

  “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along,”

  “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,”

  “Carolina in the Morning,” and “The Sheik of Araby.” We seemed to be dancing on the grave of social coherence. But while the scene was plainly revolutionary, where was the new day, the world to come? The next set was “Lena from Palesteena,”

  “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,”

  “Louisville Lou,”

  “Smiles,” and “The Red Red Robin” again. That last one really gets us jumping. but when the band blew the spit out of their in
struments I saw them shaking their heads in deep moral disapproval of our antics. Millie went back to her table, and I stood by the door, wondering why my heart should heave when I see people leave a dance floor at the end of a set—heave as it heaves when I see a crowd pack up and leave a beach as the shadow of the cliff falls over the water and the sand, heave as if I saw in these gentle departures the energies and the thoughtlessness of life itself.

  Time, I thought, strips us rudely of the privileges of the bystander, and in the end that couple chatting loudly in bad French in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne (Athens) turns out to be us. Someone else has got our post behind the potted palms, our quiet corner in the bar, and, exposed, perforce we cast around for other avenues of observation. What I wanted to identify then was not a chain of facts but an essence—something like that indecipherable collision of contingencies that can produce exaltation or despair. What I wanted to do was to grant my dreams, in so incoherent a world, their legitimacy. None of this made me moody, and I danced, drank, and told stories at the bar until about one, when we went home. I turned on the television set to a commercial that, like so much else I had seen that day, seemed terribly funny. A young woman with a boarding-school accent was asking, “Do you offend with wet-fur-coat odor? A fifty-thousand-dollar sable cape caught in a thundershower can smell worse than an old hound dog who’s been chasing a fox through a swamp. Nothing smells worse than wet mink. Even a light mist can make lamb, opossum, civet, baum marten, and other less costly and serviceable furs as malodorous as a badly ventilated lion house in a zoo. Safeguard yourself from embarrassment and anxiety by light applications of Elixircol before you wear your furs…” She belonged to the dream world, and I told her so before I turned her off. I fell asleep in the moonlight and dreamed of an island.

  I was with some other men, and seemed to have reached the place on a sailing boat. I was sunburned, I remember, and, touching my jaw, I felt a three-or four-day stubble. The island was in the Pacific. There was a smell of rancid cooking oil in the air—a sign of the China coast. It was in the middle of the afternoon when we landed, and we seemed to have nothing much to do. We wandered through the streets. The place either had been occupied by the Army or had served as a military way station, because many of the signs in the windows were written in an approximation of English. “Crews Cutz,” I read on a sign in an Oriental barbershop. Many of the stores had displays of imitation American whiskey. Whiskey was spelled “Whikky.” Because we had nothing better to do, we went into a local museum. There were bows, primitive fishhooks, masks, and drums. From the museum we went to a restaurant and ordered a meal. I had a struggle with the local language, but what surprised me was that it seemed to be an informed struggle. I seemed to have studied the language before coming ashore. I distinctly remembered putting together a sentence when the waiter came up to the table. “Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zyolpocz ciwego,” I said. The waiter smiled and complimented me, and, when I woke from the dream, the fact of the language made the island in the sun, its population, and its museum real, vivid, and enduring. I thought with longing of the quiet and friendly natives and the easy pace of their lives.