by John Cheever
A clinician like Shitz would have said that I had been warned but he was wrong all along. My fault was that I had thought of love as a heady distillate of nostalgia—a force of memory that had resisted analysis by cybernetics. We do not fall in love—I thought—we re-enter love, and I had fallen in love with a memory—a piece of white thread and a thunderstorm. My own true love was a piece of white thread and that was so.
Sleeping alone then, as I often did, I found myself forced into the reveries of an adolescent, a soldier, or a prisoner. To sublimate my physical needs and cure my insomnia I fell into the habit of inventing dream girls. I know the vastness that separates revery from the realities of a robust and a sweaty fuck on a thundery Sunday afternoon, but like some prisoner in solitary confinement I had nothing to go on but my memories and my imagination. I began with my memory and pretended to be sleeping with a girl I had known in Ashburnham. I remembered her dark blondness in detail and seemed to feel her pubic hair against my naked hip. Night after night I summoned up all the girls I had ever romanced. Night after night they came singly and sometimes in pairs so that I lay happily on my stomach with a naked woman on either side. I began by summoning them but after a while they seemed to come of their own volition. Like all lonely men, I fell in love—hopelessly—with the girls on magazine covers and the models who advertise girdles. I did not go so far as to carry their photographs around in my wallet, but I was tempted to, and having fallen in love with these strangers I found that they willingly joined me in bed. Surrounded then by the women I remembered and the women I had seen photographed I was joined by a third group of comforters produced, I suppose, by some chamber in my nature. These were women I had never seen. I woke one midnight to find myself lying beside an imaginary Chinese who had very small breasts and a voluptuous backside. She was followed by a vivacious Negress and she by an amiable but very fat woman with red hair. I had never romanced a fat woman that I could recall. But they came, they solaced me, they let me sleep, and when I woke in the morning I was moderately hopeful.
I envied men like Nailles who might, I suppose, looking at Nellie, recall the number and variety of places where he had covered her. On the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean, in catboats, in motorboats, in outboards, cabin cruisers and ocean liners; in hotels, motels, in castles, in tents; on beds, on sofas, on floors, on grassy hummocks, on pine needles, on stony mountain ledges warm from the sun; at every hour of the day and night; in England, in France, in Germany, Italy and Spain; while I, looking at Marietta, would remember the number of places where I had been rebuffed. In the motel in Stockbridge she had locked herself in the bathroom until I fell asleep. When I took her for a two-week cruise she forgot to pack her contraceptives and the ship’s doctor had none for sale. In Chicago she kicked me in the groin. In Easthampton she defended herself with a carving knife. Her menstrual periods seemed frequent and prolonged and on most nights she would hurry into bed and cover her face with a blanket before I could get undressed. I am too tired, she would say, I am too sleepy. I have a head cold. I have a toothache. I have indigestion. I have the flu. On the beach at Nantucket she ran away from me and when I thought I had her cornered in the sailboat she dove overboard and swam to shore.
After a year or two the yellow paint on the walls had begun to crack and discolor, and Marietta called the painter in Blenville and had him bring out some samples. I had never told her about the importance of the yellow walls and so her choice of pink was not malicious but pink was the color she chose. I could have protested but my obsession with yellow had begun to seem absurd. Surely I had enough character to live with a normal spectrum and I let the painter go ahead. Two or three weeks after the painters had finished I woke with the cafard. I suffered, on getting out of bed, all the symptoms of panic. My lips were swollen, I had difficulty breathing and my hands were shaking. I dressed and had two scoops of gin before breakfast. I was drunk most of that day. I had, I knew, to change the pace of my life and on Friday we flew to Rome.
The cafard followed me throughout that trip but it followed me without much guile either because it was lazy or because it was an assassin so confident of its prey that it had no need to exert itself. On Saturday morning I woke, feeling cheerful and randy. I was just as cheerful on Sunday but on Monday I woke in a melancholy so profound that I had to drag myself out of bed and stumble, step by step, into the shower. On Tuesday we took a train to Fondi and a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where we stayed with friends. I had two good days there but the bête noire caught up with me on the third and we took the train for Naples at Formia. I had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? My fifth day in Naples was crushing and we took the afternoon train back to Rome. Here again I had three good days but I woke on the fourth in danger of my life and went out to take a walk, putting one foot in front of the other. On some broad and curving street, the name of which I can’t remember, I saw coming towards me a line of motorcycle policemen, moving at such a slow pace that they had to keep putting their feet on the paving to keep the engines upright. Behind them were a few hundred men and women carrying signs that said PACE, SPERANZA and AMORE. It was, I realized, a memorial procession for the communist delegate Mazzacone, who had been shot in his bathtub. All I knew about him was that he had been described as saintly in L’Unità. I did not know his opinions and had read none of his speeches but I began to cry. There was no question of drying my tears. They splashed down my face and wet my jacket, they were torrential. I joined the procession and as soon as I began to march I felt the cafarde take off. There were marshals with armbands to keep the parade in order and we were told not to speak so that as we moved through Rome there was no sound but the shuffle and hiss of shoe leather, much of it worn, and because of our numbers, a loud, weird and organic sound, a sighing that someone with his back to the parade might have mistaken for the sea.
We marched through the Venezia to the Colosseum. We walked proudly, men, women and children, in spite of the shuffling sound. This grief which, in my case, we accidentally shared reminded me of how little else there was that we had in common. I felt the strongest love for these strangers for the space of three city blocks. There was a memorial service in the Colosseum—nothing as moving as the procession but when I went back to the hotel I felt well. We flew back to New York soon afterwards and it was sitting on a beach that following summer (I had already seen the picture in the dental journal) that I decided, on the strength of a kite string, that my crazy old mother’s plan to crucify a man was sound and that I would settle in Bullet Park and murder Nailles. Sometime later I changed my victim to Tony.
PART III
XVI
Nailles asked Hammer to go fishing. It came about this way. Nailles was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department, where he drove the old red LaFrance fire truck. To hell over the hills and dales of Bullet Park late at night, ringing his bell and blowing his siren, seemed to him the climax of his diverse life. Mouthwash, fire trucks, chain saws and touch football! The village seemed upended in the starlight and the only lights that burned burned in bathrooms. It was his finest hour.
The fire company had a meeting and dinner on the first Thursday of the month and Nailles attended this. The red fire truck was parked in front of the building. The garage space had been swept and hosed down and tables covered with sheets had been set up as a buffet and bar. Two apprentice firemen were polishing glasses and Charlie Maddux, the self-appointed firehouse cook, was basting a leg of lamb at a gas range in the corner. Charlie was a used-car dealer. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He liked to buy food, cook food, eat food, and he very likely dreamed of joints of meat and buckets of shellfish. His wife was, predictably, a spare woman devoted to a diet of blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. He seemed, as a firehouse cook, to enjoy a sense of reality that he did not enjoy either with his wife or his used cars and he stirred, bast
ed, seasoned, tasted and served the dinner with absolute absorption and like most amateur cooks he was incurably premature, getting the meal onto the table a half hour before anyone was ready. Nailles went upstairs to the meeting room.
There were thirty members of the fire department at that time. About twenty had gathered. Some part of the atmosphere of the place was that it had been the firemen themselves who had converted it from a loft into a habitable club room. They had, on Saturdays and Sundays, put down the Vinylite floor, nailed and painted the wall-board and wired the fluorescent lights. They were understandably proud of their work. The meeting was, of course, stag but it was, excepting the locker room at the club, the last stag gathering in the village and its exclusiveness had been challenged. Some members of the ladies’ auxiliary had wanted to attend the monthly meeting if only to supervise the cooking. They felt that Charlie Maddux was a usurper and that his grocery bills were probably scandalous. They had been forestalled but the sense that the maleness of the place was embattled gave it the snugness of a tree house. The atmosphere of a tree house extended to the ceremoniousness that followed. The chief called the meeting to order with a memorial gavel and the secretary then uncovered an American flag made of stiff silk with a thick fringe of gold. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved, and the treasurer reported that there was eighty-three dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury. All of this and all that followed was performed with an immutable solemnity that could not have been explained by the few facts and figures involved. There was a somber discussion reproaching those firemen who came to the car wash and did nothing but drink beer. Had anyone spoken humorously it would have been a misunderstanding of the gravity of these rites. “We have a new application for membership,” said the secretary. “Mr. Hammer, will you leave the room please while we discuss your application?”
Nailles turned and saw that Hammer was in the back row. Hammer left the room. “Mr. Hammer,” the secretary said, “lives on Powder Hill and seems to be the sort of man who would fit into the company all right but when we asked about his experience he said that he’d been the member of a fire department in a place called Ashburnham. It’s outside Cleveland. So we wrote for his papers and the letter was returned. There isn’t any fire department in Ashburnham. There never was. I don’t like to accuse a man of lying but at the same time we don’t want any phonies in the outfit, do we?”
“How do we know there isn’t a fire department in Ashburnham,” Nailles asked.
“The letter was returned.”
“It could have been a slipup in the post office. Why don’t we take him in? The roster isn’t full and even if he doesn’t have any experience he could help with the truck wash.”
“Do you want to put that in the form of a motion?”
“I move that Paul Hammer be elected a member of the fire department.”
“I second the motion.”
“All those in favor say aye.”
“Aye.”
“Contrary-minded?”
“Everything’s been ready for twenty minutes,” Charlie Maddux shouted up the stairs, “and if you don’t get your arses down here now it will all be spoiled. I don’t mind cooking but I don’t like to see everything get cold.”
The meeting was adjourned. Eliot joined Hammer at the bar and asked if he was a fisherman. He was motivated entirely by kindness. Hammer said that he was. “There’s a little stream in Venable that I sometimes go to on Saturday morning,” Eliot said. “If you’d like to try it I’ll pick you up at around eight o’clock. This time of year I use bait.”
On Saturday morning Eliot, with Tessie in the back seat, picked up Hammer and they started north on Route 61. Route 61 was one of the most dangerous and in appearance one of the most inhuman of the new highways. It had basically changed the nature of the Eastern landscape like some seismological disturbance, forcing it to conform, it seemed, to some parts of Montana. At least fifty men and women died on its reaches each year. On a Saturday morning the mixture of domestic and industrial traffic was catastrophic. Trucks as massive and towering as the land castles of the barbarians roared triumphantly downhill and labored uphill at a walking pace. Passing them and repassing them made this simple journey seem warlike. Nailles remembered the roads of his young manhood. They followed the contours of the land. It was cool in the valleys, warm on the hilltops. One could measure distances with one’s nose. There was the smell of eucalyptus, maples, sweet grass, manure from a cow barn and, as one got into the mountains, the smell of pine. There were landmarks—abandoned farms—a stone tower and a blue lake. In the windows of the houses one passed one saw a cat, an array of geraniums, the face of a child or an old man. He remembered it all as intimate, human and pleasant, compared to this anxious wasteland through which one raced the barbarians.
They turned off 61 at Venable, bought some bait in the village, and started into the woods. It was a walk of about two miles and Tessie limped along gallantly although it was a struggle for the old bitch. Coming down into a valley they heard the sound of the stream. It was explicitly the sound of laughter—nothing else. Giddy laughter, the laughter of silly girls and nymphs, rang through the bleak spring woods. The stream was shallow—this would account for the asinine and continuous laughter—and they walked upstream until they found a deep pool. “I’ll go further up and fish down,” Nailles said. “Why don’t we plan to meet here at around noon. I want to get back for lunch.” Off he went with Tessie.
When they met at noon Nailles had taken two trout. Hammer had caught nothing. They both carried flasks of bourbon and they sat on the banks of the stream—immersed in the sound of watery laughter—and had a drink. They were about the same weight, height and age, and they both wore a size-eight shoe. Nailles’s hair was dark and long enough to fall over his brow. He had a habit of combing it or pushing it up with his fingers. His father had criticized this gesture and he may have clung to it as a sign of rebelliousness and independence. Hammer’s hair was brown and cut very short. Nailles’s face was the broadest and most open. Hammer’s face was thin and he frequently touched it with his fingers—a sort of groping gesture as if he were looking for something he had lost. His right hand moved over his face from time to time as one’s hand moves over a shelf in a dark closet where a key has been left. His laughter was sharp—three harsh, explosive sounds. He had a nervous way of shifting his head, setting his teeth and bracing his shoulders as if his thinking consisted of a series of resolves and decisions. I must cut down on my smoking. (Teeth-setting.) Life can be beautiful. (Shoulder bracing.) I am often misunderstood. (A sudden lifting of the head.) Nailles’s manner was much more serene.
The force of friendship—a force that Nailles had never seen described—was nearly as important to him as love although there was no resemblance at all between the two. Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to recognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all. Nailles had enjoyed a large number of friends for as long as he could remember. Most of his friends were partners in games—skiing, fishing, cards or drinking. He was intensely contented in the company of his friends—in which he would now count Hammer—but it was a contentment in which there was no trace of jealousy, sexuality or nostalgia. He could remember as a boy—and as a man—friends who were both jealous and possessive but he could not honestly recall having experienced this. In the clubs that he belonged to there was some vestigial, adolescent jockeying for popularity—or perhaps love—but Nailles was innocent of this. This was not insensibility. To ski a mountain in tandem with a friend was, for Nailles, close to bliss but his happiness frustrated analysis. He was genuinely delighted to meet an old friend but there was no sorrow when they parted. His friends played a practical role in his dreams but no role at all in his longings. When they were apart he did not correspond—he scarcely remembered them—but his happiness when they were reunited was absolute. Here was an affe
ction, stripped of all the sentiments that make an affection recognizable. Nailles was very happy, drinking bourbon in the woods with Hammer.
