Oh What a Paradise It Seems

by John Cheever

  They had walked for no more than half a block when she was attracted—magnetized was the word—to a display of embroidered scarves in a window. Still holding his arm she admired these. He offered to buy her one of the scarves and she politely refused, but her refusal was, he thought from his experience, genuine. He had known many women whose refusals were transparent. He felt that her distinct refusal to let a stranger buy her a present displayed a glimpse at the proportions of her self-respect. He thought this intimate and lovely. He was also delighted to see that in the three blocks they had to walk from her office to the apartment she was to show him she stopped to look at the display in absolutely every window with the exception of a window that displayed surgical appliances. They looked at shoes and hats and dresses and pottery animals and jewelry and china, and her interest in everything there was for sale charmed him and seemed to promise that she shared with him an undisciplined enthusiasm for men and women and circumstances and changes in the weather. The apartment she showed him was very different.

  At about this time the high incidence of criminal rapes and robberies made it difficult to get into apartments in some neighborhoods, and though she had keys and credentials they had great difficulties with a doorman, whose uniform was unbuttoned and who cleaned his teeth, while he talked to them, with an old-fashioned kitchen match. When they finally got inside, the uniformity of the dim lights in the corridors, the sameness of the doors and the great difficulty she had in finding the place seemed to expose him to the loneliness of penance. The apartment that she showed him was a sort of nomadic hideout—it was still furnished with the chairs and tables of a divorcee whose lover or gigolo had abandoned her, although she still had photographs of him—many of them naked—hung on her bedroom wall. There was a narrow terrace from which you could see some blue sky, but the broad light of day could never reach the apartment.

  She knew, of course, that he would not want it and said so. “I don’t,” she said, “know why I ever showed it to you. I detest the place myself.” “It’s given me an opportunity to ask you to dinner,” he said. “I’d love to have dinner with you,” she said, “if you don’t mind having a late dinner. I’m busy early in the evening.” “The time,” he said, “makes no difference.”

  They walked back, now on the other side of the street, looking at the gloves, shoes, antiques, embroideries and paintings that were displayed. “When do we meet?” he asked when they reached the door to her office. “Thursday?” she asked. “Meet me in the parish house of St. Anselm’s at about nine-fifteen on Thursday.” Then she was gone.

  St. Anselm’s was Presbyterian and he wondered what she could be doing there on a weekday night. This was in Lent and the only church observations would be mournful. He didn’t know but he thought the Presbyterians had a less exacting calendar than his own Episcopal Church, and he guessed that Thursday was not a church holiday and that she had not gone to church to pray. None of his wives or lovers had been enthusiastic church members and this might be the first time in his life that he had gone to church to meet a woman. St. Anselm’s was on Park Avenue in a good neighborhood—that is a neighborhood where wealth was of the first importance. The main entrance to the church was dark and locked, but the parish-house door around the corner was lighted and unlocked. He let himself into a large vestibule. There was a second door—royal in its proportions. A sign was thumbtacked to this: MEMBERS ONLY, THIS IS A CLOSED MEETING. The sign was amateurish and he could imagine some woman—neither young nor beautiful but charmingly earnest—working on the sign at a kitchen table. Sears’s imagination was inclined to be optimistic and that the gathering beyond the closed doors involved membership—some vow or commitment or oath—did not seem to him sinister. He thought perhaps that dues were paid. He did not feel that to take a look at the gathering would in any way involve an intrusion and he opened the door a crack.

  He saw an ecclesiastical meeting room or auditorium—one of those places where the rummage sale would be held and the nativity play would be performed. He looked into the faces of forty men and women who were listening attentively to a speaker at a podium. He was at once struck by his incompetence at judging the gathering. Not even in times of war, with which he was familiar, not even in the evacuation of burning cities had he seen so mixed a gathering. It was a group, he thought, in which there was nowhere the force of selection. Since the faces—young, old, haggard and serene—conveyed nothing to him, he looked at their clothing and found even fewer bearings. They wore the clothes of the rich, the clothes of the poor and a few cheap imitations of the rich. Who were they: who in the world could they be? Here were the plain, cheerful faces of the mixed nationalities that distinguished his country.

  He looked at the woman on the podium. She was a black-haired woman, perhaps in her forties, wearing one of those long nondescript dresses known as evening dresses although they are worn to weddings, christenings and barbecues. She was reading a list of names. Three men and two women came to the platform as she called their names. One of the women was bent with age, surely a septuagenarian. One of the men was perhaps nineteen. He had three cowlicks and a high color and wore a sweatshirt with Odium University printed on it. Beside him was a blond young man in a full suit and next was his beloved Renée, wearing one of those very simple frocks that cost a little less than a good used car. She looked as lovely—as bright—as she had looked to him from the start.

  “Turn out the lights, Charlie,” said the woman in the long dress. The lights went out and after a minute or two of suspense a door opened and a man came in carrying one of those flat, cheap cakes with candles that are ordered to celebrate the retirement of the building maintenance assistant or the oldest member of the stenographic pool. The lights went on and the gathering got to their feet and sang in the customary genuinely sincere and tuneless voices, “Happy anniversary to you, Happy anniversary, dear celebrant …” Renée smiled, laughed, and seemed truly happy with their wishes, and he looked back at the congregation. It seemed that he should be able to make some sense of the variety in their faces, and then he found himself, countenance by countenance, man and woman, young and old, trying to imagine how their faces would look contorted by the throes of erotic love. He was chagrined at his willingness to invade their lives—he was ashamed of himself and he closed the door.

  A workman was sweeping the vestibule. “What is going on in there?” Sears asked. “I don’t know,” the workman said. “They’re either trying to stop smoking or drinking or eating but I don’t remember which bunch is in there tonight. It’s the no smokers that give me a pain in the ass. I smoke a pack, maybe a pack and a half a day, I sweep up cigarette butts, that’s my job, that’s what I get paid for and it’s nobody’s business but my own. For instance I went to pay my state tax last week. This is in a government building, this is in a building I pay for and right on the wall there is this sign that says THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. How the hell do they know that I’m not going to smoke? How do they know that I’m not going to piss or fart or get a hard-on? Thank you for not smoking. What the hell business is it of theirs? Thank you for not breathing….” Then he went out a door.

  A few minutes later Sears heard the group recite something in unison. He guessed from the eagerness and clarity in their voices that it could not be an occult mantra. It was difficult to imagine what it could be. The cadence had for Sears the familiarity of church scripture and might have been the Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm, but there was some sameness to the cadence in the seventeenth-century translations of scripture and unless he was told he would never know what they were chanting.

  Then the doors opened and they came out—not like a crowd discharged at the end of an entertainment or a lecture but gradually, like the crowd at the close of a social gathering, and he had, after all, seen them blow the candles out on a cake. He looked for her, he sought her brightness as he had for all his long life looked for lovely women in airports and railroad stations and ships’ piers and now in a parish house
. He saw her, as bright as ever, and he went to her and she took his arm as they went out the door and he hailed a cab on the avenue. “What in the world were you doing in there?” he asked, when they were in the cab. “Will you promise not to ask me that again?” she said. “I know this must sound unreasonable—I would think it unreasonable if I were you—but I spend quite a few nights in parish houses and I’d just as soon not tell anyone why. If you ever take me out on Friday you’ll have to pick me up at the New School for Social Research. If you want to know what I’m doing there I’ll tell you.”

  “What are you doing at the New School for Social Research?”

  “I’m taking a course in accounting.”

  “Is this for business?”

  “No. It’s to help me understand my income tax.”

  “That’s clever.”

  “You don’t,” she laughed, “understand the first thing about women.”

  He had booked a table at the most expensive restaurant where he was known. To his surprise, she was just as well known as he. The headwaiter greeted him warmly but he greeted her just as warmly. That she was intelligently aware of her attractiveness was apparent to Sears as he walked behind her to their table and saw how she carried herself. It was knowledgeable—so much so that he saw one waiter wink to another. This only increased the fun so far as he was concerned. For a first course he ordered some cold trout, most of which she ate. He ordered a ’73 Montrachet but he noticed that she hardly drank her wine. She tasted his soup and said it was too salty but when he was served his duck printanier she ate as much of it as he did. She also enjoyed her own meal. Sears seldom ate sweets but she ate a crème brûlée while she told him what she pleased about herself.

  She was divorced from a successful dentist named Arthur and had two children. Her son, who was eighteen, was absorbed in Eastern religions, but from what she said Sears wasn’t sure whether or not he was in Tibet. Her daughter was in a ballet school in Des Moines, where Arthur lived. She said without sarcasm or laughter that she was at a turning point in her affairs. He felt that the time had not yet come for him to tell her that he was not really looking for an apartment although, considering the gait of her conversation, she might already know. “I hope we can go back to your place after dinner,” he said. “My place is such a wreck that I would be ashamed to show it to you.”

  “But that’s why I’m here,” she said with a brightness that threatened to depress him for a moment but seemed then only a fair maneuver on her part. “I’m going to show you a new apartment. There is supposed to be a place in the eighties with two bedrooms and a marvelous view of the bridges. I thought we could see it after dinner.”

  He paid for the dinner with a credit card and when she saw the amount of the tip he wrote on the receipt she said, softly and sadly: “That’s too much, that’s really too much.”

  They took a cab to the apartment that was for rent. There was no difficulty with the doorman but the building seemed to Sears vast and labyrinthine. Forty or fifty stories in the air she unlocked the door on a tiny room that had a view of the river and its bridges and their lights. This was charming but distant. There were a very small bedroom and a kitchen and a locked door. She tried several keys in the door. “I know there’s another bedroom with a view of the city,” she said. “It says so here.” She showed him some duplicated piece of paper that described two bedrooms, one spacious with a view of the city. But the door was locked. None of the keys she had would unlock it. She tried them all and so did Sears. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I don’t want to see the other bedroom. The living room is really too small. I mean I couldn’t get any of my furniture into it. Don’t worry about showing me the other room.”

  Worry was it; she was worried. When the keys wouldn’t open the door she tried to force the lock with her hand. She kicked the door. Sears then remembered a scene with Estelle, his second wife. It was in some airport—London, he guessed. They had taken a night flight and it was three-thirty by their watches—an unholy hour. They were exhausted and deeply disoriented, and because of some strike or slowdown or some increase in passengers because of some historical catastrophe or celebration—an earthquake or a coronation—the whole process of claiming one’s luggage and having its contents checked for contraband was unconscionably delayed. Before they were cleared there was dawn over London—a despairing light on this particular morning. He cleared the bags and was carrying them to the queue for cabs when Estelle stopped and tried to open a door on which NO ADMITTANCE was written in every known European language as well as in the Cyrillic alphabet. She tried to force the door’s hardware as Renée had done. She pounded on the EINTRITT IST VERBOTEN sign with her fists and then, as Renée was doing now, she began to cry, to sob.

  He felt then for his wife how much he loved her and how absolutely ignorant he was of the commandment that ruled her life. She seemed, pounding on the door in the London dawn, to have come from a creation about which he knew nothing although they had slept in each other’s arms for years. His feeling for Renée was confused and profound and when she began to cry he took her in his arms, not to solace her for the locked door of course but to comfort her for Arthur and every other disappointment in her life. She wept on his shoulder for a little while and then they locked up the apartment and took a cab downtown. He kissed her in the cab and her lips were as soft as anything he had ever known and he thought that he would never forget their softness; and he never did. She wore a little more perfume than she wore in business hours, and he loved the smell, but when he touched her breasts she gently took his hand away and said: “Not tonight, darling, some other time.” She lived in the fifties and he kissed her goodbye in front of her apartment and asked when he could see her again. “I’ll be at the 83rd Street Baptist Church on Monday night,” she said. “Sometime between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty. You can’t ever tell when the meeting will end.”

  On the next day Sears received a letter from a junior member of his law firm—a man he had not met—announcing the death, the murder, of the lawyer Sears had asked to investigate the pollution of Beasley’s Pond. The lawyer had ascertained, before his murder, that the Janice Planning Board had rezoned the pond for “fill” and given the property a tax-exempt status as a future war memorial. If Sears wanted to pursue the matter the young lawyer recommended an environmentalist named Horace Chisholm.

  3

  I WISH this story I’m telling began with the fragrance of mint growing along a stream bed where I’m lying, concealed with my rifle, waiting to assassinate a pretender who is expected to come here, fishing for trout. What I can see of the sky is blue. The smell of mint is very strong and I hear the music of water. The pretender is a well-favored young man and thinks himself quite alone. There is, he seems to think, some blessedness in fishing trout with flies. He sings while he assembles his rod and looks up at the sky and around at the trees to reassure himself of the naturalness of this garden from which, unknown to him, he is about to be dismissed. My rifle is loaded and I put it to my shoulder and take the location of his heart in my cross-sights. The smell of mint seriously challenges the rightness of this or any other murder…. Yes, I would much sooner be occupied with such matters than with the death of the Salazzos’ old dog Buster, but at the time of which I’m writing the purity of the water was of inexorable interest—far more important than dynasties—and the Salazzos are linked to the purity of Beasley’s Pond.

  Sammy Salazzo ran one of the three barbershops in the village. He was a good man and a good barber but he never seemed to make ends meet. He lived in one of those little houses in Hitching Post Lane, a neighborhood that was once mentioned on Metropolitan television when it was swept by a plague of measles. The occupancy of a house there was signified by the fact that some sort of brazier for cooking meat over coals stood in the backyard. When the brazier went it meant that the family had gone and the house was for sale. The architecture was all happy ending—all greeting card—that is, it seemed to have been
evolved by a people who were exiles or refugees and who thought obsessively of returning. The variety of these homesteads was international. They were English Tudor, they were Spanish, they were nostalgic for the recent past or the efficient simplicities of some future, but they all expressed, very powerfully, a sense of endings and returns. Anything about these houses that seemed artificial or vulgar was justified by the fact that they were meant to represent a serene retirement.

  It had been a bad day at the tag end of winter. No one had come near the barbershop excepting the mailman and he had only delivered bills. Sam closed up the place at five and went home, coasting down the hills in his car to save gasoline. It is with the most genuine reluctance that I describe the house he returned to and the asininity of the game show that his wife and two daughters were watching on television. It was a show where a wheel was spun and when the winner was given merchandise, travel tickets and sometimes cash the award-giving was very noisy and demonstrative. Buster, the old dog, greeted him. “Where’s my supper?” Sammy asked. He had to shout to be heard over the television.

  “There isn’t any supper,” his wife said, “there’s nothing to eat in the house but dog food.”

  “I give you money to buy food,” shouted Sammy. “What do you do with it? Throw it in the street?”

  “With the money you give me I can’t buy nothing but dog food,” shouted his wife.

  “Well, if we ain’t going to eat, Buster ain’t going to eat,” shouted Sammy. “If I have to shoot Buster to get that through your dumb head that’s what I’m going to do.” His wife and his daughters either didn’t believe him or were too absorbed in their television show to pay any attention to his announcement.