Oh What a Paradise It Seems

by John Cheever

  She was, in his long experience, the kind of woman whose front hall was always a mess. She was the kind of woman who always forgot to buy oranges and when you woke with her in your arms you would realize that the first thing you had to do was to put on your pants and go out and buy fruit. She was the kind of woman who, as soon as she entered her apartment, turned on first the lights and then the record player. Music had been playing when he first entered her apartment and it would be playing when he was long gone and forgotten. He knew from experience that silence—the absence of music—was for some men and women as suspect as darkness. It seemed a genuine need like protein or sugar but in his case continuous music presented a problem he had never before encountered. One night when they were making love the record player was performing a romantic piano concerto that closed with a long chain of percussive, false and volcanic climaxes. Every time the pianist seemed about to ascend his final peak he would fall away from the summit into a whole spectrum of lower octaves and start his ascent once more, as would Sears. Finally Renée asked, with great tenderness: “Aren’t you ever going to come?” “Not until the pianist does,” said Sears. This was quite true and they concluded their performances simultaneously. He never knew whether or not she had understood him.

  He would have described her as a clever woman although from time to time she surprised and disappointed him. She knew absolutely nothing about radioactivity. When he came in one evening, very tired from a board meeting, and tried to explain what had tired him, she seemed bored and uncomprehending although he thought it simple enough. The conglomerate that owned his firm had, that afternoon, acquired an airline whose sales were three times as large as theirs. No conglomerate, he explained, should be overly committed. As she well knew, specialization of any sort could be very dangerous. Consider nuclear investedness: The cost of mining uranium had gone from ten to nearly forty dollars a pound while the price had dropped from forty dollars a pound to just under twenty-eight. The airline they’d bought only needed dynamic top executives to reverse their last year’s losses of twenty million. When she whistled at this news she completely failed to understand that the superiority of his firm lay in the fact that they had lost thirty-seven million. However, he would have described her as a clever woman.

  Her sister came to town and he was not to see Renée for a week or so. He missed her keenly. The physical deprivation was considerable and acute. On the day that her sister left she agreed to meet him for lunch and invited him to her place at one. He imagined that she would greet him in her old blue wrapper and that after they had made love he would send out for sandwiches. Dressing for the rendezvous he tried to remember what ties, shirts and suits she had said she liked, but then it occurred to him that he would be out of his clothes a minute or two after he entered her apartment and that there was no point in deliberating over his wardrobe. He even decided against underwear lest it delay his achieving nakedness. As we watch Sears put his genitals into his trousers it is worth observing the look on his face.

  Sears was a thoughtful man and there was no effrontery or arrogance here, but he seemed to enjoy something very like authority, as if this most commonplace organ, possessed by absolutely every other man on the planet, were some singular treasure, such as the pen that was used for signing the Treaty of Versailles, robbing Bulgaria of Macedonia, giving her Aegean coast to Greece, creating several new quarrelsome nations in the Balkans, expatriating and leaving homeless large populations, giving Poland a corridor to the Baltic and sowing the seeds for future discord and war. Putting his genitals into his trousers Sears seemed to think he was handling history.

  There were no cabs that day. He more or less ran to her apartment and was winded when he got into the elevator in her building. “Twelve B,” he said to the elevator operator. It was the same man who had taken him down on his first morning. His face seemed to Sears to possess some innocence and so he could not attribute meanness to the exchange that followed.

  “Are you her father?” the elevator man asked.

  “No,” said Sears. He could barely speak.

  “Her grandfather?”

  “I am her uncle,” said Sears.

  “Then you must have known her when she was a little girl,” said the elevator man. “She must have been terribly pretty. She’s beautiful now but I keep thinking about how she must have looked when she was a girl.”

  It was a blow to Sears, a stunning blow, although he should have been able to anticipate this in the way she wagged her ass around. Just following her to a table in a restaurant inaugurated an erotic competition that would leave the waiters, and any other players, obliged to dismiss Sears as an old man who, with his clothes off, would present nothing interesting but a costly wristwatch. He had been aware of the competition but he had always thought himself victorious. The blow was devastating.

  When she opened the door she was not wearing her old blue wrapper. She was wearing the suit she had been wearing when she first showed him an apartment, and she also wore gloves and a hat. She was wearing the glasses she wore to read by and another pair of glasses—dark—either for cosmetic reasons or to screen the light.

  “Oh, my darling,” he groaned.

  “I’ve made a reservation at the Tombeau de Couperin,” she said.

  “I’ve missed you terribly,” he said. “I’m so hardpacked that I can’t eat.” He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to his knees.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I cannot help you.”

  “Don’t you speak to me like that,” he said. “Don’t talk to me as if you were a department-store clerk talking to some customer about a discontinued line. You know perfectly well that you can help me.”

  “There is nothing between us,” she said.

  “I’ve fucked you a hundred times,” he shouted, “and if that’s nothing I think you highly immoral. I’ve hoped all morning to see you in your blue wrapper and you’ve got everything on but the slip covers.”

  “Are you or are you not going to take me to lunch?” she said. “If you’re too distracted I have a standing invitation from plenty of other men.”

  “I’ll get some flowers,” he said. He pulled up and fastened his trousers. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  She truly loved cut flowers, he thought. Cut flowers had for her a seductive force, and with cut flowers that sternness, so unlike her, would surely yield. He ran to the florist nearest her apartment but the place was closed. He hailed a cab and asked to be taken to a florist. It was a long search but they found one, where he bought two dozen yellow roses. Yellow was her color. He had often heard her say that she loved yellow. Back at her apartment he rang her bell for quite some time—a half hour, perhaps—before he would acknowledge the fact that she had gone out.

  Now there are, it seemed to Sears, some Balkans of the spirit, where the villages are lit by fire and the bears weigh upwards of seven hundred pounds, and to which he now found himself quite helplessly being transported. Sears had taken many business trips to the Balkans and he was truly familiar with this world. He imagined some Monday morning—some Blue Monday—at the turn of the year, November probably, when snow was expected and his hotel room was cold. There was no hot water for shaving, there was no water of any sort and no way of procuring any. He dressed and went out to find that the elevator wasn’t working. He walked down five or six flights of malodorous and shabby stairs to the café. The only person there was a homely waitress in a very dirty uniform who was wiping the dust off a rubber plant with a page of an untruthful newspaper the tyrannical government published for propaganda purposes, distorting all the facts including the weather and the rainfall. When he asked for coffee—that most international word—the waitress made an ugly face and he realized that he was in one of those provinces that had suffered the Turkish Occupation for centuries and that had seen no coffee since its liberation by Alexander the Second in 1878.

  He went out onto the street. The street was named to commemorate the Plebescite of Apri
l the Third. He turned right, looking for coffee, onto Eleanor Markova Street. He didn’t know it but Eleanor Markova had, at some time in the forties, been martyred by the Fascists. Markova Street led to Liberation Street and he followed this to Freedom Avenue, Proletariat Boulevard and Victory Square. He smelled coffee nowhere and saw no smiles, no beauty of any sort, no brow even that promised comprehension as brows will.

  Sears had been raised by open-hearted and loving men and women, and why such a forlorn mountain city should have established itself in his consciousness was mysterious. He was truly a stranger to hostility of any sort and yet, at the moment, hostility seemed to be his home. He had loved his dear parents, he had loved and been loved by his teachers and friends, love had illuminated even his military experience, and so why then should he seem so susceptible to a hostility that he had never known?

  He seemed to have reached his Balkans by plane. The plane was large and he traveled first class, but he found himself in some airport where no one could tell him when his plane would depart and no one anyhow could speak any language that he knew. His grief was more the grief of a traveler than a lover. The grueling search for his baggage, the ridiculous attempt to charm the customs police, the wish to send to college those venereal vagrants who haunt airport urinals had all contributed to his sense of abandonment and his gathering fear.

  The elevator door opened. It was not she. It was the elevator operator. He was wearing street clothes and a hat. He went directly to where Sears stood and embraced him. Sears put his head against the man’s shoulder. The stranger’s embrace seemed to comprehend that newfound province of loneliness that had frightened Sears. He seemed to know all about that mountainous city where there was no beauty and no coffee and where a homely waitress wiped a rubber plant’s leaves with an untruthful newspaper. What the elevator man then said came as a great surprise to Sears. “I’ve worried about you ever since that first morning,” he said. What he then did came as an even greater surprise to Sears. Sears had tried genuinely to bring to his venereal drives something like the rectitude of Burke’s Peerage, the New York Social Register or the early days of the Metropolitan Club. These congregations were, he knew, not truly selective but they had the radiance, the shine, of something chosen, an air of ordination that he unthinkingly admired. The stranger, whose name he hadn’t learned, took him downstairs to a small room off the lobby, where he undressed Sears and undressed himself. Sears’s next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.

  6

  ONE of the several pleasures of Betsy’s life was visiting Buy Brite, a massive store in the shopping mall on the four-digit interstate. She liked—she loved—to push a cart with nice rubber-tired wheels through a paradise of groceries, vegetables, meats, fishes, breads and cakes to the music she danced to the year she fell in love with Henry. Then when she paid for what she had chosen she would be given a number that might name her the winner of one hundred thousand dollars or a trip to someplace like Honolulu. Betsy was not at all interested in the paleontological history of barter and marketing, but the purity and simplicity of the bounty she saw at Buy Brite were like a reminder of the markets and festivals of our earlier history.

  It is because our fortresses were meant to be impregnable that the fortresses of the ancient world have outlasted the marketplaces of the past, leaving the impression that fear and bellicosity were the keystones of our earliest communities, when in fact those crossroads where men met to barter fish for baskets, greens for meat and gold for brides were the places where we first grew to know and communicate with one another. Some part of Betsy’s excitement at Buy Brite may have been due to the fact that she was participating in one of the earliest rites of our civilization.

  She had gone to Buy Brite that afternoon, leaving the children alone at home, in order to buy a bottle of soap that she had found efficient, sympathetic and cheap. This was called Flotilla. At Buy Brite there was a single entrance and exit. The corridor for soaps was a great distance from the entrance, and on her way there Betsy picked up a bag of potatoes (marked down), a jar of Teriyaki Sauce, a box of crackers, a dozen eggs and a pair of Argyle socks. She was careful to keep her purchases under ten so that she could use the express lane. Randy was an intelligent and obedient child but emergencies could always arise. There was the afternoon when he had gotten drunk on vanilla extract and been found playing with matches.

  Now Betsy would have noticed the music that played while she looked for Flotilla only, perhaps, if it had been music that she had danced to or music that reminded her of the pleasures of dancing. Betsy was of that generation for whom the air was, oftener than not, filled with music. She heard music everywhere; she sometimes heard music on the telephone while she waited for her call to be completed. In some ways this had left her imperceptive. She would never have noticed that morning that the air of Buy Brite was filled with some of the greatest music of the eighteenth century.

  This music had been chosen by a nephew of one of the majority stockholders, who seemed to think that there would be some enjoyable irony between eighteenth-century music and the tumult of a contemporary shopping center. He was, spiritually speaking, a frail young man who would amount to nothing, and the irony he so enjoyed would be discontinued and forgotten in a month or so. There is no irony, of course. The capital of Brandenburg was a market village and on a summer’s day when the doors of the cathedral stood open the great concertos must have been heard by the grocers and merchants. Betsy pushed her cart toward the express lane to the music that has contributed more, perhaps, than any other voice to our concept of nobility. Betsy pushed her cart toward lane 9—the express lane.

  Maria Salazzo was also there. Having, for as long as she could remember, examined the price of everything she bought, and tried not very successfully to cut their expenses by collecting coupons, to go to the store with a hundred dollars or more to spend was for her a new experience, a sense of freedom and power that was quite heady. It was because of this exciting sense of power perhaps that she headed for the express lane, in spite of the fact that her cart was heaped with groceries. She headed for the lane at the same time as Betsy. The scene with the wind chimes had left some enmity between them and they did not speak. They were neck and neck but Maria, moved perhaps by her sense of wealth, passed Betsy on her right. The queue was fairly long because at that time of day—twilight—shoppers were picking up what they had forgotten for dinner. First was a young man with two cans of cat food. Next was a black man with a bag of potato chips, a box of cheese, a can of apple juice and a novel about sex life in Las Vegas. After him was a woman with a dozen oranges in a bag, followed by Maria with a week’s groceries. The clerk was too tired to send her away and began to check her groceries through on the register.

  Betsy saw through the window that a light rain had begun to fall. She was worried about having left the children alone. Maybelle was the name of the checkout clerk and she wore a large pin that said so. “Maybelle,” said Betsy, “would you kindly explain to this lady that this lane is the express lane for shoppers with nine items only.”

  “If she can’t read I’m not going to teach her,” said Maybelle. The twelve or so members in the line behind Betsy showed their approval. “It’s about time somebody said something,” said a black.

  “You tell ’em, lady, you tell ’em,” said an old man with a frozen dinner. “I just can’t stand to see someone take advantage of other people’s kindness. It’s like fascism. It isn’t that she’s breaking the law. It’s just that most of us are too nice to do anything about it. Why do you suppose they put up a sign that says nine items? It’s to make the store more efficient for everyone. You’re just like a shoplifter only you’re not stealing groceries, you’re stealing time, you’re not stealing from the management, you’re stealing from us. People like you cause wars.”

  “Will you shut up,” said Maria. “Will you mind your own business!”

  “It happens to be our business,” said Betsy. “It’s everybody’s business. Tha
t sign up there says it’s for nine items or less and it’s for anybody who can read.”

  “They don’t care,” said Maria.

  “What did they put the sign up for if they don’t care?”

  “Well, I know one thing,” said Maria. “They didn’t put the sign up so that troublemakers like you could interfere in other people’s business.”

  “It is everybody’s business,” said Betsy. “It’s just like driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are a few basic rules or the business of life comes to a standstill. I’ve left my two children at home alone because I counted on being able to check through the express lane without waiting for someone with a week’s groceries.”

  “You tell her, lady, you tell her,” called a man way back in the line. “You’ve got my vote.”

  “This line is for nine items or less,” said Betsy, “and I’m going to see that we stick to the rule.” She picked a dozen eggs off the counter and put them back into Maria’s cart. Maria grabbed her hand and the eggs fell to the floor and broke.