by John Cheever
“Sort of,” he said.
“I never understood why you so liked the army.”
He heard, from the open space in front of the main entrance, a guard shouting: “You’re going to be good boys, aren’t you? You’re going to be good boys. You’re going to be good, good, good boys.” He heard the dragging ring of metal and guessed they’d come from Auburn.
“Oh, dammit,” she said. Peevishness darkened her face. “Oh, Goddammit,” she said with pure indignation.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I can’t find my Kleenex,” she said. She was foraging in the bag.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Everything seems to fight me today,” she said, “absolutely everything.” She dumped the contents of her bag onto the counter.
“Lady, lady,” said the turnkey, who sat above them on an elevated chair like a lifeguard. “Lady, you ain’t allowed to have nothing on the counter but soft drinks and butt cans.”
“I,” she said, “am a taxpayer. I help to support this place. It costs me more to keep my husband in here than it costs me to send my son to a good school.”
“Lady, lady, please,” he said. “Get that stuff off the counter or I’ll have to kick you out.”
She found the small box of paper and pushed the contents of her handbag back to where they belonged. Then he covered her hand with his, deeply thrilled at this recollection of his past. She pulled her hand away, but why? Had she let him touch her for a minute, the warmth, the respite, would have lasted for weeks. “Well,” she said, regaining her composure, her beauty, he thought.
The light in the room was unkind, but she was equal to its harshness. She had been an authenticated beauty. Several photographers had asked her to model, although her breasts, marvelous for nursing and love, were a little too big for that line of work. “I’m much too shy, much too lazy,” she had said. She had accepted the compliment; her beauty had been documented. “You know,” his son had said, “I can’t talk to Mummy when there’s a mirror in the room. She’s really balmy about her looks.” Narcissus was a man and he couldn’t make the switch, but she had, maybe twelve or fourteen times, stood in front of the full-length mirror in their bedroom and asked him, “Is there another woman of my age in this county who is as beautiful as I?” She had been naked, overwhelmingly so, and he had thought this an invitation, but when he touched her she said, “Stop fussing with my breasts. I’m beautiful.” She was, too. He knew that after she’d left, whoever had seen her—the turnkey, for instance—would say, “If that was your wife you’re lucky. Outside the movies I never seen anyone so beautiful.”
If she was Narcissa did the rest of the Freudian doctrine follow? He had never, within his limited judgment, taken this very seriously. She had spent three weeks in Rome with her old roommate Maria Lippincott Hastings Guglielmi. Three marriages, a fat settlement for each, and a very unsavory sexual reputation. They then had no maid and he and Peter had cleaned the house, laid and lighted fires, and bought flowers to celebrate her return from Italy. He met her at Kennedy. The plane was late. It was after midnight. When he bent to kiss her she averted her face and pulled down the floppy brim of her new Roman hat. He got her bags, got the car and they started home. “You seem to have had a marvelous time,” he said. “I have never,” she said, “been so happy in my life.” He jumped to no conclusions. The fires would be burning, the flowers gleaming. In that part of the world the ground was covered with dirty snow. “Was there any snow in Rome?” he asked. “Not in the city,” she said. “There was a little snow on the Via Cassia. I didn’t see it. I read about it in the paper. Nothing so revolting as this.”
He carried the bags into the living room. Peter was there in his pajamas. She embraced him and cried a little. The fires and the flowers missed her by a mile. He could try to kiss her again, but he knew that he might get a right to the jaw. “Can I get you a drink?” he asked, making the offer in a voice that rose. “I guess so,” she said, dropping an octave. “Campari,” she said. “Limone?” he asked. “Sì, sì,” she said, “un spritz.” He got the ice, the lemon peel, and handed her the drink. “Put it on the table,” she said. “Campari will remind me of my lost happiness.” She went into the kitchen, wet a sponge and began to wash the door of the refrigerator. “We cleaned the place,” he said with genuine sadness. “Peter and I cleaned the place. Peter mopped the kitchen floor.” “Well, you seem to have forgotten the refrigerator door,” she said. “If there are angels in heaven,” he said, “and if they are women, I expect they must put down their harps quite frequently to mop drainboards, refrigerator doors, any enameled surface. It seems to be a secondary female characteristic.” “Are you crazy?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His cock, so recently ready for fun, retreated from Waterloo to Paris and from Paris to Elba. “Almost everyone I love has called me crazy,” he said. “What I’d like to talk about is love.” “Oh, is that it,” she said. “Well, here you go.” She put her thumbs into her ears, wagged her fingers, crossed her eyes and made a loud farting sound with her tongue. “I wish you wouldn’t make faces,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t look like that,” she said. “Thank God you can’t see the way you look.” He said nothing more since he knew that Peter was listening.
It took her that time about ten days to come around. It was after a cocktail party and before a dinner. They took a nap, she in his arms. They were one, he thought. The fragrant skein of her hair lay across his face. Her breathing was heavy. When she woke she touched his face and asked: “Did I snore?” “Terribly,” he said, “you sounded like a chain saw.” “It was a lovely sleep,” she said, “I love to sleep in your arms.” Then they made love. His imagery for a big orgasm was winning the sailboat race, the Renaissance, high mountains. “Christ, that felt good,” she said. “What time is it?” “Seven,” he said. “When are we due?” “Eight.” “You’ve had your bath, I’ll take mine.” He dried her with a Kleenex and passed her a lighted cigarette. He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Liza sent us a wheel of Brie.” “That’s nice,” she said, “but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels.” He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. “That’s funny,” he said. “It constipates me.” That was their marriage then—not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees, but this: a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels.
One more time. It was when they still bred dogs. Hannah, the bitch, had whelped a litter of eight. Seven were in the kennel behind the house. One, a sickly runt who would die, had been let in. Farragut was waked from a light sleep at around three, by the noise of the puppy vomiting or defecating. He slept naked and naked he left the bed, trying not to disturb Marcia, and went down to the living room. There was a mess under the piano. The puppy was trembling. “That’s all right, Gordo,” he said. Peter had named the puppy Gordon Cooper. It was that long ago. He got a mop, a bucket and some paper towels and crawled bare-ass under the piano to clean up the shit. He had disturbed her and he heard her come down the stairs. She wore a transparent nightgown and everything was to be seen. “I’m sorry I disturbed you,” he said. “Gordo had an accident.” “I’ll help,” she said. “You needn’t,” he said. “It’s almost done.” “But I want to,” she said. On her hands and knees, she joined him under the piano. When it was done she stood and struck her head on that part of the piano that overlaps the bulk of the instrument. “Oh,” she said. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked. “Not terribly,” she said. “I hope I won’t have a bump or a shiner.” “I’m sorry, my darling,” he said. He stood, embraced her, kissed her and they made love on the sofa. He lighted a cigarette for her and they returned to bed. But it wasn’t much after this that he stepped into the kitchen to get some ice and found her embracing and kissing Sally Midland, with whom she did crewelwork twice a week. He thought the embrac
e was not platonic and he detested Sally. “Excuse me,” he said. “What for?” she asked. “I broke wind,” he said. That was nasty and he knew it. He carried the ice tray into the pantry. She was silent during dinner and for the rest of the evening. When they woke the next day—Saturday—he asked: “Good morning, darling?” “Shit,” she said. She put on her wrapper and went to the kitchen, where he heard her kick the refrigerator and then the dishwasher. “I hate you broken-down fucking second-rate appliances,” she shouted. “I hate, hate, hate this fucking dirty old-fashioned kitchen. I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls.” This was ominous, he knew, and the omens meant that he would get no breakfast. When she was distempered she regarded the breakfast eggs as if she had laid and hatched them. The egg, the egg for breakfast! The egg was like some sibyl in an Attic drama. “May I have eggs for breakfast?” he had once asked, years and years ago. “Do you expect me to prepare breakfast in this House of Usher?” she had asked. “Could I cook myself some eggs?” he asked. “You may not,” she said. “You will make such a mess in this ruin that it will take hours for me to clean it up.” On such a morning, he knew, he would be lucky to get a cup of coffee. When he dressed and went down, her face was still very dark and this made him feel much more grievous than hungry. How could he repair this? He saw out the window that there had been a frost, the first. The sun had risen, but the white hoarfrost stood in the shadow of the house and the trees with a Euclidian preciseness. It was after the first frost that you cut the fox grapes she liked for jelly, not much bigger than raisins, black, gamy; he thought that perhaps a bag of fox grapes would do the trick. He was scrupulous about the sexual magic of tools. This could be anxiety or the fact that they had once summered in southwestern Ireland, where tools had been male and female. He would, carrying a basket and shears, have felt like a transvestite. He chose a burlap sack and a hunting knife. He went into the woods—half or three-quarters of a mile from the house—to where there was a stand of fox grapes against a stand of pines. The exposure was due east and they were ripe, blackish-purple and rimmed with frost in the shade. He cut them with his manly knife and slapped them into the crude sack. He cut them for her, but who was she? Sally Midland’s lover? Yes, yes, yes! Face the facts. What he faced was either the biggest of falsehoods or the biggest of truths, but in any case a sense of reasonableness enveloped and supported him. But if she loved Sally Midland, didn’t he love Chucky Drew? He liked to be with Chucky Drew, but when they stood side by side in the shower he thought that Chucky looked like a diseased chicken, with flabby arms like the arms of those women who used to play bridge with his mother. He had not loved a man, he thought, since he had left the Boy Scouts. So, with his bag of wild grapes, he returned to the house, burs on his trousers, his brow bitten by the last flies of that year. She had gone back to bed. She lay there with her face in the pillow. “I picked some grapes,” he said. “We had the first frost last night. I picked some fox grapes for jelly.” “Thank you,” she said, into the pillow. “I’ll leave them in the kitchen,” he said. He spent the rest of the day preparing the house for winter. He took down the screens and put up the storm windows, banked the rhododendrons with raked and acid oak leaves, checked the oil level in the fuel tank and sharpened his skates. He worked along with numerous hornets who bumped against the eaves, looking, even as he, for some sanctuary for the coming ice age….
“It was partly because we stopped doing things together,” he said. “We used to do so much together. We used to sleep together, travel together, ski, skate, sail, go to concerts, we did everything together, we watched the World Series and drank beer together although neither of us likes beer, not in this country. That was the year Lomberg, whatever his name was, missed a no-hitter by half an inning. You cried. I did too. We cried together.”
“You had your fix,” she said. “We couldn’t do that together.”
“But I was clean for six months,” he said. “It didn’t make any difference. Cold turkey. It nearly killed me.”
“Six months is not a lifetime,” she said, “and anyhow, how long ago was that?”
“Your point,” he said.
“How are you now?”
“I’m down from forty milligrams to ten. I get methadone at nine every morning. A pansy deals it out. He wears a hairpiece.”
“Is he on the make?”
“I don’t know. He asked me if I liked opera.”
“You don’t, of course.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want to be married to a homosexual, having already married a homicidal drug addict.”
“I did not kill my brother.”
“You struck him with a fire iron. He died.”
“I struck him with a fire iron. He was drunk. He hit his head on the hearth.”
“All penologists say that all convicts claim innocence.”
“Confucius say …”
“You’re so superficial, Farragut. You’ve always been a lightweight.”
“I did not kill my brother.”
“Shall we change the subject?”
“Please.”
“When do you think you’ll be clean?”
“I don’t know. I find it difficult to imagine cleanliness. I can claim to imagine this, but it would be false. It would be as though I had claimed to reinstall myself in some afternoon of my youth.”
“That’s why you’re a lightweight.”
“Yes.”
He did not want a quarrel, not there, not ever again with her. He had observed, in the last year of their marriage, that the lines of a quarrel were as ritualistic as the words and the sacrament of holy matrimony. “I don’t have to listen to your shit anymore,” she had screamed. He was astonished, not at her hysteria, but at the fact that she had taken the words out of his mouth. “You’ve ruined my life, you’ve ruined my life,” she screamed. “There is nothing on earth as cruel as a rotten marriage.” This was all on the tip of his tongue. But then, listening for her to continue to anticipate his thinking, he heard her voice, deepened and softened with true grief, begin a variation that was not in his power. “You are the biggest mistake I ever made,” she said softly. “I thought that my life was one hundred percent frustration, but when you killed your brother I saw that I had underestimated my problems.”
When she spoke of frustration she sometimes meant the frustration of her career as a painter, which had begun and ended by her winning second prize at an art show in college twenty-five years ago. He had been called a bitch by a woman he deeply loved and he had always kept this possibility in mind. The woman had called him a bitch when they were both jay-naked on the upper floor of a good hotel. She then kissed him and said: “Let’s pour whiskey all over one another and drink it.” They had, and he could not doubt the judgment of such a woman. So bitchily, perhaps, he went over her career as a painter. When they first met she had lived in a studio and occupied herself mostly with painting. When they married, the Times had described her as a painter and every apartment and house they lived in had a studio. She painted and painted and painted. When guests came for dinner they were shown her paintings. She had her paintings photographed and sent to galleries. She had exhibited in public parks, streets and flea markets. She had carried her paintings up Fifty-seventh Street, Sixty-third Street, Seventy-second Street, she had applied for grants, awards, admission to subsidized painting colonies, she had painted and painted and painted, but her work had never been received with any enthusiasm at all. He understood, he tried to understand, bitch that he was. This was her vocation, as powerful, he guessed, as the love of God, and as with some star-crossed priest, her prayers misfired. This had its rueful charms.
Her passion for independence had reached into her manipulation of their joint checking account. The independence of women was nothing at all new to him. His experience was broad, if not exceptional. His great-grandmother had been twice around the Horn, under sail. She was supercargo, of course, the captain’s wife, but this had
not protected her from great storms at sea, loneliness, the chance of mutiny and death or worse. His grandmother had wanted to be a fireman. She was pre-Freudian, but not humorless about this. “I love bells,” she said, “ladders, hoses, the thunder and crash of water. Why can’t I volunteer for the fire department?” His mother had been an unsuccessful businesswoman, the manager of tearooms, restaurants, dress shops and at one time the owner of a factory that turned out handbags, painted cigarette boxes and doorstops. Marcia’s thrust for independence was not, he knew, the burden of his company but the burden of history.
He had caught on to the checkbook manipulation almost as soon as it began. She had a little money of her own, but scarcely enough to pay for her clothes. She was dependent upon him and was determined, since she couldn’t correct this situation, to conceal it. She had begun to have tradesmen cash checks and then claim that the money had been spent for the maintenance of the house. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters and painters didn’t quite understand what she was doing, but she was solvent and they didn’t mind cashing her checks. When Farragut discovered this he knew that her motive was independence. She must have known that he knew. Since they were both knowledgeable, what was the point of bringing it up unless he wanted a shower of tears—which was the last thing he wanted.
“And how,” he asked, “is the house? How is Indian Hill?” He did not use the possessive pronoun—My house, Your house, Our house. It was still his house and would be until she got a divorce. She didn’t reply. She did not draw on her gloves finger by finger, or touch her hair, or resort to any of the soap opera chestnuts used to express contempt. She was sharper than that. “Well,” she said, “it’s nice to have a dry toilet seat.”