Falconer

by John Cheever

  They met two or three times a week. Jody was the beloved and now and then he stood Farragut up so that Farragut had developed a preternatural sensitivity to the squeak of his lover’s basketball sneakers. On some nights his life seemed to hang on the sound. When the classes in banking began, the two men met always on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Jody reported on his experience with the university. Farragut had boosted a mattress from the shop and Jody had hustled a hot plate from somewhere, and they lay on the mattress and drank hot coffee and were fairly comfortable and happy.

  But Jody spoke skeptically to Farragut about the university. “It’s the same old shit,” said Jody. “Success School. Charm School. Elite School. How to Make a Million School. I been to them all and they’re all the same. You see, Chicken, banking arithmetic and all that shit is done by computers today and what you have to concentrate on is to inspire the confidence of the potential investor. That’s the big mystery of modern banking. For instance, you come on with the smile. Every class I took begins with lessons in this smile. You stand outside the door thinking about all the great things that happened to you that day, that year, for your whole life. It has to be real. You can’t fake this selling smile. I mean you remember a great girl who made you happy or winning a long shot if you ever had one or a new suit or a race you won or a great day when you really had everything going for you. Well, then you open the door and go in and smack him with this smile. Only they don’t know nothing, Chicken. I mean about smiling. They don’t know nothing at all about smiling.

  “It’s all right to smile, I mean you have to smile to sell anything, but if you don’t smile in the right way you get terrible lines on your face like you have. I love you, Chicken, but you don’t know how to smile. If you knew how to smile you wouldn’t have those wrinkles all around your eyes and those big, disgusting cuts like scars on your face. Look at me, for example. You think I’m twenty-four, don’t you? Well, I’m actually thirty-two, but most people when they’re asked to guess my age put me down for eighteen or nineteen at the most. That’s because I know how to smile, how to use my face. This actor taught me. He was in on a morals charge but he was very beautiful. He taught me that when you use your face you spare your face. When you throw your face recklessly into every situation you come up against, you come out looking like you do, you come out looking like shit. I love you, Chicken, I really do, otherwise I wouldn’t tell you that you got a ruined face. Now watch me smile. See? I look real happy—don’t I, don’t I, don’t I?—but if you’ll notice, I keep my eyes wide open so I won’t get disgusting wrinkles all around the edges like you have and when I open my mouth I open it very, very wide so that it won’t destroy the beauty of my cheeks, their beauty and smoothness. This teacher from the university tells us to smile, smile, smile, smile, but you go around smiling all the time like he teaches us to, you get to look like a very old person, a very old and haggard person who nobody wants anything to do with especially in the line of banking investments.”

  When Jody talked scornfully about the Fiduciary University, Farragut’s attitude seemed parental, seemed to express some abiding respect for anything that was taught by an organization, however false the teaching and however benighted the organization. Listening to Jody describe the Fiduciary University as shit made Farragut wonder if disrespect was not at the bottom of Jody’s criminal career and his life in prison. He felt that Jody should bring more patience, more intelligence, to his attacks on the university. It may have been no more than the fact that the word “fiduciary” seemed to him to deserve respect and inspire honesty; and in its train were thrift, industry, frugality and honest strife.

  In fact, Jody’s attacks on the university were continuous, predictable and, in the end, monotonous. Everything about the school was wrong. The teacher was ruining his face with too broad and committed a smile. The spot quizzes were too easy. “I don’t do no work,” Jody said, “and I always get the highest marks in the class. I got this memory. It’s easy for me to remember things. I learned the whole catechism in one night. Now, today we had Nostalgia. You think it’s got something to do with your nose. It don’t. It’s what you remember with pleasure. So what you do is your homework on what the potential investor remembers with pleasure and you play on his pleasant memories like a fucking violin. You not only stir up what they call Nostalgia with talk, you wear clothes and look and talk and use body language like something they’re going to remember with pleasure. So the potential investor likes history, and can’t you see me coming into the bank in a fucking suit of armor?”

  “You’re not taking it seriously, Jody,” Farragut said. “There must be something worthwhile in it. I think you ought to pay more attention to what is useful in the course.”

  “Well, there may be something in it,” Jody said. “But you see, I had it all before in Charm School, Success School, Elite School. It’s all the same shit. I had it ten times before. Now, they tell me a man’s name is for him the sweetest sound in the language. I know this, when I was three, four years old. I know the whole thing. You want to hear it? Listen.”

  Jody ticked off his points on the bars of Farragut’s cell. “One. Let the other fellow feel that all the good ideas are his. Two. Throw down a challenge. Three. Open up with praise and honest appreciation. Four. If you’re wrong admit it quickly. Five. Get the other person saying yes. Six. Talk about your mistakes. Seven. Let the other man save his face. Eight. Use encouragement. Nine. Make the thing you want to do seem easy. Ten. Make the other person seem happy about doing what you want. Shit, man, any hustler knows that. That’s my life, that’s the story of my life. I’ve been doing all this ever since I was a little kid and look where it got me. Look where my knowledge of the essence of charm and success and banking dumped me. Shit, Chicken, I feel like quitting”

  “Don’t, Jody,” said Farragut. “Stay with it. You’ll graduate and it’ll look good on your record.”

  “Nobody’s going to look at my record for another forty years,” said Jody.

  He came one night. It was snowing. “put in for sick call tomorrow,” Jody said. “Monday. There’ll be a crowd. I’ll wait for you outside the infirmary.” He was gone. “Don’t he love you no more?” asked Tiny. “Well, if he don’t love you no more it’s a weight off my shoulders. You’re really a nice guy, Farragut. I like you, but I got no use for him. He’s blown half the population and he’s hardly begun. Last week, the week before last—I can’t remember—he did this fan dance on the third tier. Toledo told me about it. He had this piece of newspaper pleated, you know, like a fan and he kept switching it from his cock to his asshole and doing this dance. Toledo said it was very disgusting. Very disgusting.” Farragut tried to imagine this and couldn’t. What he felt was that Tiny was jealous. Tiny had never experienced the love of a man. Tiny was insecure. He made out his sick-call slip, put it between the bars and went to bed.

  The waiting room at the infirmary was full and he and Jody stood outside where no one could hear them. “Now, listen,” Jody said. “Now, before you get upset listen to me. Don’t say nothing until I stop talking. I quit the university yesterday. Now, don’t say nothing. I know you’re not going to like it because you got this father image thing about me being a big success in the world, but wait until I tell you my plan. Don’t say anything. I said don’t say anything. Graduation is planned. Nobody but us in the school knows what’s going to happen, but you will in a few days. Listen to this. The cardinal, the cardinal of the diocese, is going to come here in a helicopter and present the diplomas to the graduating class. I’m not shitting you and don’t ask me why. I guess the cardinal’s some kind of a relation to somebody in the university, but it’ll be great publicity and that’s what’s going to happen. Now, one of the dudes in the class is the chaplain’s assistant. His name is DiMatteo. He’s a very close friend to me. So he’s in charge of all those dresses they wear on the altar, you know. So what he’s got is a red one, in my size, a perfect fit. He’s going to give it to me. So when the cardinal
comes there’ll be a lot of confusion. So I’ll hang back, hide in the boiler room, get into my red dress, and when the cardinal celebrates mass I’ll get my ass on the altar. Listen. I know what I’m doing. I know. I served on the altar beginning when I was eleven. That was when I was confirmed. I know you think they’ll catch me, but they won’t. At mass you don’t look at the other acolytes. That’s the thing about prayer. You don’t look. When you see a stranger on the altar you don’t go around asking who’s the stranger on the altar. This is holy business and when you’re doing holy business you don’t see nothing. When you drink the blood of Our Savior you don’t look to see if the chalice is tarnished or if there’s bugs in the wine. You get to be transfixed, you’re like transfixed. Prayer. That’s why it is. Prayer is what’s going to get me out of this place. The power of prayer. So when the mass is over I’ll get in the helicopter in my red dress and if they ask me where I’m from I’ll say I’m from Saint Anselm’s, Saint Augustine’s, Saint Michael’s, Saint Anywheres. When we land I’ll get out of my robes in the vestry and walk out on the street. What a miracle! I’ll panhandle subway fare up to 174th Street, where I got friends. I’m telling you this, Chicken, because I love and trust you. I’m putting my life in your hands. Greater love hath no man. But don’t expect to see very much of me from now on. This dude with the red dress likes me. The chaplain brings him in food from the outside and so I’m taking the electric plate. I may never see you again, Chicken, but if I can I’ll come back and say goodbye.” Jody then put his hands on his stomach, stooped and, groaning softly with pain, went into the waiting room. Farragut followed, but they didn’t speak again. Farragut complained of headaches and the doctor gave him an aspirin. The doctor wore dirty clothes and had a large hole in his right sock.

  Jody didn’t return and Farragut missed him painfully. He listened through all the million sounds of the prison for the squeak of basketball sneakers. It was all he wanted to hear. Soon after their parting at the infirmary he was given the ditto sheet to type announcing that His Eminence Cardinal Thaddeus Morgan would arrive at Falconer by helicopter on the twenty-seventh of May to present diplomas to the graduating class of the Fiduciary University. He would be assisted by the governor and the commissioner of correction. Mass would be celebrated. Attendance at the ceremony would be mandatory and cellblock officers would have further information.

  Toledo mimeographed the ditto but he didn’t overdo it this time and there was no blizzard of paper. In the beginning the announcement had almost no impact at all. Only eight men were going to be graduated. The thought of Christ’s Advocate descending from heaven onto the gallows field seemed to excite no one. Farragut, of course, went on listening for the squeak of basketball sneakers. If Jody came to say goodbye it would probably be the night before the cardinal’s arrival. That gave Farragut a month of waiting to see his lover and then for only a moment. He had to settle for this. Jody, he guessed, was thrashing around with the chaplain’s dude, but he did not experience any real jealousy. He could not honestly guess at whether or not Jody’s plans to escape would succeed since both the cardinal’s and Jody’s plans were preposterous, although the cardinal’s plans were reported in the newspaper.

  Farragut lay on his cot. He wanted Jody. The longing began in his speechless genitals, for which his brain cells acted as interpreter. The longing then moved up from his genitals to his viscera and from there to his heart, his soul, his mind, until his entire carcass was filled with longing. He waited for the squeak of basketball sneakers and then the voice, youthful, calculatedly so perhaps, but not too light, asking: Move over, Chicken. He waited for the squeak of basketball sneakers as he had waited for the sound of Jane’s heels on the cobbles in Boston, waited for the sound of the elevator that would bring Virginia up to the eleventh floor, waited for Dodie to open the rusty gate on Thrace Street, waited for Roberta to get off the C bus in some Roman piazza, waited for Lucy to install her diaphragm and appear naked in the bathroom door, waited for telephone bells, doorbells, church bells that told the time, waited for the end of the thunderstorm that was frightening Helen, waited for the bus, the boat, the train, the plane, the hydrofoil, the helicopter, the ski lift, the five o’clock whistle and the fire alarm to deliver his beloved into his arms. It seemed that he had spent an inordinate amount of his life and his energies waiting, but that waiting was not, even when no one came, an absolute frustration; it took some of its nature from the grain of the vortex.

  But why did he long so for Jody when he had often thought that it was his role in life to possess the most beautiful women? Women possessed the greatest and the most rewarding mysteriousness. They were approached in darkness and sometimes, but not always, possessed in darkness. They were an essence, fortified and besieged, worth conquering and, once conquered, flowing with spoils. At his horniest he wanted to reproduce, to populate hamlets, towns, villages and cities. It seemed to be his desire to fructify that drove him to imagine fifty women quickening with his children. Women were Ali Baba’s cave, they were the light of the morning, they were waterfalls, thunderstorms, they were the immensities of the planet, and a vision of this had led him to decide on something better when he rolled naked off his last naked scoutmaster. There was a trace of reproach in his memory of their splendor, but reproach was not what he meant. Considering the sovereignty of his unruly cock, it was only a woman who could crown that redness with purpose.

  There was, he thought, some sameness of degree in sexual possession and sexual jealousy; and accommodations and falsehoods were needed to equate this with the inconstancy of the flesh. He had often overlooked anything expedient in his loves. He had desired and pursued women who charmed him with their lies and enchanted him with their absolute irresponsibility. He had bought their clothes and their tickets, paid their hairdressers and their landlords and, in one case, a facial surgeon. When he bought some diamond earrings he had deliberately judged the sexual mileage he could expect from these jewels. When women had faults he often found them charming. When, while dieting rigorously and continuously talking about their diet, they are found eating a candy bar in a parking lot, one is enchanted. He did not find Jody’s faults enchanting. He did not find them.

  His radiant and aching need for Jody spread out from his crotch through every part of him, visible and invisible, and he wondered if he could bring off his love for Jody in the street. Would he walk down the street with his arm around Jody’s waist, would he kiss Jody at the airport, would he hold Jody’s hand in the elevator, and if he refrained from any of this wouldn’t he be conforming to the cruel edicts of a blasphemous society? He tried to imagine Jody and himself in the world. He remembered those pensions or European boardinghouses where he and Marcia and their son sometimes spent the summer. Young men, women, and their children—if they were not young they were at least agile—set the tone. One avoided the company of the old and the infirm. Their haunts were well known and word got around. But here and there, in this familial landscape, one saw at the end of the bar or the corner of the dining room two men or two women. They were the queers, a fact that was usually established by some conspicuous dynamism of opposites. One of the women would be docile; the other commanding. One of the men would be old; the other a boy. One was terribly polite to them, but they were never asked to crew in the sailboat races or take a picnic up the mountain. They were not even asked to the marriage of the village blacksmith. They were different. How they gratified their venereal hungers would remain, for the rest of the company, acrobatic and bizarre. They would not, as the rest of the company did, inaugurate the siesta with a good, sweaty fuck. Socially the prejudice against them was very light; at a more profound level it was absolute. That they enjoyed one another’s company, as they sometimes did, seemed astonishing and subversive. At one pension Farragut remembered, the queers seemed to be the only happy couple in the dining room. That had been a bad season for holy matrimony. The wives wept. The husbands sulked. The queers won the sailboat race, climbed the highest mountain
and were asked to lunch by the reigning prince. That was an exception. Farragut—extending things out to the street—tried to imagine Jody and himself at some such pension. It was five. They were at the end of the bar. Jody was wearing a white duck suit that Farragut had bought him; but that was as far as he could go. There was no way he could wrench, twist, screw or otherwise force his imagination to continue the scene.

  If love was a chain of resemblances, there was, since Jody was a man, the danger that Farragut might be in love with himself. He had seen self-love only once that he could remember in a man, someone he had worked with for a year or so. The man played a role of no consequence in his affairs and he had, perhaps to his disadvantage, only casually observed this fault, if it was a fault. “Have you ever noticed,” the man had asked, “that one of my eyes is smaller than the other?” Later the man had asked with some intensity: “Do you think I’d look better with a beard, a mustache perhaps?” Walking down a sidewalk to a restaurant, the man had asked: “Do you like your shadow? When the sun is behind me and I see my shadow I’m always disappointed. My shoulders aren’t broad enough and my hips are too wide.” Swimming together, the man asked: “Frankly now, what do you think of my biceps? I mean do you think they’re overdeveloped? I do forty push-ups every morning to keep them firm, but I wouldn’t want to look like a weight lifter.” These questions were not continuous, they were not even daily, but they came often enough to appear eccentric and had led Farragut to wonder, and then to the conviction that the man was in love with himself. He spoke about himself as some other man, in a chancy marriage, might ask for approval of his wife. Do you think she’s beautiful? Do you think she talks too much? Don’t you like her legs? Do you think she ought to cut her hair? Farragut did not think that he was in love with himself, but once, when he got off the mattress to piss, Jody had said, “Shit, man, you’re beautiful. I mean you’re practically senile and there isn’t much light in here, but you look very beautiful to me.” Bullshit, said Farragut, but in some part of the considerable wilderness that was himself, a flower seemed to bloom and he could not find the blossom and crush it with his heel. It was a whore’s line, he knew, but he seemed helplessly susceptible. It seemed that he had always known he was beautiful and had been waiting all his life to hear this said. But if in loving Jody he loved himself, there was that chance that he might, hell for leather, have become infatuated with his lost youth. Jody posed as a youth, he had the sweet breath and the sweet-smelling skin of youth, and in possessing these Farragut possessed an hour of greenness. He missed his youth, missed it as he would miss a friend, a lover, a rented house on one of the great beaches where he had been a young man. To embrace one’s self, one’s youth, might be easier than to love a fair woman whose nature was rooted in a past that he could never comprehend. In loving Mildred, for example, he had had to learn to accommodate her taste for anchovies at breakfast, scalding bath water, tardy orgasms, and lemon-yellow wallpaper, toilet paper, bed linen, lampshades, dinner plates, table linen, upholstery and cars. She had even bought him a lemon-yellow jockstrap. To love oneself would be an idle, an impossible, but a delicious pursuit. How simple to love oneself!