by John Cheever
And then there was to think upon the courting of death and death’s dark simples, that in covering Jody’s body he willingly embraced decay and corruption. To kiss a man on the throat, to gaze into a man’s eyes with passion, was as unnatural as the rites and procedures in a funeral parlor; while kissing, as he had, the tight skin of Jody’s belly, he might have been kissing the turf that would cover him.
With Jody gone—with the removal of this erotic and sentimental schedule—Farragut found his sense of time and space somewhat imperiled. He owned a watch and a calendar and his surroundings had never been so easily catalogued, but he had never faced with such deep apprehension the fact that he did not know where he was. He was at the head of a slalom trail, he was waiting for a train, he was waking after a bad drug trip in a hotel in New Mexico. “Hey, Tiny,” he would shout, “where am I?” Tiny understood. “Falconer Prison,” he would say. “You killed your brother.” “Thanks, Tiny.” So, on the strength of Tiny’s voice, the bare facts would return. In order to lessen this troubling sense of otherness, he remembered that he had experienced this in the street as well. The sense of being simultaneously in two or three places at the same instant was something he had known beyond the walls. He remembered standing in an air-conditioned office on a sunny day while he seemed, at the same time, to be standing in a shabby farmhouse at the beginning of a blizzard. He could, standing in a highly disinfected office, catch the smell of a woodbox and catalogue his legitimate concerns about tire chains, snowplows and supplies of groceries, fuel and liquor—everything that concerns a man in a remote house at the beginning of a tempest. This was a memory, of course, seizing someplace in the present, but why should he, in an antiseptic room in midsummer, have unwillingly received such a memory? He tried to track it down on the evidence of smell. A wooden match burning in an ashtray might have provoked the memory, and he had been skeptical about his sensual responsiveness ever since he had, while watching the approach of a thunderstorm, been disconcerted by a wet and implacable erection. But if he could explain this duality by the smoke of a burning match, he could not explain that the vividness of his farmhouse memory deeply challenged the reality of the office where he stood. To weaken and dispel the unwanted memory, he forced his mind beyond the office, which was indeed artificial, to the incontestable fact that it was the nineteenth of July, the temperature outside was ninety-two, the time was three-eighteen and he had eaten for lunch scallops or cod cheeks with sweet tartar sauce, sour fried potatoes, salad, half a roll with butter, ice cream and coffee. Armed with these indisputable details, he seemed to scourge the farmhouse memory as one opens doors and windows to get the smoke out of a room. He was successful at establishing the reality of the office and while he was not truly uneasy about the experience, it had very definitely raised a question for which he had no information at all.
With the exception of organized religion and triumphant fucking, Farragut considered transcendent experience to be perilous rubbish. One saved one’s ardor for people and objects that could be used. The flora and fauna of the rain forest were incomprehensible, but one could comprehend the path that led to one’s destination. However, at Falconer the walls and the bars had sometimes seemed to threaten to vanish, leaving him with a nothingness that would be worse. He was, for example, waked early one morning by the noise of the toilet and found himself among the receding fragments of some dream. He was not sure of the depth of the dream—of its profundity—but he had never (nor had his psychiatrists) been able to clearly define the moraines of consciousness that compose the shores of waking. In the dream he saw the face of a beautiful woman he enjoyed but had never much loved. He also saw or felt the presence of one of the great beaches on a sea island. A nursery rhyme or jingle was being sung. He pursued these receding fragments as if his life, his self-esteem, depended upon his bringing them together into a coherent and useful memory. They fled, they fled purposefully like the carrier in a football game, and one by one he saw the woman and the presence of the sea disappear and heard the music of the jingle fade away. He checked his watch. It was three-ten. The commotion in the toilet subsided. He fell asleep.
Days, weeks, months or whatever later, he waked from the same dream of the woman, the beach and the song, pursued them with the same intensity that he had in the beginning, and one by one lost them while the music faded. Imperfectly remembered dreams—if they were pursued—were a commonplace, but the dispersal of this dream was unusually deep and vivid. He asked himself, from his psychiatric experience, if the dream was in color. It had been, but not brilliantly. The sea had been dark and the woman wore no lipstick, but the memory was not limited to black and white. He missed the dream. He was genuinely irritated at the fact that he had lost it. It was, of course, worthless, but it seemed like a talisman. He checked his watch and saw that it was three-ten. The toilet was still. He went back to sleep.
This happened again and again and perhaps again. The time was not always precisely three-ten, but it was always between three and four in the morning. He was always left irritable at the fact that his memory could, quite independently of anything he knew about himself, manipulate its resources in controlled and repeated designs. His memory enjoyed free will, and his irritability was increased by his realization that his memory was as unruly as his genitals. Then one morning, jogging from the mess to shop along the dark tunnel, he heard the music and saw the woman and the sea. He stopped so abruptly that several men banged into him, scattering the dream galley-west. That was that for the morning. But the dream was to reappear again and again in different places around the prison. Then one evening in his cell, as he was reading Descartes, he heard the music and waited for the woman and the sea. The cellblock was quiet. The circumstances for concentration were perfect. He reasoned that if he could pin down a line or two of the jingle, he would be able to reassemble the rest of the reverie. The words and the music were receding, but he was able to keep abreast of their retreat. He grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and was about to write down the lines he had captured when he realized that he did not know who or where he was, that the uses of the toilet he faced were completely mysterious, and that he could not understand a word of the book he held in his hands. He did not know himself. He did not know his own language. He abruptly stopped his pursuit of the woman and the music and was relieved to have them disappear. They took with them the absolute experience of alienation, leaving him with a light nausea. He was more shaken than wounded. He picked up the book and found that he could read. The toilet was for waste. The prison was called Falconer. He was convicted of murder. One by one he gathered up the details of the moment. They were not particularly sweet, but they were useful and durable. He did not know what would have happened had he copied down the words of the song. Neither death nor madness seemed involved, but he did not feel committed to discover what would happen if he pieced the reverie together. The reverie returned to him again and again, but he shrugged it off vigorously since it had nothing to do with the path he took or his destination.
“Knock, knock,” said the Cuckold. It was late, but Tiny hadn’t called lockup. Chicken Number Two and the Mad Dog Killer were playing rummy. Television was shit. The Cuckold came into Farragut’s cell and sat in the chair. Farragut disliked him. His round pink face and his thin hair had not been changed at all by prison. The brilliant pinkness of the Cuckold, his protuberant vulnerability—produced, it seemed, by alcohol and sexual embarrassment—had not lost its striking hue. “You miss Jody?” he asked. Farragut said nothing. “You score with Jody?” Farragut said nothing. “Hell, man, I know you do,” said the Cuckold, “but I don’t hold it against you. He was beautiful, he was just beautiful. Do you mind if I talk?”
“I’ve got a cab downstairs, waiting to take me to the airport,” said Farragut. Then he said, sincerely, “No, no, no, I don’t mind if you talk, I don’t mind at all.”
“I scored with a man,” said the Cuckold. “That was after I had left my wife. That time I found her screwing
this kid on the floor of the front hall. My thing with this man began in a Chinese restaurant. In those days I was the kind of lonely man you see eating in Chinese restaurants. You know? Anywhere in this country and in some parts of Europe where I’ve been. The Chung Fu Dynasty. The One Hung Low. Paper lanterns with teakwood frames all over the place. Sometimes they keep the Christmas lights up all year round. Paper flowers, many paper flowers. Large family groups. Also oddballs. Fat women. Square pegs. Jews. Sometimes lovers and always this lonely man. Me. We never eat the Chinese food, we lonely men. We always have the London broil or the Boston baked beans in Chinese restaurants. We’re international. Anyhow, I’m a lonely man eating the London broil in a Chinese restaurant on the strip outside Kansas City. Any place that used to have a local option has a place outside the town limits where you used to have to go for liquor, cunt, a motel bed for a couple of hours.
“The place, this Chinese restaurant, is about half full. At a table is this young man. That’s about it. He’s good-looking, but that’s because he’s young. He’ll look like the rest of the world in ten years. But he keeps looking at me and smiling. I honestly don’t know what he’s after. So then when I get my pineapple chunks, each one with a toothpick, and my fortune cookie, he comes over to my table and asks me what my fortune is. So I tell him I can’t read my fortune without my glasses and I don’t have my glasses and so he takes this scrap of paper and he reads or pretends to read that my fortune is I am going to have a beautiful adventure within the next hour. So I ask him what his fortune is and he says it’s the same thing. He goes on smiling. He speaks real nicely but you could tell he was poor. You could tell that speaking nicely was something he learned. So when I go out he goes out with me. He asks where I’m staying at and I say I’m staying at this motel which is attached to the restaurant. Then he asks if I have anything to drink in my room and I say yes, would he like a drink, and he says he’d love a drink and he puts his arm around my shoulder, very buddy-buddy, and we go to my room. So then he says can he make the drinks and I say sure and I tell him where the whiskey and the ice is and he makes some nice drinks and sits beside me and begins to kiss me on the face. Now, the idea of men kissing one another doesn’t go down with me at all, although it gave me no pain. I mean a man kissing a woman is a plus and minus situation, but a man kissing a man except maybe in France is a very worthless two of a kind. I mean if someone took a picture of this fellow kissing me it would be for me a very strange and unnatural picture, but why should my cock have begun to put on weight if it was all so strange and unnatural? So then I thought what could be more strange and unnatural than a man eating baked beans alone in a Chinese restaurant in the Middle West—this was something I didn’t invent—and when he felt for my cock, nicely and gently, and went on kissing me, my cock put on its maximum weight and began pouring out juice and when I felt of him he was halfway there.
“So then he made some more drinks and asked me why I didn’t take off my clothes and I said what about him and he dropped his pants displaying a very beautiful cock and I took off my clothes and we sat bare-ass on the sofa drinking our drinks. He made a lot of drinks. Now and then he would take my cock in his mouth and this was the first time in my life that I ever had a mouth around my cock. I thought this would look like hell in a newsreel or on the front page of the newspaper, but evidently my cock hadn’t ever seen a newspaper because it was going crazy. So then he suggested that we get into bed and we did and the next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and it was morning.
“It was all dark. I was alone. I had a terrible headache. I picked up the telephone and a voice said, ‘The time is now seven-thirty.’ Then I felt around in bed to see if there was any evidence of a come but there wasn’t. Then I went to the closet and looked at my wallet and all the money—about fifty dollars—was gone. Nothing else, none of my credit cards. So the hustler had teased me, given me a Mickey Finn and taken off with my money. I lost fifty dollars but I guessed I’d learned something. So while I was shaving the phone rang. It was the hustler. You’d think I’d be angry with him, wouldn’t you, but I was all sweetness and friendliness. First he said he was sorry that he made my drinks so strong I had passed out. Then he said I shouldn’t have given him all that money, that he wasn’t worth it. Then he said he was sorry, that he wanted to give me a marvelous time for free, and when could we meet. So I knew he had teased me and stoned me and robbed me, but I wanted him badly and I said I would be in at about half-past five and why didn’t he come around then.
“I had four calls to make that day and I made them and I made three sales, which was good for that territory. I was feeling all right when I got back to the motel and I had some drinks and he came in at half-past five and I mixed his drinks this time. He laughed when I did this but I didn’t say anything about the Mickey. Then he took off his clothes and folded them neatly on a chair and he took off my clothes with some assistance from me and kissed me all over. Then he got a look at himself in the big mirror on the bathroom door and this was the first time I ever saw a man who was narcissistic, what they call. One look at himself naked in the mirror and he couldn’t get away. He couldn’t get enough of it. He couldn’t tear himself away. So then I figured out my options. I had cashed a check and I had about sixty dollars in my wallet. I had to hide this. While he was loving himself I was worried about money. Then when I saw how deep he was, how really absorbed he was in the way he looked, I picked my clothes up off the floor and hung them in the closet. He didn’t notice me, he didn’t see anything but himself. So there he was, fondling his balls in the mirror, and there I was in the closet. I took the cash out of my wallet and stuffed it into the toe of my shoe. So then he finally separated from himself in the looking glass and joined me on the sofa and loved me up and when I came I nearly blew my eyeballs out. So then we got dressed and went out to the Chinese restaurant.
“When I got dressed I had some trouble getting into my shoe with the sixty dollars in the toe. I had credit cards to pay for dinner. When we walked to the restaurant he said why are you limping and I said I wasn’t limping, but I guessed he knew where the money was. They took Carte Blanche at the restaurant and so I wasn’t a lonely man in a Chinese restaurant anymore, I was an old queer with a young queer in a Chinese restaurant. I’ve been looking down my nose at couples like this all my life, but I’ve felt worse. We had this very big, very good dinner and so then I paid the check with my Carte Blanche and he said didn’t I have any cash and I said no, I’d given it all to him, hadn’t I, and he laughed and we went back to my room although I was very careful not to limp and wondered what I would do with the sixty dollars because I wasn’t going to pay him that much. So then I hid my shoe in a dark corner and we got into bed and he loved me up again and then we talked and I asked him who he was and he told me.
“He said his name was Giuseppe or Joe but he changed it to Michael. His father was Italian. His mother was white. His father had a dairy farm in Maine. He went to school but he worked for his father in his time off and he was about nine when the chief at the dairy farm started to blow him. He liked it and it got to be a daily thing until the dairy chief asked him if he would take it up the ass. He was eleven or twelve then. It took four or five tries before he got it all the way in but when it worked it felt wonderful and they did this all the time. But it was a very hard life going to school and working on the farm and never seeing anybody but the dairy chief so then he began to hustle, first in the nearest town and then the nearest city and then all the way across the country and around the world. He said that that’s what he was, a hustler, and that I shouldn’t feel sorry for him or wonder what would become of him.