by John Cheever
Now the world is full of distractions—lovely women, music, French movies, bowling alleys and bars—but Coverly lacked the vitality or the imagination to distract himself. He went to work in the morning. He came home at dark, bringing a frozen dinner which he thawed and ate out of the pot. His reality seemed assailed or contested; his gifts for hopefulness seemed damaged or destroyed. There is a parochialism to some kinds of misery—a geographical remoteness like the life led by a grade-crossing tender—a point where life is lived or endured at the minimum of energy and perception and where most of the world appears to pass swiftly by like passengers on the gorgeous trains of the Santa Fe. Such a life has its compensations—solitaire and star-wishing—but it is a life stripped of friendship, association, love and even the practicable hope of escape. Coverly sank into this emotional hermitage and then there was a letter from Betsey.
“Sweetie,” she wrote, “I’m on my way back to Bambridge to see Grandma. Don’t try to follow me. I’m sorry I took all the money but as soon as I get work I’ll pay it all back to you. You can get a divorce and marry somebody else who will have children. I guess I’m just a wanderer and now I’m wandering again.” Coverly went to the telephone and called Bambridge. Her old grandmother answered. “I want to speak with Betsey,” Coverly shouted. “I want to speak with Betsey.” “She ain’t here,” the old lady said. “She don’t live here any more. She done married Coverly Wapshot, and went to live with him somewheres else.” “I’m Coverly Wapshot,” Coverly shouted. “Well, if you’re Coverly Wapshot what you bothering me for?” the old lady asked. “If you’re Coverly Wapshot why don’t you speak to Betsey yourself? And when you speak to her you tell her to get down on her knees to say her prayers. You tell her it don’t count unless she gets down on her knees.” Then she hung up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
And now we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale and any disinterested reader is encouraged to skip. It came about like this. Coverly’s immediate superior was a man named Walcott but in charge of the whole Taping Department was a young man named Pancras. He had a sepulchral voice, beautifully white and even teeth and he drove a European racing car. He never spoke to Coverly beyond a good morning or an encouraging smile when he passed through the long Tapers’ room. It may be that we over-estimate our powers of concealment and that the brand of loneliness and unrequital is more conspicuous than we know. In any case, Pancras suddenly approached Coverly one evening and offered him a ride home. Coverly would have been grateful for any company, and the low-slung racing car had a considerable effect on his spirits. When they turned off 325th Street onto Circle K, Pancras said he was surprised not to see Coverly’s wife on the doorstep. Coverly said she was visiting in Georgia. Then you must come home and have supper with me, Pancras said. He throttled the car, and off they roared.
Pancras’ house was, of course, exactly like Coverly’s, but it was near the army post and stood on a larger piece of land. It was ele gantly furnished and a pleasant change for Coverly from the disorder of his own housekeeping. Pancras made him a drink and began to butter Coverly’s parsnips. “I’ve wanted to talk with you for a long time,” he said. “Tour work is excellent—brilliant in fact—and I’ve wanted to say so. We’re sending someone to England in a few weeks—I’m going myself. We want to compare our tapings with the English. And we want someone who can get along, of course. We need someone personable, someone with some social experience. There’s a good chance that you might make the trip if you’re interested.”
These words of esteem made Coverly happy, although Pancras showered on him so many open and lingering glances that he felt uneasy. His friend was not effeminate; far from it. His voice was the deepest bass, his body seemed to be covered with hair and his movements were very athletic, but Coverly somehow had the feeling that if he was touched on the bun he would swoon. He could see that it was ungrateful and dishonest to accept the man’s charming house and his hospitality while he entertained suspicions about his private life; and to tell the truth he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Coverly could not contemplate the consummation of any such friendship but he could enjoy the atmosphere of praise and tenderness that Pancras created and in which he seemed to bask. The dinner was the best meal Coverly had eaten in months and after dinner Pancras suggested that they take a walk through the army garrison and into the woods. It was exactly what Coverly would have liked to do and so they walked out in the evening and made a circle through the woods, talking in friendly and serious voices about their work and their pleasure. Then Pancras drove Coverly home.
In the morning, before he had started work, Walcott warned Coverly about Pancras. He was queer. This news excited in Coverly bewilderment, sadness and some stubbornness. He felt as Cousin Honora felt about the cart horse. He did not want to be a cart horse, but he did not want to see them exposed to cruelty. He did not see Pancras for a day or two and then one evening, when he was about to eat his dinner from the pot, the racing car roared into K Circle and Pancras rang the bell. He took Coverly back to his own house for supper and they walked again in the woods. Coverly had never found anyone so interested in his recollections of St. Botolphs and he was happy to be able to talk about the past.
After another evening with Pancras it was apparent to Coverly what his friend’s intentions were, although he did not know how to behave himself and saw no reason why he should not eat dinner with a homosexual. He claimed to himself to be innocent or naive, but this pretense was the thinnest. The queer never really surprise us. We choose our neckties, comb our hair with water and lace our shoes in order to please the people we desire; and so do they. Coverly had enough experience in friendship to know that the exaggerated attentions he was receiving from Pancras were amorous. He meant to be seductive and when they took their walk after supper he seemed to emanate a stir of erotic busyness or distress. They had come to the last of the houses and had reached the army installation—barracks and a chapel and a walk lined with whitewashed stone and a man sitting on a step hammering out a bracelet from a piece of rocket scrap. It was the emotional no man’s land of most army posts—tolerable enough in the push of war, but now more isolated and lonely than ever. They walked through the barracks area into the woods and sat down on some stones.
“We’re going to England in ten days,” Pancras said.
“I’ll miss you,” Coverly said.
“You’re coming,” Pancras said. “I’ve arranged the whole thing.”
Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality. “Only ten more days,” his companion sighed, and suddenly Coverly felt a dim rumble of homosexual lust in his trousers. This lasted for less than a second. Then the lash of his conscience crashed down with such force that his scrotum seemed injured, at the prospect of joining this pale-eyed company, wandering in the dark like Uncle Peepee Marshmallow. A second later the lash came down again—this time for having scorned a human condition. It was Uncle Peepee’s destiny to wander through the gardens and Coverly’s vision of the world must be a place where this forlornness was admitted. Then the lash crashed down once more, this time at the hands of a lovely woman who scorned him bitterly for his friend and whose eyes told him that he was now shut away forever from a delight in girls—those creatures of morning. He had thought with desire of going to sea with a pederast and Venus turned her naked back on him and walked out of his life forever.
It was a withering loss. Their airs and confessions, their memories and their theories about the atomic bomb, their secret stores of Kleenex and
hand lotion, the warmth of their breasts, their powers of succumbing and forgiveness, that sweetness of love that had passed his understanding—was gone. Venus was his adversary. He had drawn a mustache on her gentle mouth and she would tell her minions to scorn him. She might allow him to talk to an old woman now and then, but that was all.
It was in the summer—the air was full of seed and pollen—and with that extraordinary magnification of grief—he might have been looking through a reading glass—Coverly saw the wealth of berries and seed pods in the ground around his feet and thought how richly all of nature was created to inseminate its kind—all but Coverly. He thought of his poor, kind parents at West Farm, dependent for their happiness, their security, their food upon a prowess that he didn’t have. Then he thought of Moses and the wish to see his brother was passionate. “I can’t go to England with you,” he told Pancras. “I have to go and see my brother.” Pancras was supplicatory and then downright angry and they came out of the woods in single file.
In the morning Coverly told Walcott that he didn’t want to go to England with Pancras and Walcott said this was all right and smiled. Coverly looked back at him grimly. It was a knowledgeable smile—he would know about Pancras—it was the smile of a Philistine, a man content to have saved his own skin; it was the kind of crude smile that held together and nourished the whole unwholesome world of pretense, censure and cruelty—and then, looking more closely, he saw that it was a most friendly and pleasant smile, the smile at the most of a man who recognizes another man to have known his own mind. Coverly asked for two days’ annual leave to go and visit Moses.
He left the laboratory at noon, packed a bag and took a bus to the station. Some women were waiting on the platform for the train but Coverly averted his eyes from them. It was not his right to admire them any more. He was unworthy of their loveliness. Once aboard the train he shut his eyes against anything in the landscape that might be pleasing, for a beautiful woman would sicken him with his unworthiness and a comely man would remind him of the sordidness of the life he was about to begin. He could have traveled peaceably then only in some hobgoblin company of warty men and quarrelsome women—some strange place where the hazards of grace and beauty were outlawed.
At Brushwick the seat beside him was occupied by a gray-haired man who carried one of those green serge book bags that used to be carried in Cambridge. The worn green cloth reminded Coverly of the New England winter—a simple and traditional way of life—going back to the farm for Christmas and the snow-dark as it gathered over the skating pond and the barking of dogs way off. With the book bag between them, the stranger and Coverly began to talk. His companion was a scholar. Japanese literature was his field. He was interested in the Samurai Sagas and showed Coverly a translation of one. It was about some homosexual samurai and when Coverly had absorbed this his traveling companion produced some prints of the samurai in action. Then the valves of Coverly’s heart felt abraded and he seemed to listen at his organs, as we will at a door, to see if there was any guilty arousal there. Then, blushing like Honora—coloring like any spinster who finds the whole sky-high creaking edifice of her chastity shaken—Coverly grabbed for his suitcase and fled to another car. Feeling sick, he went to the toilet, where someone had written on the wall in pencil a homosexual solicitation for anyone who would stand by the water cooler and whistle “Yankee Doodle.” How could he refresh his sense of moral reality; how could he put different words in Pancras’ mouth or pretend that the prints he had been shown were of geisha crossing a bridge in the snow? He stared out of the window at the landscape, seeking in it, with all his heart, some shred of usable and creative truth, but what he looked into were the dark plains of American sexual experience where the bison still roam. He wished that instead of going to the Macllhenney Institute he had gone to some school of love.
He saw the entrance and the pediment of such a school and imagined the curriculum. There would have been classes on the moment of recognition; lectures on the mortal error of confusing worship with tenderness; there would have been symposiums on indiscriminate erotic impulses and man’s complex and demoniac nature and there would have been descriptions of the powers of anxiety to light the world with morbid and lovely colors. Representations of Venus would be paraded before them and they would be marked on their reactions. Those pitiful men who counted upon women to assure them of their sexual nature would confess to their sins and miseries, and libertines who had abused women would also testify. Those nights when he had lain in bed, listening to trains and rains and feeling under his hip bread crumbs and the cold stains of love—those nights when his joy overshot his understanding—would be explained in detail and he would be taught to put an exact and practical interpretation on the figure of a lovely woman bringing in her flowers at dusk before the frost. He would learn to estimate sensibly all such tender and lovely figures—women sewing, their laps heaped with blue cloth—women singing in the early dark to their children the ballads of that lost cause, Charles Stuart—women walking out of the sea or sitting on rocks. There would be special courses for Coverly on the matriarchy and its subtle influence—he would have to do make-up work here—courses in the hazards of uxoriousness that, masquerading as love, expressed skepticism and bitterness. There would be scientific lectures on homosexuality and its fluctuating place in society and the truth or the falsity of its relationship to the will to die. That hair-line where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another; that fine point where tenderness corrodes self-esteem and the spirit seems to flake like rust would be put under a microscope and magnified until it was as large and recognizable as a steel girder. There would be graphs on love and graphs on melancholy and the black looks that we are entitled to give the hopelessly libidinous would be measured to a millimeter. It would be a hard course for Coverly, he knew, and he would be on probation most of the time, but he would graduate. An upright piano would play “Pomp and Circumstance” and he would march across a platform and be given a diploma and then he would go down the stairs and under the pediment in full possession of his powers of love and he would regard the earth with candor and with relish, world without end.
But there was no such school, and when he got into New York, late that night, it was raining and the streets around the station seemed to exhale an atmosphere of erotic misdemeanor. He got a hotel room and, looking for the truth, decided that what he was was a homosexual virgin in a cheap hotel. He would never see the resemblance he bore to Cousin Honora, but, as he cracked his knuckles and stretched his neck, his train of thought was like the old lady’s. If he was a pederast he would be one openly. He would wear bracelets and pin a rose in his bottonhole. He would be an organizer of pederasts, a spokesman and prophet. He would force society, government and the law to admit their existence. They would have clubs—not hole-in-the-wall meeting places, but straight-forward organizations like the English-Speaking Union. What bothered him most was his inability to discharge his responsibilities to his parents, and he sat down and wrote Leander a letter.
A morning train took Coverly out to Clear Haven and when he saw his brother he thought how solid this friendship was. They embraced—they swatted one another—they got into the old Rolls and in a second Coverly had dropped from the anguish of anxiety to a level of life that seemed healthy and simple and reminded him only of good things. Could it be wrong, he wondered, that he seemed, in spirit, to have returned to his father’s house? Could it be wrong that he felt as if he were back at the farm, making some simple journey down to Travertine to race the Tern? They passed the gates and went up through the park while Moses explained that he was living at Clear Haven only until autumn; that it had been Melissa’s home. Coverly was impressed with the towers and battlements, but not surprised since it was a part of his sense of the world that Moses would always have better luck than he. Melissa was still in bed, but she would be down soon. They would have a picnic at the pool. “This is the library,” Moses said. “This is the ballroom, this is the state
dining room, this is what they call the rotunda.” Then Melissa came down the stairs.
She took Coverly’s breath away; her golden skin and her dark-blond hair. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, and while her voice was pleasant enough it could never be compared to the power of her appearance. She seemed a triumphant beauty to Coverly—an army with banners—and he couldn’t take his eyes off her until Moses pushed him toward a bathroom where they put on their bathing trunks. “I think we’d better wear hats,” Melissa said. “The sun’s terribly bright.” Moses opened a coat closet, passed Melissa a hat and, rummaging around for one himself, brought down a green Tyrolean hat with a brush in the band. “Is this D’Alba’s?” he asked. “Lord, no,” Melissa said. “Pansies never wear hats.” It was all that Coverly needed. He plunged into the coat closet and grabbed the first hat he saw—an old Panama that must have belonged to the late Mr. Scaddon. It was much too big for him—it drooped down over his ears—but with at least this one symbol of his male virility intact he walked behind Moses and Melissa down toward the pool.