by John Cheever
A few nights later, Melissa was driving back from the village of Parthenia. The street was lighted erratically by the few stores that hung on at the edge of town—general stores smelling of stale bread and bitter oranges, where those in the neighborhood who were too lazy, too tired and too infirm to go to the palatial shopping centers bought their coffee rings, beer and hamburgers. The darkness of the street was sparsely, irregularly, checkered with light, and she saw the tall man crossing one of these apertures, throwing a long, crooked shadow ahead of him on the paving. He held a heavy bag of groceries in each arm. He was no more stooped than before—the curvature of his spine seemed set—but the bags must be heavy, and she pitied him. She drove on, evoking defensively the worlds of difference that lay between them and the chance that he would have misunderstood her kindness had she offered to give him a ride. But when she had completed her defense it seemed so shallow, idle and selfish that she turned the car around in her own driveway and drove back toward Parthenia. Her best instinct was to help him—to make some peace between his figure and her irrational fear of death—and why should she deny herself this? He would have passed the lighted stores by this time, she decided, and she drove slowly up the dark street, looking for his stooped figure. When she saw him she turned the car around and stopped. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Can I give you a ride? You seem to have so much to carry.” He turned and looked at the beautiful stranger without quite relaxing his half-grin, and she wondered if he wasn’t a deaf-mute as well as weak-minded. Then a look of distrust touched the grin. There was no question about what he was feeling. She was from that world that had gulled him, pelted him with snowballs and rifled his lunchbox. His mother had told him to beware of strangers and here was a beautiful stranger, perhaps the most dangerous of all. “No!” he said. “No, no!” She drove on, wondering what was at the bottom of her impulse; wondering, in the end, why she should scrutinize a simple attempt at kindness.
On Thursday the maid was off, and Melissa took care of the baby. He slept after lunch, and she woke him at four, lifting him out of his crib and letting the blankets fall. They were alone. The house was quiet. She carried him into the kitchen, put him in his highchair and opened a can of figs. Sleepy and docile and pale, he followed her with his eyes, and smiled sweetly when their eyes met. His shirt was stained and wet, and she wore a wrapper. She sat by him at the table, with her face only a few inches from his, and they spooned the figs out of the can. He shuddered now and then with what seemed to be pleasure. The quiet house, the still kitchen, the pale and docile boy in his stained shirt, her round white arms on the table, the comfortable slovenliness of eating from a can were all part of an intimacy so intense and yet so tranquil that it seemed to her as if she and the baby were the same flesh and blood, subjects of the same heart, all mingled and at ease. What a comfort, she thought, is one’s skin. . . . But it was time then to change the boy, time to dress herself, time to take up cheerfully the other side of her life. Carrying the child through the living room she saw, out of the window, the stooped figure with his rubbers and umbrella.
A wind was blowing and he moved indifferently through a diagonal fall of yellow leaves, craning his neck like an adder, his back bent under its impossible burden. She held the baby’s head against her breast, foolishly, instinctively, as if to protect his eyes from some communicable evil. She turned away from the window, and shortly afterward there was a loud pounding on the back door. How had he found where she lived, and what did he want? He might have recognized her car in the driveway; he might have asked who she was, the village was that small. He had not come to thank her for her attempted kindness. She felt sure of that. He had come—in his foolishness—to accuse her of something. Was he dangerous? Was there any danger left in Proxmire Manor? She put the boy down and went toward the back door, summoning her self-respect. When she opened it, there was Mr. Narobi’s good-looking grocery boy. He made it all seem laughable—came in beaming and with a kind of radiance that seemed to liberate her from this absurd chain of anxieties.
“You’re new?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Emile. It’s a funny name. My father was French.”
“Did he come from France?”
“Oh, no, Quebec. French Canadian.”
“What does he do?”
“When people used to ask me that, I used to say, ‘He plays the harp!’ He’s dead. He died when I was little. My mother works at the florist’s—Barnum’s—on Green Street. Maybe you know her?”
“I don’t think I do. Would you like a beer?”
“Sure. Why not? It’s my last stop.”
She asked if he wanted something to eat, and got him some crackers and cheese. “I’m always hungry,” he said.
She brought the baby into the kitchen and they all three sat at the table while he ate and drank. Stuffing his mouth with cheese, he seemed to be a child. His gaze was clear and disarming. She couldn’t meet it without a stir in her blood. And was this sluttishness? Was she worse than Mrs. Lockhart? Would she be dragged figuratively out of Proxmire Manor at the tail of a cart? She didn’t care.
“Nobody ever gave me a beer before,” he said. “They give me Cokes, sometimes. I guess they don’t think I’m old enough. But I drink. Martinis, whisky, everything.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen. Now I have to go.”
“Please don’t go,” she said.
He stood at the table, covering her with his wide gaze, and she wondered what would happen if she reached out to him. Would he run out of the kitchen? Would he shout, “Unhand me!”? He seemed ripe; he seemed ready for the picking; and yet there was something else in the corner of his eyes—reserve, wariness. He perhaps had a vision of something better, and if he had, she would encourage him with all her heart. Go and love the drum majorette, the girl next door.
“Oh, I’d like to stay,” he said. “It’s nice here. But it’s Thursday, and I have to take my mother shopping. Thank you very much.”
He went to the house three or four times a week. Melissa was usually alone in the late afternoons and he timed his visits. Sometimes she seemed to be waiting for him. No one had ever been so attentive. She seemed interested in all the facts of his life—that his father had been a surveyor, that he drove a secondhand Buick, that he had done well at school. She usually gave him a beer and sat with him in the kitchen. Her company excited him. It made him feel that he might do well. Some of her worldliness, some of her finesse, would rub off on him and get him out of the grocery business. Suddenly, one afternoon, she said quite shyly, “You know, you’re divine.”
He wondered if she hadn’t lost her marbles. He had heard that women sometimes did. Had he been wasting his time? He didn’t want to fool around with a woman who had lost her marbles. He knew he wasn’t divine. If he was, someone would have said so before and if he had been divine and had been convinced of this, he would have concealed it—not through modesty but through an instinct of self-preservation. “Sometimes I think I’m good-looking,” he said earnestly to try and modify her praise. He finished his beer. “Now I have to get back to the store.”
CHAPTER XI
Melissa went shopping in New York a few days later. She stood on the platform with her neighbor, Gertrude Bender, waiting for the midmorning train. As the train came around the curve the station agent pushed out on a wagon one of those yellow wooden boxes that are used for transporting coffins. This simple fact of life came as a blow to Melissa’s high spirits. “It must be Gertrude Lockhart,” her friend whispered. “They’re sending her back to Indiana.”
“I didn’t know she was dead,” Melissa said.
“She hung herself in the garage,” her friend said, still whispering, and they boarded the train.
Now it was not true that nothing happened in Proxmire Manor; the truth was that eventfulness in the community took such eccentric curves that it was difficult to comprehend. It was not a forc
e of discreetness that kept Melissa from knowing Gertrude Lockhart’s story; it was that the story was more easily forgotten than understood. She had been, considering her widespread reputation for licentiousness, a singularly winsome woman; light-boned, quick, a little nervous. Her skin was very white. This was not a point of beauty, a stirring pallor. She just happened to have a white skin. Her hair was ash-blond but it had lost its shine. Her eyes were bright, small, dark and set close together. Her ears were too big, a fact that made her seem basically unserious. At the fourth- or fifth-string boarding school she had attended she had been known as Dirty Gertie. She was married, happily enough, to Pete Lockhart and had three small children. Her downfall began not with immortal longings but with an uncommonly severe winter when the main soil line from their house to the septic tank froze. The toilets backed up into the bathtubs and sinks. Nothing drained. Her husband went off to work. Her children caught the school bus. At half-past eight she found herself alone in a house that had, in a sense, ceased to function. The place was not luxurious but it appeared to be civilized; it appeared to promise something better than relieving herself in a bucket. At nine o’clock she took a drink of whisky and began to call the plumbers of Parthenia. There were seven and they were all busy. She kept repeating that her case was an emergency. One firm offered, as a favor, to stir up for her a retired plumber and presently an old man in an old car came to the house. He looked sadly at the mess in the bathtubs and the sinks and told her that he was a plumber, not a ditchdigger, and that she would have to find someone to dig a trench before he could repair the drain. She had another drink, put on some lipstick and drove into Parthenia.
She went first to the state employment office where eighteen or twenty men were sitting around looking for work but none of them was willing to dig a ditch and she saw as one of the facts of her life, her time, that standards of self-esteem had advanced to a point where no one was able to dig a hole. She went to the liquor store to get some whisky and told the clerk her problems. He said he thought he could get someone to help. He made a telephone call. “I’ve got you somebody,” he said. “He’s not as bad as he sounds. Give him two dollars an hour and all the whisky he can drink. His father-in-law fired him out of the house a couple of weeks ago and he’s on the bum, but he’s a nice guy.” She went home and had another drink. Sometime later the doorbell rang. She had expected an old man with the shakes but what she saw was a man in his thirties. He wore tight jeans and a dark pullover and stood on her steps with his hands thrust into his back pockets, his chest pushed forward in a curious way as if this were a gesture of pride, friendship or courtship. His skin was dark, rucked deeply around the mouth like the seams on a boot, and his eyes were brown. His smile was bare amorousness. It was his only smile, but she didn’t know this. He would smile amorously at his shovel, amorously into his whisky glass, amorously into the hole he had dug, and when it was time to go home he would smile amorously at the ignition switch on his car. She offered him some whisky but he said he would wait. She showed him where the tools were and he began to dig.
He worked for two hours and uncovered and cleared the frozen drain. She was able to clear out the bathtubs and sinks. When he returned the tools she asked him in for his whisky. She was quite drunk herself by then. He poured himself a water glass of whisky and drank it off. “What I really need,” he said, “is a shower. I’m living in a furnished room. You have to take turns at the bathtub.” She said he could take a shower, knowing full well what was afoot. He drank off another glass of whisky and she led him upstairs and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll just get out of these things,” he said, pulling off his sweater and dropping his jeans.
They were still in bed when the children came home. She opened the door and called sweetly down the stairs: “Mummy’s resting. There are cookies on top of the icebox. Be sure and take your vitamin pills before you go out to play.” When the children went out she gave him ten dollars, kissed him good-bye and slipped him out the back door. She never saw him again.
The old plumber fixed the drain and on the weekend Pete filled in the trench. The weather remained bitter. One morning, a week or ten days later, she was wakened by her husband’s huffing and puffing. “There isn’t time, darling,” she said. She slipped on a wrapper, went downstairs and tried to open a package of bacon. The package promised to seal in the bacon’s smoky flavor but she couldn’t get the package open. She broke a fingernail. The transparent wrapper that imprisoned the bacon seemed like some immutable transparency in her life, some invisible barrier of frustrations that stood between herself and what she deserved. Pete joined her while she was struggling with the bacon and continued his attack. He was very nearly successful—he had her backed up against the gas range—when they heard the thunder of their children’s footsteps in the hall. Pete went off to the train with mixed and turbulent feelings. She got the children some breakfast and watched them eat it with the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning. When the children had gone off to get the school bus she turned up the thermostat. There was a dull explosion from the furnace room. A cloud of rank smoke came out the cellar door. She poured herself a glass of whisky to steady her nerves and opened the door. The room was full of smoke but there was no fire. Then she telephoned the oil-burner repairman they employed. “Oh, Charlie isn’t here,” his wife said brightly. “He’s up in Utica with his bowling team. They’re in the semi-finals. He won’t be back for ten days.” She called every oil-burner man in the telephone directory but none of them was free. “But someone must come and help me,” she exclaimed to one of the women who answered the phone. “It’s zero outside and there’s no heat at all. Everything will freeze.” “Well, I’m sorry but I won’t have a man free until Thursday,” the stranger said. “But why don’t you buy yourself an electric heater? You can keep the temperature up with those things.” She had some more whisky, put on some lipstick and drove to the hardware store in Parthenia where she bought a large electric heater. She plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen and pulled the switch. All the lights in the house went out and she poured herself some more whisky and began to cry.
She cried for her discomforts but she cried more bitterly for their ephemeralness, for the mysterious harm a transparent bacon wrapper and an oil burner could do to the finest part of her spirit; cried for a world that seemed to be without laws and prophets. She went on crying and drinking. Some repairmen came and patched things up but when the children came home from school she was lying unconscious on the sofa. They took their vitamin pills and went out to play. The next week the washing machine broke down and flooded the kitchen. The first repairman she called had gone to Miami for his vacation. The second would not be able to come for a week. The third had gone to a funeral. She mopped up the kitchen floor but it was two weeks before a repairman came. In the meantime the gas range went and she had to do all the cooking on an electric plate. She could not educate herself in the maintenance and repair of household machinery and felt in herself that tragic obsolescence she had sensed in the unemployed of Parthenia who needed work and money but who could not dig a hole. It was this feeling of obsolescence that pushed her into drunkenness and promiscuity and she was both.
One afternoon when she was very drunk she threw her arms around the milkman. He pushed her away roughly. “Jesus, lady,” he said, “what kind of a man do you think I am?” In a blackmailing humor he stuffed the icebox with eggs, milk, orange juice, cottage cheese, vegetable salad and eggnog. She took a bottle of whisky up to her bedroom. At four o’clock the oil burner went out of order. She was back on the telephone again. No one could come for three or four days. It was very cold outside and she watched the winter night approach the house with the horror of an aboriginal. She could feel the cold overtake the rooms. When it got dark she went into the garage and took her life.
They held a little funeral for her in the undertaking parlor in Parthenia. The room where her monumental coffin stood was softly ligh
ted and furnished like a cocktail lounge and the music from the electric organ was virtually what you would have heard in a hotel bar in someplace like Cleveland. She had, it turned out, no friends in Proxmire Manor. The only company her husband was able to muster was a handful of near strangers they had met on various cruise ships. They had taken a two-week Caribbean cruise each winter and the ceremony was attended by the Robinsons from the S.S. Homeric, the Howards from S.S. United States, the Gravelys from the Gripsholm and the Leonards from the Bergensfjord. A clergyman said a few trenchant words. (The oil-burner repairmen, electricians, mechanics and plumbers who were guilty of her death did not attend.) During the clergyman’s remarks Mrs. Robinson (S.S. Homeric) began to cry with a violence and an anguish that had nothing to do with that time or place. She groaned loudly, she rocked in her chair, she sobbed convulsively. Mrs. Howard and Mrs. Leonard and then the men began to sob and wail. They did not cry over the loss of her person; they scarcely knew her. They cried at the realization of how bitterly disappointing her life had been. Melissa knew none of this, of course, traveling that morning on the same train that carried Mrs. Lockhart’s remains on the first leg of their trip back to Indiana.