by John Cheever
Gertrude Bender, with whom Melissa sat, had silver-gilt hair skinned back in a chignon with such preciseness and skill that Melissa wondered how it had been accomplished. She had matching silver-gilt furs, and rattled six gold bracelets. She was a pretty, shallow woman who wielded the inarguable powers of great wealth and whose voice was shrill. She talked about her daughter Betty. “She’s worried about her schoolwork but I tell her, ‘Betty,’ I tell her, ‘don’t you worry about your schoolwork. Do you think what I learned in school got me where I am today? Develop a good figure and learn the forks. That’s all that matters.’”
In the seat in front of Melissa there was an old lady whose head was bowed under the weight of a hat covered with cloth roses. A family occupied the facing seats across the aisle—a mother and three children. They were poor. Their clothing was cheap and threadbare, and the woman’s face was worn. One of her children was sick and lay across her lap, sucking his thumb. He was two or three years old, but it was hard to guess his age, he was so pale and thin. There were sores on his forehead and sores on his thin legs. The lines around his mouth were as deep as those on the face of a man. He seemed sick and miserable, but stubborn and obdurate at the same time, as if he held in his fist a promise to something bewildering and festive that he would not relinquish in spite of his sickness and the strangeness of the train. He sucked his thumb noisily and would not move from his position in the midst of life. His mother bent over him as she must have done when she nursed him, and sang him a lullaby as they passed Parthenia, Gatesbridge, Tuxon Valley and Tokinsville.
Gertrude said, “I don’t understand people who lose their looks when they don’t have to. I mean what’s the point of going through life looking like an old laundry bag? Now take Molly Singleton. She goes up to the Club on Saturday nights wearing those thick eyeglasses and an ugly dress and wonders why she doesn’t have a good time. There’s no point in going to parties if you’re going to depress everyone. I’m no girl and I know it, but I still have all the partners I want and I like to give the boys a thrill. I like to see them perk up. It’s amazing what you can do. Why, one of the grocery boys wrote me a love letter. I wouldn’t tell Charlie—I wouldn’t tell anyone, because the poor kid might lose his job—but what’s the sense of living if you don’t generate a little excitement once in a while?”
Melissa was jealous. That the rush of feeling she suffered was plainly ridiculous didn’t diminish its power. She seemed, unknowingly, to have convinced herself of the fact that Emile worshiped her, and the possibility that he worshiped them all, that she might be at the bottom of his list of attractions, was a shock. It was all absurd, and it was all true. She seemed to have rearranged all of her values around his image; to have come unthinkingly to depend upon his admiration. The fact that she cared at all about his philandering was painfully humiliating, but it remained painful.
She left New York in the middle of the afternoon and called Narobi’s when she got back. She ordered a loaf of bread, garlic salt, endives—nothing she needed. He was there fifteen or twenty minutes later.
“Emile?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you ever write a letter to Mrs. Bender?”
“Mrs. who?”
“Mrs. Bender.”
“I haven’t written a letter since last Christmas. My uncle sent me ten dollars and I wrote a letter and thanked him.”
“Emile, you must know who Mrs. Bender is.”
“No, I don’t. She probably buys her groceries somewhere else.”
“Are you telling the truth, Emile?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, I’m making such a damn fool of myself,” she said, and began to cry.
“Don’t be sad,” he said. “Please don’t! I like you very much, I think you’re fascinating, but I wouldn’t want to make you sad.”
“Emile, I’m going to Nantucket on Saturday, to close up the house there. Would you like to come with me?”
“Oh, gee, Mrs. Wapshot,” he said. “I couldn’t do that. I mean I don’t know.” He knocked over a chair on his way out.
Melissa had never seen Mrs. Cranmer. She could not imagine what the woman looked like. She then got into the car and drove to the florist shop on Green Street. There was a bell attached to the door and, inside, the smell of flowers. Mrs. Cranmer came out of the back, taking a pencil from her bleached hair and smiling like a child.
Emile’s mother was one of those widows who keep themselves in a continuous state of readiness for some call, some invitation, some meeting that will never take place because the lover is dead. You find them answering the telephone in the back-street cab stands of little towns, their hair freshly bleached, their nails painted, their high-arched shoes ready for dancing with someone who cannot come. They sell nightgowns, flowers, stationery and candy, and the lowest in their ranks sell movie tickets. They are always in a state of readiness, they have all known the love of a good man, and it is in his memory that they struggle through the snow and the mud in high heels. Mrs. Cranmer’s face was painted brightly, her dress was silk, and there were bows on her high-heeled pumps. She was a small, plump woman, with her waist cinctured in sternly, like a cushion with a noose around it. She looked like a figure that had stepped from a comic book, although there was nothing comic about her.
Melissa ordered some roses, and Mrs. Cranmer passed the order on to someone in the back and said, “They’ll be ready in a minute.” The doorbell rang and another customer came in—a thick-featured man with a white plastic button in his right ear that was connected by an electrical cord to his vest. He spoke heavily. “I want something for a deceased,” he said. Mrs. Cranmer was diplomatic, and through a series of delicate indirections tried to discover his relationship to the corpse. Would he like a blanket of flowers, at perhaps forty dollars, or something a little less expensive? He gave his information readily, but only in reply to direct questions. The corpse was his sister. Her children were scattered. “I guess I’m the closest she has left,” he said confusedly, and Melissa, waiting for her roses, felt a premonition of death. She must die—she must be the subject of some such discussion in a flower shop, and close her eyes forever on a world that distracted her with its beauty. The image, hackneyed and poignant, that came to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best. I do not want to leave, she thought. I do not ever want to leave. Mrs. Cranmer gave her the roses, and she went home.
CHAPTER XII
The Moonlite Drive-In was divided into three magnificent parts. There was the golf links, the roller rink and the vast amphitheater itself, where thousands of darkened cars were arranged in the form of an ancient arena, spread out beneath the tree of night. Above the deep thunder from the rink and the noise from the screen, you could hear—high in the air and so like the sea that a blind man would be deceived—the noise of traffic on the great Northern Expressway that flows southward from Montreal to the Shenandoah, engorging in its clover leaves and brilliantly engineered gradings the green playing fields, rose gardens, barns, farms, meadows, trout streams, forests, homesteads and churches of a golden past. The population of this highway gathered for their meals in a string of identical restaurants, where the murals, the urinals, the menus and the machines for vending sacred medals were uniform. It was some touching part of the autumn night and the hazards of the road that so many of these travelers pleaded for the special protection of gentle St. Christopher and the blessings of the Holy Virgin.
An exit (Exit 307) curved away from the Northern Expressway down toward the Moonlite, and here was everything a man might need: the means for swift travel, food, exercise, skill (the golf links), and in the dark cars of the amphitheater a place to perform the rites of spring—or, in this case, the rites of autumn. It was an autumn night, and the air was full of pollen and decay. Emile sat on the back seat with Louise Mecker. Charlie Putney, his best friend, was in the front seat with Doris P
ierce. They were all drinking whisky out of paper cups, and they were all in various stages of undress. On the screen a woman exclaimed, “I want to put on innocence, like a bright, new dress. I want to feel clean again!” Then she slammed a door.
Emile was proud of his skin, but the mention of cleanliness aroused his doubts and misgivings. He blushed. These parties were a commonplace of his generation, and if he hadn’t participated in them he would have gotten himself a reputation as a prude and a faggot. Four boys in his high school class had been arrested for selling pornography and heroin. They had approached him, but the thought of using narcotics and obscene pictures disgusted him. His sitting undressed in the back seat of a car might be accounted for by the fact that the music he danced to and the movies he watched dealt less and less with the heart and more and more with overt sexuality, as if the rose gardens and playing fields buried under the Expressway were enjoying a revenge. What is the grade-crossing tender standing in the autumn sun thinking of? Why has the postmaster such a dreamy look? Why does the judge presiding at General Sessions seem so restless? Why does the cab driver frown and sigh? What is the shoeshine boy thinking of as he stares out into the rain? What darkens the mind and torments the flesh of the truck driver on the Expressway? What are the thoughts of the old gardener dusting his roses, the garage mechanic on his back under the Chevrolet, the idle lawyer, the sailor waiting for the fog to lift, the drunkard, the soldier? The times were venereal, and Emile was a child of the times.
Louise Mecker was a tomato, but her looseness seemed only to be one aspect of a cheerful disposition. She did what she was expected to do to get along, and this was part of it. And yet in her readiness she sometimes seemed to debase and ridicule the seat of desire, toward which he still preserved some vague and tender feelings. When the lilac under his bedroom window bloomed in the spring and he could smell its fragrance as he lay in bed, some feeling, as strong as ambition but without a name, moved him. Oh, I want—I want to do so well, he thought, sitting naked at the Moonlite. But what did he want to do? Be a jet pilot? Discover a waterfall in Africa? Manage a supermarket? Whatever it was, he wanted something that would correspond to his sense that life was imposing; something that would confirm his feeling that, as he stood at the window of Narobi’s grocery store watching the men and women on the sidewalk and the stream of clouds in the sky, the procession he saw was a majestic one.
He thought of Melissa, who by giving him a beer had penetrated into his considerations. In the last six or eight months he had been bewildered by the sudden interest men and women took in his company. They seemed to want something from him and to want it ardently, and although he was not an innocent or a fool, he was genuinely uncertain about what it was they wanted. His own desires were violent. While he was shaving in the morning, a seizure of sexual need doubled him up with pain and made him groan. “Cut yourself, dear?” his mother asked. Now he thought of Melissa. He thought of her—oddly enough—as a tragic figure, frail, lonely and misunderstood. Her husband, whoever he was, would be obtuse, stupid and clumsy. Weren’t all men his age? She was a fair prisoner in a tower.
Halfway through the feature, they got dressed and, with the cutout open and the radio blaring “Take It Easy, Greasy,” roared out of the Moonlite onto the Expressway, jeopardizing their lives and the lives in every car they passed (men, women and children in arms), but gentle St. Christopher or the mercies of the Holy Virgin spared them, and they got Emile safely home. He climbed the stairs, kissed his mother good night—she was studying an article in Reader’s Digest about the pancreas—and went to bed. Lying in bed, he decided, quite innocently, that he was tired of tomatoes, movies and paper cups, and that he would go to Nantucket.
CHAPTER XIII
Melissa had bought the plane tickets and made all the arrangements, and she asked Emile not to speak to her on the plane. He wore new shoes and a new pair of pants, and walked with a bounce in order to feel the thickness of the new soles and to feel the nice play of muscle as it worked up his legs and back into his shoulders. He had never been on a plane before, and he was disappointed to find that it was not so sleek as the planes in magazine advertisements and that the fuselage was dented and stained with smoke. He got a window seat and watched the activity on the field, feeling that as soon as the plane was airborne he would begin a new life of motion, comfort and freedom. Hadn’t he always dreamed of going here and there and making friends in different places and being easily accepted as a man of strength and intelligence and not a grocery boy without a future or a destiny, and had he ever doubted that his dreams would come true? Melissa was the last one to get on, and was wearing a fur coat, and the dark skins made her appear to him like a visitor from another continent where everything was beautiful, orderly and luxurious. She didn’t look in his direction. A drunken sailor took the seat beside Emile and fell asleep. Emile was disappointed. Watching the planes that passed over Parthenia and Proxmire Manor, he had assumed that the people who traveled in them were of a high order. In a little while they were off the ground.
It was charming. At the distance of a few hundred feet, all the confused and mistaken works of man seemed orderly. He smiled down broadly at the earth and its population. The sensation he had looked forward to, of being airborne, was not what he had anticipated, and it seemed to him that the engines of the plane were struggling to resist gravity and hold them in their place among the thin clouds. The sea they were crossing was dark and colorless, and as they lost sight of land he felt in himself a corresponding sense of loss, as if at this point some sustaining bond with his green past had been cut. The island, when he saw it below them on the sea, with a cuff of foam on its northeast edge, looked so small and flat that he wondered why anyone should want to go there. When he left the plane she was waiting for him by the steps and they walked through the airport and got a cab. She told the driver, “First I want to go into the village and get some groceries, and then I want to go to Madamquid.”
“What do you want to go to Madamquid for?” the driver asked. “There’s nobody out there now.”
“I have a cottage out there,” she said.
They drove across a bleak landscape but one so closely associated with her youth and her happiness that the bleakness escaped her. In the village, they stopped at the grocery store where she had always traded, and she asked Emile to wait outside. When she had bought the groceries, a boy wearing the white apron and bent in exactly the same attitude as Emile was when she first saw him carried them out to the taxi. She gave him a tip and looked up and down the street for Emile. He was standing in front of the drugstore with some other young men his age.
Her courage left her then. The society of the bored and the disappointed, from which she had hoped to escape, seemed battlemented, implacable and splendid—a creation useful to concert halls, hospitals, bridges and courthouses, and one that she was not fit to enter. She had wanted to bring into her life the freshness of a journey and had achieved nothing but a galling sense of moral shabbiness. “You want me to get your boyfriend?” the cab driver asked.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Melissa said. “He’s just come out to help me move some things.”
Emile saw her then, and crossed the street, and they started for Madamquid. She felt so desperate that she took his hand, not expecting him to support her, but he turned to her with wonderful largess, a smile so strong and tender that she felt the blood pour back into her heart. They were heading out to the point where there was nothing to see but the cream-colored dunes, with their scalp locks of knife grass, and the dark autumn ocean. He was perplexed by this. One of the several divisions in his world was that group of people who went away for the summer—who closed their houses in June and bought no more groceries until September—and never having enjoyed any such migratory privileges himself, he had imagined the places where they went as having golden sands and purple seas, the houses palatial and pink-walled, with patios and swimming pools, like the houses he saw in the movies. There was nothin
g like that here, and he couldn’t believe that even in the long, hot days of summer this place would look less of a wilderness. Were there fleets of sailboats, deck chairs and beach umbrellas? There was no trace of summery furniture now. She pointed out the house to him and he saw a big, shingled building on a bluff. He could see that it was big—it was big all right—but if you were going to build a summer house why not build something neat and compact, something that would be nice to look at? But maybe he was wrong, maybe there was something to be learned here; she seemed so pleased at the sight of the old place that he was willing to suspend judgment. She paid off the cab driver and tried to open the front door, but the lock had rusted in the salt air and he had to help. He finally got the door open, and she went in and he carried in the bags and then, of course, the groceries.
She knew well enough that the place was homely—it was meant to be—but the lemony smell of the matchboard walls seemed to her like the fragrance of the lives that had been spent there in the sunny months. Her sister’s old violin music, her brother’s German textbooks, the water color of a thistle her aunt had painted seemed like the essence of their lives. And while she had quarreled with her brother and her sister and they no longer communicated with each other, all her memories now were kind and gentle. “I’ve always been happy here,” she said. “I’ve always been terribly happy here. That’s why I wanted to come back. It’s cold now, of course, but we can light some fires.” She noticed then, on the wall at her left, the pencil markings where each Fourth of July her uncle had stood them up against the matchboard and recorded their growth. Afraid that he might see this incriminating evidence of her age, she said, “Let’s put the groceries in the icebox.”