by John Cheever
It was late and it was getting cold, and he could remember the sense of the season and the hour when it was time to leave off playing and go home to study. Near where he lived there was a similar rock, and he had climbed it on winter afternoons, to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends about the future. He could remember grasping for handholds on the steep face, and how the rough stone pulled at his best school clothes, but what he remembered most clearly was how once his feet were on the ground, he had a sense of awakening to a whole new life, the arrival at a new state of consciousness, as clearly unlike his past as sleep is unlike waking. Standing at the foot of the cliff at that hour and season—about to go home and study but not yet on the path—he would stare at the yards and the trees and the lighted houses with a galvanic sense of discovery. How forceful and interesting the world had seemed in the early winter light! How new it all seemed! He must have been familiar with every window, roof, tree and landmark in the place, but he felt as if he were seeing it all for the first time.
How old he had grown since then.
They met ten days or two weeks later, in a New York hotel. She was there first and ordered some whisky and roast-beef sandwiches. When he came in, she poured herself a drink and made one for him, and he ate both the sandwiches she had ordered. She was wearing a bracelet, made of silver bells, that she had bought long ago in Casablanca. She had been given a Mediterranean cruise as a Christmas present by a rich elderly cousin, and in her travels she had never been able to escape a genuine and oppressive sense of gratitude to the old lady. When she saw Lisbon she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Lisbon! When she saw Rhodes she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Rhodes! Standing in the Casbah at dusk she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see how purple the skies are above Africa! Remembering this she gave the silver bells a shake.
“Do you have to wear that bracelet?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said.
“I hate that kind of junky stuff,” he said. “You’ve got lots of nice jewelry—those sapphires. I don’t see why you want to wear junk. Those bells are driving me crazy. Every time you move they jingle. They get on my nerves.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She took off the bracelet. He seemed ashamed or confused by his harshness; he had never before been harsh or callous with her.
“Sometimes I wonder why it happened to me like this,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t have had anything better, I know. You’re beautiful and you’re fascinating—you’re the most fascinating woman I ever saw—but sometimes I wonder—wondered—why it should happen to me this way. I mean, some fellows, right away they get a pretty young girl, she lives next door, their folks are friendly, they go to the same schools, the same dances, they go dancing together, they fall in love and get married. But I guess that’s not for poor people. No pretty girls live next door to me. There aren’t any pretty girls on my street. Oh, I’m glad it happened to me the way it did, but I can’t stop wondering what it would have been like some other way. I mean like in Nantucket that weekend. That was the big football weekend, and I was thinking, there we were, all alone in that gloomy old house—that was a real gloomy place, rainy and everything—while some fellows were driving in convertibles to the football game.”
“I must seem terribly old.”
“Oh, no. No, you don’t. It isn’t that. . . . Only once. That was in Nantucket, too. It was raining in the night. It began to rain and you got up to shut the window.”
“And I seemed terribly old?”
“Just for a minute. . . . Not really. But you see, you’re used to comfort, you’re different. Two cars, plenty of clothes. I’m just a poor kid.”
“Does it matter?”
“Oh, I know you think it doesn’t, but it does. When you go into a restaurant you never look at the prices. Now, your husband, he can buy you all these things. He can buy you anything you want, he’s loaded, but I’m just a poor kid. I guess I’m sort of a lone wolf. I guess most poor people are. I’ll never live in a house like yours. I’ll never get to join a country club. I’ll never have a place at the beach. And I’m still hungry,” he said, looking at the empty sandwich plate. “I’m still growing, you know. I have to have lunch. I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything but I’m hungry.”
“You go down to the dining room, darling,” she said, “and get some lunch. Here’s five dollars.” She kissed him and then as soon as he was gone she left the hotel herself.
CHAPTER XXIV
She wandered around the streets—she had no place to go—wondering what had been the first in the chain of events that had brought her to where she was. The barking of a dog, the dream of a castle or her boredom at Mrs. Wishing’s dance. She went home, and regard this lovely woman then, getting off the train in Proxmire Manor. See what she does. See what happens to her.
She wears a mink coat and no hat. Her car is a convertible. She drives up the hill to her house whose whiteness seems to authenticate her purity. How could anyone who lives in such a decorous environment be sinful? How could anyone who has so much Hepplewhite—so much Hepplewhite in good condition—be shaken by unruly lusts? She embraces her only son with tears in her eyes. This love for the boy seems to be one more thing to be crowded into her soul. Alone in her bedroom she doubled over with need and groaned like a bitch in rut. He seemed—his phantom—to cross the room and while she knew the plainness of his mind his skin seemed to shine; he seemed to be some golden Adam. She wanted to forget him. She wanted absolution. She had taken a lover, but was this so revolutionary? She had perhaps been mistaken in her choice, but wasn’t this, in the history of things, as common as rain? She thought briefly of confessing to Moses but she knew his pride well enough to know that he would fire her out of the house. She felt herself gored. She had hoped to be a natural woman, sensual but unromantic, able to take a lover cheerfully and to leave him cheerfully when the time came. What had been revealed to her was the force of guilt and lust within her own disposition. She had transgressed the canons of a decorous society and she seemed impaled on the decorum she despised. The pain was unbearable and she went downstairs and poured herself a drink. She would have been ashamed, that early in the day, to ask the cook for ice and she watered the whisky in the bathroom and drank it there.
The drink made her feel better. She quickly had another. She was not able to exorcise the image of Emile but she was able, slowly, and with the help of whisky, to put the image in a different light. He came toward her with his arms out and drew her down but now he seemed evil, he seemed to intend to debase and destroy her. She had been innocent, she had been wronged! That was it. The comfort of attributing evil to him was enormous. He had preyed on her innocence! But how, remembering the trip to Nantucket when she had received from him only the most heartening and gentle lasciviousness, could she claim to be innocent, to have been wronged? The comfort of absolution vanished and she drank some more whisky. By the time Moses came home she was quite drunk.
Moses said nothing. He thought she must have received some bad news. She seemed drowsy, she dropped a lighted cigarette on the rug and going in to dinner she stumbled and nearly fell. When Moses went out to put the cars in the garage she went to the bar and drank some whisky from a bottle. As drunk as she was she could not sleep. Moses did not touch her but as he lay beside her she thought that a small scar in the hair on Emile’s belly was more precious to her than the enormousness of all of Moses’ love. When Moses went to sleep she went downstairs and poured herself more whisky. She drank until three o’clock but when she went to bed the image of Emile, her golden Adam, was still vivid. To distract herself she planned the renovation of her kitchen. She removed the old range, refrigerator, dishwasher and sink, chose a new linoleum, a new garbage disposal unit, a new color scheme, a new means of lighting. Was this some foolishness of hers or of her time that, caught in the throes of a hopeless love, the only peace of mind that she could find was in imagining new stoves and linoleum?<
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She went to the doctor for an examination the next afternoon. She stretched out on the examination table, wearing a slip. The room was uncomfortably warm. The doctor touched her, she thought, with a gentleness that was not clinical, although this might, she knew, be the summit of her confused feelings, distorted by lewd dreams, drunkenness and a nearly sleepless night. As he handled her breasts she thought she saw in his face the undisguisable sadness of desire. She turned her face away but now her breathing was deep and tortured and her accumulated frustrations, her sorrow for Moses and her lust for Emile threatened to overwhelm her. What could she do? Discuss the weather? Criticize the Zoning Board? Evoke what seemed to her then to be the fragile and dishonest chain of circumstances that kept them from ruin? He seemed to linger, lasciviously, over the examination and she felt the bonds of her common sense give one by one until her feelings were wild. She reached up and caressed the back of his neck and he made no move to discourage her. When she heard him fumbling with his clothing she closed her eyes. The moment was explosive and instantaneous. She nearly lost consciousness. While he was dressing the telephone rang. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but as you know, Ethel, we don’t expect her to live through the day.” Melissa dressed and put on her furs. “When can I see you again?” the doctor asked. She didn’t reply. Six or seven patients were waiting in the front room. One of them, an old man, was groaning in pain. She was in great pain herself, a keener pain, she thought, because his suffering was blameless. She stepped out into the street, into the afternoon. The parking meters ticked. Chopped meat and bacon were on sale. A fountain splashed in the public park. She smiled and waved to a friend who passed in a car. The consummate skill with which she could appear respectable was crushing and she detested impostors. Here was the light of late afternoon—the store fronts seemed lit with fire—and she seemed, by her misery, shut away from the light.
Was she sick? It was the charitable judgment, she knew, that the street and its people would pass on her and she rebelled against it bitterly for if she was sick so was Moses, so was Emile, so was the doctor, so was mankind. The world, the village, would forgive her her sins if she would go to Dr. Herzog, whom she had last seen dancing with a fat woman in a red dress, and unburden herself three times a week for a year or two of her memories and confusions. But wasn’t it her detestation of bigotry and anesthesia that had gotten her into trouble, her loathing of mental, sexual and spiritual hygiene? She could not believe that her sorrows might be whitewashed as madness. This was her body, this was her soul, these were her needs.
Her little son came to meet her when she entered the house and she took him most tenderly in her arms. When he had gone back in the kitchen she poured herself a drink in the bathroom to blunt the pain. She then telephoned her minister and asked if she could see him at once. His wife, Mrs. Bascom, answered the telephone and kindly invited Melissa to come. Mrs. Bascom, smelling pleasantly of perfume and sherry, let her into the rectory. She would have spent the afternoon playing bridge. It would be sentimental of her, Melissa knew, to long for a life that centered on bridge parties, but the woman’s simplicity and good cheer excited in Melissa a dreadful yearning. Mrs. Bascom’s containment seemed as substantial as a well-built house, its windows shining with light, while Melissa felt herself to be cruelly exposed to every inclemency. Mrs. Bascom led her into a parlor where the rector was kneeling by an open fireplace, lighting some paper and kindling with a match. “Good afternoon,” he said, “good afternoon, Mrs. Wapshot.” For some reason he pronounced her name “Wapshirt.” He was a portly man, his hair stained a discouraging gray like the last snows of winter and with a strong, plain face. “I thought we’d have a little fire,” he said. “There’s nothing quite like a fire, is there, to stimulate conversation? Sit down, do sit down. I have a confession to make.” She flinched at the word. “Mrs. Bascom’s bridge club, one of her three bridge clubs, met this afternoon and I decided to give myself a vacation and spent the whole afternoon watching television. Now I know a lot of people disapprove of television but during my, shall we say, dissipation this afternoon I saw some very interesting playlets and some splendid acting, some splendid performances. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that the standards of acting on television today are a great deal higher than those we find in the theater. I saw one very interesting playlet about a woman who was tempted—tempted, I say, there was nothing at all unsavory—by the monotony of her middle-class life to abandon her family in favor of a business enterprise. She had a most unpleasant mother-in-law. Not really unpleasant, I suppose, but a woman, you might say, whose character had been formed by a series of unfortunate circumstances. She was a possessive woman. She felt that the heroine neglected her husband. Well, the mother-in-law was wealthy and they had every reason to expect a substantial inheritance when she passed away. They took a picnic to a lake—oh, it was very well done—and during a storm the mother-in-law drowned. The next scene was in the lawyer’s office where the will was read and where they discovered to their astonishment that they had been cut off with a single dollar. Well, the wife, rather than being disappointed, discovered new sources of strength in herself at this turn of events and was able to rededicate herself—to undergird her dedication, so to speak—to her family once more. It was all very revealing and it seems to me that if we looked at television oftener and saw the sorrows and the problems of others we might be less selfish, less egotistical, less likely to be overwhelmed by our own little problems.”
Melissa had come to him for compassion but she felt then that she might better have asked for compassion from a barn door or a stone. For a moment his stupidity, his vulgarity, seemed inviolable. But if he had no compassion for her, wasn’t it then her responsibility to extend some compassion to him, to try and understand, to try at least to tolerate the image of a stout and simple man applauding the asininities on television? What touched her, as he leaned toward the fire, was the antiquity of his devotions. No runner would ever come to his door with the news that the head of the vestry had been martyred by the local police and had she used the name of Jesus Christ, out of its liturgical context, she felt that he would have been terribly embarrassed. He was not to blame, he had not chosen this moment of history, he was not alone in having been overwhelmed at the task of giving the passion of Our Lord ardor and reality. He had failed, he seemed sitting by his fire to be a failure as she was and to deserve, like any other failure, compassion. She felt how passionately he would have liked to avoid her troubles; to discuss the church fair, the World Series, the covered-dish supper, the high price of stained glass, the perfidy of Communism, the comfortableness of electric blankets, anything but her trouble.
“I have sinned,” Melissa said. “I have sinned and the memory is grievous, the burden is intolerable.”
“How have you sinned?”
“I have committed fornication with a boy. He is not twenty-one.”
“Has this happened often?”
“Many times.”
“And with others?”
“With one other but I feel that I can’t trust myself.”
He shielded his eyes with his hands and she saw that he was shocked and disgusted. “In matters like this,” he said, his eyes still shielded, “I work with Dr. Herzog. I can give you his telephone number or I’ll be happy to call him myself and make an appointment.”
“I will not go to Dr. Herzog,” Melissa said, weeping. “I cannot.”
She left the rectory and at home telephoned Narobi’s. The cook had ordered the groceries and she asked for a case of quinine water, a bunch of water cress and a box of peppercorns. “Your cook had a case of quinine water delivered this morning,” Mr. Narobi said. He was unpleasant. “Yes, I know,” Melissa said. “We’re having guests.” Emile came a little while later.
“I’m sorry I left you in New York,” Melissa said.
“That’s all right.” He laughed. “I was just hungry.”
“I want to see you.”
“Sure,�
� he said. “Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s this shack,” he said. “Some of the fellows and me have this shack down by the cove. I’ll check in at the store and meet you there in half an hour.”
“All right.”
“You go over the railroad bridge,” he said, “down to the cove. There’s a dirt road there by the dump. I’ll get there early and make sure no one’s around.”
She hardly saw the place beyond the wall near where she lay. “You know,” he said, “for lunch I had the Manhattan clam chowder and then a hot roast-beef sandwich with two vegetables and pie with ice cream and I’m still hungry.”
CHAPTER XXV
Emile and Mrs. Cranmer lived on the second floor of a two-family frame house. The house was painted a dark green with white trim—the green turned black in the rain and was one of a species, gregarious in that one seldom finds them alone. They appear in the suburbs of Montreal, reappear across the border in Northern lumber and mill towns, flourish in Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago and go underground briefly in the wheat states to appear again in the depressed neighborhoods of Sioux City, Wichita and Kansas City, forming an irregular and mighty chain of quasi-nomadic domiciles that reaches across the entire continent.
On her walk home in the evening from Barnum’s Mrs. Cranmer passed the house that had been hers when Mr. Cranmer was alive. It was a large brick and stucco house. Twelve rooms! The dimensions and conveniences of the place returned to her like an incantation. The house had been sold by the bank to an Italian family named Tomasi. In spite of her struggle to accept the doctrines of equality that had been taught to her in school she still felt some bitterness that people from another country, people who had not yet learned the language and the customs of the United States, could possess the house of someone who was native born like herself. The economic facts were inescapable and she knew them but this didn’t cure her bitterness. The house still seemed to be hers, still seemed in her custody, still reminded her of the richness of her life with Mr. Cranmer. The Tomasis spent most of their time in the kitchen and the front windows were usually dark but this evening a fringed lamp in one of the windows was lighted and beyond the lamp she could see, hanging on the wall, the enlarged photographs of some foreigners, the men with mustaches and high collars and the women in black. There was a powerful otherness for her in looking into the lighted windows of a house where her life had been centered. On she went in her comic-strip shoes.