The Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize)

by John Cheever

  He is a little bored. He would rather be with men and girls his own age, but his mother has supported him and defended him so he finds some security in her company. She has been a staunch and formidable protector. She can and has intimidated the headmaster and most of the teachers at his school. Offshore he sees the sails of the racing fleet and wishes briefly that he were with them, but he refused an invitation to crew and has not enough self-confidence to skipper, so in a sense he chose to be alone on the beach with his mother. He is timid about competitive sports, about the whole appearance of organized society, as if it concealed a force that might tear him to pieces; but why is this? Is he a coward, and is there such a thing? Is one born a coward, as one is born dark or fair? Is his mother's surveillance excessive; has she gone so far in protecting him that he has become vulnerable and morbid? But considering how intimately he knows the depth of her unhappiness, how can he forsake her until she has found other friends?

  He thinks of his father with pain. He has tried to know and love his father, but all their plans come to nothing. The fishing trip was canceled by the unexpected arrival of the Governor of Massachusetts. At the ball park a messenger brought him a note saying that his father would be unable to come. When he fell out of the pear tree and broke his arm, his father would undoubtedly have visited him in the hospital had he not been in Washington. He learned to cast with a fly rod, feeling that, cast by cast, he might work his way into the terrain of his father's affection and esteem, but his father had never found time to admire him. He can grasp the power of his own disappointment. This emotion surrounds him like a mass of energy, but an energy that has no wheels to drive, no stones to move. These sad thoughts can be seen in his posture. His shoulders droop. He looks childish and forlorn, and his mother calls him to her.

  He sits in the sand at her feet, and she runs her fingers through his light hair. Then she does something hideous. One wants to look away but not before we have seen her undo her pearls and fasten them around his golden neck. "See how they shine," says she, doing the clasp as irrevocably as the manacle is welded to the prisoner's shin.

  Out they go; out they go; for, like Clarissa and the lush, they shed too little light.

  . In closing—in closing, that is, for this afternoon (I have to go to the dentist and then have my hair cut), I would like to consider the career of my laconic old friend Royden Blake. We can, for reasons of convenience, divide his work into four periods. First there were the bitter moral anecdotes—he must have written a hundred—that proved that most of our deeds are sinful. This was followed, as you will remember, by nearly a decade of snobbism, in which he never wrote of characters who had less than sixty-five thousand dollars a year. He memorized the names of the Groton faculty and the bartenders at "21." All of his characters were waited on hand and foot by punctilious servants, but when you went to his house for dinner you found the chairs held together with picture wire, you ate fried eggs from a cracked plate, the doorknobs came off in your hand, and if you wanted to flush the toilet you had to lift the lid off the water tank, roll up a sleeve, and reach deep into the cold and rusty water to manipulate the valves. When he had finished with snobbism, he made the error I have mentioned in Item and then moved on into his romantic period, where he wrote "The Necklace of Maivio d'Alfi" (with that memorable scene of childbirth on a mountain pass), "The Wreck of the S.S. Lorelei," "The King of the Trojans," and "The Lost Girdle of Venus," to name only a few. He was quite sick at the time, and his incompetence seemed to be increasing. His work was characterized by everything that I have mentioned. In his pages one found alcoholics, scarifying descriptions of the American landscape, and fat parts for Marlon Brando. You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves. I never liked him, but he was a colleague and a drinking companion, and when I heard, in my home in Kitzbühel, that he was dying, I drove to Innsbruck and took the express to Venice, where he then lived. It was in the late autumn. Cold and brilliant. The boarded-up palaces of the Grand Canal—gaunt, bedizened, and crowned—looked like the haggard faces of that grade of nobility that shows up for the royal weddings in Hesse. He was living in a pensione on a back canal. There was a high tide, the reception hall was flooded, and I got to the staircase over an arrangement of duckboards. I brought him a bottle of Turinese gin and a package of Austrian cigarettes, but he was too far gone for these, I saw when I sat down in a painted chair (broken) beside his bed. "I'm working," he exclaimed. "I'm working. I can see it all. Listen to me!"

  "Yes," said.

  "It begins like this," he said, and changed the level of his voice to correspond, I suppose, to the gravity of his narrative. "The Transalpini stops at Kirchbach at midnight," he said, looking in my direction to make sure that I had received the full impact of this poetic fact.

  Yes, I said.

  "Here the passengers for Vienna continue on," he said sonorously, "while those for Padua must wait an hour. The station is kept open and heated for their convenience, and there is a bar where one may buy coffee and wine. One snowy night in March, three strangers at this bar fell into a conversation. The first was a tall, bald-headed man, wearing a sable-lined coat that reached to his ankles. The second was a beautiful American woman going to Isvia to attend funeral services for her only son, who had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident. The third was a white-haired, heavy Italian woman in a black shawl, who was treated with great deference by the waiter. He bowed from the waist when he poured her a glass of cheap wine, and addressed her as 'Your Majesty.' Avalanche warnings had been posted earlier in the day..."

  Then he put his head back on the pillow and died—indeed, these were his dying words, and the dying words, it seemed to me, of generations of story-tellers, for how could this snowy and trumped-up pass, with its trio of travelers, hope to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

  THE CHIMERA

  When I was young and used to go to the circus, there was an act called the Treviso Twins—Maria and Rosita. Rosita used to balance herself on the head of Maria, skulltop to skulltop, and be carried around the ring. Maria, as a result of this strenuous exercise, had developed short, muscular legs and a comical walk, and whenever I see my wife walking away from me I remember Maria Treviso. My wife is a big woman. She is one of the five daughters of Colonel Boysen, a Georgia politician, who was a friend of Calvin Coolidge. He went to the White House seven times, and my wife has a heart-shaped pillow embroidered with the word LOVE that was either the work of Mrs. Coolidge or was at one time in her possession. My wife and I are terribly unhappy together, but we have three beautiful children, and we try to keep things going. I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed. I try to fix her a nice breakfast, because this sometimes improves her disposition, which is generally terrible. One morning not long ago, when I brought her a tray she clapped her hands to her face and began to cry. I looked at the tray to see if there was anything wrong. It was a nice breakfast—two hard-boiled eggs, a piece of Danish, and a Coca-Cola spiked with gin. That's what she likes. I've never learned to cook bacon. The eggs looked all right and the dishes were clean, so I asked her what was the matter. She lifted her hands from her eyes—her face was wet with tears and her eyes were haggard—and said, in the Boysen-family accent, "I cannot any longer endure being served breakfast in bed by a hairy man in his underwear."

  I took a shower and dressed and went to work, but when I came home that night I could see that things were no better; she was still offended by my appearance that morning.

  I cook most of the dinners on a charcoal grill in the back yard. Zena doesn't like to cook and neither do I, but it's pleasant being out of doors, and I like tending the fire. Our neighbors, Mr. Livermore and Mr. Kovacs,
also do a lot of cooking outside. Mr. Livermore wears a chef's hat and an apron that says "Name Your Pizen," and he also has a sign that says DANGER. MEN COOKING. Mr. Kovacs and I don't wear costumes, but I think we're more serious-minded. Mr. Kovacs once cooked a leg of lamb and another time a little turkey. We had hamburger that night, and I noticed that Zena didn't seem to have any appetite. The children ate heartily, but as soon as they were through—perhaps they sensed a quarrel—slipped off into the television room to watch the quarrels there. They were right about the quarrel. Zena began it.

  "You're so inconsiderate," she thundered. "You never think of me."

  "I'm sorry, darling," I said. "Wasn't the hamburger done?" She was drinking straight gin, and I didn't want a quarrel.

  "It wasn't the hamburger—I'm used to the garbage you cook. What I have for dinner is no longer of any importance to me. I've learned to get along with what I'm served. It's just that your whole attitude is so inconsiderate."

  "What have I done, darling?" I always call her darling, hoping that she may come around.

  "What have you done? What have you done?" Her voice rose, and her face got red, and she got to her feet and, standing above me, she screamed, "You've ruined my life, that's what you've done."

  "I don't see how I've ruined your life," I said. "I guess you're disappointed—lots of people are—but I don't think it's fair to blame it all on your marriage. There are lots of things I wanted to do—I wanted to climb the Matterhorn—but I wouldn't blame the fact that I haven't on anyone else."

  "You. Climb the Matterhorn. Ha. You couldn't even climb the Washington Monument. At least I've done that. I had important ambitions. I might have been a businesswoman, a TV writer, a politician, an actress. I might have been a congresswoman!"

  "I didn't know you wanted to be a congresswoman," I said.

  "That's the trouble with you. You never think of me. You never think of what I might have done. You've ruined my life!" Then she went upstairs to her bedroom and locked the door.

  Her disappointment was painfully real, I knew, although I thought I had given her everything I had promised. The false promises, the ones whose unfulfiliment made her so miserable, must have been made by Colonel Boysen, but he was dead. None of her sisters was happily married, and how disastrously unhappy they had been never struck me until that night. I mean, I had never put it together. Lila, the oldest, had lost her husband while they were taking a stroll on a high cliff above the Hudson. The police had questioned her, and the whole family, including me, had been indignant about their suspiciousness, but mightn't she have given him a little push? Stella, the next oldest, had married an alcoholic, who systematically drank himself out of the picture. But Stella had been capricious and unfaithful, and mightn't her conduct have hastened his death? Jessica's husband had been drowned mysteriously in Lake George when they had stopped at a motel and gone for a night swim. And Laura's husband had been killed in a freak automobile accident while Laura was at the wheel. Were they murderesses, I wondered—had I married into a family of incorrigible murderesses? Was Zena's disappointment at not being a congresswoman powerful enough to bring her to plot my death? I didn't think so. I seemed much less afraid for my life than to need tenderness, love, loving, good cheer—all the splendid and decent things I knew to be possible in the world.

  The next day at lunch, a man from the office told me that he had met a girl named Lyle Smythe at a party and that she was a tart. This was not exactly what I wanted, but my need to reacquaint myself with the tenderer members of the sex was excruciating. We said goodbye in front of the restaurant, and then I went back in to look up Lyle Smythe's number in the telephone book and see if I could make a date. One of the light bulbs in the lamp that illuminated the directory was dead and the print seemed faint and blurred to me. I found her name, but it was on the darkest part of the page, where the binding and the clasp drew the book together, and I had trouble reading the number. Was I losing my sight? Did I need glasses or was it only because the light was dim? Was there some irony in the idea of a man who could no longer read a telephone book trying to find a mistress? By moving my head up and down like a duck I found that I could read the exchange, and I struck a match to read the number. The lighted match fell out of my fingers and set fire to the page. I blew on the fire to extinguish it, but this only raised the flames, and I had to beat out the fire with my hands. My first instinct was to turn my head around to see if I had been watched, and I had been, by a tall, thin man wearing a plastic hat cover and a blue transparent raincoat. His figure startled me. He seemed to represent something—conscience, or evil—and I went back to the office and never made the call.

  That night, when I was washing the dishes, I heard Zena speak to me from the kitchen door. I turned and saw her standing there, holding my straight razor. (I have a heavy beard and shave with a straight-edged razor.) "You'd better not leave things like this lying around," she shouted. "If you know what's good for you, you'd better not leave things like this lying around. There are plenty of women in the world who would cut you to ribbons for what I've endured..." I wasn't afraid. What did I feel? I don't know. Bewilderment, crushing bewilderment, and some strange tenderness for poor Zena.

  She went upstairs, and I went on washing the dishes and wondering if scenes like this were common on the street where I live. But God, oh, God, how much then I wanted some kind of loveliness, softness, gentleness, humor, sweetness, and kindness. And when the dishes were done, I went out of the house, out of the back door. In the dusk Mr. Livermore was dyeing the brown spots on his lawn with a squirt gun. Mr. Kovacs was cooking two rock hens. I did not invent this world, with all its paradoxes, but it was never my good fortune to travel, and since yards like these are perhaps the most I will see of life, I looked at the scene—even the DANGER. MEN COOKING sign—with intentness and feeling. There was music in the air—there always is—and it heightened my desire to see a beautiful woman. Then a sudden wind sprang up, a rain wind, and the smell of a deep forest—although there are no forests in my part of the world—mushroomed among the yards. The smell excited me, and I remembered what it was like to feel young and happy, wearing a sweater and clean cotton pants, and walking through the cool halls of the house where I was raised and where, in the summer, the leaves hung beyond all the open doors and windows in a thick curtain of green and gold. I didn't remember my youth—I seemed to recapture it. Even more—because, given some self-consciousness by retrospect, I esteemed as well as possessed the bold privileges of being young. There was the music of a waltz from the Livermores' television set. It must have been a commercial for deodorants, girdles, or ladies' razors, the air was so graceful and so somber. Then, as the music faded—the forest smell was still sharp in the air—I saw her walk up the grass, and she stepped into my arms.

  Her name was Olga. I can't change her name any more than I can change her other attributes. She was nothing, I know, but an idle reverie. I've never fooled myself about this. I've imagined that I've won the daily double, climbed the Matterhorn, and sailed, first-class, for Europe, and I suppose I imagined Olga out of the same need for escape or tenderness, but, unlike any other reverie I've ever known, she came with a dossier of facts. She was beautiful, of course. Who, under the circumstances, would invent a shrew, a harridan? Her hair was dark, fragrant, and straight. Her face was oval, her skin was olive-colored, although I could hardly make out her features in the dusk. She had just come from California on the train. She had come not to help me but to ask my help. She needed protection from her husband, who was threatening to follow her. She needed love, strength, and counsel. I held her in my arms, basking in the grace and warmth of her presence. She cried when she spoke of her husband, and I knew what he looked like. I can see him now. He was an Army sergeant. There were scars on his thick neck, left from an attack of boils. His face was red. His hair was yellow. He wore a double row of campaign ribbons on a skin-tight uniform. His breath smelled of rye and toothpaste. I was so delighted by her company, he
r dependence, that I wondered—not at all seriously—if I wasn't missing a stitch. Did Mr. Livermore, dyeing his grass, have a friend as beautiful as mine? Did Mr. Kovacs? Did we share our disappointments this intimately? Was there such hidden balance and clemency in the universe that our needs were always requited? Then it began to rain. It was time for her to go, but we took such a long, sweet hour to say goodbye that when I went back into the kitchen I was wet through to the skin.

  On Wednesday night I always take my wife to the Chinese restaurant in the village, and then we go to the movies. We order the family dinner for two, but my wife eats most of it. She's a big eater. She reaches right across the table and grabs my egg roll, empties the roast duck onto her plate, takes my fortune cookie away from me, and then when she's done she sighs a deep sigh and says, "Well, you certainly stuffed yourself." On Wednesdays I always eat a big lunch in town, so I won't be hungry. I always have the calves' liver and bacon or something like that, to fill me up.

  As soon as I stepped into the restaurant that night, I thought I would see Olga. I hadn't known that she would return—I hadn't thought about it—but since I've seen the summit of the Matterhorn in my dreams much more than once, mightn't she reappear? I felt happy and expectant. I was glad that I had on my new suit and had remembered to get a haircut. I wanted her to see me at my best, and I wanted to see her in a brighter light than she had appeared in that rainy night. Then I noticed that the Muzak was playing the same somber and graceful waltz that I had heard coming from the Livermores' television, and I thought that perhaps this was no more than a deception of the music—some simple turn of memory that had fooled me as I had been fooled by the smell of the rain into thinking that I was young.

  There was no Olga. I had no consolation. Then I felt desperate, desolate, crushed. I noticed how Zena smacked her lips and gave me a challenging glare, as if she was daring me to touch the shrimp foo-yong. But I wanted Olga, and the force of my need seemed to reestablish her reality. How could anything I desired so ardently be unreal? The music was only a coincidence. I straightened up again and looked around the place cheerfully, expecting her to come in at any minute, but she never did.