by John Cheever
Doheny saw me that afternoon. His waiting room had a large collection of magazines but the ashtrays were clean, the cushions were unrumpled and I had the feeling that perhaps I was his first customer in a long time. Was he, I wondered, an unemployed psychiatrist, an unsuccessful psychiatrist, an unpopular psychiatrist, did he wile away the time in an empty office like an idle lawyer, barber or antique dealer? He presently appeared and led me into a consultation room that was furnished with antiques. I wondered then if some part of a psychiatrist’s education was the furnishing of his consultation room. Did they do it themselves? Did their wives do it? Was it done by a professional? Doheny had large brown eyes in a long face. When I sat in the patient’s chair he turned the beam of his brown eye onto me exactly as a dentist turns on the light above his drills and for the next fifty minutes I basked in his gaze and returned his looks earnestly to prove that I was truthful and manly. He seemed, like some illusion of drunkenness, to have two faces and I found it fascinating to watch one swallow up the other. He charged a dollar a minute.
After our fourth or fifth consultation he asked me to masturbate when I got home and report my reactions to him. I did as he asked and reported that I had felt ashamed of myself. He was delighted with this news and said that it proved that sexual guilt was the source of my cafard. I was a repressed transvestite homosexual. I had told him about Daddy posing for Fledspar and he told me that this image of a naked man supporting hotels, palaces of justice and opera houses had intimidated me and forced me into an unnatural way of life. I told him to go to hell and said that I was through. I said that he was a charlatan and that I was going to report him to the American Psychiatric Society. If he wasn’t a charlatan why didn’t he have diplomas hung on his wall like other doctors? He got very angry at this, threw open his desk drawer and pulled out a pile of diplomas. He had diplomas from Yale, Columbia and the Neurological Hospital. Then I noticed that all these documents were made out to a man named Howard Shitz and I asked if he hadn’t picked them up in a secondhand bookstore. He said he had changed his name when he went into practice for reasons that any dunce would understand. I left.
I was no better after Doheny—I was worse—and I began to wonder seriously if the ubiquity of my father’s head and shoulders carved in limestone had not been crippling; but if it had been what could I do? The opera house in Malsburg and the Prinz-Regenten had been demolished but I couldn’t remove him from his position on upper Broadway and he was still holding up the Mercedes in Frankfurt. I went on drinking—more than a quart a day—and my hands had begun to shake terribly. When I went into a bar I would wait until the bartender turned his back before I tried to get the glass up to my mouth. I sometimes spilled gin all over the bar. This amused the other customers. I went out to Pennsylvania one weekend with some heavy-drinking friends and came back on a social train that got me into Penn Station at about eleven Sunday night. The station was then being razed and reconstructed and it was such a complex of ruins that it seemed like a frightening projection of my own confusions and I stepped out into the street, looking for a bar. The bars around the station were too brightly lighted for a man whose hands were shaking and I started walking east, looking for some dark saloon where my infirmity would not be so noticeable. Walking down a side street I saw two lighted windows and a room with yellow walls. The windows were uncurtained. All I could see were the yellow walls. I put down my suitcase to stare at the windows. I was convinced that whoever lived there lived a useful and illustrious life. It would be a single man like myself but a man with a continent nature, a ruling intelligence, an efficient disposition. The pair of windows filled me with shame. I wanted my life to be not merely decent but exemplary. I wanted to be useful, continent and at peace. If I could not change my habits I could at least change my environment and I thought that if I found such a room with yellow walls I would cure my cafard and my drunkenness.
The next afternoon I packed a bag and took a cab across town to the Hotel Milton, looking for that room where I could begin my illustrious life. They gave me a room on the second floor, looking out onto an airshaft. The room had not been made up. There was an empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the bureau and only one of the two beds had been used. I called the desk to complain and they said the only other vacancy they had was a suite on the tenth floor. I then moved to this. I found a parlor, a double bedroom and a large collection of flower pictures. I ordered some gin, vermouth and a bucket of ice and got stoned. This was not what I intended to do and in the morning I moved to the Hotel Madison.
My room at the Madison was furnished with the kind of antiques Doheny had had in his consultation room. It only lacked the colored photographs of his three children. The desk, or some part of it, had once been a spinet. The coffee table was covered with leather that had been tooled, gilded and burned by many cigarettes. There were mirrors on all the walls so that I could not escape my own image. I saw myself smoking, drinking, dressing and undressing and when I woke in the morning the first thing I saw was myself. I left the next day for the Waldorf, where I was given a pleasant, high-ceilinged room. There was a broad view. I could see the dome of St. Bartholomew’s, the Seagram Building and one of those yellow bifurcated buildings that has a terraced and windowed front and a flat, yellow-brick backside with no sign of life but a rain gutter. It seemed to have been sliced with a knife. Almost anywhere in New York above the fifteenth floor your view includes a few caryatids, naiads, homely water tanks and Florentine arches and I was admiring these when it occurred to me how easy it would be to escape the cafard by jumping into the street and I checked out of the Waldorf and took a plane to Chicago.
In Chicago I took a room at the Palmer House. This was on the sixteenth floor. The furniture seemed to be of some discernible period but the more I examined it the more it seemed to be an inoffensive improvisation and then I realized that it was the same furniture I had seen in my room at the Waldorf. I flipped open the venetian blinds. My window looked out into an enclosure where I could see, upwards, downwards and sidewise, a hundred, hundred windows exactly like mine. The fact that my room had no uniqueness seemed seriously to threaten my own uniqueness. I suffered an intense emotional vertigo. The fear was not of falling but of vanishing. If there was nothing in my room to distinguish it from a hundred, hundred others there might be nothing about me to set me apart from other men, and I snapped the venetian blinds shut and went out of the room. Waiting for the elevator a man gave me that bland, hopeful gaze of a faggot on the make and I thought that he might have been driven by the sameness of the hotel windows to authenticate his identity by unnatural sexual practices. I lowered my eyes chastely to the floor. Downstairs I drank three martinis and went to a movie. I stayed in Chicago two days and took the Zephyr to San Francisco. I thought a train compartment might be the environment where I could begin my new life but it was not. In San Francisco I stayed two nights at the Palace and two nights at the St. Francis and then flew down the coast and checked in at the Los Angeles Biltmore. This was the furthest from what I wanted and I moved from there to the Château Marmont. I moved from there to the Beverly Hills and a day later took a plane to London on the northerly route. I tried to get a room at the Connaught but they were full and so I went instead to the Dorchester where I lasted two days. I then flew to Rome and checked in at the Eden. My cafard had followed me around the world and I was still drinking heavily. Lying in bed in the Eden one morning with a pillow over my face I summoned up Kilimanjaro and its ancient village, the Elysian Fields and the fortified town. It occurred to me then that I had thought the town might be Orvieto. I rented a Fiat from the concierge and started north.
It was after lunch when I got into Umbria and I stopped in a walled town and had some pasta and wine. The country was wheat country, more heavily forested than most of Italy and very green. Like most travelers I kept stupidly observing the sameness of things, kept telling myself that on the evidence of what I saw I might be in New Hampshire or the outskirts of Heidelberg.
What for? It was nearly seven o’clock when I came down the winding road into the broad valley that surrounds Orvieto.
I had been wrong about the towers but everything else seemed right. The city was high, its buildings seemed to be a variation of the stone butte and it looked like the place I had seen in fending off the cafard. It seemed to correspond to my vision. I was excited. My life, my sanity were involved. The papal cathedral, in its commanding position, excited, as it was meant to do, awe, admiration and something like dread as if some part of my memory was that of a heretic on my way to be questioned by the bishops. I drove through the lower town up to the city on the butte and checked in at the Hotel Nazionale where I was given a large, deluxe European room with a massive armoire and a glass chandelier. It was not the room I was looking for. I wandered around the streets and just before dark, in a building not far from the cathedral, I saw the lighted windows and the yellow walls.
I seemed, looking up at them from the sidewalk, to be standing at the threshold of a new life. This was not a sanctuary, this was the vortex of things, but this was a place where the cafard could not enter. The door of the building was open and I climbed some stairs. The pair of yellow rooms was on the second floor. They were unfurnished, as I knew they would be, and freshly painted. Everything was ready for my occupancy. There was a man putting up shelves for my books. I spoke to the man and asked him who the rooms belonged to. He said they were his. I asked if they were for sale or for rent and he smiled and said no. Then I said I wanted them and would pay whatever he asked for them but he went on smiling and saying no. Then I heard some men in the hallway, carrying something heavy. I could hear their strained voices, their breathing, and the object, whatever it was, bumping against the wall. It was a large bed, which they carried into the second of the yellow rooms. The owner explained to me then that this was his marriage bed. He was going to be married next day in the chapel of the cathedral and begin his married life here. I was still so convinced that the rooms were, spiritually at least, my property that I asked him if he wouldn’t prefer to live in one of the new apartments in the lower town. I would pay the difference in the rent and was prepared to give him a large present for the wedding. He was impervious, of course. Like any groom, he had imagined so many hundreds of times the hour when he would bring his bride back to the yellow rooms that no amount of money would dislodge the memory from its place in his mind. I wished him well anyhow and went down the stairs. I had found my yellow rooms and I had lost them. I left Orvieto in the morning for Rome and left Rome the next day for New York.
I spent one night in my apartment during which I drank a quart of whiskey. The next afternoon I drove out to Pennsylvania to visit a classmate of mine—Charlie Masterson—and his wife. There were heavy drinkers and we ran out of gin before dinner. I drove into the little village of Blenville and bought a fresh supply at the liquor store and started back. I made a wrong turn and found myself on a narrow red dirt lane that seemed to lead nowhere. Then on my left, set back from the road and a little above it, I saw the yellow walls for the third time.
I turned off the motor and the lights and got out of the car. There was a brook between the road and the house and I crossed this on a wooden bridge. A lawn or a field—the grass needed cutting—sloped up to a terrace. The house was stone—rectangular—an old Pennsylvania farmhouse, and the yellow room was the only room lighted. The walls were the same color I had seen in Orvieto. I went up onto the terrace, as absorbed as any thief. A woman sat in the yellow room, reading a book. She wore a black dress and high-heeled shoes and had a glass of whiskey on a table at her side. Her face was pale and handsome. I guessed she was in her twenties. The black dress and the high-heeled shoes seemed out of place in the country and I wondered if she had just arrived from town or were just about to leave, although the size of the whiskey glass made this seem unlikely. But it was not the woman but the room I wanted—square, its lemon-yellow walls simply lighted—and I felt that if I could only possess this I would be myself again, industrious and decent. She looked up suddenly as if she sensed my presence and I stepped away from the window. I was very happy. Walking back to the car I saw the name Emmison painted on a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I found my way back to the Mastersons’ and asked Mrs. Masterson if she knew anyone named Emmison. “Sure,” she said. “Dora Emmison. I think she’s in Reno.”
“Her house was lighted,” I said.
“What in the world were you doing at her house?”
“I got lost.”
“Well she was in Reno. I suppose she’s just come back. Do you know her?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but I’d like to.”
“Well if she’s back I’ll ask her for a drink tomorrow.”
She came the next afternoon, wearing the black dress and the same high heels. She was a little reserved but I found her fascinating, not because of her physical and intellectual charms but because she owned the yellow rooms. She stayed for supper and I asked about her house. I presently asked if she wouldn’t like to sell it. She was not at all interested. Then I asked if I could see the house and she agreed indifferently. She was leaving early and if I wanted to see the place I could come back with her and so I did.
As soon as I stepped into the yellow room I felt that peace of mind I had coveted when I first saw the walls in a walkup near Pennsylvania Station. Sometimes you step into a tackroom, a carpenter’s shop or a country post office and find yourself unexpectedly at peace with the world. It is usually late in the day. The place has a fine smell (I must include bakeries). The groom, carpenter, postmaster or baker has a face so clear, so free of trouble that you feel that nothing bad has ever or will ever happen here, a sense of fitness and sanctity never achieved, in my experience, by any church.
She gave me a drink and I asked again if she would sell the place. “Why should I sell my house,” she asked. “I like my house. It’s the only house I have. If you want a place in the neighborhood the Barkham place is on the market and it’s really much more attractive than this.”
“This is the house I want.”
“I don’t see why you’re so crazy about this place. If I had a choice I’d rather have the Barkham place.”
“Well I’ll buy the Barkham place and exchange it for this.”
“I simply don’t want to move,” she said. She looked at her watch.
“Could I sleep here,” I asked.
“Where.”
“Here, here in this room.”
“But what do you want to sleep here for? The sofa’s hard as a rock.”
“I’d just like to.”
“Well I guess you can if you want to. No monkey business.”
“No monkey business.”
“I’ll get some bedding.”
She went upstairs and came down with some sheets and a blanket and made my bed. “I think I’ll turn in myself,” she said, going towards the stairs. “I guess you know where everything is. If you want another drink there’s some ice in the bucket. I think my husband left a razor in the medicine cabinet. Good night.” Her smile was courteous and no more. She climbed the stairs.
I didn’t make a drink. I didn’t, as they say, need one. I sat in a chair by the window feeling the calm of the yellow walls restore me. Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman’s breasts and the apple core she has left in an ashtray. I loved it all and everyone who lived. My life had begun again and I could see, from this beginning, how far I had gone from any natural course. Here was the sense of reality—a congenial, blessed and useful construction to which I belonged. I stepped out onto the terrace. It was cloudy but some stars could still be seen. The wind was shifting and smelled of rain. I walked down to the bridge, undressed and dove into a pool there. The water was buoyant and a little brackish from the b
ogs in which it rose, but it had, so unlike the disinfected sapphire of a pool, a strong and unmistakably erotic emphasis. I dried myself on my shirttails and walked naked back to the house, feeling as if the earth were paved for my contentment. I brushed my teeth, turned out the light, and as I got into my bed it began to rain.
For a year or more the sound of the rain had meant merely umbrellas, raincoats, rubbers, the wet seats of convertibles, but now it seemed like some enlargement of my happiness, some additional bounty. It seemed to increase my feeling of limberness and innocence and I fended off sleep to listen to it with the attention and curiosity with which we follow music. When I did sleep I dreamed in this order of the mountain, the walled town and the banks of the river and when I woke at dawn there was no trace of the cafard. I dove into the pool again and dressed. In the kitchen I found a melon, made some coffee and fried some bacon. The smell of coffee and bacon seemed like a smell of newness and I ate with a good appetite. She came down later in a bathrobe and thanked me for having made the coffee. When she raised the cup to her lips her hand shook so that the coffee spilled. She went into the pantry, returned with a bottle of whiskey and spiked her coffee. She neither apologized or explained this but the spike steadied her hand. I asked her if she wouldn’t like me to cut the grass. “Well I would frankly,” she said, “if you don’t have anything better to do. It’s terribly hard to find anyone around here to do anything. All the young men leave home and all the old ones die. The mower’s in the toolshed and I think there’s some gasoline.”