by John Cheever
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for my cat.”
“Ah,” he said, “then you must be the master of dear Henry. I’ve often wondered where Henry was domiciled when he was not with me. Henry, Henry, your second master has come to pay us a call.” Schwartz was asleep on a chair. He did not stir. The room was a combination kitchen and chemistry laboratory. There was the usual kitchen furniture and on a long bench an assortment of test tubes and retorts. The air was heavy with scent. “I don’t know anything about the olfactory capacities of cats but Henry does seem to enjoy perfumes, don’t you Henry. May I introduce myself. I’m Gilbert Hansen, formerly head chemist for Beauregarde et Cie.”
“Hammer,” I said, “Paul Hammer.”
“How do you do. Won’t you sit down.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You manufacture perfume here?”
“I experiment with scents,” he said. “I’m no longer in the manufacturing end of things but if I hit on something I like I’ll sell the patent, of course. Not to Beauregarde et Cie, however. After forty-two years with them I was dismissed without cause or warning. However this seems to be a common practice in industry these days. I do have an income from my patents. I am the inventor of Etoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour.”
“Really,” I said. “How did you happen to pick a place like this—way off in the woods—for your experiments?”
“Well it isn’t as out of the way as it seems. I have a garden and I grow my own thyme, lavender, iris, roses, mint, wintergreen, celery and parsley. I buy my lemons and oranges in Blenville and Charlie Hubber, who lives at the four corners, traps beaver and muskrat for me. I find their castors as lasting as civet and I get them for a fraction of the market price. I buy gum resin, methyl salicylate and benzaldehyde. Flower perfumes are not my forte since they have very limited aphrodisiac powers. The principal ingredient of Chous-Chous is cedar bark, and parsley and celery go into Naissance de Jour.”
“Did you study chemistry?”
“No. I learned my profession as an apprentice. I think of it more as alchemy than chemistry. Alchemy is, of course, the transmutation of base metals into noble ones and when an extract of beaver musk, cedar bark, heliotrope, celery and gum resin can arouse immortal longings in a male we are close to alchemy, wouldn’t you say?”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“The concept of man as a microcosm, containing within himself all the parts of the universe, is Babylonian. The elements are constant. The distillations and transmutations release their innate power. This not only works in the manufacture of perfume; I think these transmutations can work in the development of character.”
I heard a woman’s heels in the next room—light, swift, the step of someone young. Marietta came into the kitchen. “This is my granddaughter,” he said, “Marietta Drum.”
“Paul Hammer,” I said.
“Oh, hello,” she said. She lighted a cigarette. “Eight,” she said.
“How many yesterday,” he asked.
“Sixteen,” she said, “but it was only twelve the day before.”
She wore a cloth coat with a white thread on one shoulder. Her hair was dark blond. She was not beautiful—not yet. Something, some form of loneliness or unhappiness, seemed to mask or darken her looks. It would be a lie to say that there was always a white thread on her clothing—that even if I bought her a mink coat there would be a white thread on it—but the white thread had some mysterious power as if it were a catalyst that clarified my susceptibilities. It seemed like magic and when she picked the thread off her coat and dropped it onto the floor, the magic remained.
“Where are you going now,” he asked.
“Oh, I thought I’d drive into New York,” she said.
“Why? What do you want to go to New York for? You don’t have anything to do in New York.”
“I’ll find something to do,” she said. “I’ll go to the Museum of Natural History.”
“What about the groceries.”
“I’ll buy them later. I’ll be back before the stores close.” She was gone.
“Well, goodbye Schwartz,” I said. “Come home whenever you feel like it. I always have plenty of mice. It was nice to have met you,” I said to the old man. “You and your granddaughter must come over for a drink someday. I have the Emmison place.”
I walked and ran through the snowy woods back to my house, changed my clothes and headed for the city. I was in love with Marietta and I recognized all the symptoms. My life was boundless—my knees were weak. This had nothing to do with the fact that I had been inhaling the aphrodisiac fumes of Étoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour. My sudden infatuation could be put down as immature, but the truth of the matter is that I frequently fall suddenly in love with men, women, children and dogs. These attachments are unpredictable, ardent and numerous.
For example, when I was still in the publishing business I had an appointment to meet a printer in New York. I telephoned from the hotel lobby and he asked me to come up to his room. When he opened the door and introduced himself I saw past him to where his wife stood in the middle of the room. She was not a beauty but she had a prettiness, a brightness, that was stunning. I talked with her only long enough for him to get his hat and coat, but during this time I seemed to fall in love. I urged her to join us for lunch but she said she had to go to Bloomingdale’s and look for furniture. We said goodbye and the printer and I went out to lunch. The business conversation bored me and I had trouble keeping my mind on the contracts we were meant to discuss. All I could think of was her blondness, her trimness, the radiance with which, it seemed, she had been standing in the middle of that hotel room when he opened the door. I hurried through lunch, said that I had another appointment, and looped over to the furniture department at Bloomingdale’s, where I found her reading a price tag on a chest of drawers.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, “I somehow thought you might come …” Then she took my arm and we left Bloomingdale’s, walking on air, and went to some restaurant where she had tea and I had a drink. We seemed immersed in one another—she seemed to generate a heat and light that I needed. I don’t remember much of what we said but I do remember being terribly happy and that everyone around us—the waiters and the barmen—seemed to share our happiness. They lived in Connecticut and she asked me to come out for the weekend. I walked her back to the hotel, kissed her goodbye in the lobby, and walked around the streets for an hour, so high that my ears were ringing. On Friday I went out to Connecticut and she met me at the station. There was a lot of kissing in the car. I said that I loved her. She said she loved me. That night after dinner when her husband went upstairs to the toilet we had a serious discussion about her children—they had three children—and she said that her husband had been in analysis for seven years. At this point any disruption in his affairs would be catastrophic. The pleasure his wife and I took in one another’s company must have been apparent because on Saturday he began to sulk. On Sunday he was downright mean and glum. He said that he detested above all things maladjusted men who preyed on the happiness of others. He used the word parasite five times. I said I was leaving for Cleveland in the morning and she said she would drive me to the airport. He said she would not. They had a quarrel and she cried. When I left in the morning they were still sleeping and there was no one to say goodbye to but the cat.
It took me a month or so to forget her but in the meantime I had to go to London. The man with whom I shared a seat on the plane was pleasant and we began to talk. Nothing important was said but we were very sympathetic and at one point he asked if I would like to go to sleep or should we go on talking. I said that I would like to go on talking and we talked all the way across the Atlantic. We shared a cab into London. I was going to the Connaught and he was staying at the Army-Navy. When we said goodbye he suggested that we have lunch together. I had no other engagement and he met me at the Connaught
for lunch. After lunch we started walking and we walked all over London—walked to Westminster and the Embankment—and when the bars reopened we went to a pub and had some drinks. He said that he knew of a good restaurant near Grosvenor Square and we went there for dinner and stayed there until about midnight when we said goodbye. We exchanged cards and promised to call one another in New York but we never did and I’ve never seen him again.
There was, so far as I could discern, nothing unnatural in this encounter but things are not always this simple. In the late winter I went south to Wentworth to play some golf. An amiable man in the bar the night I arrived suggested that we pair off since our scores seemed to be about the same. In the morning, at about the third or fourth hole, I noticed that he was praising my form and praising it extravagantly. There is nothing about my form that deserves praise and I began to feel that his flattery—which is what it amounted to—had in it a hint of amorousness. I then began to feel that he was losing the game to me—that his golf was better than mine but that he was chipping his shots to give me a slight advantage. We played nineteen holes and his manner grew—or so I thought—increasingly sentimental and protective. I kept my distance in the shower and when we went to the bar I definitely got the feeling that something was going on. He kept bumping into me and touching me. I was not repelled but I did not want to invest my sexuality in a one-night stand with a stranger at Wentworth and I left in the morning.
As for children I will give only one example. I went out to Maggie Fowler’s for a weekend in the Hamptons. Her son—a boy of about eight or nine—was with her. He was the child of her first marriage and evidently spent most of his time with his father or away at school. He seemed a little strange with Maggie. He had that extraordinary air of privacy that some children enjoy. This may have been produced by the rigors of a divorce but I’ve seen it in all sorts of children. I got up early on Saturday morning and, finding him downstairs, walked with him to the beach for a swim. He held my hand on the walk—an unusual attention for a boy his age—and I guessed that he was lonely, but if I explained his conduct by this I must have been lonely myself because I enjoyed his company. He may have reminded me of my own childhood. The resonance of deep affection, some part of which is surely memory, was what I experienced. We had a good swim and had breakfast together and then he asked, very shyly, if I would like to play catch. We spent perhaps an hour on the back lawn, throwing a ball back and forth. Then the others came down and we started drinking Bloody Marys and there were the usual activities of a weekend, most of which excluded a boy his age. When we were dressing that evening to go out Maggie knocked on my door and said that her son wanted me to say good night to him. I did. When I got up on Sunday morning he was sitting on a chair outside my bedroom door and we walked again to the beach. I didn’t see much of him on Sunday but I seemed aware of him—his footstep, his voice, his presence in the house. I drove back on Sunday afternoon and I’ve never seen or heard of him but I definitely felt something like love for him during the few hours we spent together.
As for dogs I will also confine myself to a single example. In the spring I went out to Connecticut for a weekend with the Powerses. After lunch on Saturday we decided to climb what they called a mountain. It was, in fact, a hill. They had a dirty old collie named Francey who came along. Near the summit there was a steep rock face that was too much for Francey and I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the top. She stayed at my side for the rest of the climb or walk and when we returned I carried her down the steep stretch. While we had cocktails Francey stayed at my side and I roughed the fur on her neck. I was just as pleased with her company, I think, as she was with mine. When I went upstairs to change Francey came along and lay on the floor. I went to bed at about midnight and just as I was about to close the bedroom door Francey came along the hall and joined me. She slept on my bed. Francey and I were inseparable on Sunday. She followed me wherever I went and I talked with her, fed her crackers and roughed and caressed her neck. When it was time for me to leave on Sunday, Francey, while I was saying goodbye, streaked across the driveway and got into my car. I was flattered, of course, but flattery is some part of susceptibility and all the way home I thought tenderly of the old dog as if I had left a love.
It took me an hour and a half to drive to New York and another twenty minutes to find a parking place near the museum. The odds against finding her in that labyrinth were unequal, I knew, but that it was a labyrinth, winding, twilit and cavernous, gave some fitness to my errand and I stepped into the museum at a basement entrance with a very light heart. It was a place I had visited once or twice a year for as long as I could remember and while there had been changes there had been fewer—far fewer—than there had been outside the walls. In fifteen years the Alaskan war canoe had traveled perhaps twenty-five yards, leaving a gallery of totem poles for a vestibule. Eskimo women in glass cases were performing the same humble tasks they had been performing when I was a child, clutching Gretchen Oxencroft’s hand. I decided to start at the top of the building and work my way down. I took the elevator and began my search in a gallery that contained jewels and glass constructions of molecular particles. Lighting was a problem since if the galleries had been well lighted I would, by standing in any door, have been able to see whether or not she was there; but many of the galleries were nocturnal and I had to go from exhibit to exhibit, looking for her face in the half-lights. I was able to take in the Pleistocene room in a glance—that soaring construction of prehistoric bone and the intensely human odor of wet clothing—and the room that contains the stuffed copperheads was also well lighted. I passed the Blue Whale and the stuffed Aardvark and then stepped into another dusky gallery where the only illumination came from cases of magnified Protozoa. I descended from there to the even deeper twilight of the African gallery and from there to the North American habitat groups. Here in the stale and cavernous dark was a thrilling sense of permanence. Here were landscapes, seasons, moments in time that had not changed by a leaf or a flake of snow during my life. The flamingoes flew exactly as they had flown when I was a child. The rutting mooses were still locked, antler to antler, the timber wolves still slinked through the blue snow towards the pane of glass that separated them from chaos and change, and not a leaf of the brilliant autumn foliage had fallen. The Alaska bear still reared at the end of a corridor that seemed to be his demesne and it was here that I found her, admiring the bear.
“Hello,” I said.
“Oh, hello,” she said.
That was quick. Then she took my arm and said: “I have the most marvelous idea. Why don’t you take me to the Plaza for lunch.”
We walked across the park towards the Plaza. “I don’t think I have enough money for lunch,” I said, “and there’s no place around here where I can cash a check.” I counted the money in my wallet. I had seventeen dollars. “But seventeen is enough to take me to lunch,” she said. “I mean you could miss lunch for once in your life, couldn’t you?” That’s what we did. She ordered a full lunch and a bottle of wine. I explained to the waiter that I had already lunched but I did drink a glass of wine. She said goodbye to me in front of the hotel. “I have to get back to Blenville in time to buy Grandfather’s groceries,” she said. “Back to my prison, back to my jail …” I had a hamburger and an orange drink at the corner and drove back to Blenville myself.
I was over there the next afternoon at around four. She answered the door. She was wearing a gray dress with a white thread on the shoulder. “Did you get anything to eat?” she asked.
“I had a hamburger.”
“I’m sorry I spent all your money.”
“That’s all right. I’ve got more. Why don’t you come over to my house?”
“Where do you live?”
“I bought Dora Emmison’s place.”
“I’ll get a coat. I feel like a prisoner here.”
Back at my house I lighted a fire, made some drinks and we sat in the yellow room while she told me her story. She wa
s twenty-three and had never married. She had lived in France until she was twelve when her parents were killed in an accident and her grandfather became her guardian. She had gone to Bennington. When her grandfather moved to the country she took an apartment and got a job as a receptionist at Macy’s. She was bored and lonely in the city and had come out to Blenville in the autumn with the hope of finding a job, but the only industry in Blenville was the motel and she didn’t want to be either a prostitute or a chambermaid.
While she was talking there was a loud crack of thunder. Thunder was unusual at that time of year—the late winter—and at the first explosion I thought a plane had broken the sound barrier. The second peal—rolling and percussive—was unmistakably thunder. “Dammit,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m afraid of thunder. I know it’s absurd but that doesn’t make any difference. When I was working at Macy’s and living alone I used to hide in the closet when there was a thunderstorm. I finally went to a psychiatrist to see if he could do anything and he said the reason I was afraid of thunder was because I was a terrible egocentric. He said I thought I was so important that the thunder would seek me out for extermination. All of this may be true but it doesn’t keep me from trembling.” She was trembling then and I took her in my arms and we became lovers before the storm had passed over my land. “That felt good,” she said, “that felt very good. That was a nice thing to do.”
“I’ve never had it better,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
Six weeks later we were married in the church in Blenville. Marietta wore a gray suit with a white thread on the lapel. (Where did all those threads come from? Later, when we traveled in Europe, she would sometimes appear with a white thread on her shoulder.) After the wedding we flew to Curaçao and spent two weeks at St. Martha’s Bay. It was lovely and when we returned to Blenville I seemed to possess everything in the world that I wanted. When I finished the Montale and took it into New York I discovered that the poetry had already been translated but for some reason this didn’t disappoint me. It seemed then that nothing could. I don’t know when the honeymoon ended … I’ll settle for a night in Blenville. Eleven o’clock. Groping, I found Marietta’s side of the bed empty. There was a light on in the kitchen. The shape of the lighted window stretched over the lawn. Was Marietta sick? I sleep naked and I went down the stairs into the kitchen naked. Marietta stood in the center of the floor wearing her wedding ring and nothing else. She was eating, with a bent fork, from a can of salmon. When I embraced her she pushed me away angrily and said: “Can’t you see that I’m eating.” The salmon gave off a sea smell, fresh and cheerful. I felt like taking a swim. When I touched her again she said: “Leave me alone, leave me alone! Can’t a person get something to eat without being molested?” After that night—if that was the night—I saw more of distemper than tenderness and often slept alone; but while Marietta’s distempers were strenuous they had no more permanence than the wind. They seemed at times to be influenced by the wind. Spring and its uncertain zephyrs—any sort of clemency—seemed to create a barometric disturbance in her nature that provoked her deepest discontents. Violence, on the other hand—hurricanes, thunderstorms and blizzards—sweetened her nature. In the autumn when tempests with girls’ names lashed the Bermudas and moved up past Hatteras into the northeast, she could be gentle, yielding and wifely. When snows closed the roads and stopped the trains she was angelic, and once, at the height of an epochal blizzard, she said she loved me. She seemed to think of love as a universal dilemma, produced by convulsions of nature and history. I will never forget how tender she was the day we went off the gold standard and her passion was boundless when they shot the King of Parthia. (He was saying his prayers in the basilica.) When our only mutuality was a roof tree and some furnishings she looked at me as if I was a repulsive brute to whom she had been sold by some cruel slavemaster; but when the carts of thunder rolled, when the assassin’s knife struck home, when governments fell and earthquakes blasted the city walls she was my glory and my child.