The Stories of John Cheever (27 page)

BAXTER WAS AWARE
that he had only himself to blame; he had moved too quickly. He knew better. He went to bed feeling angry and sad, and slept poorly. He was depressed when he woke, and his depression was deepened by the noise of a sea rain, blowing in from the northeast. He lay in bed listening to the rain and the surf. The storm would metamorphose the island. The beaches would be empty. Drawers would stick. Suddenly he got out of bed, went to the telephone, called the airport. The New York plane had been unable to land, they told him, and no more planes were expected that day. The storm seemed to be playing directly into his hands. At noon, he drove in to the village and bought a Sunday paper and a box of candy. The candy was for Clarissa, but he was in no hurry to give it to her.

She would have stocked the icebox, put out the towels, and planned the picnic, but now the arrival of her friends had been postponed, and the lively day that she had anticipated had turned out to be rainy and idle. There were ways, of course, for her to overcome her disappointment, but on the evidence of the barn dance he felt that she was lost without her husband or her mother-in-law, and that there were few, if any, people on the island who would pay her a chance call or ask her over for a drink. It was likely that she would spend the day listening to the radio and the rain and that by the end of it she would be ready to welcome anyone, including Baxter. But as long as the forces of loneliness and idleness were working on his side, it was shrewder, Baxter knew, to wait. It would be best to come just before dark, and he waited until then. He drove to the Ryans’ with his box of candy. The windows were lighted. Clarissa opened the door.

“I wanted to welcome your friends to the island,” Baxter said. “I—-”

“They didn’t come,” Clarissa said. “The plane couldn’t land. They went back to New York. They telephoned me. I had planned such a nice visit. Now everything’s changed.”

“I’m sorry, Clarissa,” Baxter said. “I’ve brought you a present.”

“Oh!” She took the box of candy. “What a beautiful box! What a lovely present! What—” Her face and her voice were, for a minute, ingenuous and yielding, and then he saw the force of resistance transform them. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said.

“May I come in?” Baxter asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t come in if you’re just going to sit around.”

“We could play cards,” Baxter said.

“I don’t know how,” she said.

“I’ll teach you,” Baxter said.

“No,” she said. “No, Baxter, you’ll have to go. You just don’t understand the kind of a woman I am. I spent all day writing a letter to Bob. I wrote and told him that you kissed me last night. I can’t let you come in.” She closed the door.

From the look on Clarissa’s face when he gave her the box of candy, Baxter judged that she liked to get presents. An inexpensive gold bracelet or even a bunch of flowers might do it, he knew, but Baxter was an extremely stingy man, and while he saw the usefulness of a present, he could not bring himself to buy one. He decided to wait.

The storm blew all Monday and Tuesday. It cleared on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon the tennis courts were dry and Baxter played. He played until late. Then, when he had bathed and changed his clothes, he stopped at a cocktail party to pick up a drink. Here one of his neighbors, a married woman with four children, sat down beside him and began a general discussion of the nature of married love.

It was a conversation, with its glances and innuendoes, that Baxter had been through many times, and he knew roughly what it promised. His neighbor was one of the pretty mothers that Baxter had admired on the beach. Her hair was brown. Her arms were thin and tanned. Her teeth were sound. But while he appeared to be deeply concerned with her opinions on love, the white image of Clarissa loomed up in his mind, and he broke off the conversation and left the party. He drove to the Ryans’.

From a distance, the cottage looked shut. The house and the garden were perfectly still. He knocked and then rang. Clarissa spoke to him from an upstairs window.

“Oh, hello, Baxter,” she said.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, Clarissa,” Baxter said. He couldn’t think of anything better.

“Oh, dear,” Clarissa said. “Well, wait just a minute. I’ll be down.”

“I’m going away, Clarissa,” Baxter said when she opened the door. “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.” He said this sadly.

“Well, come in, then,” she said hesitantly. “Come in for a minute. This is the last time that I’ll see you, I guess, isn’t it? Please excuse the way the place looks. Mr. Talbot got sick on Monday and Mrs. Talbot had to take him to the hospital on the mainland, and I haven’t had anybody to help me. I’ve been all alone.”

He followed her into the living room and sat down. She was more beautiful than ever. She talked about the problems that had been presented by Mrs. Talbot’s departure. The fire in the stove that heated the water had died. There was a mouse in the kitchen. The bathtub wouldn’t drain. She hadn’t been able to get the car started.

In the quiet house, Baxter heard the sound of a leaky water tap and a clock pendulum. The sheet of glass that protected the Ryans’ geological specimens reflected the fading sky outside the window. The cottage was near the water, and he could hear the surf. He noted these details dispassionately and for what they were worth. When Clarissa finished her remarks about Mrs. Talbot, he waited a full minute before he spoke.

“The sun is in your hair,” he said.

“What?”

“The sun is in your hair. It’s a beautiful color.”

“Well, it isn’t as pretty as it used to be,” she said. “Hair like mine gets dark. But I’m not going to dye it. I don’t think that women should dye their hair.”

“You’re so intelligent,” he murmured.

“You don’t mean that?”

“Mean what?”

“Mean that I’m intelligent.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “You’re intelligent. You’re beautiful. I’ll never forget that night I met you at the boat. I hadn’t wanted to come to the island. I’d made plans to go out West.”

“I can’t be intelligent,” Clarissa said miserably. “I must be stupid. Mother Ryan says that I’m stupid, and Bob says that I’m stupid, and even Mrs. Talbot says that I’m stupid, and—” She began to cry. She went to a mirror and dried her eyes. Baxter followed. He put his arms around her. “Don’t put your arms around me,” she said, more in despair than in anger. “Nobody ever takes me seriously until they get their arms around me.” She sat down again and Baxter sat near her. “But you’re not stupid, Clarissa,” he said. “You have a wonderful intelligence, a wonderful mind. I’ve often thought so. I’ve often felt that you must have a lot of very interesting opinions.”

“Well, that’s funny,” she said, “because I do have a lot of opinions. Of course, I never dare say them to anyone, and Bob and Mother Ryan don’t ever let me speak. They always interrupt me, as if they were ashamed of me. But I do have these opinions. I mean, I think we’re like cogs in a wheel. I’ve concluded that we’re like cogs in a wheel. Do you think we’re like cogs in a wheel?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes, I do!”

“I think we’re like cogs in a wheel,” she said. “For instance, do you think that women should work? I’ve given that a lot of thought. My opinion is that I don’t think married women should work. I mean, unless they have a lot of money, of course, but even then I think it’s a full-time job to take care of a man. Or do you think that women should work?”

“What do you think?” he asked. “I’m terribly interested in knowing what you think.”

“Well, my opinion is,” she said timidly, “that you just have to hoe your row. I don’t think that working or joining the church is going to change everything, or special diets, either. I don’t put much stock in fancy diets. We have a friend who eats a quarter of a pound of meat at every meal. He has a scales right on the table and he weighs the meat. It makes the table look awful and I don’t see what good it’s going to do him. I buy what’s reasonable. If ham is reasonable, I buy ham. If lamb is reasonable, I buy lamb. Don’t you think that’s intelligent?”

“I think that’s very intelligent.”

“And progressive education,” she said. “I don’t have a good opinion of progressive education. When we go to the Howards’ for dinner, the children ride their tricycles around the table all the time, and it’s my opinion that they get this way from progressive schools, and that children ought to be told what’s nice and what isn’t.”

The sun that had lighted her hair was gone, but there was still enough light in the room for Baxter to see that as she aired her opinions, her face suffused with color and her pupils dilated. Baxter listened patiently, for he knew by then that she merely wanted to be taken for something that she was not—that the poor girl was lost. “You’re very intelligent,” he said, now and then. “You’re so intelligent.”

It was as simple as that.

T
HIS HAPPENED
in the summer. I remember that the weather was very hot, both in New York and in the suburb where we live. My wife and I had a quarrel, and Rachel took the children and drove off in the station wagon. Tom didn’t appear—or I wasn’t conscious of him—until they had been gone for about two weeks, but her departure and his arrival seemed connected. Rachel’s departure was meant to be final. She had left me twice before—the second time, we divorced and then remarried—and I watched her go each time with a feeling that was far from happy, but also with that renewal of self-respect, of nerve, that seems to be the reward for accepting a painful truth. As I say, it was summer, and I was glad, in a way, that she had picked this time to quarrel. It seemed to spare us both the immediate necessity of legalizing our separation. We had lived together—on and off—for thirteen years: we had three children and some involved finances. I guessed that she was content, as I was. to let things ride until September or October.

I was glad that the separation took place in the summer because my job is most exacting at that time of year and I’m usually too tired to think of anything else at night, and because I’d noticed that summer was for me the easiest season of the year to live through alone. I also expected that Rachel would get the house when our affairs were settled, and I like our house and thought of those days as the last I would spend there. There were a few minor symptoms of domestic disorder. First the dog and then the cat ran away. Then I came home one night and found Maureen, the maid, dead drunk. She told me that her husband, when he was with the Army of Occupation in Germany, had fallen in love with another woman. She wept. She got down on her knees. That scene, with the two of us alone in a house unnaturally empty of women and children on a summer evening, was grotesque, and it is this kind of grotesqueness, I know, that can destroy your resolution. I made her some coffee and gave her two weeks’ wages and drove her home, and when we said goodbye she seemed composed and sober, and I felt that the grotesqueness could be forgotten. After this, I planned a simple schedule that I hoped to follow until autumn.

You cure yourself of a romantic, carnal, and disastrous marriage, I decided, and, like any addict in the throes of a cure, you must be exaggeratedly careful of every step you take. I decided not to answer the telephone, because I knew that Rachel might repent, and I knew, by then, the size and the nature of the things that could bring us together. If it rained for five days, if one of the children had a passing fever, if she got some sad news in a letter—anything like this might be enough to put her on the telephone, and I did not want to be tempted to resume a relationship that had been so miserable. The first months will be like a cure, I thought, and I scheduled my time with this in mind. I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in the summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo’s. There was usually someone there to talk with, and I’d drink a couple of Martinis and eat a steak. Afterward I’d drive over to the Stonybrook Drive-In Theatre and sit through a double feature. All this—the Martinis and the steak and the movie—was intended to induce a kind of anesthesia, and it worked. I didn’t want to see anyone outside the people in my office.

But I don’t sleep very well in an empty bed, and presently I had the problem of sleeplessness to cope with. When I got home from the movies, I would fall asleep, but only for a couple of hours. I tried to make the best of insomnia. If it was raining, I listened to the rain and the thunder. If it wasn’t raining, I listened to the distant noise of trucks on the turnpike, a sound that reminded me of the Depression, when I spent some time on the road. The trucks came gunning down the turnpike—loaded with chickens or canned goods or soap powder or furniture. The sound meant darkness to me, darkness and headlights—and youth, I suppose, since it seemed to be a pleasant sound. Sometimes the noise of the rain or the traffic or something like that would distract me, and I would be able to go to sleep again, but one night nothing at all worked, and at three in the morning I decided to go downstairs and read.

I turned on a light in the living room and looked at Rachel’s books. I chose one by an author named Lin Yutang and sat down on a sofa under a lamp. Our living room is comfortable. The book seemed interesting. I was in a neighborhood where most of the front doors were unlocked, and on a street that is very quiet on a summer night. All the animals are domesticated, and the only night birds that I’ve ever heard are some owls way down by the railroad track. So it was very quiet. I heard the Barstows’ dog bark, briefly, as if he had been waked by a nightmare, and then the barking stopped. Everything was quiet again. Then I heard, very close to me, a footstep and a cough.

I felt my flesh get hard—you know that feeling—but I didn’t look up from my book, although I felt that I was being watched. Intuition and all that sort of thing may exist, but I am happier if I discount it, and yet, without lifting my eyes from the book, I knew not only that I was being watched but that I was being watched from the picture window at the end of the living room, by someone whose intent was to watch me and to violate my privacy. Sitting under a bright lamp, surrounded by the dark, made me feel defenseless. I turned a page and pretended to go on reading. Then a fear, much worse than the fear of the fool outside the window, distracted me. I was afraid that the cough and the step and the feeling that I was being watched had come from my imagination. I looked up.