The Stories of John Cheever (28 page)

I saw him, all right, and I think he meant me to; he was grinning. I turned off the light, but it was too dark outside and my eyes were too accustomed to the bright reading light for me to pick out any shape against the glass. I ran into the hallway and switched on some carriage lamps by the front door (the light they gave was not very bright but it was enough for me to see anyone crossing the lawn), but when I got back to the window, the lawn was empty and I could see that there was no one where he had been standing. There were plenty of places where he could have hidden. There is a big clump of syringa at the foot of the walk that would conceal a man, and there is the lilac and the cut-leaved maple. I wasn’t going to get the old samurai sword out and chase him. Not me. I turned out the carriage lights then, and stood in the dark wondering who it could have been.

I had never had anything to do with night people, but I know that they exist, and I guessed that he was probably some cracked old man from the row of shanties by the railroad tracks, and perhaps because of my determination, my need, to put a pleasant, or at least a calm, face on everything, I even managed to think compassionately of the old man who was driven, in senescence, to leave his home and wander at night in a strange neighborhood, at the mercy of dogs and policemen, only to be rewarded in the end by the sight of a man reading Lin Yutang or a woman feeding pills to a sick child or somebody eating chili con carne out of the icebox. As I climbed the dark stairs, I heard thunder, and a second later a flux of summer rain inundated the county, and I thought of the poor prowler and his long walk home through the storm.

It was after four then, and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and to the morning trains coming through. They come from Buffalo and Chicago and the Far West, through Albany and down along the river in the early morning, and at one time or another I’ve traveled on most of them, and I lay in the dark thinking about the polar air in the Pullman cars and the smell of nightclothes and the taste of dining-car water and the way it feels to end a day in Cleveland or Chicago and begin another in New York, particularly after you’ve been away for a couple of years, and particularly in the summer. I lay in the dark imagining the dark cars in the rain, and the tables set for breakfast, and the smells.

I was very sleepy the next day, but I got my work done and dozed on the train coming home. I might have been able to go to sleep then, but I didn’t want to take any chances, and I followed the routine of going to Orpheo’s and then to the movies. I saw a terrible double feature. The pictures stupefied me, and I did go to sleep as soon as I got into bed, but then the telephone woke me. It was two o’clock. I lay in bed until the phone stopped ringing. I knew I was too wakeful then for any night sounds—the wind or the traffic—to make me sleepy, and I went downstairs. I didn’t expect that the Peeping Tom would return, but my reading light was conspicuous in the dark neighborhood, so I turned on the carriage lamps by the door and sat down again with the book by Lin Yutang. When I heard the Barstows’ dog bark, I put down my book and watched the picture window to assure myself that the Peeping Tom was not coming or, if he should come, to see him before he saw me.

I didn’t see anything, anything at all, but after a few minutes I experienced that terrible hardening of the flesh, that certainty that I was being watched. I picked up my book again, not because I intended to read but because I wanted to show him that I was indifferent to the fact that he had returned. Of course, there are many other windows in the room, and I wondered for a minute which one he had taken up his stand at this night. Then I knew, and the fact that he was behind me, that he was at my back, frightened and exasperated me, and I jumped up without turning off the lamp and saw his face in the narrow window above the piano. “Get the hell away from here!” I yelled. “She’s gone! Rachel’s gone! There’s nothing to see! Leave me alone!” I ran to the window, but he had gone. And then, because I had been shouting at the top of my lungs in an empty house, I thought that perhaps I was going crazy. I thought, again, that I might have imagined the face in the window, and I got the flashlight and went outside.

There is a flower bed under the narrow window. I looked at this with the flashlight, and he had been there, all right. There were footprints in the dirt, and he’d stepped on some of the flowers. I followed his tracks out of the flower bed to the edge of the lawn, where I found a man’s patent-leather bedroom slipper. It was a little cracked and worn, and I thought it might have belonged to an old man, but I knew it didn’t belong to any servant. I guessed that Tom was one of my neighbors. I heaved the slipper over my hedge towards where the Barstows have a compost heap, and went back to the house and turned off the lights and went upstairs.

DURING
the next day, I thought once or twice of calling the police, but I couldn’t make up my mind. I thought about it again that night while I was standing at the bar at Orpheo’s, waiting for them to cook my steak. The situation, on the surface, was ridiculous, and I could see that, but the dread of seeing his face in the window again was real and cumulative, and I didn’t see why I should have to endure it, particularly at a time when I was trying to overhaul my whole way of living. It was getting dark outside. I went to the public telephone then and called the police. Stanley Madison, who sometimes directs traffic at the station, answered. He said “Oh” when I told him that I wanted to report a prowler. He asked me if Rachel was at home. Then he said that the village, since its incorporation in 1916, had never had such a complaint registered. He spoke with that understandable pride that we all take in the neighborhood. I had anticipated putting myself at a disadvantage, but Stanley spoke as if I were deliberately trying to damage real-estate values. He went on to say that a five-man police force was inadequate, that they were underpaid and overworked, and that if I wanted a guard put around my house, I should move to enlarge the police force at the next meeting of the civic-improvement association. He tried not to seem unfriendly and ended the conversation by asking about Rachel and the children, but when I left the telephone booth, I felt that I had made a mistake.

That night, a big thunderstorm broke right in the middle of the movie, and it rained until morning. I guess the storm kept Tom at home, because I didn’t see him or hear him. But he was back the next night. I heard him come at about three and leave about an hour later, but I didn’t look up from my book. I reasoned that he was probably a harmless nuisance, and that if I only knew who he was—that if I only knew his name—his ability to irritate me would be lost and I could peacefully resume the schedule of my cure. I went upstairs with the question of his identity still on my mind. I was pretty sure that he came from the neighborhood. I wondered if any of my friends or neighbors had a cracked relative staying with them for the summer. I went over the names of everyone I knew, trying to associate with them some eccentric uncle or grandfather. I thought that if I could disengage the stranger from the night, from the dark, everything would be all right.

In the morning, when I went down to the station, I walked through the crowd on the platform looking for some stranger who might be the culprit. Even though I had only seen the face dimly, I thought that I would recognize it. Then I saw my man. It was as simple as that. He was waiting on the platform for the eight-ten with the rest of us, but he wasn’t any stranger.

It was Herbert Marston, who lives in the big yellow house on Blenhollow Road. If there had been any question in my mind, it would have been answered by the way he looked when he saw that I recognized him. He looked frightened and guilty. I started across the platform to speak to him. “I don’t mind you looking in my windows at night, Mr. Marston,” I was going to say, in a voice loud enough to embarrass him, “but I wish that you wouldn’t trample on my wife’s flowers.” Then I stopped, because I saw that he was not alone. He was with his wife and his daughter. I walked behind them and stood at the corner of the waiting room, looking at this family.

There was nothing irregular in Mr. Marston’s features or—when he saw that I was going to leave him alone—in his manner. He’s a gray-haired man, a little over medium height, with a bony face that must have been handsome when he was younger. The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard. I felt the loss of it that morning when I searched his face for some mark. He looked solvent, rested, and moral—much more so than Chucky Ewing, who was job hunting, or Larry Spencer, whose son had polio, or any of a dozen other men on the platform waiting for the train. Then I looked at his daughter, Lydia. Lydia is one of the prettiest girls in our neighborhood. I’d ridden in on the train with her once or twice and I knew that she was doing voluntary secretarial work for the Red Cross. She had on a blue dress that morning, and her arms were bare, and she looked so fresh and pretty and sweet that I wouldn’t have embarrassed or hurt her for anything in the world. Then I looked at Mrs. Marston, and if the mark was anywhere, it was on
her
face, although I don’t understand why she should be afflicted for her husband’s waywardness. It was very hot, but Mrs. Marston had on a brown suit and a worn fur piece. Her face was sallow and plain, but it was wreathed, even while she watched for the morning train, in an impermeable smile. It was a face that must have seemed, long ago, cut out for violent, even malevolent, passion. But years of prayer and abstinence had expunged the inclination to violence, I thought, leaving only a few ugly lines at the mouth and the eyes and rewarding Mrs. Marston with an air of adamant and fetid sweetness. She must pray for him, I thought, while he wanders around the back yards in his bathrobe. I had wanted to know who Tom was, but now that I knew, I didn’t feel any better. The graying man and the beautiful girl and the woman, standing together, made me feel worse.

That night, I decided to stay in town and go to a cocktail party. It was in an apartment in one of the tower hotels—way, way, way up. As soon as I got there, I went out onto the terrace, looking around for someone to take to dinner. What I wanted was a pretty girl in new shoes, but it looked as if all the pretty girls had stayed at the shore. There was a gray-haired woman out there, and a woman with a floppy hat, and Grace Harris, this actress I’ve met a couple of times. Grace Harris is a beauty, a faded one, and we’ve never had much to say to one another, but that night she gave me a very cordial smile. It was cordial but it was very sad, and the first thing I thought of was that she must have learned that Rachel had left me. I smiled right back at her and went in to the bar, where I found Harry Purcell. I had some drinks and talked with him. I looked around the room a couple of times, and each time I saw Grace Harris giving me this sad, sad look. I wondered about it, and then I thought she had probably mistaken me for somebody else. A lot of those ageless beauties with violet eyes are half blind, I know, and I thought that perhaps she couldn’t see across the room. It got late, but there weren’t any claims on my time, and I went on drinking. Then Harry went to the bathroom, and I stood alone at the bar for a couple of minutes, but that was too long. Grace Harris, who was with some people at the other end of the room, came over to me. She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. “You poor boy,” she murmured, “you poor boy.”

I’m not a boy, and I’m not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever face, but I felt in it, that night, the force of great sadness and great malice. “I see a rope around your neck,” she said sadly. Then she lifted her hand off my coat sleeve and went out of the room, and I guess she must have gone home, because I didn’t see her again. Harry came back, and I didn’t tell him what had happened, and I tried not to think much about it myself. I stayed at the party too long and got a late train home.

I remember that I took a bath and put on pajamas and lay down. As soon as I shut my eyes, I saw this rope. It had a hangman’s noose at the end of it, but I’d known all along what Grace Harris had been talking about; she’d had a premonition that I would hang myself. The rope seemed to come down slowly into my consciousness. I opened my eyes and thought about the work I had to do in the morning, but when I shut my eyes again, there was a momentary blankness into which the rope—as if it had been pushed off a beam—fell, and swung through space. I opened my eyes and thought some more about the office, but when I shut them, there was the rope, still swinging. Whenever I closed my eyes that night and tried to go to sleep, it felt as though sleep had taken on the anguish of blindness. And with the visible world gone, there was nothing to keep the arbitrary rope from occupying the dark. I got out of bed and went downstairs and opened the Lin Yutang. I had only been reading for a few minutes when I heard Mr. Marston in the flower garden. I thought I knew, at last, what he was waiting to see. This frightened me. I turned off the light and stood up. It was dark outside the window and I couldn’t see him. I wondered if there was any rope in the house. Then I remembered the painter on my son’s dinghy in the cellar. I went into the cellar. The dory was on sawhorses, and there was a long painter on it, long enough for a man to hang himself by. I went upstairs to the kitchen and got a knife and hacked the painter off the boat. Then I got some newspapers and put them into the furnace and opened the drafts and burned up the rope. Then I went upstairs and got into bed. I felt saved.

I don’t know how long it had been since I had had a good night’s rest. But I felt queer in the morning, and although I could see from the window that it was a bright day, I didn’t feel up to it. The sky and the light and everything else seemed dim and remote, as if I saw it all from a great distance. The thought of seeing the Marston family again revolted me, so I skipped the eight-ten and took a later train. The image of the rope was still at the back of my mind, and I saw it once or twice on the trip. I got through the morning, but when I left the office at noon, I told my secretary that I wouldn’t be back. I had a lunch date with Nathan Shea, at the University Club, and I went there early and drank a Martini at the bar. I stood beside an old gentleman who was describing to a friend the regularity of his habits, and I had a strong impulse to crown him with a bowl of popcorn, but I drank my drink and stared at the bartender’s wristwatch, which was hanging on a long-necked bottle of white crème de menthe. When Shea came in, I had two more drinks with him. Anesthetized by gin, I got through the lunch.