The Stories of John Cheever (83 page)

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 unfulfillment 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 skintight uniform. His breath smelled of rye and toothpaste. I was so delighted by her company, her 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 fooyong. But I wanted Olga, and the force of my need seemed to re-establish 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.

I didn’t think she would be at the movies—I knew she didn’t like movies—but I still had the feeling that I would see her that night. I didn’t deceive myself—I want to make this clear; I knew she was unreal, and yet she seemed to have some punctuality, some order, some schedule of engagements, and above all I needed her. After my wife went to bed I sat on the edge of the bathtub reading the newspaper. My wife doesn’t like me to sit in the kitchen or the living room, so I read in the bathroom, where the light is bright. I was reading when Olga came in. There was no waltz music, no rain, nothing that could account for her presence, excepting my loneliness. “Oh, my darling,” I said, “I thought you were going to meet me at the restaurant.” She said something about not wanting to be seen by my wife. Then she sat down beside me on the bathtub, I put my arms around her, and we talked about her plans. She was looking for an apartment. She was then living in a cheap hotel, and she was having trouble finding a job. “It’s too bad you can’t type and take shorthand,” I remember telling her. “It might almost be worthwhile going to school…. I’ll look around and see if I can find anything. Sometimes there’s an opening for a receptionist…. You could do that, couldn’t you? I won’t let you be a hat-check girl or a restaurant hostess. No, I won’t let you. I’d rather pay your salary until something better comes along….”

My wife threw open the bathroom door. Women’s hair curlers, like grass dye and funny signs, only seem to me reminders of the fact that we must find more serious and finer things upon which to comment, and I will only say that my wife wears so many and such bellicose hair curlers that anybody trying to romance her would lose an eye. “You’re talking to yourself,” she thundered. “You can be heard all over the neighborhood. They’ll think you’re nuts. And you woke me up. You woke me out of a sound sleep, and you know that if my first sleep is interrupted I can’t ever get to sleep again.” She went to the medicine cabinet and took a sleeping pill. “If you want to talk to yourself,” she said, “go on up to the attic.” She went into her bedroom and locked the door.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER
, when I was cooking some hamburgers in the back yard, I saw what looked to be some rain clouds rising in the south. I thought this was a good sign. I wanted some news of Olga. After I had washed the dishes I went out onto the back porch and waited. It isn’t really a porch—just a little wooden platform with four steps above the garbage pail. Mr. Livermore was on his porch, and Mr. Kovacs was on his, and I wondered were they waiting as I was for a chimera. If I went over, for instance, and asked Mr. Livermore if his was blond or dark-haired, would he understand? For a minute I wanted terribly to confide in someone. Then the waltz began to play, and just as the music faded she ran up the steps.

Oh, she was very happy that night! She had a job. I knew all about this, because I’d found the job for her. She was working as a receptionist in the same building where I worked. What I didn’t know was that she had found an apartment—not a real apartment but a furnished room with a kitchen and bath of her own. This was just as well, because all her furniture was in California. Would I come and see the apartment? Would I come now? We could take a late train in and spend the night there. I said that I would, but first I had to go into the house and see that the children were all right. I went upstairs to the children’s room. They were asleep. Zena had already locked herself in. I went into the bathroom to wash my hands and found on the basin a note, written by Betty-Ann, my oldest daughter. “Dere Daddy,” she had written, “do not leave us.”