The Stories of John Cheever (84 page)

This convergence of reality and unreality was meaningless. The children wouldn’t know anything about my delusion. The back porch, to their clear eyes, would seem empty. The note would only reflect their inescapable knowledge of my unhappiness. But Olga was waiting on the back porch. I seemed to feel her impatience, to see the way she swung her long legs, glanced at her wristwatch (a graduation present), and smoked a cigarette, and yet I also seemed nailed to the house by the children’s plea. I could not move. I remembered a parade in the village I had taken my youngest son to not long ago. It was the annual march of some provincial and fraternal order. There were two costumed bands and half a dozen platoons of the fraternity. The marchers, the brotherhood, seemed mostly to be marginal workmen—post-office clerks and barbers, I guess. The weather couldn’t have accounted for my attitude, because I remembered clearly that it was fair and cool, but the effect of the parade upon me was as somber as if I had stood on some gallows hill. In the ranks I saw faces lined by drink, harried by hard work, wasted by worry, and stamped invariably with disappointment, as if the gala procession was meant to prove that life is a force of crushing compromise. The music was boisterous, but the faces and the bodies were the faces and bodies of compromised men, and I remembered getting to my feet and staring into the last of the ranks, looking for someone with clear features that would dispel my sober feelings. There was no one. Sitting in the bathroom, I seemed to join the marchers. I seemed to experience for the first time in my life what they must all have known—racked and torn with the desire to escape and nailed through the heart by a plea. I ran downstairs, but she had gone. No pretty woman waits very long for anyone. She was a fiction, and yet I couldn’t bring her back, any more than I could change the fact that her wrist-watch was a graduation present and that her name was Olga.

She didn’t come back for a week, although Zena was in terrible shape and there seemed to be some ratio, some connection, between her obstreperousness and my ability to produce a phantom. Every night at eight, the Livermores’ television played the somber and graceful waltz, and I was out there every night. Ten days passed before she returned. Mr. Kovacs was cooking. Mr. Livermore was dyeing his grass. The music had just begun to fade when she appeared. Something had changed. She held her head down. What was wrong? As she came up the steps, I saw that she had been drinking. She was drunk. She began to cry as soon as I took her in my arms. I stroked her soft, dark hair, perfectly happy to support and hold her, whatever had happened. She told me everything. She had gone out with a man from the office. He had got her drunk and seduced her. She had felt too ashamed of herself to go to work in the morning, and had spent some time in a bar. Then, half drunk, she had gone to the office to confront her seducer, and there had been a disorderly scene, during which she was fired. It was I she had betrayed, she told me. She didn’t care about herself. I had given her a chance to lead a new life and she had failed me. I caught myself smiling fatuously at the depth of her dependence, the ardor with which she clung to me. I told her that it would be all right, that I would find her another job and pay her rent in the meantime. I forgave her, and she promised to return the next evening.

I rushed outdoors the next night—I was there long before eight o’clock, but she didn’t come. She wasn’t thoughtless. I knew that. She wouldn’t deliberately disappoint me. She must be in trouble again, but how could I help her? How could I get word to her? I seemed to know the place where she lived. I knew its smells, its lights, the van Gogh reproduction, and the cigarette burns on the end table, but even so, the room didn’t exist, and I couldn’t look there. I thought of looking for her in the neighborhood bars, but I was not yet this insane. I waited for her again on the following night. I was worried but not angry when she didn’t come, since she was, after all, such a defenseless child. The next night, it rained, and I knew she couldn’t come, because she didn’t have a raincoat. She had told me that. The next day was Saturday, and I thought she might put off her return until Monday, the weekend train and bus schedules being so erratic. This seemed sensible to me, but I was so convinced that she would return on Monday that when she failed me I felt terribly disappointed and lost. She came back on Thursday. It was the same hour of the day; I heard the same graceful waltz. Even down the length of the yard, long before she reached the porch, I could see she was staggering. Her hair was disheveled, her dress was torn, her wristwatch was missing. I asked her, for some reason, about the wristwatch, but she couldn’t remember where it was. I took her in my arms, and she told me what had happened. Her seducer had returned. She had let him in; she had let him move in. He stayed three days, and then they gave a party for some friends of his. The party was late and noisy, and the landlady called the police, who raided the place and took Olga off to jail, where she was charged with using the room for immoral purposes. She was in the Women’s House of Detention for three days before her case was heard. A kindly judge gave her a suspended sentence. Now she was going back to California, back to her husband. She was no better than he, she kept insisting; they were two of a kind. He had wired her the money, and she was taking the night train. I tried to persuade her to stay and begin a new life. I was willing to go on helping her; I would take her on any terms. I shook her by the shoulders—I remember that. I remember shouting at her, “You can’t go! You can’t go! You’re all I have. If you go, it will only prove that even the most transparent inventions of my imagination are subject to lust and age. You can’t go! You can’t leave me alone!”

“Stop talking to yourself,” my wife shouted from the television room, and at that moment a thought occurred to me: Since I had invented Olga, couldn’t I invent others—dark-eyed blondes, vivacious redheads with marbly skin, melancholy brunettes, dancers, women who sang, lonely housewives? Tall women, short women, sad women, women whose burnished hair flowed to their waists, sloe-eyed, squint-eyed, violet-eyed beauties of all kinds and ages could be mine. Mightn’t Olga’s going only mean that she was making room for someone else?

E
ACH YEAR
, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer—with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook—arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers—travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling. I never investigate the houses that we rent, and so the wooden castle with a tower, the pile, the Staffordshire cottage covered with roses, and the Southern mansion all loom up in the last of the sea light with the enormous appeal of the unknown. You get the sea-rusted keys from the house next door. You unfasten the lock and step into a dark or a light hallway, about to begin a vacation—a month that promises to have no worries of any kind. But as strong as or stronger than this pleasant sense of beginnings is the sense of having stepped into the midst of someone else’s life. All my dealings are with agents, and I have never known the people from whom we have rented, but their ability to leave behind them a sense of physical and emotional presences is amazing. Our affairs are certainly not written in air and water, but they do seem to be chronicled in scuffed baseboards, odors, and tastes in furniture and paintings, and the climates we step into in these rented places are as marked as the changes of weather on the beach. Sometimes there is in the long hallway a benignness, a purity and clearness of feeling to which we all respond. Someone was enormously happy here, and we rent their happiness as we rent their beach and their catboat. Sometimes the climate of the place seems mysterious, and remains a mystery until we leave in August. Who, we wonder, is the lady in the portrait in the upstairs hallway? Whose was the Aqualung, the set of Virginia Woolf? Who hid the copy of
Fanny Hill
in the china closet, who played the zither, who slept in the cradle, and who was the woman who painted red enamel on the nails of the claw-footed bathtub? What was this moment in her life?

The dog and the children run down to the beach, and we bring in our things, wandering, it seems, through the dense histories of strangers. Who owned the
Lederhosen
, who spilled ink (or blood) on the carpet, who broke the pantry window? And what do you make of a bedroom bookshelf stocked with
Married Happiness, An Illustrated Guide to Sexual Happiness in Marriage, The Right to Sexual Felicity
, and
A Guide to Sexual Happiness for Married Couples?
But outside the windows we hear the percussive noise of the sea; it shakes the bluff where the house stands, and sends its rhythm up through the plaster and timbers of the place, and in the end we all go down to the beach—it is what we came for, after all—and the rented house on the bluff, burning now with our lights, is one of those images that have preserved their urgency and their fitness. Fishing in the spring woods, you step on a clump of wild mint and the fragrance released is like the essence of that day. Walking on the Palatine, bored with antiquities and life in general, you see an owl fly out of the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus and suddenly that day, that raffish and noisy city all make sense. Lying in bed, you draw on your cigarette and the red glow lights an arm, a breast, and a thigh around which the world seems to revolve. These images are like the embers of our best feelings, and standing on the beach, for that first hour, it seems as if we could build them into a fire. After dark we shake up a drink, send the children to bed, and make love in a strange room that smells of someone else’s soap—all measures taken to exorcise the owners and secure our possession of the place. But in the middle of the night the terrace door flies open with a crash, although there seems to be no wind, and my wife says, half asleep, “Oh, why have they come back? Why have they come back? What have they lost?”

BROADMERE
is the rented house I remember most clearly, and we got there at the usual time of day. It was a large white house, and it stood on a bluff facing south, which was the open sea on that coast. I got the key from a Southern lady in a house across the garden, and opened the door onto a hallway with a curved staircase. The Greenwoods, the owners, seemed to have left that day, seemed in fact to have left a minute earlier. There were flowers in the vases, cigarette butts in the ashtrays, and a dirty glass on the table. We brought in the suitcases and sent the children down to the beach, and I stood in the living room waiting for my wife to join me. The stir, the discord of the Greenwoods’ sudden departure still seemed to be in the air. I felt that they had gone hastily and unwillingly, and that they had not wanted to rent their summer house. The room had a bay window looking out to sea, but in the twilight the place seemed drab, and I found it depressing. I turned on a lamp, but the bulb was dim and I thought that Mr. Greenwood had been a parsimonious and mean man. Whatever he had been, I seemed to feel his presence with uncommon force. On the bookshelf there was a small sailing trophy that he had won ten years before. The books were mostly Literary Guild selections. I took a biography of Queen Victoria off the shelf, but the binding was stiff, and I think no one had read it. Hidden behind the book was an empty whiskey bottle. The furniture seemed substantial and in good taste, but I was not happy or at ease in the room. There was an upright piano in the corner, and I played some scales to see if it was in tune (it wasn’t) and opened the piano bench to look for music. There was some sheet music, and two more empty whiskey bottles. Why hadn’t he taken out his empties like the rest of us? Had he been a secret drinker? Would this account for the drabness of the room? Had he learned to take the top off the bottle without making a sound, and mastered the more difficult trick of canting the glass and the bottle so that the whiskey wouldn’t splash? My wife came in, carrying an empty suitcase, which I took up to the attic. This part of the house was neat and clean. All the tools and the paints were labeled and in their places, and all this neatness, unlike the living room, conveyed an atmosphere of earnestness and probity. He must have spent a good deal of time in the attic, I thought. It was getting dark, and I joined my wife and children on the beach.

The sea was running high and the long white line of the surf reached, like an artery, down the shore for as far as we could see. We stood, my wife and I, with our arms loosely around one another—for don’t we all come down to the sea as lovers, the pretty woman in her pregnancy bathing suit with a fair husband, the old couples who bathe their gnarled legs, and the bucks and the girls, looking out to the ocean and its fumes for some riggish and exalted promise of romance? When it was dark and time to go to bed, I told my youngest son a story. He slept in a pleasant room that faced the east, where there was a lighthouse on a point, and the beam swept in through the window. Then I noticed something on the corner baseboard—a thread or a spider, I thought—and knelt down to see what it was. Someone had written there, in a small hand, “My father is a rat. I repeat. My father is a rat.” I kissed my son good night and we all went to sleep.

Sunday was a lovely day, and I woke in very high spirits, but, walking around the place before breakfast, I came on another cache of whiskey bottles hidden behind a yew tree, and I felt a return of that drabness-—it was nearly like despair—that I had first experienced in the living room. I was worried and curious about Mr. Greenwood. His troubles seemed inescapable. I thought of going into the village and asking about him, but this kind of curiosity seems to me indecent. Later in the day, I found his photograph in a shirt drawer. The glass covering the picture was broken. He was dressed in the uniform of an Air Force major, and had a long and a romantic face. I was pleased with his handsomeness, as I had been pleased with his sailing trophy, but these two possessions were not quite enough to cure the house of its drabness. I did not like the place, and this seemed to affect my temper. Later I tried to teach my oldest son how to surf-cast with a drail, but he kept fouling his line and getting sand in the reel, and we had a quarrel. After lunch we drove to the boatyard where the sailboat that went with the house was stored. When I asked about the boat, the proprietor laughed. It had not been in the water for five years and was falling to pieces. This was a grave disappointment, but I did not think angrily of Mr. Greenwood as a liar, which he was; I thought of him sympathetically as a man forced into those embarrassing expedients that go with a rapidly diminishing income. That night in the living room, reading one of his books, I noticed that the sofa cushions seemed unyielding. Reaching under them, I found three copies of a magazine dealing with sunbathing. They were illustrated with many pictures of men and women wearing nothing but their shoes. I put the magazines into the fireplace and lighted them with a match, but the paper was coated and they burned slowly. Why should I be made so angry, I wondered; why should I seem so absorbed in this image of a lonely and drunken man? In the upstairs hallway there was a bad smell, left perhaps by an unhousebroken cat or a stopped drain, but it seemed to me like the distillate, the essence, of a bitter quarrel. I slept poorly.