The Stories of John Cheever

  He dictated some letters and answered the telephone when it rang, but he did nothing worthwhile for the rest of that afternoon. He spent some time trying to get rid of the litter that his Finnish wolf bitch had whelped. The Bronx Zoo was not interested. The American Kennel Club said that he had not introduced a breed, he had produced a monstrosity. Someone had informed him that jewelers, department stores, and museums were policed by savage dogs, and he telephoned the security departments of Macy’s, Cartier’s, and the Museum of Modern Art, but they all had dogs. He spent the last of the afternoon at his window, joining that vast population of the blunderers, the bored—the empty-handed barber, the clerk in the antique store nobody ever comes into, the idle insurance salesman, the failing haberdasher—all of those thousands who stand at the windows of the city and watch the afternoon go down. Some nameless doom seemed to threaten his welfare, and he was unable to refresh his boisterousness, his common sense.

  He had a directors’ dinner meeting on the East Side at seven. He had brought his evening clothes to town in a suit box, and had been invited to bathe and change at his host’s. He left his office at five and, to kill time and if possible cheer himself, walked the two or three miles to Fifty-seventh Street. Even so, he was early, and he stopped in a bar for a drink. It was one of those places where the single women of the neighborhood congregate and are made welcome; where, having tippled sherry for most of the day, they gather to observe the cocktail hour. One of the women had a dog. As soon as Larry entered the place, the dog, a dachshund, sprang at him. The leash was attached to a table leg, and he struck at Larry so vigorously that he dragged the table a foot or two and upset a couple of drinks. He missed Larry, but there was a great deal of confusion, and Larry went to the end of the bar farthest from the ladies. The dog was excited, and his harsh, sharp barking filled the place. “What are you thinking of, Smoky?” his mistress asked. “What in the world are you thinking of? What’s become of my little doggy? This can’t be my little Smoky. This must be another doggy…” The dog went on barking at Larry.

  “Dogs don’t like you?” the bartender asked.

  “I breed dogs,” Larry said. “I get along very well with dogs.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” the bartender said, “but I never heard that dog bark before. She’s in here every afternoon, seven days a week, and that dog’s always with her, but this is the first time there’s ever been a peep out of him. Maybe if you took your drink into the dining room.”

  “You mean I’m disturbing Smoky?”

  “Well, she’s a regular customer. I never saw you before.”

  “All right,” Larry said, putting as much feeling as he could into his consent. He carried his drink through a doorway into the empty dining room and sat at a table. The dog stopped barking as soon as he was gone. He finished his drink and looked around for another way to leave the place, but there was none. Smoky sprang at him again when he went out through the bar, and everyone was glad to see such a troublemaker go.

  The apartment house where he was expected was one he had been in many times, but he had forgotten the address. He had counted on recognizing the doorway and the lobby, but when he stepped into the lobby he was faced with the sameness of those places. There was a black-and-white floor, a false fireplace, two English chairs, and a framed landscape. It was all familiar, but he realized that it could have been one of a dozen lobbies, and he asked the elevator man if this was the Fullmers’ house. The man said yes, and Larry stepped into the car. Then, instead of ascending to the tenth floor where the Fullmers lived, the car went down. The first idea that crossed Larry’s mind was that the Fullmers might be having their vestibule painted and that, for this or for some other inconvenience or change, he would be expected to use the back elevator. The man slid the door open onto a kind of infernal region, crowded with heaped ash cans, broken perambulators, and steam-pipes covered with ruptured asbestos sleeving. “Go through the door there and get the other elevator,” the man said.

  “But why do I have to take the back elevator?” Larry asked.

  “It’s a rule,” the man said.

  “I don’t understand,” Larry said.

  “Listen,” the man said. “Don’t argue with me. Just take the back elevator. All you deliverymen always want to go in the front door like you owned the place. Well, this is one building where you can’t. The management says all deliveries at the back door, and the management is boss.”

  “I’m not a deliveryman,” Larry said. “I’m a guest.”

  “What’s the box?”

  “The box,” Larry said, “contains my evening clothes. Now take me up to the tenth floor where the Fuilmers live.”

  “I’m sorry, mister, but you look like a deliveryman.”

  “I am an investment banker,” Larry said, “and I am on my way to a directors’ meeting, where we are going to discuss the underwriting of a forty-four-million-dollar bond issue. I am worth nine hundred thousand dollars. I have a twenty-two-room house in Bullet Park, a kennel of dogs, two riding horses, three children in college, a twenty-two-foot sailboat, and five automobiles.”

  “Jesus,” the man said.

  After Larry had bathed, he looked at himself in the mirror to see if he could detect any change in his appearance, but the face in the glass was too familiar; he had shaved and washed it too many times for it to reveal any secrets. He got through dinner and the meeting, and afterward had a whiskey with the other directors. He was still, in a way that he could not have defined, troubled at having been mistaken for a deliveryman, and hoping to shift his unease a little he said to the man beside him, “You know, when I was coming up in the elevator tonight I was mistaken for a deliveryman.” His confidant either didn’t hear, didn’t comprehend, or didn’t care. He laughed loudly at something that was being said across the room, and Larry, who was used to commanding attention, felt that he had suffered another loss.

  He took a taxi to Grand Central and went home on one of those locals that seem like a roundup of the spiritually wayward, the drunken, and the lost. The conductor was a corpulent man with a pink face and a fresh rose in his buttonhole. He had a few words to say to most of the travelers.

  “You working the same place?” he asked Larry.

  “Yes.”

  “You rush beer up in Yorktown, isn’t that it?”

  “No,” Larry said, and he touched his face with his hands to see if he could feel there the welts, lines, and other changes that must have been worked in the last few hours.

  “You work in a restaurant, don’t you?” the conductor asked.

  “No,” Larry said quietly.

  “That’s funny,” the conductor said. “When I saw the soup-and-fish I thought you was a waiter.”

  It was after one o’clock when he got off the train. The station and the cab stand were shut, and only a few cars were left in the parking lot. When he switched on the lights of the small European car he used for the station, he saw that they burned faintly, and as soon as he pressed the starter they faded to nothing with each revolution of the motor. In the space of a few minutes, the battery gave up the ghost. It was only a little less than a mile to his house, and he really didn’t mind the walk. He strode briskly along the empty streets and unfastened the gates to his driveway. He was fastening them when he heard the noise of running and panting and saw that the dogs were out.

  The noise woke his wife, who, thinking that he had already come home, called to him for help. “Larry! Larry, the dogs are out! The dogs are out! Larry, please come quickly, the dogs are out and I think they’re after someone!” He heard her calling him as he fell, and saw the yellow lights go on in the windows, but that was the last he saw. II

  Orville Betman spent the three summer months alone in New York, as he had done ever since his marriage. He had a large apartment, a good housekeeper, and a host of friends; but he had no wife. Now, some men have a sexual disposition as vigorous, indiscriminate, and demanding as a digestive tract, and to invest these drives with
the crosslights of romantic agony would be as tragic as it would be to invent rituals and music for the bronchial tree. These men do not, when they are eating a piece of pie, consider themselves involved in a sacred contract; no more do they in the bounding act of love. This was not Betman. He loved his wife, and he loved no other woman in the world. He loved her voice, her tastes, her face, her grace, her presence, and her memory. He was a good-looking man, and when he was alone other women pursued him. They asked him up to their apartments, they tried to force their way into his apartment, they seized him in corridors and garden paths, and one of them, on the beach in East Hampton, pulled off his bathing trunks, but, thus incommoded, the only love he had was for Victoria.

  Betman was a singer. His voice was distinguished not by its range and beauty but by its persuasiveness. He gave one recital of eighteenth-century music early in his career and was roasted by the critics. He drifted into television and for a while dubbed voices for animated cartoons. Then, by chance, someone asked him to do a cigarette commercial. It was four lines. The result was explosive. Cigarette sales shot up eight hundred per cent, and from this single commercial he made, with residuals, more than fifty thousand dollars. The element of persuasiveness in his voice could not be isolated or imitated, but it was infallible. Whatever he praised in song—shoe polish, toothpaste, floor wax—hundreds and thousands of men and women would find his praise irresistible. Even little children heeded his voice. He was very wealthy, of course, and the work was light.

  He first saw his wife on a Fifth Avenue bus on a rainy night. She was then a young and slender woman with yellow hair, and the instant he saw her he felt a singular attraction or passion that he had never felt before and would never, as it happened, feel again. The strenuousness of his feeling made him follow her when she left the bus, somewhere on upper Fifth Avenue. He suffered, as any lover will who, moved by a pure and impetuous heart, well knows that his attentions, whatever they are, will be mistaken for a molestation, and usually a revolting one. She walked toward the door of an apartment house and hesitated under the awning long enough to shake the raindrops out of her umbrella.

  “Miss?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Could I speak with you for a minute?”

  “What about?”

  “My name is Orville Betman,” he said. “I sing television commercials. You may have heard me. I…” Her attention wandered from him to the lighted lobby, and then he sang, in a true, sweet, and manly voice, a commercial he had taped that afternoon: “Gream takes the ish Out of washing a dish.”

  His voice touched her as it seemed to have touched the rest of the world, but it touched her glancingly. “I don’t look at television,” she said. “What is it you want?”

  “I want to marry you,” he said sincerely.

  She laughed and went on into the lobby and the elevator. The doorman, for five dollars, gave him her name and circumstances. She was Victoria Heatherstone and lived with her invalid father in 14-B. In the space of a morning, the research department in the station where he worked reported that she had graduated from Vassar that spring, and was doing volunteer work in an East Side hospital. One of the apprentice script girls had been in her class and knew her roommate intimately. In a few days, Betman was able to go to a cocktail party where he met her, and he took her out to dinner. His instinct when he first glimpsed her on the bus had been unerring. She was the woman life meant him to have; she was his destiny. She resisted his claims on her for a week or two, and then she succumbed. But there was a problem. Her old father—a Trollope scholar—was indeed an invalid, and she felt that if she left him he would die. She could not, even if it meant constricting her own life, hold the burden of his death upon her conscience. He was not expected to live for long, and she would marry Betman when her father died; she became, to express the genuineness of her promise, his mistress. Betman’s happiness was exalted. But the old man did not die.

  Betman wanted to marry; wanted to have the union blessed, celebrated, and announced. He was not content to have Victoria come to his apartment two or three times a week as she did. Then the old man had a stroke and was urged by his doctor to leave New York. He moved to a house he owned in Albany, and this then left Victoria free—or free at least for nine months of the year. She married Betman, and they were vastly happy together, although they had no children. However, on the first of June she left for an island in Lake St. Francis, where the dying old man summered, and she did not return to her husband until September. The old man still thought his daughter unmarried, and Betman was forbidden to visit her. He wrote her three times a week to a post-office box, and she replied much less frequently, since, as she explained, there was nothing to report but her father’s blood pressure, temperature, digestion, and night sweats. He always appeared to be dying. Since he had never seen either the island or the old man, the place naturally took on for Betman legendary proportions, and his three months alone each year was agony.

  He woke one summer Sunday morning to feel such love for his wife that he called out her name: “Victoria, Victoria!” He went to church, dismissed the housekeeper after lunch, and late in the afternoon went for a walk. It was inhumanly hot, and the high temperature seemed to draw the city closer to the heart of time; the smell of hot pavings seemed to belong to history. From an open car window he heard himself singing a song about peanut butter. Traffic was heavy on the East River Drive, and this respiratory and melancholy sound came up to where he walked. Traffic would be heavy on all the approaches to the city—and the thought of these lines of cars at Sunday’s end made it seem as if the day conformed to some rigid script, part of which was the traffic, part the golden light that poured through the city’s parallel streets, part a distant rumble of thunder, as if some leaf had been peeled away from the bulk of sound, and part the unendurable spiritual winter of his months alone. He was overwhelmed by the need for his only love. He got his car and started north a little after dark.

  He spent the night in Albany and got to the town of Lake St. Francis in the middle of the morning. It was a small and pleasant resort town, neither booming nor dead. He asked at the boat livery how he could get out to Temple Island. “She comes over once a week,” the boatman said. “She comes over to get groceries and medicine, but I don’t expect she’ll be over today.” He pointed across the water to where the island lay, a mile or so distant. Betman rented an outboard and started across the lake. He circled the island and found a landing in a cove, where he made the boat fast. The house above him was a preposterous and old-fashioned cottage, highly inflammable, black with creosote and ornamented with outrageous medieval fancies. There was a round tower of shingles and a wooden parapet that wouldn’t have withstood the fire of a .22. Tall firs surrounded the wooden castle and covered it in darkness. It was so dark on that bright morning that lights were burning in most of the rooms.

  He crossed the porch and saw, through a glass panel in the door, a long hall ending in a staircase with newel posts. Venus stood on one, a lusterless bronze. In one hand she held a branch of two electric candles, lighted against the gloom of the firs. There was no trace of modesty in her stance, and that her legs were apart made her seem utterly defenseless and a little pathetic, as is sometimes the case with Venus. On the other newel post was Hermes; Hermes in flight. He, too, carried a pair of lighted electric candles. The stairs, carpeted in dark green, led up to a stained-glass window. The colors of the glass, even in the gloom, were of astonishing brilliance and discord. After he had rung, an elderly maid came down the stairs, keeping one hand on the banister. She limped. She came up to the door and, looking out at him through the glass panel, simply shook her head.

  He opened the door; it opened easily. “I’m Mr. Betman,” he said softly. “I want to see my wife.”

  “You can’t see her now. Nobody can. She’s with him.”

  “I must see her.”

  “You can’t. Please go. Please go away.” Her pleading seemed frightened.

  Bey
ond the firs he could see the lake, flat as glass, but the wind in the trees made a sound so like the sea that had he been blindfolded he would have guessed that the house stood on a headland. Then he thought or felt that this was that instant where death enters the terrain of love. These were not the bare facts of life but its ancient and invisible storms, and they moved him like the weight of water. Then he sang: “Wher-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade; Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade.”

  The elderly maid, too courteous perhaps to interrupt or moved perhaps by Handel’s air and the words, said nothing. Upstairs he heard a door close and footsteps on the carpet. She hastened past the brilliant, ugly window down to where he waited. There was nothing in all the world so sweet to him as her kiss.

  “Come back! Come with me now, he said.

  “I can’t, darling, my darling. He’s dying.”

  “How many times have you thought this before?”

  “Oh, I know, but now he is dying.”

  “Come with me.

  “I can’t. He’s dying.”

  “Come.”

  He took her hand and led her out the door, down over the treacherous, pungent carpet of pine needles, to the landing. They crossed the lake without speaking but in such a somberness of feeling that the air, the hour, and the light seemed solid. He paid for the boat, opened the car door for her, and they started south. He did not look at her until they were on the main highway, and then he turned to bask in her freshness, her radiance. It was because he loved her too well that her white arms, the color of her hair, her smile distracted him. He veered from one lane into another and the car was crushed by a truck.