The visitors drifted over to the office to see the compressors and the pipe diagrams. Sears walked around the edge of the pond to the beginnings of the brook. Some mint grew here and he broke a leaf in his fingers. It was in the early summer but the sun was hot. The sound of water and the broken leaf reminded him of waking one morning with Renée. It was early. It was the first of the light. She lay in his arms and smelled of last night’s perfume and of her own mortality, her yesterday. Her eyelashes had been dyed black and these contrasted with her blondness. They seemed quite artificial. The beauty of her breasts was no longer the beauty of youth and he knew that she worried about their size. He thought this charming. Her hair was not long but it was long enough to need some restraint, and she had, the night before, pulled up her hair—he could easily imagine the gesture—and secured it with a gold buckle. He had not seen her do this but now he saw the gold buckle and the hair it contained and the strands that had escaped. He kissed the loveliness of her neck and caressed the smoothness of her back and seemed to lose himself in the utter delight of loving. It seemed, in his case, to involve some clumsiness, as if he carried a heavy trunk up a staircase with a turning.
The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!
The Salazzos packed their charcoal broiler and their stand-up swimming pool and vanished. Betsy told no one but Henry that she had threatened to poison the community, and she did not tell Henry until some time later. But, you might ask, whatever became of the true criminals, the villains who had murdered a high-minded environmentalist and seduced, bribed and corrupted the custodians of municipal welfare? Not to prosecute these wretches might seem to incriminate oneself with the guilt of complicity by omission. But that is another tale, and as I said in the beginning, this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION,
OCTOBER 1991
Copyright © 1982 by John Cheever
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1982.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cheever, John.
Oh what a paradise it seems / John Cheever.—
1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75998-6
I. Title.
PS3505.H6428O3 1991
813′.52-dc20 91-55305
v3.0
John Cheever, Oh What a Paradise It Seems
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