The Stories of John Cheever (110 page)

I CALLED
Grace Parlapiano the next day, and went to their house after work. She was pale and seemed unhappy. I said that I had talked with Boobee. “Anthony has been very difficult,” she said, “and I am thinking seriously of getting a divorce or at least a legal separation. I happen to have rather a good voice, but he seems to feel that I’ve produced this fact out of spite and in order to humiliate him. He claims that I’m spoiled and greedy. This is, after all, the only house in the neighborhood that doesn’t have wall-to-wall carpeting, but when I had a man come to give me an estimate on carpeting, Anthony lost his temper. He completely lost his temper. I know that Latins are emotional—everyone told me this before I married—but when Boobee loses his temper it’s really frightening.”

“Boobee loves you,” I said.

“Anthony is very narrow-minded,” she said. “I sometimes think he married too late in life. For instance I suggested that we join the country club. He could learn to play golf, and you know how important golf is in business. He could make a great many advantageous business connections if we joined the club, but he thinks this is unreasonable of me. He doesn’t know how to dance, but when I suggested that he take dancing lessons he thought me unreasonable. I don’t complain, I really don’t. I don’t, for instance, have a fur coat and I’ve never asked for one, and you know perfectly well that I’m the only woman in the neighborhood who doesn’t have a fur coat.”

I ended the interview clumsily, and on that note of spiritual humbug we bring to the marital difficulties of our friends. My words were useless, of course, and things got no better. I happened to know, because Boobee kept me informed on the train every morning. He did not understand that men in America do not complain about their wives, and it was a vast and painful misunderstanding. He came up to me at the station one morning and said, “You are wrong. You are very wrong. That night when I told you she had a madness, you told me it was nothing. Now listen! She is buying a grand piano, and she is hiring a singing coach. She is doing this out of spitefulness. Now do you believe that she is mad?”

“Grace is not mad,” I said. “There is nothing wrong with the fact that she likes to sing. You’ve got to understand that her desire for a career is not spiteful. It is shared by almost every woman in the neighborhood. Margaret is working with a dramatic coach in New York three days a week and I don’t consider her spiteful or insane.”

“American men have no character,” he said. “They are commercial and banal.”

I would have hit him then, but he turned and walked away. This was evidently the end of our friendship, and I was tremendously relieved, because his accounts of Grace’s madness had come to be a harrowing bore and there seemed to be no hope of changing or illuminating his point of view. He left me alone for two weeks or longer, and then he approached me again one morning. His face was dark, his nose was enlarged, his manner was definitely unfriendly. He spoke in English. “Now you will be agreeing with me,” he said, “when I am telling you what she is doing. Now you will be seeing that there is no end to her spitefulness.” He sighed; he whistled through his teeth. “She is for having a concert!” he exclaimed and turned away.

A FEW DAYS LATER
, we received an invitation to hear Grace sing at the Aboleens’. Now, Mrs. Aboleen is the muse of our province. Through her brother, the novelist W. H. Towers, she has some literary connections, and through the bounty of her husband—a successful dental surgeon—she has a large collection of paintings. On her walls you read Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, but the pictures on which these signatures appear are very bad, and Mrs. Aboleen is a surprisingly jealous muse. Any other woman in the neighborhood with similar inclinations is thought to be a vulgar usurper. The paintings, of course, are her paintings, but when a poet comes to spend a weekend at the Aboleens he becomes her poet. She may display him, urge him to perform, and let you shake his hand, but if you come too close to him or talk with him for more than a minute or two she will cut in with an avid possessiveness, a kind of anger, as if she had caught you pocketing the table silver. Grace had become, I suppose, her princess. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon, a lovely day, and I went bitterly. This may have colored my judgment of Grace’s performance, but everybody else said it was terrible. She sang a dozen songs, mostly in English, mostly arch and about love. Boobee’s despondent sighs could be heard between the songs, and I knew he was thinking that her abysmal spitefulness had invented the whole scene—the folding chairs, the vases of flowers, the maids waiting to pass tea. He was polite enough when the concert ended, but his nose seemed enormous.

I didn’t see him again for some time, and then I read one evening in the local paper that Marcantonio Parlapiano had been injured in an automobile accident on Route
67
and was recovering at the Platner Memorial Hospital. I went there at once. When I asked the nurse on his floor where I could find him, she said gaily, “Oh, you want to see Tony? Poor old Tony. Tony no speaka da English.”

He was in a room with two other patients. He had broken a leg, he looked dreadful, and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him when he would be allowed to go home. “To Grace?” he asked. “Never. I am never going back. Her father and mother are with her now. They are arranging a legal separation. I am going to Verona. I am taking the
Colombo
on the twenty-seventh.” He sobbed. “You know what she is asking me?” he said.

“No, Boobee. What did she ask you?”

“She is asking me to change my name.” He began to cry.

I SAW HIM OFF
on the
Colombo
, more because I like ships and sailings than because of the depth of our friendship, and I never saw him again. The last of my story has no more relevance than the wall in Verona, but when it happened I was reminded of Boobee, and so I’ll put it down. It was in a little town called Adrianapolis, about sixty miles from Yalta on the dry side of the Crimean Mountains. I had come over from the coast in a cab and was waiting for a plane to Moscow when I met another American. We were both, naturally, very happy to encounter someone who spoke English, and we went to the dining room and ordered a bottle of vodka. He was working as an engineer in a chemical-fertilizer plant in the mountains and was on his way back to the States for a six weeks’ vacation. We had a table by a window overlooking the airfield, where there was very little activity. At home it would have passed for one of those private airfields you find in the suburbs, mostly used by charter flights. There was a public address system, and a young woman with a very pure and musical voice was making announcements in Russian. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I suppose she was asking Igor Vassilyevitch Kryukov to please report to the Aeroflot ticket counter.

“That reminds me of my wife,” my friend said. “The voice. I’m divorced now, but I was married five years to this girl. She was everything you could ask for. Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, loving, a great cook—she even had some money. She had planned to be an actress, but when this didn’t work out she wasn’t bitter or disappointed or anything. She realized she wasn’t up to the competition, and she gave it up, just like that. I mean, she wasn’t one of these women who claim to have given up a big career. We had a little apartment in Bayside, and she looked around for a job, and because of her training—I mean, she knew how to use her voice—they took her on at Newark Airport as an announcer. She had a very pretty voice, not affected or anything, very calm and humorous and musical. She worked on a four-hour shift, saying things like ‘Will passengers for United’s jet flight to Seattle please board at Gate Sixteen? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ I suppose that girl is saying the same sort of thing.” He nodded his head toward the loudspeaker. “It was a great job, and just working four hours a day she made more money than I did, and she had plenty of time to shop and cook and be wifely, at which she was very good. Well, when we had about five thousand in the savings account, we began to think about having a child and moving out to the country. She had been announcing at Newark then for about five years. Well, one night before supper, I was drinking whiskey and reading the paper when I heard her say, in the kitchen, ‘Will you please come to the table? Supper is ready. Will you please come to the table?’ She was speaking to me in that same musical voice she used at the airport and it made me angry, and so I said, ‘Honey, don’t speak to me like that—don’t speak to me in that voice,’ and then she said, ‘Will you please come to the table?’ just as if she was saying, ‘Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ So then I said, ‘Honey, you make me feel as if I were waiting for a plane or something. I mean, your voice is very pretty, but you sound very impersonal.’ So then she said, in this very well-modulated voice, ‘I don’t suppose that can be helped,’ and she gave me one of those forced, sweet smiles like those airplane clerks give you when your flight is four hours late and you’ve missed the connecting flight and will have to spend a week in Copenhagen. So then we sat down to dinner, and all through dinner she talked to me in this even and musical voice. It was like having dinner with a recording. It was like having dinner with a tape. So then, after dinner, we watched some television, and she went to bed and then she called to me, ‘Will you please come to bed now? Will you please come to bed now?’ It was just like being told that passengers for San Francisco were boarding at Gate Seven. I went to bed, and thought things would be better in the morning.

“Anyhow, the next night when I came home I shouted, ‘Hello, honey!’ or something like that, and I heard this very impersonal voice from the kitchen saying, ‘Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent? Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent?’ So then I went into the kitchen and gathered her up in my arms and gave her a big, messy kiss and said, ‘Come off it, baby, come off it.’ Then she began to cry, and I thought this might be a step in the right direction, but she cried and cried and said I was unfeeling and cruel and just imagined things about her voice that weren’t true in order to pick a quarrel. Well, we stayed together for another six months, but that was really the end of it. I really loved her. She was a marvelous girl until she began to give me this feeling that I was a dumb passenger, one of hundreds in some waiting room, being directed to the right gate and the right flight. We quarreled all the time then, and I finally left, and she got a consent decree in Reno. She still works at Newark, and naturally I prefer Kennedy, but sometimes I have to use Newark, and I can hear her telling Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the American Airlines ticket counter…. But it isn’t only in Newark that I hear her voice, it’s everywhere. Orly, London, Moscow, New Delhi. I have to travel by air, and in every airport in the whole wide world I can hear her voice or a voice just like hers asking Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the ticket counter. Nairobi, Leningrad, Tokyo, it’s always the same even if I can’t understand the language, and it reminds me of how happy I was those five years and what a lovely girl she was, really lovely, and what mysterious things can happen in love. Shall we have another bottle of vodka? I’ll pay for it. They give me more rubles than I can spend for the trip, and I have to turn them in at the border.”

R
EMINISCENCE
, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea. Reminiscences are written on such a table as this, corrected, published, read, and then they begin their inevitable journey toward the bookshelves in those houses and cottages one rents for the summer. In the last house we rented, we had beside our bed the
Memories of a Grand Duchess, the Recollections of a Yankee Whaler
, and a paperback copy of
Goodbye to All That
, but it is the same all over the world. The only book in my hotel room in Taormina was
Recordi d’un Soldato Garibaldino
, and in my room in Yalta I found
Unpopularity is surely some part of this drifting toward salt water, but since the sea is our most universal symbol for memory, might there not be some mysterious affinity between these published recollections and the thunder of waves? So I put down what follows with the happy conviction that these pages will find their way into some bookshelf with a good view of a stormy coast. I can even see the room—see the straw rug, the window glass clouded with salt, and feel the house shake to the ringing of a heavy sea.

Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father's cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before dinner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a Jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history.
You
can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.