The Stories of John Cheever (18 page)

He was standing at the bar when she breezed in, looking as though she had taken no part in that calamitous night. The advice she wanted concerned selling her jewelry. Her grandmother had left her some jewelry, and she wanted to raise money on it but didn’t know where to go. She took some rings and bracelets out of her purse and showed them to Jack. He said that he didn’t know anything about jewelry but that he could lend her some money. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow money from you, Jack,” she said. “You see, I want to get the money for Pete. I want to help him. He wants to open an advertising agency, and he needs quite a lot to begin with.” Jack didn’t press her to accept his offer of a Joan after that, and the project wasn’t mentioned again during lunch.

He next heard about Joan from a young doctor who was a friend of theirs. “Have you seen Joan recently?” the doctor asked Jack one evening when they were having dinner together. He said no. “I gave her a checkup last week,” the doctor said, “and while she’s been through enough to kill the average mortal—and you’ll never know what she’s been through—she still has the constitution of a virtuous and healthy woman. Did you hear about the last one? She sold her jewelry to put him into some kind of business, and as soon as he got the money, he left her for another girl, who had a car—a convertible.”

Jack was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1942. He was kept at Fort Dix for nearly a month, and during this time he came to New York in the evening whenever he could get permission. Those nights had for him the intense keenness of a reprieve, a sensation that was heightened by the fact that on the train in from Trenton women would often press upon him dog-eared copies of
Life
and half-eaten boxes of candy, as though the brown clothes he wore were surely cerements. He telephoned Joan from Pennsylvania Station one night. “Come right over, Jack,” she said. “Come right over. I want you to meet Ralph.”

She was living in that place in the West Twenties that Jack had found for her. The neighborhood was a slum. Ash cans stood in front of her house, and an old woman was there picking out bits of refuse and garbage and stuffing them into a perambulator. The house in which Joan’s apartment was located was shabby, but the apartment itself seemed familiar. The furniture was the same. Joan was the same big, easygoing girl. “I’m so glad you called me,” she said. “It’s so good to see you. I’ll make you a drink. I was having one myself. Ralph ought to be here by now. He promised to take me to dinner.” Jack offered to take her to Cavanagh’s, but she said that Ralph might come while she was out. “If he doesn’t come by nine, I’m going to make myself a sandwich. I’m not really hungry.”

Jack talked about the Army. She talked about the store. She had been working in the same place for—how long was it? He didn’t know. He had never seen her at her desk and he couldn’t imagine what she did. “I’m terribly sorry Ralph isn’t here,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like him. He’s not a young man. He’s a heart specialist who loves to play the viola.” She turned on some lights, for the summer sky had got dark. “He has this dreadful wife on Riverside Drive and four ungrateful children. He—”

The noise of an air-raid siren, lugubrious and seeming to spring from pain, as if all the misery and indecision in the city had been given a voice, cut her off. Other sirens, in distant neighborhoods, sounded, until the dark air was full of their noise, “Let me fix you another drink before I have to turn out the lights,” Joan said, and took his glass. She brought the drink back to him and snapped off the lights. They went to the windows, and, as children watch a thunderstorm, they watched the city darken. All the lights nearby went out but one. Air-raid wardens had begun to sound their whistles in the street. From a distant yard came a hoarse shriek of anger. “Put out your lights, you Fascists!” a woman screamed. “Put out your lights, you Nazi Fascist Germans. Turn out your lights. Turn out your lights.” The last light went off. They went away from the window and sat in the lightless room.

In the darkness, Joan began to talk about her departed lovers, and from what she said Jack gathered that they had all had a hard time. Nils, the suspect count, was dead. Hugh Bascomb, the drunk, had joined the Merchant Marine and was missing in the North Atlantic. Franz, the German, had taken poison the night the Nazis bombed Warsaw. “We listened to the news on the radio,” Joan said, “and then he went back to his hotel and took poison. The maid found him dead in the bathroom the next morning.” When Jack asked her about the one who was going to open an advertising agency, she seemed at first to have forgotten him. “Oh, Pete,” she said after a pause. “Well, he was always very sick, you know. He was supposed to go to Saranac, but he kept putting it off and putting it off and—” She stopped talking when she heard steps on the stairs, hoping, he supposed, that it was Ralph, but whoever it was turned at the landing and continued to the top of the house. “I wish Ralph would come,” she said, with a sigh. “I want you to meet him.” Jack asked her again to go out, but she refused, and when the all-clear sounded, he said goodbye.

Jack was shipped from Dix to an infantry training camp in the Carolinas and from there to an infantry division stationed in Georgia. He had been in Georgia three months when he married a girl from the Augusta boarding-house aristocracy. A year or so later, he crossed the continent in a day coach and thought sententiously that the last he might see of the country he loved was the desert towns like Barstow, that the last he might hear of it was the ringing of the trolleys on the Bay Bridge. He was sent into the Pacific and returned to the United States twenty months later, uninjured and apparently unchanged. As soon as he received his furlough, he went to Augusta. He presented his wife with the souvenirs he had brought from the islands, quarreled violently with her and all her family, and, after making arrangements for her to get an Arkansas divorce, left for New York.

Jack was discharged from the Army at a camp in the East a few months later. He took a vacation and then went back to the job he had left in 1942. He seemed to have picked up his life at approximately the moment when it had been interrupted by the war. In time, everything came to look and feel the same. He saw most of his old friends. Only two of the men he knew had been killed in the war. He didn’t call Joan, but he met her one winter afternoon on a crosstown bus.

Her fresh face, her black clothes, and her soft voice instantly destroyed the sense—if he had ever had such a sense—that anything had changed or intervened since their last meeting, three or four years ago. She asked him up for cocktails and he went to her apartment the next Saturday afternoon. Her room and her guests reminded him of the parties she had given when she had first come to New York. There was a woman with a fancy hat, an elderly doctor, and a man who stayed close to the radio, listening for news from the Balkans. Jack wondered which of the men belonged to Joan and decided on an Englishman who kept coughing into a handkerchief that he pulled out of his sleeve. Jack was right. “Isn’t Stephen brilliant?” Joan asked him a little later, when they were alone in a corner. “He knows more about the Polynesians than anyone else in the world.”

Jack had returned not only to his old job but to his old salary. Since living costs had doubled and since he was paying alimony to two wives, he had to draw on his savings. He took another job, which promised more money, but it didn’t last long and he found himself out of work. This didn’t bother him at all. He still had money in the bank, and anyhow it was easy to borrow from friends. His indifference was the consequence not of lassitude or despair but rather of an excess of hope. He had the feeling that he had only recently come to New York from Ohio. The sense that he was very young and that the best years of his life still lay before him was an illusion that he could not seem to escape. There was all the time in the world. He was living in hotels then, moving from one to another every five days.

In the spring, Jack moved to a furnished room in the badlands west of Central Park. He was running out of money. Then, when he began to feel that a job was a desperate necessity, he got sick. At first, he seemed to have only a bad cold, but he was unable to shake it and he began to run a fever and to cough blood. The fever kept him drowsy most of the time, but he roused himself occasionally and went out to a cafeteria for a meal. He felt sure that none of his friends knew where he was, and he was glad of this. He hadn’t counted on Joan.

Late one morning, he heard her speaking in the hall with his landlady. A few moments later, she knocked on his door. He was lying on the bed in a pair of pants and a soiled pajama top, and he didn’t answer. She knocked again and walked in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Jack,” she said. She spoke softly. “When I found out that you were in a place like this I thought you must be broke or sick. I stopped at the bank and got some money, in case you’re broke. I’ve brought you some Scotch. I thought a little drink wouldn’t do you any harm. Want a little drink?”

Joan’s dress was black. Her voice was low and serene. She sat in a chair beside his bed as if she had been coming there every day to nurse him. Her features had coarsened, he thought, but there were still very few lines in her face. She was heavier. She was nearly fat. She was wearing black cotton gloves. She got two glasses and poured Scotch into them. He drank his whiskey greedily. “I didn’t get to bed until three last night,” she said. Her voice had once before reminded him of a gentle and despairing song, but now, perhaps because he was sick, her mildness, the mourning she wore, her stealthy grace, made him uneasy. “It was one of those nights,” she said. “We went to the theatre. Afterward, someone asked us up to his place. I don’t know who he was. It was one of those places. They’re so strange. There were some meat-eating plants and a collection of Chinese snuff bottles. Why do people collect Chinese snuff bottles? We all autographed a lampshade, as I remember, but I can’t remember much.”

Jack tried to sit up in bed, as if there were some need to defend himself, and then fell back again, against the pillows. “How did you find me, Joan?” he asked.

“It was simple,” she said. “I called that hotel. The one you were staying in. They gave me this address. My secretary got the telephone number. Have another little drink.”

“You know, you’ve never come to a place of mine before—never,” he said. “Why did you come now?”

“Why did I come, darling?” she asked. “What a question! I’ve known you for thirty years. You’re the oldest friend I have in New York. Remember that night in the Village when it snowed and we stayed up until morning and drank whiskey sours for breakfast? That doesn’t seem like twelve years ago. And that night—”

“I don’t like to have you see me in a place like this,” he said earnestly. He touched his face and felt his beard.

“And all the people who used to imitate Roosevelt,” she said, as if she had not heard him, as if she were deaf. “And that place on Staten Island where we all used to go for dinner when Henry had a car. Poor Henry. He bought a place in Connecticut and went out there by himself one weekend. He fell asleep with a lighted cigarette and the house, the barn, everything burned. Ethel took the children out to California.” She poured more Scotch into his glass and handed it to him. She lighted a cigarette and put it between his lips. The intimacy of this gesture, which made it seem not only as if he were deathly ill but as if he were her lover, troubled him.

“As soon as I’m better,” he said, “I’ll take a room at a good hotel. I’ll call you then. It was nice of you to come.”

“Oh, don’t be ashamed of this room, Jack,” she said. “Rooms never bother me. It doesn’t seem to matter to me where I am. Stanley had a filthy room in Chelsea. At least, other people told me it was filthy. I never noticed it. Rats used to eat the food I brought him. He used to have to hang the food from the ceiling, from the light chain.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I’m better,” Jack said. “I think I can sleep now if I’m left alone. I seem to need a lot of sleep.”

“You really
are
sick, darling,” she said. “You must have a fever.” She sat on the edge of his bed and put a hand on his forehead.

“How is that Englishman, Joan?” he asked. “Do you still see him?”

“What Englishman?” she said.

“You know. I met him at your house. He kept a handkerchief up his sleeve. He coughed all the time. You know the one I mean.”

“You must be thinking of someone else,” she said. “I haven’t had an Englishman at my place since the war. Of course, I can’t remember everyone.” She turned and, taking one of his hands, linked her fingers in his.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Jack said. “That Englishman’s dead.” He pushed her off the bed, and got up himself. “Get out,” he said.

“You’re sick, darling,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone here.”

“Get out,” he said again, and when she didn’t move, he shouted, “What kind of an obscenity are you that you can smell sickness and death the way you do?”

“You poor darling.”

“Does it make you feel young to watch the dying?” he shouted. “Is that the lewdness that keeps you young? Is that why you dress like a crow? Oh, I know there’s nothing I can say that will hurt you. I know there’s nothing filthy or corrupt or depraved or brutish or base that the others haven’t tried, but this time you’re wrong. I’m not ready. My life isn’t ending. My life’s beginning. There are wonderful years ahead of me. There are, there are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful years ahead of me, and when they’re over, when it’s time, then I’ll call you. Then, as an old friend, I’ll call you and give you whatever dirty pleasure you take in watching the dying, but until then, you and your ugly and misshapen forms will leave me alone.”

She finished her drink and looked at her watch. “I guess I’d better show up at the office,” she said. “I’ll see you later. I’ll come back tonight. You’ll feel better then, you poor darling.” She closed the door after her, and he heard her light step on the stairs.

Jack emptied the whiskey bottle into the sink. He began to dress. He stuffed his dirty clothes into a bag. He was trembling and crying with sickness and fear. He could see the blue sky from his window, and in his fear it seemed miraculous that the sky should be blue, that the white clouds should remind him of snow, that from the sidewalk he could hear the shrill voices of children shrieking, “I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain.” He emptied the ashtray containing his nail parings and cigarette butts into the toilet, and swept the floor with a shirt, so that there would be no trace of his life, of his body, when that lewd and searching shape of death came there to find him in the evening.