The Stories of John Cheever Part 31

"When can I go home?"

"Not until camp closes." Georgie felt some of the weight of this sentence himself. He heard the boy's breathing quicken with pain. Somewhere a bugle sounded. Georgie, struggling to mix his responsibilities with his instincts, knelt and took the boy in his arms. "You see, I can't very well cable Mummy and tell her I'm not coming. She's expecting me there. And anyhow, we don't really have a home when Mummy isn't with us. I have my dinners out, and I'm away all day. There won't be anyone there to take care of you."

"I've partic.i.p.ated in everything," the boy said hopefully. It was his last appeal for clemency, and when he saw it fail he said, "I have to go now. It's my third period." He went up a worn path under the pines.

Georgie returned to the administration building reflecting on the fact that he had loved camp, that he had been one of the most popular boys in camp, and that he had never wanted to go home.

"I think things are bound to improve," the directress said. "As soon as he gets over the hump, he'll enjoy himself much more than the others. I would suggest, however, that you don't stay too long. He has a riding period now. Why don't you watch him ride, and leave before the period's ended? He takes pride in his riding, and in that way you'll avoid a painful farewell. This evening we're going to have a big campfire and a good long sing. I'm sure that he's suffering from nothing that won't be cured by a good sing with his mates around a roaring fire."

It all sounded plausible to Georgie, who liked a good campfire sing himself. Were there any sorrows of early life that couldn't be cured by a rousing performance of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? He walked over to the riding ring singing, "They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps..." It had begun to rain again, and Georgie couldn't tell whether the boy's face was wet with tears or drops of rain. He was on horseback and being led around the ring by a groom. Bibber waved once to his father and nearly lost his seat, and when the boy's back was turned Georgie went away.

He flew to Treviso and took a train into Venice, where Jill waited for him in a Swiss hotel on one of the back ca.n.a.ls. Their reunion was ardent, and he loved her no less for noticing that she was tired and thin. Getting her lambs across Europe had been a rigorous and exhausting task. What he wanted to do then was to move from their third-rate hotel to Cipriani's, get a cabana at the Lido, and spend a week on the beach. Jill refused to move to Cipriani's-it would be full of tourists-and on their second day in Venice she got up at seven, made instant coffee in a toothbrush gla.s.s, and rushed him off to eight-o'clock Ma.s.s at St. Mark's. Georgie knew Venice, and Jill knew-or should have known-that he was not interested in painting or mosaics, but she led him by the nose, so to speak, from monument to monument. He guessed that she had got into the habit of tireless sightseeing, and that the tactful thing to do would be to wait until the habit spent itself. He suggested that they go to Harry's for lunch, and she said, "What in the world are you thinking of, Georgie?" They had lunch in a trattoria, and toured churches and museums until closing time. In the morning, he suggested that they go to the Lido, but she had already made arrangements to go to Maser and see the villas.

Jill brought all her competence as a tour director to their days in Venice, although Georgie didn't see why. Most of us enjoy displaying our familiarity with the world, but he could not detect a trace of enjoyment in her a.s.sault. Some people love painting and architecture, but there was nothing loving in her approach to the treasures of Venice. The worship of beauty was mysterious to Georgie, but was beauty meant to crush one's sense of humor? She stood, one hot afternoon, before the facade of a church, lecturing him from her guidebook. She recited dates, naval engagements, and so on, and sketched the history of the Republic as if she were preparing him for an examination. The light in which she stood was bright and unflattering, and the generally festive air of Venice made her erudition, the sternness of her enthusiasm, seem ungainly. She was trying to impress him with the fact that Venice was to be taken seriously. And was this, he wondered, the meaning, the sum, of these brilliant marbles, this labyrinthine and dilapidated place, suffused with the rank and ancient smell of bilge? He put an arm around her and said, "Come off it, darling." She put him away from her and said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Had she lost an address, a child, a pocketbook, a string of beads, or any other valuable, her canva.s.s of Venice couldn't have been more grueling and exhaustive. He spent the rest of their time in Venice accompanying her on this mysterious search. Now and then he thought of Bibber and his camp. They flew home from Treviso, and in the gentler and more familiar light of Gordenville she seemed herself again. They took up their happiness, and welcomed Bibber when he was released from camp.

"Isn't it divine, isn't it the most divine period in domestic American architecture?" Jill always asked, showing guests through their large frame house. The house had been built in the 1870s, and had long windows, an oval dining room, and a stable with a cupola. It must have been difficult to maintain, but these difficulties-at parties, anyhow-were never felt. The high-ceilinged rooms were filled with light and had a special grace-austere, gloomy, and finely balanced. The obvious social responsibilities were all hers; his conversation was confined to the shipbuilding industry, but he mixed the drinks, carved the roast, and poured the wine. There was a fire in the fireplace, there were flowers, the furniture and the silver shone, and no one knew and no one would have guessed that it was he who polished the furniture and forks.

"Housework simply isn't my style," she had said, and he was intelligent enough to see the truth in her remark; intelligent enough not to expect her to recast this image of herself as an educated woman. It was the source of much of her vitality and joy.

One stormy winter, they weren't able to get any servants at all. A fly-by-night cook came in when they had guests, but the rest of the work fell to Georgie. That was the year Jill was studying French literature at Columbia and trying to finish her book on Flaubert. On a typical domestic evening, Jill would be sitting at her desk in their bedroom, working on her book. Bibber would be asleep. Georgie might be in the kitchen, polishing the bra.s.s and silver. He wore an ap.r.o.n. He drank whiskey. He was surrounded by cigarette boxes, andirons, bowls, ewers, and a large chest of table silver. He did not like to polish silver, but if he did not do this the silver would turn black. As she had said, it was not her style. It was not his style, either, nor was it any part of his education, but if he was, as she said, unintellectual, he was not so unintellectual as to accept any of the vulgarities and commonplaces a.s.sociated with the struggle for s.e.xual equality. The struggle was recent, he knew; it was real; it was inexorable; and while she side-stepped her domestic tasks, he could sense that she might do this unwillingly. She had been raised as an intellectual, her emanc.i.p.ation was still challenged in many quarters, and since he seemed to possess more lat.i.tude, to hold a stronger traditional position, it was his place to yield on matters like housework. It was not her choice, he knew, that she was raised as an intellectual, but the choice, having been made by others, seemed irrevocable. His restless s.e.xual nature attributed to her softness, warmth, and the utter darkness of love; but why, he wondered as he polished the forks, did there seem to be some contradiction between these attributes and the possession of a clear mind? Intellect, he knew, was not a masculine attribute, although the bulk of tradition had put decisive powers into the hands of men for so many centuries that their ancient supremacy would take some unlearning. But why should his instincts lead him to expect that the woman in whose arms he lay each night would at least conceal her literacy? Why should there seem to be some rub between the enormous love he felt for her and her ability to understand the quantum theory?

She wandered downstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching him at his work. Her feeling was tender. What a kind, gentle, purposeful, and handsome man she had married. What pride he took in their house. But then, as she went on watching him, she suffered a spiritual chill, a paroxysm of doubt. Was he, bent over the kitchen table at a woman's work, really a man? Had she married some half male, some aberration? Did he like to wear an ap.r.o.n? Was he a transvest.i.te? And was she aberrant herself? But this was inadmissible, and equally inadmissible was the reasoning that would bring her to see that he polished silver because he was forced to. Suddenly some vague, brutish stray appeared in the corner of her imagination, some hairy and drunken sailor who would beat her on Sat.u.r.day nights, debauch her with his gross appet.i.tes, and make her scrub the floor on her hands and knees. That was the kind of man she should have married. That had been her destiny. He looked up, smiled gently, and asked her how her work was coming. "ca marche, ca marche," she said wearily, and went back upstairs to her desk. "Little Gustave didn't get along at all well with his school chums," she wrote. "He was frightfully unpopular."

He came into their room when his work was done. He ran a hand lightly through her hair. "Just let me finish this paragraph," she said. She heard him take a shower, heard his bare feet on the carpet as he crossed the room and bounded happily into bed. Moved equally by duty and desire but still thinking of the glories of Flaubert, she washed, scented herself with perfume, and joined him in their wide bed, which, with its clean and fragrant linen and equal pools of light, seemed indeed a bower. Bosquet, she thought, brume, bruit. And then, sitting up in his arms, she exclaimed, "Elle avait iu 'Paul et Virginie' et elle avait rev la maisonnette de bambous, le nigre Domingo, le chien Fiddle, mais surtout l'amitie' douce de quelque bon pet.i.t frere, qui va chercher pour vous des fruits rouges clans des grands arbres plus hauts que des clochers, ou qui court pieds nus sur le sable, vous apportant un nid d'oiseau..

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l!" he said. He spoke in utter bitterness. He got out of bed, got a blanket from the closet, and made his bed in the living room.

She cried. He was jealous of her intelligence-she saw that. But was she meant to pose as a cretin in order to be attractive? Why should he rage because she had said a few words in French? To a.s.sume that intelligence, knowledge, the very benefits of education were male attributes was an att.i.tude that had been obsolete for a century. Then she felt as if the strain put on her heart by this cruelty was too much. She seemed to feel one of its fastenings give, as if this organ was a cask and so heavily laden with sorrow that, like some ruptured treasure chest of childhood, its sides had burst. "Intelligence" was the word she returned to-intelligence was at stake. And yet the word should ring free and clear of the pain she was suffering. Intelligence was the subject up for discussion, but it had the sentience, at that hour, of flesh and blood. What she faced was the bare bones of pain, cleansed in the stewpot and polished by the hound's tooth; this intelligence had the taste of death. She cried herself to sleep.

Later she was awakened by a crash. She was afraid. Might he harm her? Had something gone wrong with the complicated machinery of the old house? Burglars? Fire? The noise had come from their bathroom. She found him naked on his hands and knees on the bathroom floor. His head was under the washbasin. She went to him quickly and helped him to his feet. "I'm all right," he said. "Ju-just terribly drunk." She helped him back to their bed, where he fell asleep at once.

They had a dinner party a few nights later, and all the silver he had polished was used. The party went off without a hitch. One of their guests, a lawyer, described a local scandal. A four-mile link of highway, connecting two parkways in the neighborhood, had been approved by the state and the local governments. The cost was three million dollars, on a bid given by a contractor named Felici. The road was to destroy a large formal garden and park that had been maintained and open to the public for half a century. The owner, an octogenarian, lived in San Francisco and was either helpless, indifferent, or immobilized by indignation. The connecting road was of no use; no study of traffic patterns had proved that there was any need for such a road. A beautiful park and a large slice of tax money were to be handed over to an unscrupulous and avaricious contractor.

It was the kind of story Jill liked. Her eyes were bright, her color was high. Georgie watched her with a mixture of pride and dismay. Her civic zeal had been provoked, and he knew she would pursue the scandal to some conclusion. She was very happy with this challenge, but it was, on that evening, a happiness that embraced her house, her husband, her way of life. On Monday morning she stormed the various commissions that controlled highway construction, and verified the scandal. Then she organized a committee and circulated a pet.i.tion. An old woman named Mrs. Haney was found to take care of Bibber, and a high-school girl came in to read to him in the afternoons. Jill was absorbed in her work, bright-eyed and excited.

This was in December. Late one afternoon, Georgie left his office in Brooklyn and went into New York to do some shopping. All the high buildings in midtown were hidden in rain clouds, but he felt their presence overhead like the presence of a familiar mountain range. His feet were wet and his throat felt sore. The streets were crowded, and the decorations on the store fronts were mostly at such an angle that their meaning escaped him. While he could see the canopy of light at Lord & Taylor's, he could only see the chins and vestments of the choir plastered across the front of Saks. Blasts of holy music wavered through the rain. He stepped into a puddle. It was as dark as night; it seemed, because of the many lights, the darkest of nights. He went into Saks. Inside, the scene of well-dressed and brightly lighted pillage stopped him. He stood to one side to avoid being savaged by the crowds that were pushing their way in and out. He distinctly felt the symptoms of a cold. A woman standing beside him dropped some parcels. He picked them up. She had a pleasant face, wore a black mink coat, and her feet, he noticed, were wetter than his. She thanked him, and he asked if she was going to storm the counters. "I thought I would," she said, "but now I think I won't. My feet are wet, and I have a terrible feeling that I'm coming down with a cold."

"I feel the same way," he said. "Let's find some quiet place and have a drink."

"Oh, but I couldn't do that," she said.

"Why not?" he asked. "It's a festival, isn't it?"

The dark afternoon seemed to turn on that word. It was meant to be festive. That was the meaning of the singing and the lights.

"I had never thought of it that way," she said.

"Come on," he said. He took her arm and led her down the avenue to a quiet bar. He ordered drinks and sneezed. "You ought to have a hot bath and go to bed," she said. Her concern seemed purely maternal. He introduced himself. Her name was Betty Landers. Her husband was a doctor. Her daughter was married and her son was in his last year at Cornell. She was alone a good deal of the time, but she had recently taken up painting. She went to the Art Students League three times a week, and had a studio in the Village. They had three or four drinks and then took a cab downtown to see her studio.

It was not his idea of a studio. It was a two-room apartment in one of the new buildings near Washington Square and looked a little like the lair of a spinster. She pointed out her treasures. That's what she called them. The desk she had bought in England, the chair she had bought in France, the signed Matisse lithograph. Her hair and her eyebrows were dark, her face was thin, and she might have been a spinster. She made him a drink, and when he asked to see her paintings she modestly refused, although he was to see them later, stacked up in the bathroom, where her easel and her other equipment were neatly stored. Why they became lovers, why in the presence of this stranger he should suddenly find himself divested of all his inhibitions and all his clothing, he never understood. She was not young. Her elbows and knees were lightly gnarled, as if she were some distant cousin of Daphne and would presently be transformed, not into a flowering shrub but into some hardy and common tree.

They met after this two or three times a week. He never discovered much about her beyond the fact that she lived on Park Avenue and was often alone. She was interested in his clothes and kept him posted on department-store sales. It was a large part of her conversation. Sitting in his lap, she told him that there was a sale of neckties at Saks, a sale of shoes at Brooks, a sale of shirts at Altman's. Jill, by this time, was so absorbed in her campaign that she hardly noticed his arrivals and departures, but, sitting one evening in the living room while Jill was busy on the upstairs telephone, he felt that he had behaved shabbily. He felt that it was time that the affair, begun on that dark afternoon before Christmas, was over. He took some notepaper and wrote to Betty: "Darling, I'm leaving for San Francisco this evening and will be gone six weeks. I think it will be better, and I'm sure you'll agree with me, if we don't meet again." He wrote the letter a second time, changing San Francisco to Rome, and addressed the note to her studio in the Village.

Jill was campaigning on the telephone the next night when he returned home. Mathilde, the high-school girl, was reading to Bibber. He spoke to his son and then went down to the pantry to make a drink. While he was there, he heard Jill's heels on the stairs. They seemed to strike a swift and vengeful note, and when she came into the pantry her face was pale and drawn. Her hands were shaking, and in one of them she held the first of the two notes he had written.

"What is the meaning of this?" she asked.

"Where did you find it?"

"In the waste-paper basket."

"Then I will explain," he said. "Please sit down. Sit down for a minute, and I'll explain the whole thing."

"Do I have to sit down? I'm terribly busy."

"No, you don't have to sit down, but would you close the door? Mathilde can hear us."

"I can't believe you have anything to say that would necessitate closing a door."

"I have this to say," he said. He closed the door. "In December, just before Christmas, I took a mistress, a lonely woman. I can't explain my choice. It may have been because she had an apartment of her own. She was not young; she was not beautiful. Her children are grown. Her husband is a doctor. They live on Park Avenue."

"Oh, my G.o.d," she said. "Park Avenue!" and she laughed. "I adore that part of it. I could have guessed that if you invented a mistress she would live on Park Avenue. You've always been such a hick."

"Do you think this is all an invention?"

"Yes, I do. I think you've made the whole thing up to try and hurt me. You've never had much of an imagination. You might have done better if you'd tasted some Thackeray. Really. A Park Avenue matron. Couldn't you have invented something more delectable? A Va.s.sar senior with blazing red hair? A colored night-club singer? An Italian princess?"

"Do you really think I've made this all up?"

"I do, I do. I think it's all a fabrication and a loathsome one, but tell me more, tell me more about your Park Avenue matron."

"I have nothing more to tell you."

"You have nothing more to tell me because your powers of invention have collapsed. Isn't that it? My advice to you, old chap, is never to embark on anything that counts on a powerful imagination. It isn't your forte."

"You don't believe me."

"I do not, and if I did I wouldn't be jealous. My sort of woman is never jealous. I have more important things to do."

At this point in their marriage, Jill's a.s.sault on the highway commission served as a sort of suspension bridge over which they could travel, meet, converse, and dine together, elevated safely above the turbulence of their feelings. She was working to have the issue brought to a public hearing, and was to appear before the commission with pet.i.tions and doc.u.ments that would prove the gravity of her case and the number of influential supporters she had been able to enlist. Unluckily, at this time Bibber came down with a bad cold and it was difficult to find anyone to stay with him. Now and then, Mrs. Haney would come to sit beside his bed, and in the afternoons Mathilde read to him. When it was necessary for Jill to go to Albany, George stayed home from his office for a day so that she could make this trip. He stayed home on another day when she had an important appointment and Mrs. Haney couldn't come. She was sincerely grateful to him for these sacrifices, and he had nothing but admiration for her intelligence and tenacity. She was far superior to him as an advocate and as an organizer. She was to appear before the commission on a Friday, and he looked forward to having this much of their struggle behind them. He came home on Friday at around six. He called out, "Jill? Mathilde? Mrs. Haney?" but there was no answer. He threw off his hat and coat and bounded up the stairs to Bibber's room. The room was lighted, but the boy was alone and seemed to be asleep. Pinned to his pillow was this note: "Dear Mrs. Madison my aunt and uncle came to visit with us and I have to go home and help my mother. Bibber's asleep so he won't know the difference. I am sorry. Mathilde." On the pillow next to the note was a dark stain of blood. He touched the boy lightly and felt the searing heat of fever. Then he tried to rouse the child, but Bibber was not sleeping; he was unconscious.

Georgie moistened the boy's lips with some water, and Bibber regained consciousness long enough to throw his arms around his father. The pathos of seeing the burden of grave illness on someone so innocent and so young made Georgie cry. There was a tumultuous power of love in that small room, and he had to subdue his feelings lest he harm the boy with the force of his embrace. They clung to one another. Then Georgie called the doctor. He called ten times, and each time he heard the idiotic and frustrating busy signal. Then he called the hospital and asked for an ambulance. He wrapped the boy in a blanket and carried him down the stairs, enormously grateful to have this much to do. The ambulance was there in a few minutes.

Jill had stopped long enough to have a drink with one of her a.s.sistants, and came in a half hour later. "Hail the conquering hero!" she called as she stepped into the empty house. "We shall have our hearing, and the scurvy rascals are on the run. Even Felici appeared to be moved by my eloquence, and Carter said that I should have been an advocate. I was simply stupendous."

ITEM: "INTL PD FLORENCE VIA RCA 22 23 9:35 AMELIA FAXON CHIDCHESTER CARE AMEXCO: BIBBER DIED OF PNEUMONIA ON THURSDAY. CAN YOU RETURN OR MAY I COME TO YOU LOVE JILL".

Amelia Faxon Chidchester was staying with her old friend Louisa Trefaldi, in Fiesole. She bicycled down into Florence late in the afternoon of the twenty-third of January. Her bicycle was an old, high-seated Dutheil, and it elevated her a little above the small cars. She b.u.mped imperturbably through some of the worst traffic in the world. Her life was threatened every few minutes by a Vespa or a trolley, but she yielded to no one, and the look on her ruddy face was serene. Elevated, moving with that somnambulistic pace of a cyclist, smiling gently at the death that menaced her at every intersection, she looked a little supernatural, and it may have been that she thought she was. Her smile was sweet, inscrutable, and adamantine, and you felt that, had she been knocked off her bicycle, this expression, as she sailed through the air, would not lose its patience. She pumped over a bridge, dismounted gracefully, and walked along the river to the American Express office. Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disa.s.sociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail. The place was crowded, and she read her tragic cable in the middle of the crowd. You could not, from her expression, have guessed its content. She sighed deeply and raised her face. She seemed enn.o.bled. She wrote her reply at once: "NON POSSO TORNARE TANTI BACI FERVIDI. MELEE."

"Dearest darling," she wrote that evening. "I was frightfully sorry to have your tragic news. I can only thank G.o.d that I didn't know him better, but my experience in these matters is rather extensive, and I have come to a time of life when I do not especially like to dwell upon the subject of pa.s.sing away. There is no street I walk on, no building or painting I see here that doesn't remind me of Berenson, dear Berenson. The last time I saw him, I sat at his feet and asked if he had a magic carpet what picture in the whole wide world would he ask to be transported to. Without a moment's hesitation he chose the Raphael Madonna in The Hermitage. It is not possible for me to return. The truth will out, and the truth is that I don't like my own countrymen. As for your coming over, I am now staying with dear Louisa and, as you know, with her two is company, three is a crowd. Perhaps in the autumn, when your loss is not so painful, we might meet in Paris for a few days and revisit some of our old haunts."

Georgie was crushed by the death of his son. He blamed Jill, which was cruel and unreasonable, and it seemed, in the end, that he could be both. Jill went to Reno at his request and got a consent decree. It was all made by Georgie to seem like a punishment. Later on she got a job with a textbook publishing firm in Cleveland. Her ac.u.men and her charm were swiftly recognized and she was very successful, but she didn't many again, or hadn't married when I last had any news. The last I heard was from Georgie, who telephoned one night and said that we must get together for lunch. It was about eleven. I think he was drunk. He hadn't married again either, and from the bitterness with which he spoke of women that night I guessed that he never would. He told me about Jill's job in Cleveland and said that Mrs. Chidchester was bicycling across Scotland. I thought then how inferior he was to Jill, how immature. When I agreed to call him about lunch he gave me his telephone number at the shipyard, his extension there, the telephone number of his apartment, the telephone number of a cottage he had in Connecticut, and the telephone number of the club where he lunched and played cards. I wrote all these numbers on a piece of paper and when we said goodbye I dropped the paper into a wastebasket.

METAMORPHOSES.

I.

Larry Actaeon was built along cla.s.sical lines: curly hair, a triangulated nose, and a large and supple body, and he had what might be described as a Periclean interest in innovation. He designed his own sailboat (it had a list to port), ran for mayor (he was defeated), bred a Finnish wolf b.i.t.c.h to a German shepherd dog (the American Kennel Club refused to list the breed), and organized a drag hunt in Bullet Park, where he lived with his charming wife and three children. He was a partner in the investment-banking firm of Lothard and Williams, where he was esteemed for his shrewd and boisterous disposition.

Lothard and Williams was a highly conservative shop with an unmatched reputation for probity, but it was unconventional in one respect. One of the partners was a woman. This was a widow named Mrs. Vuiton. Her husband had been a senior partner, and when he died she had asked to be taken into the firm. In her favor were her intelligence, her beauty, and the fact that, had she withdrawn her husband's interest from the partnership, it would have been missed. Lothard, the most conservative of them all, supported her candidacy, and she was taken in. Her intellect was formidable, and was fortified by her formidable and immaculate beauty. She was a stunning woman, in her middle thirties, and brought more than her share of business to the firm. Larry didn't dislike her-he didn't quite dare to-but that her good looks and her musical voice were more effective in banking than his own shrewd and boisterous manner made him at least uneasy.

The partners in Lothard and Williams-they were seven-had their private offices arranged around the central offices of Mr. Lothard. They had the usual old-fashioned appurtenances-walnut desks, portraits of dead partners, dark walls and carpets. The six male partners all wore watch chains, stickpins, and high-crowned hats. Larry sat one afternoon in this atmosphere of calculated gloom, weighing the problems of a long-term bond issue that was in the house and having a slow sale, and suddenly it crossed his mind that they might unload the entire issue on a pension-fund customer. Moved by his enthusiasm, his boisterousness, he strode through Mr. Lothard's outer office and impetuously opened the inner door. There was Mrs. Vuiton, wearing nothing but a string of beads. Mr. Lothard was at her side wearing a wrist.w.a.tch. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry!" Larry said, and he closed the door and returned to his own desk.

The image of Mrs. Vuiton seemed incised in his memory, burnt there. He had seen a thousand naked women, but he had never seen one so stunning. Her skin had a luminous and pearly whiteness that he could not forget. The pathos and beauty of the naked woman established itself in his memory like a strain of music. He had beheld something that he should not have seen, and Mrs. Vuiton had glared at him with a look that was wicked and unholy. He could not shake or rationalize away the feeling that his blunder was disastrous; that he had in some way stumbled into a transgression that would demand compensation and revenge. Pure enthusiasm had moved him to open the door without knocking; pure enthusiasm, by his lights, was a blameless impulse. Why should he feel himself surrounded by trouble, misfortune, and disaster? The nature of man was concupiscent; the same thing might be going on in a thousand offices. What he had seen was commonplace, he told himself. But there had been nothing commonplace about the whiteness of her skin or her powerful and collected stare. He repeated to himself that he had done nothing wrong, but underlying all his fancies of good and evil, merits and rewards, was the stubborn and painful nature of things, and he knew that he had seen something that it was not his destiny to see.

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 b.i.t.c.h 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 n.o.body 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.tonhole. 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 s.p.a.ce 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.