The Stories of John Cheever

Three Stories

THE SUBJECT TODAY will be the metaphysics of obesity, and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth. I am the body cavity between his diaphragm and his pelvic floor and I possess his viscera. I know you won’t believe me, but if you’ll buy a cri de coeur why not a cri de ventre? I play as large a part in his affairs as any other lights and vitals, and while I can’t act independently he too is at the mercy of such disparate forces in his environment as money and starlight. We were born in the Middle West and he was educated in Chicago. He was on the track team (pole vault) and later on the diving team, two sports that made my existence dangerous and obscure. I did not discover myself until he was in his forties, when I was recognized by his doctor and his tailor. He stubbornly refused to grant me my rights and continued for almost a year to wear clothes that confined me harshly and caused me much soreness and pain. My one compensation was that I could unzip his fly at will.

I’ve often heard him say that, having spent the first half of his life running around behind an unruly bowsprit, he seemed damned to spend the rest of his life going around behind a belly that was as independent and capricious as his genitals. I have been, of course, in a position to observe his carnal sport, but I think I won’t describe the thousands—or millions—of performances in which I have participated. I am, in spite of my reputation for grossness, truly visionary, and I would like to look past his gymnastics to their consequences, which, from what I hear, are often ecstatic. He seems to feel that his erotic life is an entry permit into what is truly beautiful in the world. Balling in a thunderstorm—any rain will do—is his idea of a total relationship. There have been complaints. I once heard a woman ask, “Will you never understand that there is more to life than sex and nature worship?” Once, when he exclaimed over the beauty of the stars his belle amie giggled. My open knowledge of the world is confined to the limited incidence of nakedness: bedrooms, showers, beaches, swimming pools, trysts, and sunbathing in the Antilles. The rest of my life is spent in a sort of purdah between his trousers and his shirts.

Having refused to admit my existence for a year or more, he finally had his trousers enlarged from thirty to thirty-four. When I had reached thirty-four inches and was striving for thirty-six his feelings about my existence became obsessive. The clash between what he had been and wanted to be and what he had become was serious. When people poked me with their fingers and made jokes about his Bay Window his forced laughter could not conceal his rage. He ceased to judge his friends on their wit and intelligence and began to judge them on their waistbands. Why was X so flat and why was Z, with a paunch of at least forty inches, contented with this state of affairs? When his friends stood his eye dropped swiftly from their smiles to their middles. We went one night to Yankee Stadium to see a ball game. He had begun to enjoy himself when he noticed that the right fielder had a good thirty-six inches. The other fielders and the basemen passed but the pitcher—an older man—had a definite bulge—and two of the umpires—when they took off their guards—were disgusting. So was the catcher. When he realized that he was not watching a ball game—that because of my influence he was unable to watch a ball game—we left. This was at the top of the fourth. A day or two later he began what was to be a year or a year and a half of hell.

We started with a diet that emphasized water and hard-boiled eggs. He lost ten pounds in a week but he lost it all in the wrong places, and while my existence was imperiled I survived. The diet set up some metabolic disturbance that damaged his teeth, and he gave this up at his doctor’s suggestion and joined a health club. Three times a week I was tormented on an electric bicycle and a rowing machine and then a masseur would knead me and strike me loudly and cruelly with the flat of his hand. He then bought a variety of elastic underpants or girdles that meant to disguise or dismiss me, and while they gave me great pain they only challenged my invincibility. When they were removed in the evening I reinstated myself amply in the world I so much love. Soon after this he bought a contraption that was guaranteed to destroy me. This was a pair of gold-colored plastic shorts that could be inflated by a hand pump. The acidity of the secretions I had to refine informed me of how painful and ridiculous he felt. When the shorts were inflated he read from a book of directions and performed some gymnastics. This was the worst pain to be inflicted on me so far, and when the exercises were finished my various parts were so abnormally cramped and knotted that we spent a sleepless night.

By this time I had come to recognize two facts that guaranteed my survival. The first was his detestation of solitary exercise. He liked games well enough but he did not like gymnastics. Each morning he would go to the bathroom and touch his toes ten times. His buttocks (there’s another story) scraped the washbasin and his forehead grazed the toilet seat. I knew from the secretions that came my way that this experience was spiritually crushing. Later he moved to the country for the summer and took up jogging and weight lifting. While lifting weights he learned to count in Japanese and Russian, hoping to give this performance some dignity, but he was not successful. Both jogging and weight lifting embarrassed him intensely. The second factor in my favor was his conviction that we lead a simple life. “I really lead a very simple life,” he often said. If this were so I would have no chance for prominence, but there is, I think, no first-class restaurant in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the British Isles to which I have not been taken and asked to perform. He often says so. Going after a dish of crickets in Tokyo he gave me a friendly pat and said: “Do your best, man.” So long as he considers this to be a simple life my place in the world is secure. When I fail him it is not through malice or intent. After a Homeric dinner with fourteen entrées in southern Russia we spent a night together in the bathroom. This was in Tbilisi. I seemed to be threatening his life; It was three in the morning. He was crying with pain. He was weeping, and perhaps I know more than any other part of his physique about the true loneliness of this man. “Go away,” he shouted at me, “go away.” What could be more pitiful and absurd than a naked man at the dog hour in a strange country casting out his vitals. We went to the window to hear the wind in the trees. “Oh, I should have paid more attention to spiritual things,” he shouted.

If I were the belly of a secret agent or a reigning prince my role in the clash of time wouldn’t have been any different. I represent time more succinctly than any scarecrow with a scythe. Why should so simple a force as time—told accurately by the clocks in his house—cause him to groan and swear? Did he feel that some specious youthfulness was his principal, his only lure? I know that I reminded him of the pain he suffered in his relationship to his father. His father retired at fifty-five and spent the rest of his life polishing stones, gardening, and trying to learn conversational French from records. He had been a limber and an athletic man, but like his son he had been overtaken in the middle of the way by an independent abdomen. He seemed, like his son, to have no capacity to age and fatten gracefully. His paunch, his abdomen seemed to break his spirit. His abdomen led him to stoop, to walk clumsily, to sigh, and to have his trousers enlarged. His abdomen seemed like some precursor of the Angel of Death, and was Farnsworth, touching his toes in the bathroom each morning, struggling with the same angel?

Then there was the year we traveled. I don’t know what drove him, but we went around the world three times in twelve months. He may have thought that travel would heighten his metabolism and diminish my importance. I won’t go into the hardships of safety belts and a chaotic eating schedule. We saw all the usual places as well as Nairobi, Malagasy, Mauritius, Bali, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and New Zealand. We saw Madang, Goroka, Lee, Rabaul, Fiji, Reykjavík, Thingvellir, Akureyri, Narsarssuak, Kagsiarauk, Bukhara, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, and the Gobi Desert. Then there were the Galápagos, Patagonia, the Mato Grosso jungle, and of course the Seychelles and the Amirantes.

It ended or was resolved one night at Passetto’s. He began the meal with figs and Parma ham and with this he ate two rolls and butter. After this he had spaghetti carbonara, a steak with fried potatoes, a serving of frogs’ legs, a whole spigola roasted in paper, some chicken breasts, a salad with an oil dressing, three kinds of cheese, and a thick zabaglione. Halfway through the meal he had to give me some leeway, but he was not resentful and I felt that victory might be in sight. When he ordered the zabaglione I knew that I had won or that we had arrived at a sensible truce. He was not trying to conceal, dismiss, or forget me and his secretions were bland. Leaving the table he had to give me another two inches, so that walking across the piazza I could feel the night wind and hear the fountains, and we’ve lived happily together ever since.

MARGE LITTLETON would, in the long-gone days of Freudian jargon, have been thought maternal, although she was no more maternal than you or you. What would have been meant was a charming softness in her voice and her manner and she smelled like a summer’s day, or perhaps it is a summer’s day that smells like such a woman. She was a regular churchgoer, and I always felt that her devotions were more profound than most, although it is impossible to speculate on anything so intimate. She was on the liturgical side, hewing to the Book of Common Prayer and avoiding sermons whenever possible. She was not a native, of course—the last native along with the last cow died twenty years ago—and I don’t remember where she or her husband came from. He was bald. They had three children and lived a scrupulously unexceptional life until one morning in the fall.

It was after Labor Day, a little windy. Leaves could be seen falling outside the windows. The family had breakfast in the kitchen. Marge had baked johnnycake. “Good morning, Mrs. Littleton,” her husband said, kissing her on the brow and patting her backside. His voice, his gesture seemed to have the perfect equilibrium of love. I don’t know what virulent critics of the family would say about the scene. Were the Littletons making for themselves, by contorting their passions into an acceptable social image, a sort of prison, or did they chance to be a man and woman whose pleasure in one another was tender, robust, and invincible? From what I know it was an exceptional marriage. Never having been married myself I may be unduly susceptible to the element of buffoonery in holy matrimony, but isn’t it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels. But with the Littletons one felt that they might live together with intelligence and ardor—giving and taking until death did them part.

On that particular Saturday morning he planned to go shopping. After breakfast he made a list of what they needed from the hardware store. A gallon of white acrylic paint, a four-inch brush, picture hooks, a spading fork, oil for the lawn mower. The children went along with him. They went, not to the village, which, like so many others, lay dying, but to a crowded and fairly festive shopping center on Route 64. He gave the children money for Cokes. When they returned the southbound traffic was heavy. It was as I say after Labor Day, and many of the cars were towing portable houses, campers, sailboats, motorboats, and trailers. This long procession of vehicles and domestic portables seemed not the spectacle of a people returning from their vacations but rather like a tragic evacuation of some great city or state. A car carrier, trying to pass an exceptionally bulky mobile home, crashed into the Littletons and killed them all. I didn’t go to the funeral but one of our neighbors described it to me. “There she stood at the edge of the grave. She didn’t cry. She looked very beautiful and serene. She had to watch four coffins, one after the other, lowered into the ground. Four.”

She didn’t go away. People asked her to dinner, of course, but in such an intensely domesticated community the single are inevitably neglected. A month or so after the accident the local paper announced that the State Highway Commission would widen Route 64 from a four-lane to an eight-lane highway. We organized a committee for the preservation of the community and raised ten thousand dollars for legal fees. Marge Littleton was very active. We had meetings nearly every week. We met in parish houses, courtrooms, high schools, and houses. In the beginning these meetings were very emotional. Mrs. Pinkham once cried. She wept. “I’ve worked sixteen years on my pink room and now they’re going to tear it down.” She was led out of the meeting, a truly bereaved woman. We chartered a bus and went to the state capital. We marched down 64 one rainy Sunday with a motorcycle escort. I don’t suppose we were more than thirty and we straggled. We carried picket signs. I remember Marge. Some people seem born with a congenital gift for protest and a talent for carrying picket signs, but this was not Marge. She carried a large sign that said: STOP GASOLINE ALLEY. She seemed very embarrassed. When the march disbanded I said goodbye to her on a knoll above the highway. I remember the level gaze she gave to the line of traffic, rather, I guess, as the widows of Nantucket must have regarded the sea.

When we had spent our ten thousand dollars without any results our meetings were less and less frequent and very poorly attended. Only three people, including the speaker, showed up for the last. The highway was widened, demolishing six houses and making two uninhabitable, although the owners got no compensation. Several wells were destroyed by the blasting. After our committee was disbanded I saw very little of Marge. Someone told me she had gone abroad. When she returned she was followed by a charming young Roman named Pietro Montani. They were married.

Marge displayed her gifts for married happiness with Pietro although he was very unlike her first husband. He was handsome, witty, and substantial—he represented a firm that manufactured innersoles—but he spoke the worst English I have ever heard. You could talk with him and drink with him and laugh with him but other than that it was almost impossible to communicate with him. It didn’t really matter. She seemed very happy and it was a pleasant house to visit. They had been married no more than two months when Pietro, driving a convertible down 64, was decapitated by a crane.

She buried Pietro with the others but she stayed on in the house on Twin-Rock Road, where one could hear the battlefield noises of industrial traffic. I think she got a job. One saw her on the trains. Three weeks after Pietro’s death a twenty-four-wheel, eighty-ton truck, northbound on Route 64 for reasons that were never ascertained, veered into the southbound lane demolishing two cars and killing their four passengers. The truck then rammed into a granite abutment there, fell on its side, and caught fire. The police and the fire department were there at once, but the freight was combustible and the fire was not extinguished until three in the morning. All traffic on Route 64 was rerouted. The women’s auxiliary of the fire department served coffee.

Two weeks later at 8 P.M. another twenty-four-wheel truck with a load of cement blocks went out of control at the same place, crossed the southbound lane, and felled four full-grown trees before it collided with the abutment. The impact of the collision was so violent that two feet of granite was sheared off the wall. There was no fire, but the two drivers were so badly crushed by the collision that they had to be identified by their dental work.

On November third at 8:30 P.M. Lt. Dominic DeSisto reported that a man in work clothes ran into the front office. He seemed hysterical, drugged, or drunk and claimed to have been shot. He was, according to Lieutenant DeSisto, so incoherent that it was some time before he could explain what had happened. Driving north on 64, at about the same place where the other trucks had gone out of control, a rifle bullet had smashed the left window of his cab, missed the driver, and smashed the right window. The intended victim was Joe Langston of Baldwin, South Carolina. The lieutenant examined the truck and verified the broken windows. He and Langston drove in a squad car back to where the shot had been fired. On the right side of the road there was a little hill of granite with some soil covering. When the highway had been widened the hill had been blasted in two and the knoll on the right corresponded to the abutment that had killed the other drivers. DeSisto examined the hill. The grass on the knoll was trampled and there were two cigarette butts on the ground. Langston was taken to the hospital, suffering from shock. The hill was put under surveillance for the next month, but the police force was understaffed and it was a boring beat to sit alone on the hill from dusk until midnight. As soon as surveillance was stopped a fourth oversized truck went out of control. This time the truck veered to the right, took down a dozen trees, and drove into a narrow but precipitous valley. The driver, when the police got to him, was dead. He had been shot.

In December Marge married a rich widower and moved to North Salem, where there is only one two-lane highway and where the sound of traffic is as faint as the roaring of a shell.

HE TOOK HIS AISLE SEAT—32—in the 707 for Rome. The plane was not quite full and there was an empty seat between him and the occupant of the port seat. This was taken, he was pleased to see, by an exceptionally good-looking woman—not young, but neither was he. She was wearing perfume, a dark dress, and jewelry and she seemed to belong to that part of the world in which he moved most easily. “Good evening,” he said, settling himself. She didn’t reply. She made a discouraging humming noise and raised a paperback book to the front of her face. He looked for the title but this she concealed with her hands. He had met shy women on planes before—infrequently, but he had met them. He supposed they were understandably wary of lushes, mashers, and bores. He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy. If one read the editorials, the sports page, and especially the financial section shy strangers would sometimes be ready for a conversation. The plane took off, the smoking sign went dark, and he took out a gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. They were not flashy, but they were gold. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. “Why should I?” she asked. She did not look in his direction. “Some people do,” he said, lighting his cigarette. She was nearly as beautiful as she was unfriendly, but why should she be so cold? They would be side by side for nine hours, and it was only sensible to count on at least a little conversation. Did he remind her of someone she disliked, someone who had wounded her? He was bathed, shaved, correctly dressed, and accustomed to making friends. Perhaps she was an unhappy woman who disliked the world, but when the stewardess came by to take their drink orders the smile she gave the young stranger was dazzling and open. This so cheered him that he smiled himself, but when she saw that he was trespassing on a communication that was aimed at someone else she turned on him, scowled, and went back to her book. The stewardess brought him a double Martini and his companion a sherry. He supposed that his strong drink might increase her uneasiness, but he had to take that chance. She went on reading. If he could only find the title of the book, he thought, he would have a foot in the door. Harold Robbins, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Emily Dickinson—anything would help. “May I ask what you’re reading?” he said politely. “No,” she said.

When the stewardess brought their dinners he passed her tray across the empty seat. She did not thank him. He settled down to eat, to feed, to enjoy this simple habit. The meal was unusually bad and he said so. “One can’t be too particular under the circumstances,” she said. He thought he heard a trace of warmth in her voice. “Salt might help,” she said, “but they neglected to give me any salt. Could I trouble you for yours?” “Oh, certainly,” he said. Things were definitely looking up. He opened his salt container and in passing it to her a little salt spilled on the rug. “I’m afraid the bad luck will be yours,” she said. This was not said at all lightly. She salted her cutlet and ate everything on her tray. Then she went on reading the book with the concealed title. She would sooner or later have to use the toilet, he knew, and then he could read the title of the book, but when she did go to the stern of the plane she carried the book with her.

The screen for the film was lowered. Unless a picture was exceptionally interesting he never rented sound equipment. He had found that lipreading and guesswork gave the picture an added dimension, and anyhow the dialogue was usually offensively banal. His neighbor rented equipment and seemed to enjoy herself heartily. She had a lovely musical laugh and communicated with the actors on the screen as she had communicated with the stewardess and as she had refused to communicate with her neighbor. The sun rose as they approached the Alps, although the film was not over. Here and there the brightness of an Alpine morning could be seen through the cracks in the drawn shades, but while they sailed over Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn the characters on the screen relentlessly pursued their script. There was a parade, a chase, a reconciliation, an ending. His companion, still carrying her mysterious book, retired to the stern again and returned wearing a sort of mobcap, her face heavily covered with some white unguent. She adjusted her pillow and blanket and arranged herself for sleep. “Sweet dreams,” he said, daringly. She sighed.

He never slept on planes. He went up to the galley and had a whiskey. The stewardess was pretty and talkative and she told him about her origins, her schedule, her fiancé and her problems with passengers who suffered from flight fear. Beyond the Alps they began to lose altitude and he saw the Mediterranean from the port and had another whiskey. He saw Elba, Giglio, and the yachts in the harbor at Porto Ercole, where he could see the villas of his friends. He could remember coming into Nantucket so many years ago. They used to line the port railing and shout, “Oh, the Perrys are here and the Saltons and the Greenoughs.” It was partly genuine, partly show. When he returned to his seat his companion had removed her mobcap and her unguent. Her beauty in the light of morning was powerful. He could not diagnose what he found so compelling—nostalgia, perhaps—but her features, her pallor, the set of her eyes, all corresponded to his sense of beauty. “Good morning,” he said, “did you sleep well?” She frowned, she seemed to find this impertinent. “Does one ever?” she asked on a rising note. She put her mysterious book into a handbag with a zipper and gathered her things. When they landed at Fiumicino he stood aside to let her pass and followed her down the aisle. He went behind her through the passport, emigrant, and health check and joined her at the place where you claim your bags.

But look, look. Why does he point out her bag to the porter and why, when they both have their bags, does he follow her out to the cab stand, where he bargains with a driver for the trip into Rome? Why does he join her in the cab? Is he the undiscourageable masher that she dreaded? No, no. He is her husband, she is his wife, the mother of his children, and a woman he has worshipped passionately for nearly thirty years.