John Cheever: Falconer

One more time. It was when they still bred dogs. Hannah, the bitch, had whelped a litter of eight. Seven were in the kennel behind the house. One, a sickly runt who would die, had been let in. Farragut was waked from a light sleep at around three, by the noise of the puppy vomiting or defecating. He slept naked and naked he left the bed, trying not to disturb Marcia, and went down to the living room. There was a mess under the piano. The puppy was trembling. "That's all right, Gordo," he said. Peter had named the puppy Gordon Cooper. It was that long ago. He got a mop, a bucket and some paper towels and crawled bare-ass under the piano to clean up the shit. He had disturbed her and he heard her come down the stairs. She wore a transparent nightgown and everything was to be seen. "I'm sorry I disturbed you," he said, "Gordo had an accident." "I'll help," she said. "You needn't," he said. "It's almost done." "But I want to," she said. On her hands and knees, she joined him under the piano. When it was done she stood and struck her head on that part of the piano that overlaps the bulk of the instrument. "Oh," she said. "Did you hurt yourself?" he asked. "Not terribly," she said. "I hope I won't have a bump or a shiner." "I'm sorry, my darling," he said. He stood, embraced her, kissed her and they made love on the sofa. He lighted a cigarette for her and they returned to bed. But it wasn't much after this that he stepped into the kitchen to get some ice and found her embracing and kissing Sally Midland, with whom she did crewelwork twice a week. He thought the embrace was not platonic and he detested Sally. "Excuse me," he said. "What for?" she asked. "I broke wind," he said. That was nasty and he knew it. He carried the ice tray into the pantry. She was silent during dinner and for the rest of the evening. When they woke the next day-Saturday-he asked: "Good morning, darling?" "Shit," she said. She put on her wrapper and went to the kitchen, where he heard her kick the refrigerator and then the dishwasher. "I hate you broken-down fucking second-rate appliances," she shouted. "I hate, hate, hate this fucking dirty old-fashioned kitchen. I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls." This was ominous, he knew, and the omens meant that he would get no breakfast. When she was distempered she regarded the breakfast eggs as if she had laid and hatched them. The egg, the egg for breakfast! The egg was like some sibyl in an Attic drama. "May I have eggs for breakfast?" he had once asked, years and years ago. "Do you expect me to prepare breakfast in this House of Usher?" she had asked. "Could I cook myself some eggs?" he asked. "You may not," she said. "You will make such a mess in this ruin that it will take hours for me to clean it up." On such a morning, he knew, he would be lucky to get a cup of coffee. When he dressed and went down, her face was still very dark and this made him feel much more grievous than hungry. How could he repair this? He saw out the window that there had been a frost, the first. The sun had risen, but the white hoarfrost stood in the shadow of the house and the trees with a Euclidian preciseness. It was after the first frost that you cut the fox grapes she liked for jelly, not much bigger than raisins, black, gamy; he thought that perhaps a bag of fox grapes would do the trick. He was scrupulous about the sexual magic of tools. This could be anxiety or the fact that they had once summered in southwestern Ireland, where tools had been male and female. He would, carrying a basket and shears, have felt like a transvestite. He chose a burlap sack and a hunting knife. He went into the woods- half or three-quarters of a mile from the house-to where there was a stand of fox grapes against a stand of pines. The exposure was due east and they were ripe, blackish-purple and rimmed with frost in the shade. He cut them with his manly knife and slapped them into the crude sack. He cut them for her, but who was she? Sally Midland's lover? Yes, yes, yes! Face the facts. What he faced was either the biggest of falsehoods or the biggest of truths, but in any case a sense of reasonableness enveloped and supported him. But if she loved Sally Midland, didn't he love Chucky Drew? He liked to be with Chucky Drew, but when they stood side by side in the shower he thought that Chucky looked like a diseased chicken, with flabby arms like the arms of those women who used to play bridge with his mother. He had not loved a man, he thought, since he had left the Boy Scouts. So, with his bag of wild grapes, he returned to the house, burs on his trousers, his brow bitten by the last flies of that year. She had gone back to bed. She lay there with her face in the pillow. "I picked some grapes," he said. "We had the first frost last night. I picked some fox grapes for jelly." "Thank you," she said, into the pillow. "I'll leave them in the kitchen," he said. He spent the rest of the day preparing the house for winter. He took down the screens and put up the storm windows, banked the rhododendrons with raked and acid oak leaves, checked the oil level in the fuel tank and sharpened his skates.! le worked along with numerous hornets who bumped against the eaves, looking, even as he, for some sanctuary for the coming ice age…

"It was partly because we stopped doing things together," he said. "We used to do so much together. We used to sleep together, travel together, ski, skate, sail, go to concerts, we did everything together, we watched the World Series and drank beer together although neither of us likes beer, not in this country. That was the year Lomberg, whatever his name was, missed a no-hitter by half an inning. You cried. I did too. We cried together."

"You had your fix," she said. "We couldn't do that together."

"But I was clean for six months,” he said. "It didn’t make any difference. Old turkey. It nearly killed me."

"Six months is not a lifetime," she said, "and anyhow, how long ago was that?"

"Your point," he said.

"How are you now?"

"I'm down from forty milligrams to ten. I get methadone at nine every morning. A pansy deals it out. He wears a hairpiece."

"Is he on the make?"

"I don't know. He asked me if I liked opera."

"You don't, of course."

"That's what I told him."

"That's good. I wouldn't want to be married to a homosexual, having already married a homicidal drug addict."

"I did not kill my brother."

"You struck him with a fire iron. He died."

"I struck him with a fire iron. He was drunk. He hit his head on the hearth,"

"All penologists say that all convicts claim innocence."

"Confucius say.

"You're so superficial, Farragut. You've always been a lightweight.

"I did not kill my brother."

"Shall we change the subject?"

"Please."

"When do you think you'll be clean?"

"I don't know. I find it difficult to imagine cleanliness. I can claim to imagine this, but it would be false. It would be as though I had claimed to reinstall myself in some afternoon of my youth."

"That's why you're a lightweight."

"Yes."

He did not want a quarrel, not there, not ever again with her. He had observed, in the last year of their marriage, that the lines of a quarrel were as ritualistic as the words and the sacrament of holy matrimony. "I don't have to listen to your shit anymore," she had screamed. He was astonished, not at her hysteria, but at the fact that she had taken the words out of his mouth. "You've ruined my life, you've ruined my life," she screamed. "There is nothing on earth as cruel as a rotten marriage." This was all on the tip of his tongue. But then, listening for her to continue to anticipate his thinking, he heard her voice, deepened and softened with true grief, begin a variation that was not in his power. "You are the biggest mistake I ever made," she said softly. "I thought that my life was one hundred percent frustration, but when you killed your brother I saw that I had underestimated my problems."