Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

I turned out the light that hung down, and the room filled with the pale night like a bucket let down a well. It was never dark enough, the enormous sky flashing with its August light rushing into the emptiest rooms, the loneliest windows. The month of falling stars. I hate the time of year this is.

If we lay together any on the bed, almost immediately I was propped up against the hard rods with my back pressing them, and sighing — deep sigh after deep sigh. I heard myself.

“Get up,” I said. “I want the whole bed. You don’t need to be here.” And I showed I had the pistol. I lay back holding it toward me and trying to frown her away, the way I used to lie still cherishing a dream in the morning and Jinny would pull me out of it.

Maideen had been pulling or caressing my arm, but she had no strength in her hands at all. She rose up and stood in the space before my eyes, so plain there in the lighted night. She was disarrayed. There was blood on her, blood and disgrace. Or perhaps there wasn’t. I did not remember anything about it. For a moment I saw her double.

“Get away from me,” I said.

While she was speaking to me I could hear only the noises of the place we were in — of frogs and nightbirds, a booted step in the heavy tangle all around, and the little idiot nigger running up and down the fence, up and down, as far as it went and back, sounding the palings with his stick.

“This is my grandfather’s dueling pistol — one of a pair. Very valuable.”

“Don’t, Ran. Don’t do that, Ran. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.”

I knew I had spoken to her again in order to lie. It was my father’s pistol he’d never cared for. When she spoke, I didn’t hear what she said; I was reading her lips, the way people being told good-by do conscientiously through train windows. I had the pistol pointing toward my face and did not swerve it. Outside, it sounded as though the little nigger at the gate was keeping that up forever — running a stick along the fence, up and down, to the end and back again.

Poor Bella, it was so hot for her. She lay that day with shut eyes, her narrow little forehead creased. Her nose was dry as a thrown-away rind. The weather was only making her suffer more. She never had a long thick coat, was the one good thing. She was just any kind of a dog. The kind I liked best.

I tried to think. What had happened? No — what had not happened? Something had not happened. The world was not going on. Or, you understand, it went on but somewhere it had stopped being real, and I had walked on, like a tight-rope walker without any rope. How far? Where should I have fallen? Hate. Discovery and hate. Then, right after… Destruction was not real, disgrace not real, nor death. They all got up again, Jinny and Dugan got up…

Up and down, the little idiot nigger. He was having a good time at that. I wondered, when would that stop? Then that stopped.

I put the pistol’s mouth in my own. It tasted, the taste of the whole machinery of it. And then instead it was my own mouth put to the pistol’s, quick as a little baby’s maybe, whose hunger goes on every minute — who can’t be reassured or gratified, ever, quite in time enough. There was Maideen still, white in her petticoat.

“Don’t do it, Ran. Please don’t do it.”

Urgently I made it — made the awful sound.

And immediately she said, “Now, you see. It didn’t work. Now you see. Hand that old thing to me, I’ll keep that.”

She took it from me. She took it over to the chair, as if she were possessed of some long-tried way to deal with it, and disposed of it in the fold of her clothes. She came back and sat down on the edge of the bed. In a minute she put her hand out again, differently — and touched my shoulder. Then I met it, hard, with my face, the small, bony, freckled (I knew) hand that I hated (I knew), and kissed it and bit it until my lips and tongue tasted salt tears and salt blood — that the hand was not Jinny’s. Then I lay back in the bed a long time, up against the rods.

“You’re so stuck up,” she said.

I lay there and after a while my eyes began to close and I saw her again. She lay there plain as the day by the side of me, quietly weeping for herself. The kind of soft, restful, meditative sobs a child will venture long after punishment.

So I slept.

How was I to know she would hurt herself like this?

Now — where is Jinny?

JOHN CHEEVER (1912–1982) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was expelled from Thayer Academy and described the event in his first published story, which was bought by Malcolm Cowley, an editor of the New Republic .

Cheever moved to New York City during the Depression and continued to write, publishing stories in The New Yorker and Story . One day he walked a manuscript into the Story office. He had until then spelled his first name Jon. Series editor Martha Foley looked at the cover of his story and told him, “You are going to spend the rest of your life correcting proofs,” so he changed it to John.

Cheever said in an interview, “I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. Characters and events come simultaneously to me. Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap. It is a calculated attempt to hold the reader’s interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.”

Cheever met the woman who would become his wife while riding in an elevator. “We went together for a couple of years before we got married,” he said. “Nobody got married in those years, then there was a period where everybody got married, then nobody got married again.” Cheever is known for his insightful portrayals of marriage and suburban life as well as for depicting the tension between a character’s inner and outer worlds.

In 1958 Cheever won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle. The Stories of John Cheever won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its first paperback edition won the 1981 National Book Award. Shortly before he died of cancer, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

★

JIM AND IRENE Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house in the East Seventies between Fifth and Madison Avenues, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott, at thirty-seven, looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts — although they seldom mentioned this to anyone — and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.

Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio — or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them — and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.