Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [163]
The core story of this complicated tour-de-force is suggested by the title: Justina, an elderly cousin of the narrator Moses's wife,† dies during a visit and sits gaping on the sofa while Moses learns, to his chagrin, that he is prevented by a zoning ordinance from disposing of the body. As his doctor explains, “A couple of years ago some stranger bought the old Plewett mansion and it turned out that he was planning to operate it as a funeral home. We didn't have any zoning provision at the time that would protect us and one was rushed through the Village Council at midnight and they overdid it. It seems that you not only can't have a funeral home in Zone B—you can't bury anything there and you can't die there.” The doctor suggests that Moses drive his guest to Zone C (“beyond the traffic light by the high school”) and “just say that she died in the car.” When Moses indignantly appeals to the Mayor, the man objects that such “morbidity” could easily get out of hand (“People don't like to live in a neighborhood where this sort of thing goes on all the time”), but finally agrees to make an exception when Moses threatens to bury the woman in his backyard. The funeral, however, is a very gloomy affair on the outskirts of town, where the dead “are transported furtively as knaves and scoundrels and where they lie in an atmosphere of perfect neglect.”
Such anyway is the pretext for an elaborate rumination on the denial of death in a pre-apocalyptic world. At the outset Moses informs us that he's just given up drinking and smoking on doctor's orders, as a result of which his senses are so dreadfully heightened that he sees a face in his breakfast muffin (“As you can see, I was nervous”) and for the first time perceives the awful breadth of despair beneath the paralyzing gentility of Proxmire Manor: “Above me on the hill were my home and the homes of my friends, all lighted and smelling of fragrant wood smoke like the temples in a sacred grove, dedicated to monogamy, feckless childhood, and domestic bliss but so like a dream that I felt the lack of viscera with much more than poignance—the absence of that inner dynamism we respond to in some European landscapes. In short, I was disappointed.” Even the “anthracite eyes” of a melting snowman seem to regard the scene with “terrifying bitterness.” The same malaise prevails at Moses's office, where he is prevented from attending to poor Justina by his gum-chewing tyrant of a boss, who insists he stay behind to write a commercial for Elixircol, “the true juice of youth.” Rebelling against a world in which “the solemn fact of death” cannot be respected or even admitted, Moses writes a scathing parody: “Are you growing old? … Are you falling out of love with your face in the looking glass? Does your face in the morning seem rucked and seamed with alcoholic and sexual excesses and does the rest of you appear to be a grayish-pink lump, covered all over with brindle hair?” And so on, hilariously. (There are three commercials in all, the last consisting verbatim of the Twenty-third Psalm.) A further element in this zany (yet somber) fantasia is a dream Moses has on the night of Justina's death: in a vast supermarket he sees thousands of shoppers—obviously citizens of his own “beloved country,” there being a farrago of races, colors, and creeds,