Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [382]
“I've missed you terribly,” [Sears] said. “I'm so hardpacked that I can't eat.” He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to his knees.
“I'm sorry,” she said, “but I cannot help you.” …
“I'll get some flowers,” he said. He pulled up and fastened his trousers.
One suspects Mr. Hyde had a similar approach, but in Sears's case it doesn't work (this time), and the lovely Renée simply vanishes from the book with barely a further word.
Puzzled and heartbroken, Sears promptly takes up with the elevator operator in Renée's building, Eduardo, next to whom Renée (as a character) is a triumph of nuanced roundness. The reader has caught a fleeting glimpse of Eduardo ten pages before, when he gives Sears a “look of solicitude” that apparently derives from some notion of Renée's vagaries; when the two meet again, Eduardo wordlessly embraces the bereft old man: “The stranger's embrace seemed to comprehend that newfound province of loneliness that had frightened Sears. … The stranger, whose name he hadn't learned, took him downstairs to a small room off the lobby, where he undressed Sears and undressed himself. Sears's next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.” Sears's consternation is not so much due to the fact that he allowed himself to be seduced by an anonymous elevator operator, but rather because his seducer is, after all, a man: “I've never really had any reason to be anxious about money or friends or position or health,” Sears “politely” explains to Dr. Palmer, the psychiatrist, “but I did enjoy myself with the elevator man and if I should have to declare myself a homosexual it would be the end of my life.” Dr. Palmer informs Sears that he is a “neurotic” who has “invented some ghostly surrogate of a lost school friend or a male relation from [his] early youth.” It transpires, however, that Dr. Palmer's views are hardly disinterested, since he himself is a “homosexual spinster” who has spent much of his life in “vigilant repression” of “random erections” suffered because of the odd comely male. We are therefore left with the impression that Sears's “polite” candor is far less neurotic than the shrink's hapless denial, and when the latter accuses Sears, say, of “construct[ing] a carapace of friendliness,” it seems merely absurd.
Another aspect of homelessness treated in the novel is the nomadism of modern life, the “converging highways and the gathering whiplike noise of traffic” which conspire to blight the “intrinsic beauty” of the world. Distracted by the mad clamor of it all, Henry and Betsy Logan ruin an idyllic day at the beach by leaving their baby on the shoulder of Route 224—which leads happily, however, to a rare friendship with the baby's savior, Horace Chisholm, who also happens to be the environmentalist Sears has hired to investigate the Beasley's Pond affair. Like Sears, Chisholm seeks in nature a sense of purity—oneness—otherwise lacking in his lonely life: “Nothing waited for him in his apartment. There was no woman, no man, no dog, no cat, and his answering tape would likely be empty and the neighborhood where he lived had become so anonymous and transient that there were no waiters or shopkeepers or bartenders who would greet him.” His new friend Betsy assuages her own suburban loneliness by pushing a cart around the Buy Brite (“a massive store in the shopping mall on the four-digit interstate”), to which she vengefully returns when Horace is murdered by the cabal of gangsters and venal