Stories of John Cheever (1979 Pulitzer Prize), The - John Cheever [99]
You cure yourself of a romantic, carnal, and disastrous marriage, I decided, and, like any addict in the throes of a cure, you must be exaggeratedly careful of every step you take. I decided not to answer the telephone, because I knew that Rachel might repent, and I knew, by then, the size and the nature of the things that could bring us together. If it rained for five days, if one of the children had a passing fever, if she got some sad news in a letter—anything like this might be enough to put her on the telephone, and I did not want to be tempted to resume a relationship that had been so miserable. The first months will be like a cure, I thought, and I scheduled my time with this in mind. I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in the summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo's. There was usually someone there to talk with, and I'd drink a couple of Martinis and eat a steak. Afterward I'd drive over to the Stonybrook Drive-In Theatre and sit through a double feature. All this—the Martinis and the steak and the movie—was intended to induce a kind of anesthesia, and it worked. I didn't want to see anyone outside the people in my office.
But I don't sleep very well in an empty bed, and presently I had the problem of sleeplessness to cope with. When I got home from the movies, I would fall asleep, but only for a couple of hours. I tried to make the best of insomnia. If it was raining, I listened to the rain and the thunder. If it wasn't raining, I listened to the distant noise of trucks on the turnpike, a sound that reminded me of the Depression, when I spent some time on the road. The trucks came gunning down the turnpike—loaded with chickens or canned goods or soap powder or furniture. The sound meant darkness to me, darkness and headlights—and youth, I suppose, since it seemed to be a pleasant sound. Sometimes the noise of the rain or the traffic or something like that would distract me, and I would be able to go to sleep again, but one night nothing at all worked, and at three in the morning I decided to go downstairs and read.
I turned on a light in the living room and looked at Rachel's books. I chose one by an author named Lin Yutang and sat down on a sofa under a lamp. Our living room is comfortable. The book seemed interesting. I was in a neighborhood where most of the front doors were unlocked, and on a street that is very quiet on a summer night. All the animals are domesticated, and the only night birds that I've ever heard are some owls way down by the railroad track. So it was very quiet. I heard the Barstows' dog bark, briefly, as if he had been waked by a nightmare, and then the barking stopped. Everything was quiet again. Then I heard, very close to me, a footstep and a cough.
I felt my flesh get hard—you know that feeling—but I didn't look up from my book, although I felt that I was being watched. Intuition and all that sort of thing may exist, but I am happier if I discount it, and yet, without lifting my eyes from the book, I knew not only that I was being watched but that I was being watched from the picture window at the end of the living room, by someone whose intent was to watch me and to violate my privacy. Sitting under a bright lamp, surrounded by the dark, made me feel defenseless. I turned a page and pretended to go on reading. Then a fear, much worse than the fear of the fool outside the window, distracted me. I was afraid that the cough and the step and the feeling that I was being watched had come from my imagination. I looked up.
I saw him, all right, and I think he meant me to; he was grinning. I turned off the light, but it was too