The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [115]
“Why should I tell him my troubles? I know what my troubles are. I hate this house. I hate this place, this Remsen Park.”
“If you talked with Dr. Blennar …”
“Is he a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“You want to prove that I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No, Betsey.”
“Psychiatrists are for crazy people. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Then she got out of bed and went into the living room. “Oh, I’m sick of you, sick of your earnest damned ways, sick of the way you stretch your neck and crack your knuckles and sick of your old father with his dirty letters asking is there any news, is there any good news, is there any news. I’m sick of Wapshots and I don’t give a damn who knows it.” Then she went into the kitchen and came out with the blue dishes that Sarah had sent them from West Farm and began to break them on the floor. Coverly went out of the living room on to the back steps but Betsey followed him and broke the rest of the dishes out there.
On the day after they were married they had gone out to sea in a steamer of about the same vintage as the Topaze but a good deal bigger. It was a fine day at sea, mild and fair and with a haze suspended all around them so that, but for the wake rolled away at their stern, their sense of direction and their sense of time were obscured. They walked around the decks, hand in hand, finding in the faces of the other passengers great kindliness and humor. They went from the bow down to the shelter of the stern where they could feel the screw thumping underfoot and where many warm winds from the galley and the engine room blew around them and they could see the gulls, hitchhiking their way out to Portugal. They did not raise the island—it was too hazy—and warped in by the lonely clangor of sea bells they saw the place—steeples and cottages and two boys playing catch on a beach—rise up around them through the mist.
The cottage was far away—a place that belonged to Leander’s time—a huddle of twelve or sixteen cottages, so awry and weather-faded that they might have seemed thrown up to accommodate the victims of some disaster had you not known that they had been built for those people who make a pilgrimage each summer to the sea. The house they went to was like West Farm, a human burrow or habitation that had yielded at every point to the crotchets and meanderings of a growing family. They put down their bags and undressed for a swim.
It was out of season, early or late, and the inn and the gift shop were under lock and key and they went down the path, hand in hand, as bare as the day they were born with no thought of covering themselves, down the path, dust and in some place ashes and then fine sand like the finest sugar and crusty—it would set your teeth on edge—down onto the coarser sand, wet from the high tide and the sea, ringing then with the music of slammed doors. There was a rock offshore and Betsey swam for this, Coverly following her through the rich, medicinal broths of the North Atlantic. She sat naked on the rock when he approached her, combing her hair with her fingers, and when he climbed up on the rock she dived back into the sea and he followed her to shore.
Then he could have roared with joy, kicked up his heels in a jig and sung a loud tune, but he walked instead along the edge of the sea picking up skimmers and firing them out to beyond the surf where they skittered sometimes and sometimes sank. And then a great sadness of contentment seemed to envelop him—a joy so fine that it gently warmed his skin and bones like the first fires of autumn—and going back to her then, still picking skimmers and firing them, slowly, for there was no rush, and kneeling beside her, he covered her mouth with his and her body with him and then—his body raked and exalted—he seemed to see a searing vision of some golden age that bloomed in his mind until he fell asleep.
The next night when Coverly came home, Betsey had gone. The only message she left