The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [118]
“You’re coming,” Pancras said. “I’ve arranged the whole thing.”
Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality. “Only ten more days,” his companion sighed, and suddenly Coverly felt a dim rumble of homosexual lust in his trousers. This lasted for less than a second. Then the lash of his conscience crashed down with such force that his scrotum seemed injured, at the prospect of joining this pale-eyed company, wandering in the dark like Uncle Peepee Marshmallow. A second later the lash came down again—this time for having scorned a human condition. It was Uncle Peepee’s destiny to wander through the gardens and Coverly’s vision of the world must be a place where this forlornness was admitted. Then the lash crashed down once more, this time at the hands of a lovely woman who scorned him bitterly for his friend and whose eyes told him that he was now shut away forever from a delight in girls—those creatures of morning. He had thought with desire of going to sea with a pederast and Venus turned her naked back on him and walked out of his life forever.
It was a withering loss. Their airs and confessions, their memories and their theories about the atomic bomb, their secret stores of Kleenex and hand lotion, the warmth of their breasts, their powers of succumbing and forgiveness, that sweetness of love that had passed his understanding—was gone. Venus was his adversary. He had drawn a mustache on her gentle mouth and she would tell her minions to scorn him. She might allow him to talk to an old woman now and then, but that was all.
It was in the summer—the air was full of seed and pollen—and with that extraordinary magnification of grief—he might have been looking through a reading glass—Coverly saw the wealth of berries and seed pods in the ground around his feet and thought how richly all of nature was created to inseminate its kind—all but Coverly. He thought of his poor, kind parents at West Farm, dependent for their happiness, their security, their food upon a prowess that he didn’t have. Then he thought of Moses and the wish to see his brother was passionate. “I can’t go to England with you,” he told Pancras. “I have to go and see my brother.” Pancras was supplicatory and then downright angry and they came out of the woods in single file.
In the morning Coverly told Walcott that he didn’t want to go to England with Pancras and Walcott said this was all right and smiled. Coverly looked back at him grimly. It was a knowledgeable smile—he would know about Pancras—it was the smile of a Philistine, a man content to have saved his own skin; it was the kind of crude smile that held together and nourished the whole unwholesome world of pretense, censure and cruelty—and then, looking more closely, he saw that it was a most friendly and pleasant smile, the smile at the most of a man who recognizes another man to have known his own mind. Coverly asked for two days’ annual leave to go and visit Moses.
He left the laboratory at noon, packed a bag and took a bus to the station. Some women were waiting on the platform for the train but Coverly averted his eyes from them. It was not his right to admire them any more. He was unworthy of their loveliness. Once aboard the train he shut his eyes against anything in the landscape that might be pleasing, for a beautiful woman would sicken him with his unworthiness and a comely man would remind him of the sordidness of the life he was about to begin. He could have traveled peaceably then only in some hobgoblin company of warty men and quarrelsome women