The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [125]
Melissa’s lips were drawn as if to check her tears. Moses went to her eagerly, thinking that he could take her out of the atmosphere of breakage that the old woman had left in the room, but when he put his hands on her shoulders she twisted out of his reach.
“Would you like another drink?”
“Yes.”
He put some whisky and ice in her glass.
“Shall we go up?”
“All right.”
She walked ahead of him; she didn’t want him at her side. The encounter had damaged her grace and she sighed as she walked. She held her whisky glass in both hands before her like a grail. She seemed to emanate weariness and pain. It was her charming custom to undress where she could be seen but this evening she went instead to the bathroom and slammed the door. When she returned she was wearing a drab gray dress that Moses had never seen before. It was shapeless and very old; he could tell because there were moth holes in it. A row of steel buttons, pressed to look like ships in full sail, ran from the tight neck to the sagging hem, and the shape of her waist and her breasts was lost in the folds of gray cloth. She sat at the dressing table and removed her earrings, her bracelets and pearls, and began to brush the curl out of her hair.
Now Moses knew that women can take many forms; that it is in their power in the convulsions of love to take the shape of any beast or beauty on land or sea—fire, caves, the sweetness of haying weather—and to let break upon the mind, like light on water, its most brilliant imagery, and it did not dismay him that this gift for metamorphosis could be used to further all kinds of venal and petty schemes for self-aggrandizement. Moses had learned that it was wise to keep in mind the guises most often taken by the women he loved so that when a warmhearted woman appeared suddenly, for some reason of her own, to have become a spinster he would be prepared and in not much danger of losing the hopefulness that sustained his patience, for while women could metamorphose themselves at will he found that they could not sustain these impersonations for long and that if he could endure, patiently, a disguise or distemper or false modesty, it would soon wear thin. Now he watched the changes that had come over his golden-skinned wife, trying to discover what it was that she represented.
She represented chastity—an infelicitous and implacable chastity. She represented an unhappy spinster. She glanced scornfully at where he had let his clothes drop to the floor, averting her eyes at the same time from where he stood in his skin. “I wish you would learn to pick up your things, Moses,” she said in a singsong voice that he didn’t recognize at all. It had in it the forced sweetness of a lonely and a patient woman, forced by a reduction of circumstances to take care of a dirty boy. When she had done what she could to take the softness out of her hair she stood and moved in little steps toward the door.
“I’m going down.”
“If you’ll wait a minute, darling.”
“I think if I go down now I might be able to help. After all, the poor servants have a great deal to do.” Her smile was pure hypocrisy. She drifted out of the room.
Moses’ determination to see through this clumsy disguise put him into a position that verged on foolishness and while he dressed his lined face shone with false cheer. She would have exhausted the part by midnight, he thought, so his yearning would have to wait until then; but there it was, a sense of fullness and strength that seemed to increase in the lamplight. When he went down to the hall he noticed that the bottles he had foolishly left there had been appropriated by Justina and that he would never see them again. He had a glass of bad sherry and a peanut. Melissa was among the lemon trees, twisting off the dead leaves. Even as she did this she seemed to sigh. She was a poor relation now, a shadowy figure, not meant to play a large part in life but philosophically resigned