The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [134]
I’ve got those guest-room blues,
I’m feeling blue all the time,
I’ve got those guest-room blues,
Surrounded by things that aren’t mine.
The bed is lumpy and has sprained my back,
And I hear the choo-choo whistling that will taka me back,
I’ve got those guest-room blues …
When Moses approached the piano they both looked up. Melissa sighed deeply and Moses felt as if he had violated the atmosphere of a tryst. Badger gave Moses a jaded look and closed the piano. He seemed to be in an emotional turbulence that Moses was at some pains not to misunderstand. He got up from the piano bench and walked out onto the terrace, a figure of grief and unease, and Melissa turned her head and followed him with her eyes and all her attention.
Now Moses knew that if we grant men vestigial sexual rites—that if the ease of his stance when a hockey stick was first put into his hands, if the pleasure he took in the athletic equipment in the closet at West Farm or the sense, during a football scrimmage on a rainy day, of looking, during the last minutes of light and play, deep into the past of his kind, had any validity—there must be duplicate rites and ceremonies for the opposite sex. By this Moses did not mean the ability to metamorphose swiftly, but something else, linked perhaps to the power beautiful women have of evoking landscapes—a sense of rueful distance—as if their eyes had come to rest on a horizon that had never been seen by any man. There was some physical evidence for this—their voices softened and the pupils of their eyes dilated, and they seemed to be recollecting some distaff voyage over distaff waters to a walled island where they were committed by the nature of their minds and their organs to some secret rites that would refresh their charming and creative stores of sadness. Moses did not expect ever to know what was going on in Melissa’s mind but as he saw her pupils dilate now and a deeply thoughtful cast fall over her beautiful face he knew that it would be hopeless to inquire. She was recalling the voyage or she had seen the horizon and the effect of this was to stir up in her vague and stormy longings, but that Badger seemed to fit somehow into her memories of the voyage was what made him anxious.
“Melissa?”
“Justina is so mean to him,” Melissa said, “and she has no right to be. And you don’t like him.”
“I don’t like him,” Moses said, “that’s true.”
“Oh, I feel so sorry for him.” She got up from the bench and started for the terrace after Badger. “Melissa,” Moses said, but she was gone in the dark.
It was about ten o’clock when Moses went upstairs. The door to their room was locked. He called his wife’s name and she didn’t reply and then he was enraged. Then some part of him that was as unsusceptible to compromise as his sexual pride was inflamed and this rage seemed to settle in his gut like stone. He pounded on the door and tried to break the lock with his shoulders and was resting from these exertions when the cold air, coming through the space between the door and the sill, reminded him that Badger was sleeping in the room where he had slept when he first made his trip over the roofs.
He ran down the back stairs and across the rotunda and took the old elevator to the bedrooms on the other side of the house. Badger’s door was shut but when he knocked no one answered. When he opened the door and stepped in the first thing he heard was the loud noise of rain from the balcony. There was no sign of Badger in the room. Moses went out onto the balcony and swung up onto the roof and sure enough, about a hundred yards away from him and moving very cautiously, bent at the waist and sweeping the air around his feet with his hands like a swimmer (he must have been tripped up by the old