The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [135]
He seemed to know the way; he steered clear of the airshaft anyhow. He ran toward the pyramidal roof that the chapel made and then turned right and ran along the pitched slate roof of the hall. Moses came around the other side but Badger retreated and got back onto the straightaway and began running toward D’Alba’s lighted dormer. Halfway across the flat roof Moses outstripped him and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“It isn’t what you think,” Badger said. Then Moses hit him and down Badger went on his bum and he must have sat on a nail because he let out such a hoarse, loud roar of pain that the count stuck his head out of a window.
“Who’s there, who’s there?”
“It’s Badger and me,” Moses said.
“If Justina hears about this she’ll be wild,” the count said. “She doesn’t like people to walk on the roofs. It makes leaks. And what in the world are you doing?”
“I’m on my way to bed,” Moses said.
“Oh, I wish you’d give a civil answer to a sensible question once in a while,” the count said. “I’m terribly, terribly tired of your sense of humor and so is Justina. It’s a terrible comedown for her to have people like you in the house after having spent her life in the highest society including royalty, and she told me herself …” The voice got fainter as Moses continued along the ledge to above Melissa’s balcony, his feelings blasted with anger. Then he sat on the roof with his feet in the rain gutter for half an hour, composing an obscene indictment of her intractableness and seeming to release this into the night until the stony rage in his gut diminished. Then, realizing that if he was to find any usable truth in the situation, he would have to find it in himself, he swung down onto the balcony, undressed and got into bed where Melissa was asleep.
But Moses had wronged Badger. There had not been a lecherous thought in his head when he started over the roofs. He had been very drunk. But there was some magnanimity in the man—a trace of the raw material of human excellence—or at least enough scope in his emotions to set the scene for a conflict, and when he woke early the next morning he reproached himself for his drunkenness and his crazy schemes. He could see the world out of his window then all blue and gold and round as a bull’s eye but all the sapphire-colored lights in heaven merely chilled Badger’s spirit and excited in him a desire to retire into some dark, badly ventilated place. The world, in the partial lights of early morning, appeared to him as hypocritical and offensive as the smile of a door-to-door salesman. Nothing was true, thought Badger; nothing was what it appeared to be, and the enormity of this deception—the subtlety with which the color of the sky deepened as he dressed—angered him. He got down through the rotunda without meeting anyone—not even a rat—and telephoned Giacomo, although it was not six o’clock, and Giacomo drove him to the station.
The early train was a local and all the passengers were night-shift workmen, returning home. Looking into their tired and dirty faces Badger felt a longing for what he thought to be their humble ways. If he had been brought up simply his life would have had more meaning and value, the better parts of his disposition would have been given a chance to develop and he would not have wasted his gifts. Shaken with drink and self-reproach, he felt it was plain that morning that he had wasted them beyond any chance of their renewal, and images of his earlier life—a high-spirited and handsome boy, bringing in the terrace furniture before a thunderstorm—rose up to reinforce his self-condemnation. Then at the nadir of his depression light seemed to strike into Badger’s mind, for it was the force of his imagination rebelling against utter despair, to raise white things in his head—cities or archways at least of marble—signs of prosperity, triumph and splendor.
Then whole palladia seemed to mushroom beneath Badger’s patent-leather hair, the cities and villas of a younger world, and he made the trip into the