The Stories of John Cheever

“Well, it isn’t simple,” he said. “It isn’t as simple as it might seem. To begin with, you can’t expect much in the way of sympathy. Everybody in the business knows how generous Penumbra was to you. Most of us would be happy to change places. I mean, there’s a certain amount of natural envy. People don’t like to help a man who’s in a more comfortable position than they. And another thing is that Penumbra wants you to stay in retirement. I don’t know why this is, but I know it’s a fact, and anybody who took you on would be in trouble with Milltonium. And, to get on with the unpleasant facts, you’re just too damned old. Our president is twenty-seven. Our biggest competitor has a chief in his early thirties. So why don’t you enjoy yourself? Why don’t you take it easy? Why don’t you go around the world?” Then I asked, very humbly, if I made an investment in his firm—say fifty thousand dollars—could he find me a responsible post. He smiled broadly. It all seemed so easy. “I’ll be happy to take your fifty thousand,” he said lightly, “but as for finding you anything to do, I’m afraid…” Then his secretary came in to say that he was late for lunch.

I stood on a street corner, appearing to wait for the traffic light to change, but I was just waiting. I was staggered. What I wanted to do was to make a sandwich board on which I would list all my grievances. On it I would describe Penumbra’s dishonesty, Cora’s sorrow, the indignities I had suffered from the maid and gardener, and how cruelly I had been hurled out of the stream of things by a vogue for youth and inexperience. I would hang this sign from my shoulders and march up and down in front of the public library from nine until five, passing out more detailed literature to those who were interested. Throw in a snowstorm, gale winds, and the crash of thunder; I wanted it to be a spectacle.

I then stepped into a side-street restaurant to get a drink and some lunch. It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious. The headwaiter was a brisk character off the Corso di Roma. He duckfooted, banging down the heels of his Italian shoes, and hunched his shoulders as if his suit jacket bound. He spoke sharply to the bartender, who then whispered to a waiter, “I’ll kill him! Someday I’ll kill him!”