The Stories of John Cheever

“You and me,” whispered the waiter, “we’ll kill him together.” The hat-check girl joined the whispering. She wanted to kill the manager. The conspirators scattered when the headwaiter returned, but the atmosphere remained mutinous. I drank a cocktail and ordered a salad, and then I overheard the impassioned voice of a man in the booth next to mine. I had nothing better to do than listen. “I go to Minneapolis,” he said. “I have to go to Minneapolis, and as soon as I check into the hotel the telephone’s ringing. She wants to tell me that the hot-water heater isn’t working. There I am in Minneapolis and she’s on Long Island and she calls me long-distance to say that the hot-water heater isn’t working. So then I ask her why doesn’t she call the plumber, and then she begins to cry. She cries over long-distance for about fifteen minutes, just because I suggest that she might call the plumber. Well, anyhow, in Minneapolis there’s this very good jewelry store, and so I bought her a pair of earrings. Sapphires. Eight hundred dollars. I can’t afford this kind of thing, but I can’t afford not to buy her presents. I mean, I can make eight hundred dollars in ten minutes, but as the tax lawyer says, I don’t take away more than a third of what I make, and so a pair of eight-hundred-dollar earrings cost me around two thousand. Anyway, I get the earrings, and I give them to her when I get home, and we go off to a party at the Barnstables. When we come home, she’s lost one of the earrings. She doesn’t know where she lost it. She doesn’t care. She won’t even call the Barnstables to see if it’s lying around on the floor. She doesn’t want to disturb them. So then I say it’s just like throwing money into the fire, and she begins to cry and says that sapphires are cold stones—that they express my inner coldness toward her. She says there wasn’t any love in the present—it wasn’t a loving present. All I had to do was to step into a jewelry store and buy them, she says. They didn’t cost me anything in thoughtfulness and affection. So then I ask her does she expect me to make her some earrings—does she want me to go to night school and learn how to make one of those crummy silver bracelets they make? Hammered. You know. Every little hammer blow a sign of love and affection. Is that what she wants, for Christ’s sake? That’s another night when I slept in the guest room…”