The Stories of John Cheever

I went on eating and listening. I waited for the stranger’s companion to enter into the conversation, to make some sound of sympathy or assent, but there was none, and I wondered for a moment if he wasn’t talking to himself. I craned my neck around the edge of the booth, but he was too far into the corner for me to see. “She has this money of her own,” he went on. “I pay the tax on it, and she spends it all on clothes. She’s got hundreds and hundreds of dresses and shoes, and three fur coats, and four wigs. Four. But if I buy a suit she tells me I’m being wasteful. I have to buy clothes once in a while. I mean, I can’t go to the office looking like a bum. If I buy anything, it’s very wasteful. Last year, I bought an umbrella, just so I wouldn’t get wet. Wasteful. The year before, I bought a light coat. Wasteful. I can’t even buy a phonograph record, because I know I’ll catch hell for being so wasteful. On my salary—imagine, on my salary, we can’t afford to have bacon for breakfast excepting on Sundays. Bacon is wasteful. But you ought to see her telephone bills. She has this friend, this college roommate. I guess they were very close. She lives in Rome. I don’t like her. She was married to this very nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and she just ran him into the ground. She just disposed of him. He’s a wreck. Well, now she lives in Rome, and Vera keeps calling her on the telephone. Last month my telephone bills to Rome were over eight hundred dollars. So I said, ‘Vera,’ I said, ‘if you want to talk with your girl chum so much, why don’t you just get on a plane and fly to Rome? It would be a lot cheaper. ‘I don’t want to go to Rome,’ she said. ‘I hate Rome. It’s noisy and dirty.’