The Stories of John Cheever

“Well, he’s been carrying on with this disgusting slut, a perfectly disgusting woman. His older son, Ralph—he’s a marvelous boy—saw them together in a restaurant. They were feeding each other. None of his children want to see him again.”

“Men have had mistresses before,” he said tentatively.

“Adultery is a mortal sin,” she said gaily, “and was punished in many societies with death.”

“Do you feel this strongly about divorce?”

“Oh, he had no intention of marrying the pig. He simply thought he could play his dirty games, humiliate, disgrace, and wound his family and return to their affections when he got bored. The divorce was not his idea. He’s begged Lois not to divorce him. I believe he’s threatened to kill himself.”

“I’ve known men,” he said, “to divide their attentions between a mistress and a wife.”

“I daresay you’ve never known it to be done successfully,” she said.

The fell truth in this had never quite appeared to him. “Adultery is a commonplace,” he said. “It is the subject of most of our literature, most of our plays, our movies. Popular songs are written about it.”

“You wouldn’t want to confuse your life with a French farce, would you?”

The authority with which she spoke astonished him. Here was the irresistibility of the lawful world, the varsity team, the best club. Suddenly, the image of Mrs. Zagreb’s bedroom, whose bleakness had seemed to him so poignant, returned to him in an unsavory light. He remembered that the window curtains were torn and that those hands that had so praised him were coarse and stubby. The promiscuity that he had thought to be the wellspring of her pureness now seemed to be an incurable illness. The kindnesses she had showed him seemed perverse and disgusting. She had groveled before his nakedness. Sitting in the summer night, in his clean clothes, he thought of Mrs. Estabrook, serene and refreshed, leading her four intelligent and handsome children across some gallery in his head. Adultery was the raw material of farce, popular music, madness, and self-destruction.

“It was terribly nice of you to have had me,” he said. “And now I think I’ll run along. I’ll practice the piano before I go to bed.”

“I’ll listen,” said Doris. “I can hear it quite clearly across the garden.”