The Stories of John Cheever

“Let’s get out of here,” McGowen said, turning back to the kitchen. Mallory followed him through the kitchen, where there were no signs of dinner, down some stairs into a cellar furnished with a Ping-Pong table, a television set, and a bar. He got Mallory a drink. “You see, Helen used to be rich,” McGowen said. “It’s one of her difficulties. She came from very rich people. Her father had a chain of laundromats that reached from here to Denver. He introduced live entertainment in laundromats. Folk singers. Combos. Then the Musicians’ Union ganged up on him, and he lost the whole thing overnight. And she knows that I fool around but if I wasn’t promiscuous, Mallory, I wouldn’t be true to myself. I mean, I used to make out with that Mitchell dame upstairs. The one with the kitten. She’s great. You want her, I can fix it up. She’ll do anything for me. I usually give her a little something. Ten bucks or a bottle of whiskey. One Christmas I gave her a bracelet. You see, her husband has this suicide thing. He keeps taking sleeping pills, but they always pump him out in time. Once, he tried to hang himself—”

“I’ve got to go,” Mallory said.

“Stick around, stick around,” McGowen said. “Let me sweeten your drink.”

“I’ve really got to go,” Mallory said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“But you haven’t had anything to eat,” McGowen said. “Stick around and I’ll heat up some gurry.”

“There isn’t time,” Mallory said. “I’ve got a lot to do.” He went upstairs without saying goodbye. Mrs. Mitchell had gone, but his hostess was still tying tags onto the furniture. He let himself out and took a cab back to his hotel.

He got out his slide rule and, working on the relation between the volume of a cone and that of its circumscribed prism, tried to put Mrs. McGowen’s drunkenness and the destiny of the Mitchells’ kitten into linear terms. Oh, Euclid, be with me now! What did Mallory want? He wanted radiance, beauty, and order, no less; he wanted to rationalize the image of Mr. Mitchell, hanging by the neck. Was Mallory’s passionate detestation of squalor fastidious and unmanly? Was he wrong to look for definitions of good and evil, to believe in the inalienable power of remorse, the beauty of shame? There was a vast number of imponderables in the picture, but he tried to hold his equation to the facts of the evening, and this occupied him until past midnight, when he went to sleep. He slept well.