The Stories of John Cheever

One Saturday morning he called to ask if I would help him with some shopping. He wanted to buy some blue jeans. He pronounced them “blugins,” and it was some time before I understood what he meant. He stopped at my house a few minutes later and drove me in to the village Army and Navy store. He had a large air-conditioned car covered with chromium, and he drove like a Roman. We were speaking Italian when we entered the store. At the sound of this language the clerk scowled as if he sensed shoplifting or check kiting.

“We want some blue jeans,” I said.

“Blugins,” said Boobee.

“What size?”

Boobee and I discussed the fact that we did not know his measurement in inches. The clerk took a tape measure from a drawer and passed it to me. “Measure him yourself,” he said. I measured Boobee and told the clerk the size. The clerk threw a pair of blue jeans on the counter, but they were not what Boobee had in mind. He explained at length and with gestures that he wanted something softer and paler. Then the proprietor, from the back of the store, shouted down the canyon of boxed work boots and denim shirts to his clerk, “Tell them it’s all we got. Where they come from they wear goatskins.”

Boobee understood. His nose seemed to get longer, as it did in every emotional crisis. He sighed. It had never occurred to me that in America a sovereign prince might be penalized for his foreignness. I had seen some anti-American feeling in Italy but nothing as crude as this, and anyhow I wasn’t a prince. In America, Prince Parlapiano was a wop.

“Thank you very much,” I said, and started for the door.

“Where you from, mister?” the clerk asked me.

“I live on Chilmark Lane,” I said.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean where you from in Italy.”

We left the store and found what Boobee wanted in another place, but I saw that his life as an alien was hazardous. He might be Prince Parlapiano at some place like the Hotel Plaza, but struggling with the menu at Chock Full O’Nuts he would be an untouchable.