The Stories of John Cheever

“Anyhow, the next night when I came home I shouted, ‘Hello, honey!’ or something like that, and I heard this very impersonal voice from the kitchen saying, ‘Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent? Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent?’ So then I went into the kitchen and gathered her up in my arms and gave her a big, messy kiss and said, ‘Come off it, baby, come off it.’ Then she began to cry, and I thought this might be a step in the right direction, but she cried and cried and said I was unfeeling and cruel and just imagined things about her voice that weren’t true in order to pick a quarrel. Well, we stayed together for another six months, but that was really the end of it. I really loved her. She was a marvelous girl until she began to give me this feeling that I was a dumb passenger, one of hundreds in some waiting room, being directed to the right gate and the right flight. We quarreled all the time then, and I finally left, and she got a consent decree in Reno. She still works at Newark, and naturally I prefer Kennedy, but sometimes I have to use Newark, and I can hear her telling Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the American Airlines ticket counter… But it isn’t only in Newark that I hear her voice, it’s everywhere. Orly, London, Moscow, New Delhi. I have to travel by air, and in every airport in the whole wide world I can hear her voice or a voice just like hers asking Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the ticket counter. Nairobi, Leningrad, Tokyo, it’s always the same even if I can’t understand the language, and it reminds me of how happy I was those five years and what a lovely girl she was, really lovely, and what mysterious things can happen in love. Shall we have another bottle of vodka? I’ll pay for it. They give me more rubles than I can spend for the trip, and I have to turn them in at the border.” PERCY