Cheever had not expected his manuscript to burn so well.
After months of working on the novel, he had finally admitted to himself that not only was it not working but also that he couldn’t imagine ever making it work. Sometimes a story straightened itself out, and other times, no matter what forces were applied, the story could not be made straight. So to put an end to it he gathered the typed pages of the manuscript and all of his handwritten notes for the novel and took them out and dropped them into the trashcan behind his house. The sky was clear and the stars were brighter than he could remember seeing them in a long time. It was cold out but he did not hurry back inside. The possibilities, even if they didn’t come to him straight away or even some time soon, still seemed endless. Yes, he thought. Why not? Something else would surely come to him.
He dragged the trashcan out into the middle of the yard and took from his pocket a matchbook from a jazz club that he’d been to from time to time. The first few pages flared readily, and the flames soon lit up the underside of the branches in the tall pines that stood over him in a way that was both terrifying and sublime. He thought it unlikely that a destructive act, either of literature or in literature, had ever been such a glorious thing.
Cheever looked across the yard at his house, of which he was immensely fond—so fond of it that after he first bought it he sometimes struggled to sleep because he feared that it would be taken away from him. The house was on Cedar Lane in Westchester County, Ossining, on a sloping five-acre property with a brook running through dense stands of rhododendrons. It was stone-and-clapboard, with long and deep verandas on which Cheever and his wife, Mary, entertained friends and acquaintances such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. The house was first built back in 1795, and then rebuilt in the 1920s by the American architect Eric Gugler. Most Americans knew of at least one of Gugler’s works even if they didn’t know it was by him: for President Roosevelt he’d completed a renovation of the West Wing that included the design of the modern Oval Office. On a whim, Cheever had once gone to Gugler’s office on Park Avenue in Manhattan, but the architect had been on site elsewhere in the city that day so Cheever never got the chance to meet the man to whom he thought Americans in general and he himself in particular owed a great deal. There was a story in Gugler that someone should write someday.
As he contemplated the flickering pages of his failed novel, Cheever recalled that his work on it had begun easily enough and much of the writing that followed had seemed effortless. But later, as he’d reread the manuscript in preparation to send it to his editor, he’d seen nothing more than its flaws. The style was his, of course (he’d heard it said once that one’s style is really just an inability to do anything else, but he could live with his stylistic inabilities); the plot had much in common—probably too much in common—with his earlier work when he’d instead hoped that with this novel he would do something wholly different, perhaps even different enough that people might think it came instead from the imagination of another writer. But the novel was clearly his, from his own imagination, and not at all what he’d hoped for.
A few final pages lay atop one another, insulating each other, retaining heat but stifling flame so Cheever found that he had to routinely lift the pages for them to burn—“…just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural” Hemingway had written of the procedure of inducing an abortion, and wasn’t this what Cheever was doing now? Purging himself of something he couldn’t live with? It could be done without regret, couldn’t it? It could. As the last pages burned he saw words devoid of context first blur with the heat and darken as the flames engulfed them. In this way, word by word, the novel was taken from him.
When it was all gone, Cheever grew cold; with all of those pages and all of those words so easily left behind he couldn’t help but wonder what words and pages, if any, would be out there in front of him.
In the morning, Cheever went back out into the yard. He approached the trashcan with caution, as though unsure what he would find there even though he knew that there would be nothing but ashes. Sifting through the ashes he found that they were now cold and that there really was nothing at all left. But wasn’t that how he always began a story—with nothing? You first found a point of light in the ash-black sky and through an act of pure imagination and, if necessary, through the application of brute force, you generated from that one star a whole constellation? And wasn’t a novel just an expansion of that? You just took the unity of a constellation and let a whole galaxy form around it? But maybe that’s what went wrong with the novel. Maybe it had not only lost its constellation but its original point of light. That could be why it had not only failed but had done so suddenly and irreversibly. The novel had expanded too far, could no longer be sustained, and had simply but spectacularly collapsed in on itself. That would almost certainly be why he had felt the way he did when it failed. Even as he saw that it was failing he’d felt a dreadful pull toward it. The novel drew him back again each day and may well have continued to do so if he hadn’t burnt it. Maybe it was only by burning the novel that he had been able to save himself from it.
Cheever stood looking for a point of light somewhere in the trashcan’s black hole.
Days later, caught at Grand Central, between one train from the Adirondacks and another to the Cape, Cheever stood looking out over the concourse. His train, like many others, had been cancelled. No reason had been given officially, which left much room for speculation in the minds of those that way inclined, and in the earnest conversations of people passing, Cheever heard it both confirmed and denied with utmost conviction to be a single suicide or multiple carriages coming off the tracks. He thought either event was possible but that neither was more probable than the other, and he knew that whether he believed either of them more probable did not make the other any less possible.
From where he was standing by the information booth, Cheever saw a man descending the stairs at the eastern end of the concourse, his eyes flitting between his watch and a sheet of paper in his hand, and then finally coming to rest on the four-faced clock above Cheever. The man bore the open-faced awe of someone adrift from all things familiar. Cheever moved toward the man, who, through the innate sense possessed by the desperate and lost, not only saw him coming but also knew in an instant that he was doing so to help. He seemed to soften in relief.
“You seem unsure of yourself,” Cheever said.
“I sure am unsure,” the man replied in an accent that struck Cheever as both unexpectedly and distinctly Australian.
“A long way from home?”
The man nodded. “I have a train at…” He raised the slip of paper—a typed itinerary—and waved it cheerfully. “Five forty-eight, which gets me to the airport by seven-twenty for a nine-fifteen flight to Sydney.”
“Sydney’s home?”
“Home’s a couple of hours north of Sydney. I’ll be home the morning of my son’s birthday. He’ll be twenty-one.”
“A great occasion,” Cheever said. “You must wonder sometimes where those years have gone.”
The man looked suddenly earnest. He offered his hand and said that his name was Ned. “My friends call me Neddy,” he added, the implication clearly being that Cheever call him Neddy from the beginning because they were destined to become friends.
Cheever introduced himself. He said that given his own train was not in until six they could get something to eat. And perhaps something to drink.
They went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. Cheever recommended a bottle of wine, a vintage that he’d shared with many friends. Neddy laughed heartily but declined the wine, saying that he’d long ago learned his lesson. “Well I’m still taking lessons,” Cheever said. “Do you mind if I study up?”
“Not at all. You go ahead,” Neddy said, and they ordered, and while they waited Neddy proceeded to tell Cheever all about the project and the tender in what Cheever considered an unnecessarily lengthy passage of exposition: “…stories high,” “ …thousands of cubic feet of concrete,” “…jobs created,” “…man-hours of labour,” “…blueprints,” “…schedules.” Cheever wouldn’t have tolerated this in a story. He would have instead used a little narrative summary to give a sense of the detail—“…Neddy was on his first trip overseas,” “…he was an engineer,” “…he’d been sent to look at a construction project for which his firm was submitting a tender”—and in this way he would have given the reader both a sense of the story’s reality and a sense that even within so few sentences sufficient time had passed for their meals to arrive.
Their meals arrived.
As they began to eat, Neddy asked Cheever what business he was in.
“I write,” Cheever said.
“Oh, you’re a writer.” Neddy replied. “How interesting. Tell me, John, what do you write. You write fact? The truth?”
“I write stories. Fiction. Deeper truths.”
Neddy was impressed. As an engineer, he worked from tangible materials with known properties. “To work from imagination—That’s really something else. Tell me, you just imagine something and you sit down and write it. It’s that easy?”
“Not always,” Cheever said. He ran the tips of his fingers beneath his nose. He was sure that he could still smell the novel. “But the best stories do come easily.”
“And you write these stories for the papers?”
Cheever shook his head.
“Then for who?”
For whom, Cheever thought. “Mostly for myself.”
Neddy tapped his knife against the wine bottle by Cheever’s glass. “They’re like this wine are they? Keeping them all to yourself? Surely you share your stories with other people.”
Cheever nodded. Other people did read his stories and he liked it when they did because they did so by buying some magazine that had paid him for the story. “They get published; I get paid; my family gets to eat.”
“Family…” It appeared that Neddy was about to take a train of thought somewhere but almost immediately returned his attention to Cheever. “So what kind of people read these stories of yours?”
“I guess that they are read by men and women in the dentist’s office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on plane trips; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women”—he was enjoying himself now, unashamedly walking that fine line between sincerity and sentimentality—“people who feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.” Cheever laughed at himself and reached for the comfort of his wine. Neddy stared at him with a frightfully earnest expression. “What’s the matter?” Cheever asked.
“What did you say? ‘The bewildering world around us’? Is that what you said?”
“Sometimes,” Cheever clarified. “The sometimes bewildering world around us.”
Nodding slowly, Neddy said, “I know that bewildering world. I have spent some time there and, believe me, John Cheever, you may be a man of imagination but I have a story for you. And this story is more bewildering than you can imagine.” Neddy then told Cheever things about himself.
“Years ago, on a midsummer night of oppressive heat and humidity,” Neddy began.
Cheever settled back in his chair, marveling at the dramatic tone Neddy had immediately adopted.
“I took Lucinda—my wife now, but my girlfriend at the time—to a restaurant within sight of the glistening harbour. Lucinda had not been feeling up to going out but I insisted. You see, we lived in a terrace on the western end of a block. The western wall of the terrace absorbed the day’s heat and”—here Neddy clenched his fist so tight his knuckles whitened and hand shuddered—“held in it’s grip for the night ahead. Neither of us ever slept well in such heat. Going out for dinner was just one way to delay the inevitable.
“The air-conditioning did little to soothe Lucinda. We were seated at a table beside the window with a clear view of the water and she sat staring out at the lights on the boats in the harbour. Conversation was not without effort but I persisted, I guess you could say” Neddy grinned. “I tried to engineer a conversation.”
Cheever’s imagined that, at the time, every utterance came out as a draft or sketch of some other thing Neddy was trying to, or would have liked to say.
“I was drinking back then—we both were, so surprised when Lucinda declined the wine. But she did eat. We both ate. And with good appetite, too. We had entrees and mains, and as we started on dessert I called for more wine and Lucinda asked that I stop drinking. ‘Just listen,’ she said. She said, ‘I have something I want to talk about.’ And let me tell you,” Neddy said ruefully. “I’ve heard those words before and every other time I’ve heard those words, I’ve always make some sort of excuse and left the table. The bed. The room. Once I even left a city! I can hardly believe that myself. But this time I remained unmoved. I was between drinks; I was mid-way through dessert; I was caught between the past and the future, and for the life of me I could not move. So Lucinda leaned forward, her breasts pressed against the edge of the table and her cleavage swelled unexpectedly, gloriously.” Neddy’s voice rose in pitch and then fell. “And then she said, ‘I’m pregnant’.”
“Pregnant?”
Neddy nodded.
“What did you do?”
“I laughed quietly to myself, thinking surely she was joking. I waited for her to laugh but when she didn’t, I said….”
Cheever waited for Neddy to continue but instead he sat staring at Cheever, his focal point drifted beyond Cheever’s face, seemingly through to some space deep inside his skull. Cheever’s scalp tingled. Then, with an air of embarrassment, Neddy regained his focus and averted his eyes. He ran his finger around the bright curve of his dinner plate. “When she didn’t laugh, I said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”
“You didn’t?” It was the kind of line Cheever though he might add to a story to generate conflict or to escalate conflict that was already there on the page. “You actually said that?”
Neddy nodded heavily with the weight of his admission. “I did. And Lucinda leaned further forward, right over the rich, dark cake on her plate. Icing smeared on her dress but she didn’t even care about that. She was furious. ‘What am I going to do about it?’ She pushed back from the table. My glass fell, the bottle too; wine spilled into my lap. She said, ‘If you even have to ask what I’m going to do about it then I can tell you right now that I am not going to have this baby with you.’ She stood over me and glared. I couldn’t look her in the eye. Before I could even begin to gather my thoughts, let alone assemble them into something vaguely constructive, she’d hailed a taxi and was gone.
“And I’m ashamed to say that I just sat there, prodding the remains of my dessert. I couldn’t stomach it, of course. But I ordered another bottle of wine and when it arrived I found it all too easy to drink. Sometime later, thoroughly drunk, I began my long walk home.”
The set up was complete, Cheever thought. Here was a character forced into a situation in which they had to make a choice between remaining impassive and doing nothing or making an active choice to act, they could choose to wander aimlessly or they could choose a definite direction.
“I wandered aimlessly in the direction of home and eventually stopped at the corner of the block on which our terrace sat diagonally opposite. I imagined Lucinda there, in tears, hating me, but maybe still waiting for me come home to her. From that corner there were two ways home and I stood there for longer than you could imagine, hesitating as though either choice negated a better alternative. Ludicrous, I know, given that both alternatives took me home. One way or another I was always going home.
“The Town Hall clock struck ten, or eleven, or twelve, and the sound pounded inside my head and I felt so tired and so old. I found myself wishing for an earlier, easier time in the night. And in my life,” Neddy said, drifting into a vaguely philosophical tone.
Neddy said that he spent his childhood just a few streets away from where he now lived and that the fondest memories from that time in his life were ‘missions’ that he’d gone on with other boys from the neighbourhood. He admitted that these missions were little more than acts of willful trespass. “The sole objective of which was to pass without detection through our neighbours’ yards. We made rules for ourselves: nothing was ever taken—our being there was enough; we were to never set foot in yards beyond our intended mission, so we scaled fences and in single file moved with stealth along between the yards.”
“You balanced on the fences?”
“We did. The fences around the older, original residences were six-foot high, foot-wide stone walls and we could move easily along those—we could practically run along them—but there were also narrow timber fences topped with a hardwood beam no more than a couple of inches wide. On those we moved more slowly, placing our feet one after the other.” Neddy sighed. “My childhood could be plotted along the tops of fences.
“But that night, with Lucinda waiting, I stood on the corner considering the alternatives, and with those memories coming back to me, I looked at the wall beside me—it was a wall of sandstone blocks not unlike the stone walls in our neighbourhood—and I imagined winding back the clock. In my youth I would have reached the top of such a wall with a fluid movement of arms and legs and momentum, but in my drunken adult state, my movements were entirely effortful and far from fluid. My arms and legs seemed to disagree with my intent, and it was almost like the oxygen thinned out by half with each foot I rose above the footpath.” Neddy raised a triumphant fist. “But I reached my Everest. It may have only been six-feet of space below me but an eternity of time and possibility seemed to lie before me. I straddled that wall as if it was a rocking horse and I rode it like that the short distance to the junction that led down through the middle of the block. From there I saw that by continuing along the spine of the fences I could make my way back home to Lucinda and my—no, I had reminded myself, our—new life. Making my way home by an uncommon route gave me the feeling that I was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny.
“I’d not gone far when someone called out. It was Graham, a doctoral student at the university, someone I’d known as an undergrad. We’d spent nights drinking, and drunkenly lecturing each other on topics from our fields. I was in engineering; he was an English Literature major. I’d debate the feasibility of impossible structures such as floating skyscrapers; he’d debate the notion of whether writing could be taught. You’re a writer, John,” Neddy said in deference. “You would know this debate only too well already.”
Cheever shook as though a chill had come over him. He did not enjoy getting drawn into debates about writing—his own or anyone else’s writing or the many theories people had about writing—and he not only knew this debate well enough, he knew that he did not want to spend any more time on it.
“Anyhow,” Neddy continued. “Graham inevitably returned to a statement that he found enormously amusing: ‘Writing can, in fact must, be taut.’ That’s taught, T-A-U-T,” Neddy spelled it out. Graham was so enamoured with the wordplay that he’d even had it made into a t-shirt, which he wore around the campus. He was so full of optimism. He honestly thought that his thesis would once and for all answer the question of whether writing can be taught. ‘This time next year,’ he’d declared, ‘there will be no argument’.”
Cheever had to ask: “What year would that have been?”
“Last year: 1960.”
“And how did things work out for Graham?”
For a moment Neddy looked bemused. “You know what,” he said. “I’m not sure. That was the last night I ever spoke to him. He seemed to disappear after that. But he was definitely there that night. I was making my way along the fence behind his place and he called out to me: ‘What the hell are you doing up there?’ I said that I was just heading home from a night out and through the darkness came a conspiratorial, ‘Are you drunk?’ I said ‘I’m not sure’ and he insisted I get down off the fence and ‘make damn well sure’.
“Food was laid out on the table inside and he must have seen my confusion; he said that he was expecting friends from Cessnock but that they were running late.”
“Cessnock?” Cheever asked.
“It’s just a place,” Neddy said. “They could just as easily have been—I don’t know, friends from Connecticut.” Cheever smiled at the way Neddy had pronounced the name phonetically. He didn’t correct Neddy. It could’ve just as easily been Connect-i-cut.
“Anyhow, Graham asked me to stay—to join him and his friends for dinner, but I said that I was just coming back from dinner. “And then he said a curious thing: ‘A drink then—I believe congratulations are in order.’
“‘Congratulations?’ I asked, but before Graham could respond there was a loud knocking on the door. He went down the hall to answer it and a group of people tumbled in, making as many declarations of starvation and dehydration as they did of greetings and goodwill. During the uproarious reunions I was able to slip away.
“I scaled the fence and entered a dense passage of summer foliage from the overhanging trees. I soon found that I could walk along the fence, alternating between hands, holding and letting go of branches as I made my way home.” Neddy’s arms were moving in broad sweeps now. Cheever saw the branches that Neddy was pushing aside; he saw Neddy’s motions like those of a swimmer moving in slow motion, moving through both space and time.
“The commotion at Graham’s faded behind me as I passed between Hammer’s and Lear’s. Their subdued lights suggested movements towards sleep. The Howlands and the Crossups were both away; their yards seemed hollowed by their absence. I took my keys from my pocket. I’d once rented the terrace now owned by the Howlands, they actually bought it while I was living there. I saw out my lease and moved—well, I guess,” Neddy said, already chuckling at the joke to follow. “I guess you could say I moved just a few yards away…Literally.”
Cheever pondered that word: literally. It irritated him that people appended it to so many statements that already bore an emphasis that was too heavy-handed. Such statements, if rendered into print, would include italicised phrases, and before the ‘literally’ there would no doubt be an ellipsis. He was sure people conceivedthe whole thing under the mistaken belief that it squared or cubed their wit, but in his mind all it did was halve or negate their efforts. He sometimes thought that the word literally would be the death of him…literally. Or maybe he’d survive. He supposed that Neddy would not be the death of him. There was a harmlessness to Neddy that made him seem somehow malleable, like a fictional character or even a fiction’s narrator. Clearly Neddy liked to tell a story, but Cheever thought that more than the telling of a story, Neddy seemed to like to be the story. But the second act of Neddy’s story so far seemed nothing more now than a series of inconsequential episodes. There did not yet seem to be any moment of consequence let alone a sense of unity. Regardless, it went on…
“Before I realised it I was down in Howland’s yard and heading for the door. I wondered if the key would still work and was soon surprised to find that the door did open. I walked into the kitchen and, as though I’d never left, I went straight to the refrigerator and opened the door. There was a board with remnants of cheese. I put that on the bench and went to the pantry, searching for biscuits. There was no cheese knife where I had kept it so I just angled each biscuit down against the edge of the soft cheese and sliced it off. Once I finished, I rinsed the board and left it on the sink to dry. I drank some water, and then let myself out, locking the door behind me. When I climbed back up onto the fence I looked along the block, into the suburbs beyond and saw that leaves on some of the deciduous trees had appeared to turn already. The summer was hotter and drier than typical so it didn’t seem entirely impossible that they might even be dying.
“Ahead, I saw that the Bunkers were having a party. Beyond the soft layers of jacaranda, white-coated caterers glided like ghosts between the gathered guests. I could see drinks slipped into hands and empty glasses spirited away, and I imagined the partygoers oblivious to the choices they were not making. They were not oblivious to me, though. As soon as Enid Bunker saw me she began to scream: ‘Oh, look who’s here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said you couldn’t come I though I’d die.’ Enid made me get down off the fence and led me in to the kitchen where a bar had been established like a base camp for the journey ahead. I took a drink, mingled a little but left as soon as I could. I thought I’d made my escape unnoticed but Enid called after me, ‘Please wish Lucinda well for me. It’s such wonderful news.’ ‘Wonderful news?’ I thought. Had Lucinda confided in Enid before she’d told me? Perhaps she needed the certainty of someone’s enthusiasm. You see,” Neddy explained. “Enid was the kind of woman to whom even the most commonplace event was ‘such wonderful news’.
“I thought the next yard looked somewhat like Bunkers may in several hours. The Levys must have turned in for the night or perhaps, being unlikely able to sleep with the noise from the party next door, they’d even joined forces with the Bunkers. When I jumped down into their yard I felt a crisp layer of autumn-coloured leaves beneath my feet. The ground seemed covered in gigantic confetti leaves. I’d never seen anything like it. Glasses and bottles and dishes of nuts were on a table. I got myself a glass and poured a drink. It was my fourth or fifth since dinner. I wondered how late I was. I’d lost track of time. I’d not come far but I’d taken my time about it. I drank hastily and pushed on.”
Yes, do push on, Cheever thought. Push on and bewilder me.
“Leaves were falling down around me and I smelled wood smoke on the wind. I thought, who would be burning wood at this time of year? I scanned the sky for signs of smoke and that was when I noticed that the constellations of mid-summer seemed adrift. It was as though I was staring into an autumn sky. I tried to place the stars but a mass of cumulus cloud had gathered. The moon was almost entirely obscured by cloud. It looked set to storm. Rain would certainly bring some relief. A ship’s horn rose out of the harbour and was met by the percussive sound of thunder. The cumulative sounds sent a chill through, and I realised that it was not only no longer hot—it was actually now cold. I stood atop the fence and looked first behind from where I’d come and ahead to where I was going. There was another peal of thunder and I took off for home. In the tops of the trees around me the wind passed like running water.”
Cheever nodded appreciatively. He’d always thought of those first watery notes of a storm wind as having for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, and glad tidings. Glancing at his watch as the waiter removed their plates, Cheever saw that it was after five. They would soon need to return to Grand Central but he did want Neddy to get to the end of the story. He wondered what tidings awaited him.
In response to seeing Cheever check his watch, Neddy gave a hurried summation of much of the rest of his journey. In essence, the night went on; each yard led to another; he met more people—the Saches, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes—and they were all either pleased or surprised, or surprised and pleased to see him; there was an almost overwhelming sense of goodwill and endless well wishing; he was slowly sobering up. Neddy became breathless in his telling, his mind racing from one encounter to the next. But then Cheever raised his hand, waving as though Neddy was speeding along a track and he was trying to flag him down. “No rush,” he reassured. “We have time.” And they did have time. They already had their tickets and were not far from the station.
Neddy took a single deep breath, his shoulders rising as though a clothes hanger was being drawn up inside his jacket. Cheever poured the last of the wine and leaned back in his chair. Neddy leaned back too.
“I passed the Lindley’s, who had gone away. Their garden furniture was stacked on the veranda at the rear of their terrace. Lucinda and I had declined an invitation to dine with them a week before. They were just a couple of days into a trip to Cairns and already their yard appeared to have returned to some natural, wild state. Between pavers stood dandelions and milkweed, both were full grown and flowering or already gone to seed. I thought I could climb down their now and pull them all out, or stop them seeding by severing their heads, but I knew I’d best get home. Lucinda would be there. And I decided I would try this time—really try—to be there for her. I would tell her about how far I’d come home along the fence and what I’d seen and done along the way.” Cheever gratefully noted that Neddy had passed on the opportunity to clarify that he would no longer be literally sitting on the fence. “And she would laugh and call me a crazy fool—her crazy fool—and say that she loved me and I’d say that it would all be all right. I was almost there. Just one yard remained between me and my own yard; between me and Lucinda.”
A note of caution entered Neddy’s voice. “The Hallorans were elderly and nudists. They were early risers; they were often up ‘saluting the sun’ as they called it—working their way through a sequence of yoga poses they brought back with them from a trip to India. I thought I heard them there now and given that it was almost dawn and they sometimes saluted the sun naked I called out to avoid startling them or myself. ‘Hello, hello,’ I warned of my approach. They were there, and they were clothed. The Hallorans seemed not surprised or displeased to see me, and Mrs Halloran, a stout woman with white hair and a serene face, enquired most intently about my welfare. ‘People talk,’ she said. ‘Not my husband and I. We keep to ourselves. You can trust us. We’re not like other people’.
“I said that I was quite well, just a little drunk and destined for a headache in the morning. Mr Halloran laughed and said, ‘Much like having a young child running around inside the hallways of your mind’.
“‘Not that we mind,’ Mrs Halloran added. She glared at her husband. We don’t, do we?’
“‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Children give life life. We’re just pleased to see you out and about again. It seemed like years since we’ve seen you’.
“‘Years?’ I thought. ‘Didn’t I just come by last week to help bring these pots through to the back?’”
Mr Halloran laughed. ‘It’s been a long week.’”
“I’d looked then at the pots. The figs in them had certainly grown since I’d last seen them. They were thick trunked now and the Halloran’s had topiarised them. They looked like giant green lollypops in the corners of the yard.
“Climbing onto the fence for the last time, I saw that the sun had now risen, my night—my pilgrimage—was drawing to a close. And with those first rays of light warming my face I began to feel like I was waking up from a dream. I was beginning to feel like myself again, and I was also feeling a deep regret for not having better handled the situation in the restaurant. I chided myself. It was wrong to think of it as a situation; it was not a situation, it was more than a situation, it was lifelong change in circumstances. I reasoned that I was as ready as I ever would be to become a father. I made my final descent.”
It’s coming to an end, Cheever thought. Even though Neddy had used the word ‘descent’ he was really still on his ascent toward the climax of his story, and Cheever could not yet guess what that climax might be. He was hoping for surprise and inevitability. He always appreciated those things as a reader, and strived for those things as a writer.
“A cartoonish flicker of light spilled out into the yard. Upstairs, water was running; Lucinda was showering. I let myself in and went through the kitchen to the lounge room where the television was on. Roadrunner had just escaped again and Wile E. Coyote was recovering from yet another death. I switched off the television. There was a noise behind me and when I turned I saw a small boy looking up at me from the lounge. ‘Mum!’ the boy cried and a woman called out that she would be down soon and the shower stopped. I reeled and stumbled through the kitchen and out into the yard. I felt the vaguely antagonistic forces of drunkenness and sobriety at work in me.
“In the corner of the yard stood a liquidambar like one that Lucinda and I had planted late in spring a couple of years before. We’d carefully watered it over that first summer, and in autumn, when it’s leaves turned, we’d marveled at it as though we were the first people to ever witness such a thing. I could readily imagine that this tree here was that same tree. I was sure that it was the same tree. I knew that some people would say they all look the same, but I knew better than that, I knew the shape of our tree and even though the tree now seemed twice—no, three or four times the size it was when we planted it. It didn’t make any sense at all but I somehow knew it was our tree.
“A light came on upstairs and a woman’s silhouette passed across the glass. I saw the ghostly limbs of the woman dressing. The boy came out onto the back steps and I saw the gun in his hand. I went to the tree and began to climb. The boy came to the base of the tree and raised the gun, I saw with relief that it was only a water pistol. I climbed higher, placing my foot on the fence. ‘Freeze!’ the boy cried. ‘Freeze or I’ll shoot!’ I raised a hand in mock surrender. The boy squeezed the trigger and a needling cold struck me in the eye. I clapped my hand to my face. And, I’m not ashamed to admit, I began to cry. It was probably the first time in my adult life I had ever cried, certainly the first time in my life that I had ever felt so…so bewildered. I tried to stand on the fence; I had both feet on it and was leaning against the tree, supporting myself with one hand. I pushed away from the tree but the branch I’d been holding snapped. I fell.
“And as I fell, I turned over in the air and suddenly everything was clear to me—the child’s clothes on the line; the plastic tricycle; the toys in the timber-lined sandpit on which I struck my head.” Neddy was silent for a while. The immensity of the realisation was upon him again. “I’m not sure how long I was unconscious—it could’ve been seconds or minutes; hell, it could’ve been hours or years—but when I came to the boy was standing over me with the pistol at his side, water trickling down the leg of his pajamas. And there was Lucinda kneeling beside me. ‘Nice of you to join us,’ she said. She got up, shepherded the boy back inside and called for me to hurry. ‘We can’t be late for his first day at school’.
“My son’s first day at school…” Neddy said. His voice was so low as to be barely audible but Cheever still hung on his every word. Neddy laughed dismissively. “The funny thing is that as I heard myself tell you that story I could hardly believe it myself.”
“That’s the sometimes bewildering world we live in,” Cheever said.
Dismissing Neddy’s attempt to share the cost of their meal, Cheever paid, and together they walked back to Grand Central where Cheever saw Neddy to his train.
Neddy stepped into the carriage and turned back. “Do you know something, John? If that story was something that you wrote I’d think, ‘My God, that man sure has some imagination’.”
“Well, that’s one helluva story you have there.”
“You think so?”
“I do. I really do.” A whistle sounded and the train began to move. Cheever raised his hand in farewell. “Wish your son the best from me,” he said. Neddy waved back at Cheever, as he did, Cheever thought he saw a sense of bewilderment pass over Neddy’s face. “Your son,” Cheever called. “Wish him a happy twenty-first birthday.”
The bewilderment left Neddy’s face, and was replaced by some other arrangement of features that, to Cheever, in that moment, seemed entirely unreliable. The train gathered momentum and within seconds Neddy was gone out along the tracks, taking with him whatever truth there was in his story.
Later, aboard his own train, Cheever began to entertain idea, if not the possibility, that Neddy’s story was entirely true. Whether he believed Neddy’s story or not did not make it any more or less true, and from his own experience as a writer—and, truth be told, more so from what he’d read in Aristotle’s Poetics—Cheever knew that in a story a probable impossibility was preferable to an improbable possibility. Weren’t there things about himself that he knew to be true that people might think possible but improbable, when these things were in fact probable impossibilities: that when he could not write he used to swim to distract himself and sometimes in the fluid motion of swimming he found that ideas came more easily within his reach; that when he did write, he wrote quickly, completing each of his better stories in under a week, and a great many of them in his underwear.
Later still, as he returned to contemplate the ashes of his failed novel, Cheever found a point of light, and from that dense, dark mass came a story that went on to shine above all others as his most anthologized: “The Swimmer” is about a man who took the long way home, a man called Neddy.
Notes on ‘Cheever’s Unreliable Narrator’
‘Cheever’s Unreliable Narrator’ was was first published in the Review of Australian Fiction, 158 Volume 23, Issue 4 (2017).
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