One of John Cheever's great stories, "The Five-Forty-Eight," draws a kind of map that other writers can follow. Specifically, Matthew Weiner ("Mad Men") and Adrian Lyne ("Fatal Attraction") owe a debt to Cheever.
In "The Five-Forty-Eight," a married executive, Blake, sleeps with his secretary, Miss Dent. Then, he discovers that her presence is distracting, so he fires her. Wrong move. She is emotionally disturbed; she begins stalking him. Eventually, Miss Dent leads Blake (at gunpoint) onto a train. In Ossining, she literally forces him to eat dirt--then she walks away.
"Sometimes it seems to me that if I were good and loving and sane--oh, much better than I am--sometimes it seems to me if I were all these things and young and beautiful, too, and if I called to show you the right way, you wouldn't heed me. Oh, I'm better than you, I'm better than you, and I shouldn't waste my time or spoil my life like this. Put your face in the dirt. Put your face in the dirt! Do what I say. Put your face in the dirt."
He fell forward in the filth. The coal skinned his face. He stretched out on the ground, weeping. "Now I feel better," she said. "Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this, because you see there is some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find and use. I can wash my hands." Then he heard her footsteps go away from him, over the rubble. He heard the clearer and more distant sound they made on the hard surface of the platform. He heard them diminish. He raised his head. He saw her climb the stairs of the wooden footbridge and cross it and go down to the other platform, where her figure in the dim light looked small, common, and harmless. He raised himself out of the dust--warily at first, until he saw by her attitude, her looks, that she had forgotten him; that she had completed what she had wanted to do, and that he was safe. He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home.
What makes this writing so wonderful is the use of detail. When Blake has his face in the dirt, we shift to "auditory" imagery. That's because Blake is overwhelmed--his ears are the only part of him that can "gather intel." ("He heard her footsteps....over the rubble. He heard the clearer and more distant sound they made on the hard surface of the platform...") As Blake contemplates his own death, he witnesses a banal exchange. "Two of the stranded passengers drove off in the only taxi the village had. I'm sorry, darling, a woman said tenderly to her husband when she drove up a few minutes later. All our clocks are slow...In the station, a telephone began to ring. The ringing was loud, evenly spaced, and unanswered....." Things we'd normally fail to notice become crucial--we think we might be experiencing a man's final seconds on Earth.
Cheever's compassion--both for Blake and for Miss Dent--is also notable. Here's the specific "Mad Men" moment that the story anticipates. Don shtups a secretary, fires her, then promises to write her a letter of reference. He immediately finds the task bothersome, but he thinks he can repackage his laziness as generosity. "Tell you what, you write the letter yourself. I'll sign off on anything you have to say!"
Unforgettable.
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