Liars and Saints

  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 fa...

 John Cheever's extraordinary story "Reunion" is about a father and son. Three years before today, the father abandoned his family. The son can't "process" this; he needs to believe that his father has noble reasons for his actions, because a father is a father. Taking a last stab at parenting, the father agrees to meet his young son at the information booth in Grand Central Terminal. He has his secretary make the arrangement (or perhaps he has paid a friend to impersonate a secretary). He repeatedly alludes to his "club"; he says, "We just don't have time to visit my club." These allusions do the opposite of their intended job; they make the father look pathetic. What follows is a series of embarrassing moments in which the father dumps his self-loathing on waiters and waitresses. He fights with one about the drinking age. He has a tantrum, later, because he is told he cannot clap his hands in the presence of the staff. At another es...

  In John Cheever's "The Sorrows of Gin," a nanny becomes impatient with John Cheever's drinking. So she goes to the little daughter, Susan, and suggests that family peace might be secured if Susan would occasionally dump John's many gallons of alcohol in the sink. Susan does this--but John wrongly concludes that the nanny is "having a tipple" (and another and another) while (ostensibly) working. A drunken child-minder! The nanny loses her job. I think of this when my child mimics his teacher. I'm trying to put ornaments on the tree. "Is that your best effort?" asks my son. "You're not showing YOUR BEST EFFORT." I consider Josh's teacher--and her recent lesson plans. One day, Josh half-colored a printout image of a bat. Another day, he colored a Pilgrim--but the printout was dated, so it made a reference to "the Indians." (The teacher had made a bold "X" through that last word.) I imagine the kind of se...

Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped some day to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive. The Westcotts differ...

The Comptons lived in the house next to the Blakes, and Mrs. Compton had never understood the importance of minding her own business. Louise Blake took her troubles to Mrs. Compton, Blake knew, and instead of discouraging her crying jags, Mrs. Compton had come to imagine herself a sort of confessor and had developed a lively curiosity about the Blakes’ intimate affairs. She had probably been given an account of their most recent quarrel. Blake had come home one night, overworked and tired, and had found that Louise had done nothing about getting supper. He had gone into the kitchen, followed by Louise, and had pointed out to her that the date was the fifth. He had drawn a circle around the date on the kitchen calendar. “One week is the twelfth,” he had said. “Two weeks will be the nineteenth.” He drew a circle around the nineteenth. “I’m not going to speak to you for two weeks,” he had said. “That will be the nineteenth.” She had wept, she had protested, bu...

To begin at the beginning, the airplane from Minneapolis in which Francis Weed was traveling East ran into heavy weather. The sky had been a hazy blue, with the clouds below the plane lying so close together that nothing could be seen of the earth. Then mist began to form outside the windows, and they flew into a white cloud of such density that it reflected the exhaust fires. The color of the cloud darkened to gray, and the plane began to rock. Francis had been in heavy weather before, but he had never been shaken up so much. The man in the seat beside him pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a drink. Francis smiled at his neighbor, but the man looked away; he wasn’t sharing his painkiller with anyone. The plane had begun to drop and flounder wildly. A child was crying. The air in the cabin was overheated and stale, and Francis’s left foot went to sleep. He read a little from a paper book that he had bought at the airport, but the violence of the storm divided his attent...

Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again, where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk. He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night, baking, and he was in no real hurry. Some n...