Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever Read Free Book Online

you were a department-store clerk talking to some customer about a discontinued line. You know perfectly well that you can help me.”
    “There is nothing between us,” she said.
    “I’ve fucked you a hundred times,” he shouted, “and if that’s nothing I think you highly immoral. I’ve hoped all morning to see you in your blue wrapper and you’ve got everything on but the slip covers.”
    “Are you or are you not going to take me to lunch?” shesaid. “If you’re too distracted I have a standing invitation from plenty of other men.”
    “I’ll get some flowers,” he said. He pulled up and fastened his trousers. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
    She truly loved cut flowers, he thought. Cut flowers had for her a seductive force, and with cut flowers that sternness, so unlike her, would surely yield. He ran to the florist nearest her apartment but the place was closed. He hailed a cab and asked to be taken to a florist. It was a long search but they found one, where he bought two dozen yellow roses. Yellow was her color. He had often heard her say that she loved yellow. Back at her apartment he rang her bell for quite some time—a half hour, perhaps—before he would acknowledge the fact that she had gone out.
    Now there are, it seemed to Sears, some Balkans of the spirit, where the villages are lit by fire and the bears weigh upwards of seven hundred pounds, and to which he now found himself quite helplessly being transported. Sears had taken many business trips to the Balkans and he was truly familiar with this world. He imagined some Monday morning—some Blue Monday—at the turn of the year, November probably, when snow was expected and his hotel room was cold. There was no hot water for shaving, there was no water of any sort and no way of procuring any. He dressed and went out to find that the elevator wasn’t working. He walked down five or six flights of malodorous and shabby stairs to the café. The only person there was a homely waitress in a very dirty uniform who was wiping the dust off a rubber plant with a page of an untruthful newspaper the tyrannical government publishedfor propaganda purposes, distorting all the facts including the weather and the rainfall. When he asked for coffee—that most international word—the waitress made an ugly face and he realized that he was in one of those provinces that had suffered the Turkish Occupation for centuries and that had seen no coffee since its liberation by Alexander the Second in 1878.
    He went out onto the street. The street was named to commemorate the Plebescite of April the Third. He turned right, looking for coffee, onto Eleanor Markova Street. He didn’t know it but Eleanor Markova had, at some time in the forties, been martyred by the Fascists. Markova Street led to Liberation Street and he followed this to Freedom Avenue, Proletariat Boulevard and Victory Square. He smelled coffee nowhere and saw no smiles, no beauty of any sort, no brow even that promised comprehension as brows will.
    Sears had been raised by open-hearted and loving men and women, and why such a forlorn mountain city should have established itself in his consciousness was mysterious. He was truly a stranger to hostility of any sort and yet, at the moment, hostility seemed to be his home. He had loved his dear parents, he had loved and been loved by his teachers and friends, love had illuminated even his military experience, and so why then should he seem so susceptible to a hostility that he had never known?
    He seemed to have reached his Balkans by plane. The plane was large and he traveled first class, but he found himself in some airport where no one could tell him when his plane would depart and no one anyhow could speak any language that he knew. His grief was more the grief ofa traveler than a lover. The grueling search for his baggage, the ridiculous attempt to charm the customs police, the wish to send to college those venereal vagrants who haunt airport