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

urinals had all contributed to his sense of abandonment and his gathering fear.
    The elevator door opened. It was not she. It was the elevator operator. He was wearing street clothes and a hat. He went directly to where Sears stood and embraced him. Sears put his head against the man’s shoulder. The stranger’s embrace seemed to comprehend that newfound province of loneliness that had frightened Sears. He seemed to know all about that mountainous city where there was no beauty and no coffee and where a homely waitress wiped a rubber plant’s leaves with an untruthful newspaper. What the elevator man then said came as a great surprise to Sears. “I’ve worried about you ever since that first morning,” he said. What he then did came as an even greater surprise to Sears. Sears had tried genuinely to bring to his venereal drives something like the rectitude of Burke’s
Peerage
, the New York Social Register or the early days of the Metropolitan Club. These congregations were, he knew, not truly selective but they had the radiance, the shine, of something chosen, an air of ordination that he unthinkingly admired. The stranger, whose name he hadn’t learned, took him downstairs to a small room off the lobby, where he undressed Sears and undressed himself. Sears’s next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.

6
    O NE of the several pleasures of Betsy’s life was visiting Buy Brite, a massive store in the shopping mall on the four-digit interstate. She liked—she loved—to push a cart with nice rubber-tired wheels through a paradise of groceries, vegetables, meats, fishes, breads and cakes to the music she danced to the year she fell in love with Henry. Then when she paid for what she had chosen she would be given a number that might name her the winner of one hundred thousand dollars or a trip to someplace like Honolulu. Betsy was not at all interested in the paleontological history of barter and marketing, but the purity and simplicity of the bounty she saw at Buy Brite were like a reminder of the markets and festivals of our earlier history.
    It is because our fortresses were meant to be impregnable that the fortresses of the ancient world have outlasted the marketplaces of the past, leaving the impression that fear and bellicosity were the keystones of our earliest communities, when in fact those crossroads where men met to barter fish for baskets, greens for meat and gold for brides were the places where we first grew to know and communicate with one another. Some part of Betsy’s excitement at Buy Brite may have been due to the fact that she was participating in one of the earliest rites of our civilization.
    She had gone to Buy Brite that afternoon, leaving the children alone at home, in order to buy a bottle of soap that she had found efficient, sympathetic and cheap. This was called Flotilla. At Buy Brite there was a single entrance and exit. The corridor for soaps was a great distance from the entrance, and on her way there Betsy picked up a bag of potatoes (marked down), a jar of Teriyaki Sauce, a box of crackers, a dozen eggs and a pair of Argyle socks. She was careful to keep her purchases under ten so that she could use the express lane. Randy was an intelligent and obedient child but emergencies could always arise. There was the afternoon when he had gotten drunk on vanilla extract and been found playing with matches.
    Now Betsy would have noticed the music that played while she looked for Flotilla only, perhaps, if it had been music that she had danced to or music that reminded her of the pleasures of dancing. Betsy was of that generation for whom the air was, oftener than not, filled with music. She heard music everywhere; she sometimes heard music on the telephone while she waited for her call to be completed. In some ways this had left her imperceptive. She would never have noticed that morning that the air of Buy Brite was filled with some of the greatest music of the eighteenth century.
    This music