The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever Read Free Book Online Page B

Denver and he longed to get back to a place where people were more courteous and predictable. He halved limes, squeezed lemons, arranged a row of cocktail glasses on the table and filled these with ice. At six o’clock the maid took a paper-back novel out of her bag and sat down to read. At a little after six the back doorbell rang and Betsey hastened to answer it. It was the delivery man from the dry-cleaners. Coverly heard Betsey ask him in for a drink. “Oh, I’d love to, Mrs. Wapshot,” the man said, “but I have to go home now and cook my supper. I’m living alone now. I guess I told you. My wife ran off with one of the butchers in the food express. The lawyer told me to put the kids in an orphanage, he said I’d get custody quicker that way, so I’m all alone. I’m so alone that I talk with the flies. There’s a lot of flies where I live but I don’t kill them. I just talk with them. They’re like friends. ‘Hello, flies,’ I say. ‘We’re all alone, you and me. You’re looking good, flies.’ I suppose you might think I was crazy for talking with the flies but that’s the way it is. I don’t have anybody else to talk to.”
    Coverly heard the door close. Betsey drew some water in the sink. When she came back into the room her face was pale. “Well, let’s have a party,” Coverly said. “Let’s you and I have a party.” He got her another drink and passed her a tray of sandwiches but she seemed so stiff with pain that she could not turn her head and when she drank her whisky she spilled some on her chin. “The things you read about in these paper books,” the maid said. “I don’t know. I been married three times but right here in this book they’re doing something and I don’t know what it is. I mean I don’t know what they’re doing. . . .” She glanced at the little boy and went on reading. Coverly asked the couple if they wouldn’t like a drink but they both politely refused and said that they didn’t drink on duty. Their presence seemed to amplify a pain of embarrassment that was swiftly turning into shame; their eyes seemed to be the eyes of the world, civil as they were, and Coverly finally asked them to go. They were enormously relieved. They had the good taste not to say that they were sorry; not to say anything but good-bye. “We’ll leave everything out for the latecomers,” Betsey called gallantly after them as they went out the door.
    It was her last gallantry. The pain in her breast threatened to overwhelm her. Her spirit seemed about to break under the organized cruelty of the world. She had offered her innocence, her vision of friendly strangers, to the community and she had been wickedly spurned. She had not asked them for money, for help of any kind, she had not asked them for friendship, she had only asked that they come to her house, drink her whisky and fill the empty rooms with the noise of talk for a little time and not one of them had the kindness to come. It was a world that seemed to her as hostile, incomprehensible and threatening as the gantry lines on the horizon, and when Coverly put an arm around her and said, “I’m sorry, sugar,” she pushed him away from her and said harshly, “Leave me be, leave me be, you just leave me be.”
    In the end Coverly, by way of consolation, took Betsey to a coffee house in the commercial center. They bought their tickets and sat in canvas chairs with mugs of coffee to drink. A young woman with yellow hair drawn back over her ears was plucking a small harp and singing:
“Oh Mother, dear Mother, oh Mother,
Why is the sky so dark?
Why does the air smell of roach powder?
Why is there no one in the park?”

“It’s nothing, my darling daughter,
This isn’t the way the world ends,
The washing machine is on spinner,
And I’m waiting to entertain friends.”

“But Mother, dear Mother, please tell me,
Why does your Geiger counter tick?
And why are all those nice people
Jumping into the creek?”

“It’s nothing,