The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [110]
When Coverly stepped into the dark kitchen he could see into the Frascatis’ lighted kitchen where Mr. Frascati was drinking wine and patting his wife on the rump as she went between the stove and the table. He slapped the Venetian blinds shut and, finding some frozen food, cooked it after his fashion, which was not much. He put Betsey’s supper onto a tray and took it into her room. Fretfully she worked herself up to a sitting position in the pillows and let him put the tray on her lap but when he went back into the kitchen she called after him, “Aren’t you going to eat with me? Don’t you want to eat with me? Don’t you even want to look at me?” He took his plate into the bedroom and ate off the dressing table, telling her the news of the laboratory. The long tape he had been working on would be done in three days. He had a new boss named Pancras. He brought Betsey a dish of ice cream and washed up and walked down to the shopping center to buy her some mystery stories at a drugstore. He slept on the sofa, covered with an overcoat and feeling sad and lewd.
Betsey remained in bed another week and seemed more and more unhappy. “There’s a new doctor at the laboratory, Betsey,” Coverly said one night. “His name is Blennar. I’ve seen him in the cafeteria. He’s a nice-looking fellow. He’s a sort of marriage counselor, and I thought …”
“I don’t want to hear about him,” Betsey said.
“But I want you to hear about him, Betsey. I want you to talk with Dr. Blennar. I think he might help us. We’ll go together. Or you could go alone. If you could tell him your troubles …”
“Why should I tell him my troubles? I know what my troubles are. I hate this house. I hate this place, this Remsen Park.”
“If you talked with Dr. Blennar …”
“Is he a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“You want to prove that I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No, Betsey.”
“Psychiatrists are for crazy people. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Then she got out of bed and went into the living room. “Oh, I’m sick of you, sick of your earnest damned ways, sick of the way you stretch your neck and crack your knuckles and sick of your old father with his dirty letters asking is there any news, is there any good news, is there any news. I’m sick of Wapshots and I don’t give a damn who knows it.” Then she went into the kitchen and came out with the blue dishes that Sarah had sent them from West Farm and began to break them on the floor. Coverly went out of the living room on to the back steps but Betsey followed him and broke the rest of the dishes out there.
On the day after they were married they had gone out to sea in a steamer of about the same vintage as the Topaze but a good deal bigger. It was a fine day at sea, mild and fair and with a haze suspended all around them so that, but for the wake rolled away at their stern, their sense of direction and their sense of time were obscured. They walked around the decks, hand in hand, finding in the faces of the other passengers great kindliness and humor. They went from the bow down to the shelter of the stern where they could feel the screw thumping underfoot and where many warm winds from the galley and the engine room blew around them and they could see the gulls, hitchhiking their way out to Portugal. They did not raise the island—it was too hazy—and warped in by the lonely clangor of sea bells they saw the place—steeples and cottages and two boys playing catch on a beach—rise up around them through the mist.
The cottage was far away—a place that belonged to Leander’s time—a huddle of twelve or sixteen cottages, so awry and weather-faded that they might have seemed thrown up to accommodate the victims of some disaster had you not known that they had been built for those people who make a pilgrimage each summer to the sea. The house they went to was like West Farm, a human burrow or habitation that had yielded at every point to the crotchets and meanderings of a growing family. They put down their bags and undressed for a swim.