The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [130]
But Moses had wronged Badger. There had not been a lecherous thought in his head when he started over the roofs. He had been very drunk. But there was some magnanimity in the man—a trace of the raw material of human excellence—or at least enough scope in his emotions to set the scene for a conflict, and when he woke early the next morning he reproached himself for his drunkenness and his crazy schemes. He could see the world out of his window then all blue and gold and round as a bull’s eye but all the sapphire-colored lights in heaven merely chilled Badger’s spirit and excited in him a desire to retire into some dark, badly ventilated place. The world, in the partial lights of early morning, appeared to him as hypocritical and offensive as the smile of a door-to-door salesman. Nothing was true, thought Badger; nothing was what it appeared to be, and the enormity of this deception—the subtlety with which the color of the sky deepened as he dressed—angered him. He got down through the rotunda without meeting anyone—not even a rat—and telephoned Giacomo, although it was not six o’clock, and Giacomo drove him to the station.
The early train was a local and all the passengers were night-shift workmen, returning home. Looking into their tired and dirty faces Badger felt a longing for what he thought to be their humble ways. If he had been brought up simply his life would have had more meaning and value, the better parts of his disposition would have been given a chance to develop and he would not have wasted his gifts. Shaken with drink and self-reproach, he felt it was plain that morning that he had wasted them beyond any chance of their renewal, and images of his earlier life—a high-spirited and handsome boy, bringing in the terrace furniture before a thunderstorm—rose up to reinforce his self-condemnation. Then at the nadir of his depression light seemed to strike into Badger’s mind, for it was the force of his imagination rebelling against utter despair, to raise white things in his head—cities or archways at least of marble—signs of prosperity, triumph and splendor.
Then whole palladia seemed to mushroom beneath Badger’s patent-leather hair, the cities and villas of a younger world, and he made the trip into the city in a hopeful mood. But sitting over his first cup of coffee in the hole-in-the-wall where he lived Badger saw that his marble white civilizations were helpless before invaders. These snowy, high-arched constructions of principle, morality and faith—these palaces and memorials—were overrun with hordes of war-whooping, half-naked men, dressed in the stinking skins of beasts. In they rode at the north gate and as Badger sat huddled over his cup, he saw one by one his temples and palaces go. Out the south gate rode the barbarians, leaving poor Badger without even the consolation of a ruin; leaving him with a nothingness and with his essence, which was never much better than the perfume of a wood violet gone.
“Mamma e Papa Confettiere arrivan’ domani sera,” Giacomo said. He was screwing light bulbs once more into the long string of fixtures that were hung in the trees of the driveway. Melissa met Moses sweetly at the door as she had done on his first night there and told him that some old friends of Justina’s were arriving on the next night. Mrs. Enderby was in the office, telephoning invitations, and D