The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [46]
You walk and walk and come at last to a neighborhood where the atmosphere is countrified and domesticated and where signs hang here and there, advertising board and rooms. You climb some stairs and a gray-haired widow answers the door and asks your business, your name and your former address. She has a vacancy, but she can’t climb the stairs because of a weak heart or some other infirmity and so you climb them alone to the third floor back where there is a pleasant-enough room with a window looking into some back yards. Then you sign a register and hang your best suit in the closet; the suit that you will wear for your interview in the morning.
Or you wake—like Coverly—a country boy in the biggest city in the world. It’s the hour when Leander usually begins his ablutions and the place is a three-dollar furnished room, as small or smaller than the closets of your home. You notice that the walls are painted a baneful green which can’t have been chosen because of its effect on a man’s spirit—this is always discouraging—and so must be chosen because it is cheap. The walls seem to be sweating but when you touch the moisture it is as hard as glue. You get out of bed and look out of your window onto a broad street where trucks are passing, bringing produce up from the markets and railroad yards—a cheerful sight but one that you, coming from a small town in New England, regard with some skepticism, even with compassion, for although you have come here to make your fortune you think of the city as a last resort of those people who lack the fortitude and character necessary to endure the montony of places like St. Botolphs. It is a city, you have been told, where the value of permanence has never been grasped and this, even early in the morning, seems to be a pitiful state of affairs.
In the hallway you find a wash basin where you shave your beard and while you are shaving a stout man joins you and watches critically. “You gotta stretch your skin, sonny,” the stranger says. “Look. Let me show you.” He takes a fold of his skin and pulls it tight. “Like that,” he says. “You gotta stretch it, you gotta stretch your skin.” You thank him for his advice and stretch your lower lip, which is all you have left to shave. “That’s the way to do it,” the stranger says. “That’s the way. If you stretch your skin you’ll have a nice, clean shave. Last you all day.” He takes over the wash basin when you are finished and you go back to your room and dress. Then you climb down the stairs to a street full of shocks and wonders, for in spite of its Philosophical Society your home town was a very small place and you have never seen a high building or a dachshund; you have never seen a man in suede shoes or a woman blow her nose into a piece of Kleenex; you have never seen a parking meter or felt the ground under your feet shaken by a subway, but what you first notice is the fineness of the sky. You have come to feel—you may have been told—that the beauties of heaven centered above your home, and now you are surprised to find, stretched from edge to edge of the dissolute metropolis, a banner or field of the finest blue.
It is early. The air smells of cheap pastry, and the noise of trucking—the clatter of tail gates—is loud and cheerful. You go into a bakery for some breakfast. The waitress smiles at you openly and you think: Perhaps. Maybe. Later. Then you go out onto the street once more and gawk. The noise of traffic has gotten louder and you wonder how people can live in this maelstrom: how can they stand it? A man duckfoots past you wearing a coat that seems to be made out of machine waste and you think how unacceptable such a coat would be in St. Botolphs. People would laugh. In the window of a tenement you see an old man in an undershirt eating something from a paper bag. He seems to be by-passed so pitilessly by life that you feel sad. Then, in crossing the street, you are nearly killed by a truck. Safe on the curb again you wonder about the pace of life in this big city. How do they keep it up? Everywhere you look you see signs of demolition and creation. The mind of the city seems divided about its purpose and its tastes. They are not only destroying good buildings; they are tearing up good streets; and the noise is so loud that if you should shout for help no one would hear you.