The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [98]
This seemed to be the greatest of the improbabilities at Clear Haven but considering what it was that he sought, to be a naked man scrambling over the leads presented nothing that was actually very irregular or perplexing. The rain on his skin and hair felt fresh and soft and the chaos of wet roofs fitted easily into the picture of love; and it was the roofs of Clear Haven, to be seen only by the birds or a stray airplane, where the architect had left bare the complexity of his task—in a sense his defeat—for here all the random majesty of the place appeared spatchcocked, rectified and jumbled; here, hidden in the rain, were the architect’s secrets and most of his failures. Peaked roofs, flat roofs, pyramidal roofs, roofs inset with stained-glass skylights and chimneys and bizarre systems of drainage stretched for a quarter of a mile or more, shining here and there in the light from a distant dormer window like the roofs of a city.
As far as he could see in the rainy dark the only way to get to the other side of the house lay past this distant row of dormers and he had started for them when a length of wire, stretched knee-high across a part of the roof, tripped him up. It was an old radio aerial, he guessed charitably, since he was not hurt, and started off again. A few minutes later he passed a rain-soaked towel and a bottle of sun-tan lotion and still further along there was an empty bottle of vermouth, making the roof seem like a beach on which someone, unknown he felt sure to Justina, had stretched out his bones in the sun. As he approached the ledge to the first lighted dormer he saw straight into a small room, decked with religious pictures, where an old servant was ironing. The lights in the next window were pink, and glancing in briefly he was surprised to see the Count D’Alba standing in front of a full-length mirror without any clothes on. The next window was Mrs. Enderby’s and she sat at a desk, dressed as she had been at dinner, writing in a book. He had gone out of the range of her desk light when his right foot, seeking a hold, moved off into nothing but the rainy dark and only by swinging and throwing his weight onto the slates did he keep from falling. What he had missed was an airshaft that cut straight through the three stories of the hall and that would have been the end of him. He peered down at this, waiting for the chemistry of his alarmed body to quiet and listening then to see if Mrs. Enderby or the others had heard the noise he made when he threw himself down. Everything was quiet and he made the rest of his climb more slowly, swinging down at last onto the balcony of Melissa’s room where he stood outside her window, watching her brush her hair. She sat at a table by a mirror and her nightgown was transparent so that even in the dim light of the room he could see the fullness of her breasts, parting a little as she leaned toward the mirror.
“You’re drenched, my darling, you’re drenched,” she said. Her look was opaque and wanton; she raised her mouth to be kissed and he unknotted the ribbons of her gown so that it fell to her waist and she drew his head down from her lips to salute her breasts. Then, naked and unshy, she crossed the floor and went into the bathroom to finish her toilet and Moses listened to the noises of running water and the sounds of opening and closing drawers, knowing that it was sensible for a lover to be able to estimate these particular delays. She came back, walking he thought in glory and turning out the lights that she passed on her way, and at dawn, stroking her soft buttocks and listening to the singing of the crows, she told him that he would have to go and he climbed in his skin back over the chaos of roofs.