The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever Page B

the milkman, and that old man who reads the gas meter. That nice fresh-faced boy who used to deliver the laundry lost his job because of her. The truck used to be parked there for hours at a time. Then she began to buy her groceries from Narobi’s, and one of the delivery boys had quite a lot of trouble. Her husband’s a nice-looking man, and they say he puts up with it for the sake of the children. He adores the children. But what I really wanted to say is that we’re getting her out. They have a twenty-eight-thousand-dollar mortgage with a repair clause, and Charlie Peterson at the bank has just told them that they’ll have to put a new roof on the house. Of course, they can’t afford this, and so Bumps Trigger is going to give them what they paid for the place, and they’ll have to go somewhere else. I just thought you might like to know.”
    “Thank you,” Melissa said. “Will you have some more sherry?”
    “Oh, no, thank you. I must get along. We’re going to the Wishings’. Aren’t you?”
    “Yes, we are,” Melissa said.
    Laura put on a short mink jacket and stepped out of the house with that grace, that circumspection, that gentle and unmistakable poise of a lady who has said farewell to love.
    Then the back doorbell rang. The cook was out with the baby, and so Melissa went to the back door and let in one of Mr. Narobi’s grocery boys. She wondered if he was the one Mrs. Lockhart had tried to seduce. He was a slender young man with brown hair and blue eyes that shed their light evenly, as the eyes of the young will, and were so unlike the eyes of the old—those haggard lanterns that shed no light at all. She would have liked to ask him about Mrs. Lockhart, but this, of course, was not possible. She gave him a quarter tip, and he thanked her politely, and she went upstairs to bathe and dress for the Wishings’ dance.
    The Wishings’ dance was an annual affair. As Mrs. Wishing kept explaining, they gave it each year before the rugs were put down. There was a three-piece orchestra, a fine dinner, with glazed salmon, boeuf en daube , a dark flowery claret and a bar for drinks. By quarter after ten, Melissa felt bored and would have asked Moses to take her home, but he was in another room. Lovely and high-spirited, she was seldom bored. Watching the dancers, she thought of poor Mrs. Lockhart, who was being forced out of this society. On the other hand, she knew how easy, how mistaken it was to assume that the exceptions—the drunkard and the lewd—penetrate, through their excesses, the carapace of immortal society. Did Mrs. Lockhart know more about mankind than she, Melissa? Who did have the power of penetration? Was it the priest who saw how their hands trembled when they reached for the chalice, the doctor who had seen them stripped of their clothing, or the psychiatrist who had seen them stripped of their obdurate pride, and who was now dancing with a fat woman in a red dress? And what was penetration worth? What did it matter that the drunken and unhappy woman in the corner dreamed frequently that she was being chased through a grove of trees by a score of naked lyric poets? Melissa was bored, and she thought her dancing neighbors were bored, too. Loneliness was one thing, and she knew herself how sweet it could make lights and company seem, but boredom was something else, and why, in this most prosperous and equitable world, should everyone seem so bored and disappointed?
    Melissa went to the bathroom. The Wishings’ house was large and she lost her way. She stepped by mistake into a dark bedroom. The moment she entered the room another woman, who must have been waiting, embraced her, groaning with ardor. Then realizing her mistake she said: “I’m terribly sorry,” and went out the door. Melissa saw only that she had dark hair and full skirts. She stood in the dark room for a moment, trying, with no success at all, to fit this encounter somewhere into the distant noise of dance music. It could