Here, then, is Jones’s “mud”: that Cheever won’t allow his characters to get on with their lives, that he has to give them a hinted-at sullied history (that sly, marvelous “I know”), that he has to put this poor drunk maid in the narrator’s path. The mistake, I think, is to regard this as mean-spiritedness (Jones claims that Cheever “begrudges his characters happiness out of stinginess or envy”) rather than a dramatic device. Because what good is a story—as opposed to a life, I suppose–if you give your characters what they want, especially if they don’t deserve it? Especially characters like the narrator, who manages to get the maid out of the house, and then gives us this piece of advice:

You cure yourself of a romantic, carnal, and disastrous marriage, I decided, and like any addict in the throes of a cure, you must be exaggeratedly careful of every step you take. I decided not to answer the telephone, because I knew that Rachel might repent, and I knew, by then, the size and the nature of the things that could bring us together. If it rained for five days, if one of the children had a passing fever, if she got some sad news in a letter—anything like this might be enough to put her on the telephone, and I did not want to be tempted to resume a relationship that had been so miserable. The first months will be like a cure, I thought, and I scheduled my time with this in mind.

Another fact: this is a remarkable passage. Remarkable for the direct address, which the narrator uses to establish his authority and which quickly disappears, which lets the reader know he is meant to resist self-help advice from someone who is trying so mightily, and still failing, to help himself; remarkable for the calmness of the voice which just barely succeeds (for the time being) in keeping at bay the panic everywhere under the surface; remarkable for the planting of Rachel’s phone call (Jones says that Cheever “was certainly no Chekhov,” but here, in the phone call, is the contemporary version of Chekhov’s gun that, as Chekhov tells every writer who came after him, had better go off or else…what? Or else you’ll be bludgeoned again with the truism about what Chekhov said about the gun); remarkable for the bald statement of purpose (“The first months will be like a cure”); and most remarkable for the way in which this narrator should be unlikable—for his know-it-allness, for the way he wants to put his family out of his mind and life, for that way he lies to himself—and yet he isn’t. He isn’t unlikable because, as Cheever suggests at the beginning at the story and then throughout, we lie to others and ourselves not because we are necessarily bad people, but because we want the lies to turn our life into the kind of life worth living. He isn’t unlikable, because we know that the missing dogs and cats, the drunken, jilted maid, are just the beginning of what Cheever will put his man through before the end of the story, when Rachel calls and the narrator answers the phone. He isn’t unlikable because the world he lives in is so full of terrors and (compromised) rewards that the narrator is animated and transformed just by living in it. In the real world he’d be a sad sack; in the magical world of Cheever’s fiction, he’ll do anything not to be one.

I wouldn’t use the adjective “magical” (so corny, so redolent of Disney and Doug Henning) if it weren’t the best one available to describe the world of the “The Cure,” especially if our definition of “magical” is capacious enough to allow it to include its opposite, or antidote. For example, as part of the narrator’s attempt to keep busy and away from home and the telephone, he goes straight from work to the train station, and then straight from the train station to Orpheo’s, “where there was usually someone there to talk to, and [where] I’d drink a couple of martinis and eat a steak,” and then straight from there to the Stonybrook Drive-In Theatre, where the narrator “sit[s] through a double feature.” I’m convinced these names, these places—the Orpheo, the Stonybrook Drive-In Theatre—were as magical seeming and sounding when Cheever wrote “The Cure” as they are to us now. Because for us they function as a dream world, a hazy reminder of what we’ve lost and maybe never had in the first place, and for the narrator of “The Cure” they function in the very same way. The places are magical, but the people who inhabit them are human, the same way the Gingerbread House was magical, but the children who entered it were not. The difference being the children were innocent, but the narrator of “The Cure” is not. All the better, as far as I’m concerned. Cheever’s sad account of Orpheo’s and the Stonybrook—the narrator says there’s only “usually someone there to talk to” (emphasis added) at Orpheo’s and he “sits through a double feature” but doesn’t enjoy it—isn’t a debunking of the suburbs (there is nothing as dull as a debunking) or of anything else, but rather a depiction of what happens when we bring our problems to the places we love but that can’t cure our problems and shouldn’t be expected to. And when that happens, the only where we have left to go is home.

And home, in Cheever’s stories, is where we have a hard time sleeping at night. Two things happen when Cheever’s protagonists can’t sleep: they listen to weather and modes of transportation (there is no better bard of insomnia and rain and train travel than Cheever, another fact this passage from “The Cure” makes evident: “It was after four then, and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and to the morning trains coming through. They come from Buffalo and Chicago and the Far West, through Albany and down along the river in the early morning, and at one time or another I’ve traveled on most of them, and I lay in the dark thinking about the polar air in the Pullman cars and the smell of nightclothes and the taste of dining-car water and the way it feels to end a day in Cleveland or Chicago and begin another in New York”) or they get up out of bed. The narrator of the “The Cure” gets out of bed, goes into the living room, picks up one of his wife’s books (by Lin Yutang—and what a wry bit of scene and era setting this is! And how excellent that Cheever chooses not to celebrate or satirize the book, the era, the milieu, but instead understatedly says “The book seemed interesting” just as the “living room is comfortable”) until, “I heard, very close to me, a footstep and a cough…I felt my flesh get hard—you know that feeling—but I didn’t look up…and yet, without lifting my eyes from the book, I knew not only that I was being watched but that I was being watched from the picture window at the end of the living room….I looked up [and] saw him, all right, and I think he meant me to; he was grinning.”

And then suddenly the story becomes a different kind of story, which is one of the things I most love about Cheever: how he will tell you it is one kind of fiction ( “This happened in the summer” is the way one might begin a ghost story) and then coerces you into thinking it’s another kind of fiction altogether (the realistic tale of suburban sadness and ennui) only to then remind you that perhaps you’ve forgotten his original promise, but he hasn’t, and he won’t let you forget it, either (“you know the feeling”) nor will he allow his narrator to forget it. Although the narrator does try mightily to forget: he doesn’t chase after the man at the window. Instead, he turns off the light until dawn, then goes to work, then goes to Orpheo’s and the movies, after which tries to go sleep, and when he can’t, he gets up and reads Lin Yutang. Notice the use of pattern and repetition in Cheever (for Cheever, pattern and repetition are often synonymous with plot) and also pay close attention his use of talismans. Too many critics pay fetishistic attention to these objects, as though Cheever is using them as, say, the television show Mad Men uses gray flannel suits and cocktails. Cheever’s talismans aren’t period costumes or identifiers; rather, they’re dear objects that nonetheless fail to keep horror at bay, just as the Lin Yutang fails to keep the narrator of “The Cure” from looking up and seeing the Peeping Tom’s “face in the narrow window above the piano. ‘Get the hell away from here!’ I yelled. ‘She’s gone! Rachel’s gone! There is nothing to see! Leave me alone!’”

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