Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 44
him a swift push. He jumped or fell out the window, missed the
iron spears and landed on his knees on the paving. One of the
departing guests returned and helped him to his feet and he went
on talking about when they would meet again. He did this to avoid
looking back at the window to see, if he might, who had pushed
him. That he didn’t want to know. He had sprained an ankle and
bruised a knee, but he refrained from thinking about the incident
again. Many years later, walking in the woods, Eben had suddenly
asked: “Do you remember that party at Sarah’s when you got
terribly drunk and someone pushed you out the window?” “Yes,”
said Farragut. “I’ve never told you who it was,” said Eben. “It was
that man from Chicago.” Farragut thought that his brother had
incriminated himself with this remark, but Eben seemed to feel
exonerated. He braced his shoulders, lifted his head to the light
and began to kick the leaves on the path vigorously.
The lights and the TV went off. Tennis began to ask: “Have you
been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Farragut, lying
on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought
that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some
advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories
and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the
shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon
chance smells—grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the
showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and
indisposed. Waking in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately
around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant
him a bearing, but he was left mostly with methadone and his
unruly keel. He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had
traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen
alienation. It was the sense that on waking before dawn,
everything, beginning with the dream from which he waked, was
alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the
texture and smell of strange bedclothes. From the window came
the strange smell of strange fuels. He bathed in strange and rusty