Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 83
mileage he could expect from these jewels. When women had
faults he often found them charming. When, while dieting
rigorously and continuously talking about their diet, they are
found eating a candy bar in a parking lot, one is enchanted. He did
not find Jody’s faults enchanting. He did not find them.
His radiant and aching need for Jody spread out from his crotch
through every part of him, visible and invisible, and he wondered
if he could bring off his love for Jody in the street. Would he walk
down the street with his arm around Jody’s waist, would he kiss
Jody at the airport, would he hold Jody’s hand in the elevator, and
if he refrained from any of this wouldn’t he be conforming to the
cruel edicts of a blasphemous society? He tried to imagine Jody
and himself in the world. He remembered those pensions or
European boardinghouses where he and Marcia and their son
sometimes spent the summer. Young men, women, and their
children—if they were not young they were at least agile—set the
tone. One avoided the company of the old and the infirm. Their
haunts were well known and word got around. But here and there,
in this familial landscape, one saw at the end of the bar or the
corner of the dining room two men or two women. They were the
queers, a fact that was usually established by some conspicuous
dynamism of opposites. One of the women would be docile; the
other commanding. One of the men would be old; the other a boy.
One was terribly polite to them, but they were never asked to crew
in the sailboat races or take a picnic up the mountain. They were
not even asked to the marriage of the village blacksmith. They
were different. How they gratified their venereal hungers would
remain, for the rest of the company, acrobatic and bizarre. They
would not, as the rest of the company did, inaugurate the siesta
with a good, sweaty fuck. Socially the prejudice against them was
very light; at a more profound level it was absolute. That they
enjoyed one another’s company, as they sometimes did, seemed
astonishing and subversive. At one pension Farragut remembered,
the queers seemed to be the only happy couple in the dining