Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 84
room. That had been a bad season for holy matrimony. The wives
wept. The husbands sulked. The queers won the sailboat race,
climbed the highest mountain and were asked to lunch by the
reigning prince. That was an exception. Farragut—extending
things out to the street—tried to imagine Jody and himself at
some such pension. It was five. They were at the end of the bar.
Jody was wearing a white duck suit that Farragut had bought him;
but that was as far as he could go. There was no way he could
wrench, twist, screw or otherwise force his imagination to
continue the scene.
If love was a chain of resemblances, there was, since Jody was a
man, the danger that Farragut might be in love with himself. He
had seen self-love only once that he could remember in a man,
someone he had worked with for a year or so. The man played a
role of no consequence in his affairs and he had, perhaps to his
disadvantage, only casually observed this fault, if it was a fault.
“Have you ever noticed,” the man had asked, “that one of my eyes
is smaller than the other?” Later the man had asked with some
intensity: “Do you think I’d look better with a beard, a mustache
perhaps?” Walking down a sidewalk to a restaurant, the man had
asked: “Do you like your shadow? When the sun is behind me and
I see my shadow I’m always disappointed. My shoulders aren’t
broad enough and my hips are too wide.” Swimming together, the
man asked: “Frankly now, what do you think of my biceps? I mean
do you think they’re overdeveloped? I do forty push-ups every
morning to keep them firm, but I wouldn’t want to look like a
weight lifter.” These questions were not continuous, they were not
even daily, but they came often enough to appear eccentric and
had led Farragut to wonder, and then to the conviction that the
man was in love with himself. He spoke about himself as some
other man, in a chancy marriage, might ask for approval of his
wife. Do you think she’s beautiful? Do you think she talks too
much? Don’t you like her legs? Do you think she ought to cut her
hair? Farragut did not think that he was in love with himself, but