She lives in the pages of a John Cheever story. It's just a draft, unfinished, the first and only page hanging limp from the mouth of the typewriter; he's washing down his omelets with gin at breakfast again. He hasn't named her yet, but she hopes something will occur to him soon. In her solitude, she wonders about this, her identity. Maybe he will name her something conventional, the kind of name someone might shout across the room at a cocktail party, asking if you'd please pass the martini shaker.

Karen. 

Donna.

Maybe Cordelia. Something with classical dimensions.

Cheever, while decorating the woman's living room in Shady Hill with his crisp prose, was thoughtful enough to place The Complete Works of William Shakespeare on her bookshelf, right next to the staircase that leads down to the wine cellar. Why is it there, she wonders? To allude to her husband's hidden intellectual side, his sensitivity to art? Since he's sleeping with Jodie, the babysitter who lives down the street (even she gets a name), when will he have time to read it?

Perhaps the book is for the unnamed woman, after all. To give her depth, emotion. Unable to contain her curiosity any longer, she picks up the book and begins to read. While Cheever sleeps off his hangovers, she watches Ophelia tumble into a weeping brook, weeping herself. While he spends his nights drifting from bar to bar, she stays awake at Desdemona's bedside and pleads with her to wake up. While he pukes in the bathroom down the hall, she looks at Cordelia and sees herself, recognizes the jail cell where her father expects them to spend eternity singing like birds in a cage, telling each other stories until they can speak no more. What's in a story? There's nothing here. The yard has no garden. The dining room has been furnished with nothing but highball glasses. Her kitchen has a window, but Cheever hasn't placed anything outside. No moon, no stars, no passing clouds—but how could she expect anything but a blank sky? His own window, she cannot help but notice, hasn't been cleaned for weeks.

Aleyna Rentz is an MFA candidate in fiction at Johns Hopkins. She has work in or coming from Hobart, Passages North, Barrelhouse and others.

Detail of engraving on main page, "Desdemona—After Cabanal," from The Aldine, October, 1874.

W i g l e a f               02-26-18                                [home]