"Montraldo" (The Stories of John Cheever)
Tourist meets people and yeah...
I found a link stating that Montraldo is a name that means "artist, problem avoider, charismatic" and I think that might be the best key to this story. Not only is the main character avoiding any problems by taking off to Italy and the town of Montraldo but the writer is avoiding any possible lasting plot from the beginning to end.
In order of appearance, the plot threads introduced in this story include:
Our nameless protagonist stealing a diamond ring from Tiffany's by swapping it for a worthless ring.
A voyage to Italy that involves an affair
A bullying owner of a villa that rents out to sad people
An old woman and her servant who hates her
A woman on a beach with a kid
An anecdote about a waiter who actually pushed a customer's head in his food
A band that plays Dixieland Jazz.
Eventually Cheever settles on the old woman and her servant. Her servant is her daughter actually and also her servant/daughter probably kills her. This is a strange one since the servant insults the old woman and the old woman simply speaks of her in loving terms.
This really doesn't make sense, even filtered through a sardonic narrator who is more fascinated with everything. He doesn't really do much of anything after that initial robbery of Tiffany's (the first time he robbed Tiffany's but as far as the story is concerned, the last time he robbed Tiffany's. Certainly there might be other times, but he's probably coming into a new adventure.
This is a 6 page story with 7 different plot threads. Most of them are abandoned. A more cynical view would state that Cheever was trying to find a story and when he finally managed to resolve one of the stories called it a day (I hate the pantser vs. plotter dichotomy but I would say that this is more pantser than anything.)
Just as the Job chapters feel repetitive when it comes to Job's dumb friends telling Job to shut up and Job telling them that God is a tyrant, the John Cheever stories are feeling repetitive in their seemingly random happenstance.
I also feel like these stories are beautiful in their romantic nature and their love of travel and Italy but also so random that John Cheever appeared to be coasting on his reputation. He was the author that New Yorker bought. They loved him and they sold more issues when he was in them (kind of like in the 90s when a Harlan Ellison story would be an automatic sale because almost everyone who loved science fiction would be excited with a new Ellison story - even if Ellison's best days were behind him).
Oddly enough I was thinking more about the Beckett plays I saw in college. They were uniformly awful. One was just a guy getting up and looking shocked as a voice droned on. I don't even remember the other two, but the program said that he sold these to a television show and it aired on a certain date. I immediately thought "I bet they paid him before he wrote them" because "Holy shit, the guy who wrote Waiting for Godot wants to be on television" superseded everything including anyone actually reading those scripts to find out if they were actually worth producing.
So this is another messy John Cheever story that is kind of from the late period (although the stories of John Cheever were all written before he stopped drinking so there was at least a decade of writing afterwards) and if it hadn't been for "The Swimmer" (we're getting to it) critics would have probably let his legacy end in the 1950s as the "Checkov of Suburbia".
