"The Worm in the Apple" (The Stories of John Cheever)
Better. This one is better. It also feels very meta or self-parodying as John Cheever takes a break from his usual bad marriages and drunks of Shady Hill to tell a story about the Crutchmans, a perfectly happy couple with children who grow up healthy.
Two things before I go on. First I think that the reason why George on Seinfeld thinks that having an affair is adult is a generation gap thing. The generation gap didn't end with the 60s when all the hippies decided to go corporate.
I know. I know. I'm going to keep talking about tensions between Baby Boomers and "The Greatest Generation" with the "greatest generation" being a bunch of fuck ups who were scarred by a war that they had to approach with toxic positivity after it was over. The Great War. The big one. The best years of our lives. And oh yeah, no one is talking about it because they went through some fucking trauma.
So George thinking that an affair is adult is because the "greatest generation" was the last generation that thought that it was stuck in their marriages, so of course they had affairs. And that dumbass question "Why don't marriages last?" has an easy answer. THey don't have to. No one has to stay in a miserable marriage. So the Baby Boomers just got divorced and after the Baby Boom we can experiment. Group marriages, polyamory, monogamish, cuckolding, key parties, weird religious culty marriages, etc.
There was a second thing but I forgot it.
So this story is funny because Cheever has a narrator wondering what the fuck is wrong with this couple. When is the other shoe going to drop? Like maybe the war will tear them apart. Maybe she makes too much money. Maybe he will get drunk.
There's also a part where everyone wonders why neither husband nor wife has an affair. Yeah, that greatest generation cheated fits here (but most of the Cheever stories have infidelity and drinking). Were they prudes? Were they monogamous?
And their children - well they had some problems but they turned out ok. Sure the daughter ran off with a gardener's son and was pregnant when she married and the son was held back a year, but overall they were fine.
This is a slight story, which makes sense because it's a one joke story where the major point is that this is a happy couple so what the hell are they doing in a Cheever story? But it was what I needed after that damn bus story.
