"Brimmer" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Satyr on a Cruise Ship

“We see the faces of our dearly beloved friends and relations rubbed out by distance, and going over to the port deck to make a profoundly emotional farewell to the New York Skyline we find the buildings hidden in the rain.”

A man meets an old satyr on an ocean liner. Brimmer is not merely a man, but a creature of legend, a satyr who once lived in the hidden paths and mountains, but now inhabits heteropic spaces where all the rule of society exist but are suspended. Heterotopic spaces can include Renaissance Festivals after hours or science fiction conventions where one's encyclopedic knowledge of My Little Pony or Babylon 5 is welcome.

The narrator meets Brimmer on the most traditional heterotopia - the ocean liner. Before Las Vegas, the traditional place to drink all you want, eat endless shrimp platters and have sex with strangers was the ocean liner. Even today, “singles cruises” promise debauchery along with ocean view. On international waters, all bets are off. You could swap spouses and play shuffleboard. The engines could catch fire. You might be stranded in the middle of nowhere waiting for rescue before the food runs out. New friends puke on you. A fellow passenger could die and his body moved to the drink cooler where it rapidly decomposes.

The narrator is on the last voyage of this particular ship. Sightseers have stolen the ashtrays. Everything else is tied down. The lifeboats are damaged and the ship is rocking too much to actually sleep. He calls it a tub. As far as he's concerned, it's damnation on high seas.

“They began to play that morning and they played for the rest of the voyage and they played for no one. They played day and night to those empty rooms where the chairs were screwed to the floor. They played opera. They played old dance music. They played selections from Show Boat.”

Other Cheever stories flirt with the mystical. GG of “The Scarlet Moving Van” is probably Bacchus. In “Torch Song,” Joan could be a malignant witch or simply a woman attracted to self-destructive men. Brimmer is a satyr and Cheever's protagonist goes to great lengths to explain why he's the satyr of legend - an older satyr, no longer one of those “pretty boys with long ear.” He has a lined face and a conspicuous tail. His legs are crossed in satyr pose and instead of grapes, he is always holding wine.

Cheever does not mention, but he assumes that the reader knows, that satyrs are almost always depicted with massive erections. They are either masturbating or rushing to poke into someone or something. Brimmer is just as comfortable in a distant mountain or woodlands as he is in a lonely ship where ping pong tables fly overboard and you can't even play cards. Brimmer enjoys his ocean voyage by putting that erection to use.

“She and Brimmer had only met by chance that morning and what carnal anarchy would crack the world if all such chance meetings were consummated! If they had waited a day or two – long enough to give at least the appearance of founding their affair on some romantic or sentimental basis – I think I would have found it more acceptable.”

Mme Troyan was witty and beautiful with lines around her eyes. The narrator obviously admires her as a charming brilliant woman. He fondly recalls her dark hair and her white arms and thinks about how her company would be pleasant. That's before he hears her sex moans in the next cabin. Sadly, the narrator is next to Brimmer's cabin so he can't even pretend that Brimmer isn't making the beast with two backs.

Even funnier is the fact that he is in bed when he first hears the couple. Without telling us, he gets up and goes to listen at the wall. We know that he does this because as he's whining about the indecency of it all (“they were both, in a sense, European”) he falls on his face. He definitely didn't roll out of bed, because he admits to tripping and falling as he hears those “faint sounds of tenderness” (as well as the ship's motors.

Our perspective character is a thoroughly puritan, constantly attempting to salvage the shock of traveling with a horny other-worldly beast. The next day, he sees Brimmer and Mme Troyan in the bar and tries to imagine regret. He even suggests a Bridge game, but they make excuses to go back to the cabin and bunny rabbit away. They do not feel regret. He takes a long walk to avoid sex sounds. He drinks with an Episcopalian clergyman who speaks of his parish that is full of alcoholism and promiscuity.

Portugal inspires rapturous descriptions of the clouds and villas for of catboats and fishing nets. Everyone on the ship truly enjoys the scenery, everyone except for Brimmer, who is too busy having sex in his cabin to come out. Truly the funniest way to express jealousy is to pretend that your mountain view is superior to any cum-soaked antics enjoyed by your new friend/mortal enemy/demonic rival. Who needs orgasms when you can smell the shallows?

“When we left Gibraltar, the potted palms were retired again, the lines were put up, and the ship's orchestra begin to play. It remained rough and dreary.”

Mme Troyan disembarks at Gibraltar to see her husband and children. So Brimmer again joins our hero for a drink at the bar. Swiftly, Brimmer grows bored of his talk of Nantucket (home of the man with a dick so long he could suck it) and wanders over to the “Roman” businesswoman and her personal assistant. Oh the injustice. The narrator finally gets Brimmer back as a drinking buddy, and before he can have one conversation, Brimmer is already seducing a woman with a guttural voice and vulgar eyes and no humanity whatsoever.

The nameless narrator really doesn't like this woman.

And that's before he finds out that she's a screamer. As Brimmer and the businesswoman have loud bumping sex next door, our poor narrator is expressing his moral superiority. “It is difficult to be a man, I think,” he says at one point, “but the difficulties are not insuperable. Yet if we relax our vigilance for a moment we pay an exorbitant price.”

He sounds like the least credible purity ring wearing youth pastor.

Having convinced himself that Brimmer is hate-fucking the Roman businesswoman and not having the fun that he's obviously having, the narrator goes out to seek better dinner companions, like the boring German businessman. Or the insufferable Southern family. He even talks to the bartender at one point.

“...any such indulgence on my part would, I was sure, turn my hair white in a moment, destroy the pigmentation in my eyes, incline me to simper, and leave a hairy tail coiled in my pants.”

Even after the cruise ends, the protagonist remains with Brimmer. Brimmer's wife (“a leggy blonde”) offers him a ride to Florence, with stops in Rome and Terracina for lunch. Just in case you didn't get that Brimmer is a supernatural satyr, Assisi rebels against his presence with storms and winds and dark clouds. The group takes shelter in a duomo but the moment Brimmer enters the sacristy, a window explodes and the candles go out. St. Francis' birthplace only regains peace when Brimmer leaves.

Even as the narrator is back with his family, Brimmer bothers him. First, there's the blonde writing to tell him that Brimmer is dying. The wife assumes that he's Brimmer's best friend even though he barely knows him. That fills him with pompous self-regard - “My wife is lovely, lovely were my children and lovely that scene, and how dead he and his dirty words seemed in the summer light” - as he reads the clippings sent along with the imminent death notice - satires about toilets, a prayer and a ballad of a sexually promiscuous man named Jeremy.

The narrator has maybe a page to revel in his puritanism, remembering the bells and brackish water and grandfather's bathing shoes, before discovering that Brimmer is indeed alive. Spearfishing with his son, he finds a magazine underwater. Brimmer's picture is there, smiling, his arm wrapped around his new wife, holding a drink.

“I go up to the surface, shake the water out of my hair, and think that I am worlds away from home.”

In case, it's not obvious, I love this story. I never quite knew that I needed a story about a puritanical scold encountering a satyr until now.

I definitely need work (not enough of you guys are getting paid subscriptions), so if you need to revise your resume or edit your manuscript

Here’s a website about traditional satyr mythology.

I FINALLY got my fair hearing for SNAP, but I don’t know how it’s going to go and I still need to pay my rent even if I will be able to buy food by the end of the month, so if you don’t want to commit to a paid subscription but still like me, please consider donating to my gofundme.