英语读物：游泳者.pdfVIP

The Library of America • Story of the Week From J ohn Chee er: Collected Stories Other Writing s (The Library of America, 2009), pages 726–737. Originally published in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964. Reprinted in The Brig adier and the Golf Widow (1964) and in The Stories of J ohn Chee er (1978). Copyright © 1978 by John Cheever. Used by permission of Alfred A . Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. The Swimmer t was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits I around saying, “I drank too much last night.” ou might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the estiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. “I drank too much,” said Donald Westerhazy. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill. “It must have been the wine,” said Helen Westerhazy. “I drank too much of that claret.” This was at the edge of the Westerhazys’ pool. The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance— from the bow of an approaching ship— that it might have had a name. Lisbon. Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy Merrill sat by the green w ater, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was a slender man— he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth— and while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his dining room. He might have been com- pared to a summer’s day, p