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Fiction
APRIL 10, 1954 ISSUE
The Five-Forty-Eight
BY JOHN CHEEVER
ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN MURADOV
W
hen Blake stepped out of the elevator, he
saw her. A few people, mostly men
waiting for girls, stood in the lobby watching the
elevator doors. She was among them. As he saw
her, her face took on a look of such loathing and
purpose that he realized she had been waiting for
him. He did not approach her. She had no
legitimate business with him. They had nothing to
say. He turned and walked toward the glass doors
at the end of the lobby, feeling that faint guilt and bewilderment we experience when
we bypass some old friend or classmate who seems threadbare, or sick, or miserable in
some other way. It was five-eighteen by the clock in the Western Union office. He
could catch the express. As he waited his turn at the revolving doors, he saw that it
was still raining. It had been raining all day, and he noticed now how much louder the
rain made the noises of the street. Outside, he started walking briskly east toward
Madison Avenue. Traffic was tied up, and horns were blowing urgently on a
crosstown street in the distance. The sidewalk was crowded. He wondered what she
had hoped to gain by a glimpse of him coming out of the office building at the end of
the day. Then he wondered if she was following him.
Walking in the city, we seldom turn and look back. The habit restrained Blake. He
listened for a minute—foolishly—as he walked, as if he could distinguish her
footsteps from the worlds of sound in the city at the end of a rainy day. Then he
noticed, ahead of him on the other side of the street, a break in the wall of buildings.
Something had been torn down; something was being put up, but the steel structure
had only just risen above the sidewalk fence and daylight poured through the gap.
Blake stopped opposite here and looked into a store window. It was a decorator’s or an
auctioneer’s....