The Five-Forty-Eight

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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....