The Five-Forty-Eight by John Cheever

Next stop, Shady Hill!

If you ask me, the adulterer in Five-Forty-Eight by John Cheever gets off way too easy, but that seems to be intentional. Blake is a successful businessman who fires his secretary, Miss Dent, after he has a one-night stand with her. When he suspects she’s stalking him after work one evening, he takes several detours through the city to shake her off. Convinced he’s finally in the clear, he boards the train home to Shady Hill (hence the title), only to realize that she’s right there in the same car, a gun hidden in her handbag and aimed straight at him. This premise has all the machinations of a classic thriller or a film-noir with Miss Dent stepping into the role of  the femme fatale, but this isn't that kind of story.

Blake is selfish, smug, and utterly indifferent to the damage he leaves in his wake. He uses people, discards them, and moves on without a second thought. His former secretary, Miss Dent, isn’t so lucky. She’s been left shattered, both emotionally and mentally, and now she’s come back to confront him about his immoral actions. An impressive aspect of this story is how Cheever slowly builds towards this tense, psychological showdown without ever tipping into melodrama. This isn’t really a revenge fantasy; it’s something more unsettling. Miss Dent doesn’t want to kill Blake. She wants him to understand what he’s done, to experience, even for a brief moment, the helplessness and humiliation she felt after being used for his own sexual gratification and then tossed aside like garbage. In a way, she succeeds during the final showdown by forcing him down into the dirt, leaving him shaken, powerless, exposed. But then… what? The train moves on, life goes on, and there’s no grand reckoning. Just the lingering sense that Blake will probably return to his old promiscuous ways, completely unchanged by the experience.

That’s what makes Cheever’s stories so different from his contemporaries like Flannery O'Connor or John Updike. He rarely offers dramatic epiphanies or neatly resolved endings. Instead, they function as portraits—snapshots of people at specific moments in their lives, often during times of crisis or moral failing. Rather than leading his characters to deep self-awareness or redemption, Cheever simply observes them, revealing their flaws, desires, and contradictions with a keen, almost voyeuristic eye.

His stories act as windows into lives in motion, capturing characters mid-stream, with histories behind them and uncertain futures ahead. Whether it’s marital dissatisfaction, suburban ennui, or in this case, a fleeting brush with humiliation, these conflicts don’t necessarily change them. Instead, Cheever leaves us with the disconcerting truth that people rarely change. They continue down their chosen paths, often indifferent to those they hurt, driven by self-interest rather than reflection or growth. This lack of transformation in these characters makes his stories feel all the more realistic and poignant.