Summary
The story begins with Blake, the protagonist, leaving his office in Manhattan at the end of the day. When he gets out of the elevator, he sees that a woman he knows is waiting for him. He avoids her and heads out onto the crowded, rainy sidewalk. Walking briskly towards Madison Avenue, he wonders why she was waiting for him. It occurs to him that she might be following him, but he doesn't want to turn around and look. He stops and looks into a store window, where a deserted living room is arranged as a decorator's or auctioneer's display. Suddenly, Blake notices her reflection very close to him in the window. He abruptly turns away and begins walking again.
All of a sudden he is afraid she might mean him harm. The physical sensations of the rain and the cold heighten his fear. He is comforted by the bright lights ahead on Madison Avenue; he enters a bakery to buy a coffee ring and exits through the other side door onto Madison Avenue. She is waiting for him there. He considers potential ways to lose her—calling a taxi, running, or perhaps heading underground. He thinks that she will be easy to shake. It is absurd to imagine her harming him on this busy street. He is cheered.
He enters a men's bar and orders a Gibson. The bar is crowded with other men having a drink before their commute home. He tries to remember her name, but is surprised to find that he can't. He remembers meeting her six months ago when he hired her to be his secretary. He wasn't much impressed with her appearance but he was willing to try her out. She told him after a few days that she had been in the hospital and was grateful to have found work. Her hair and eyes were dark and Blake got the impression that she was oversensitive and lonely. She seemed to imagine his life to be full of love and happiness. One day, she gave him a rose, and he threw it away because he didn't like roses. She was a good secretary, but the crudeness of her handwriting shocked him. It gave him the impression that some trauma had disturbed her consciousness. After three weeks, they stayed late at the office together and he went home with her.
Her room felt like a closet to him. She gave him a drink and changed into more comfortable clothes. He was confident there would be no consequences because of how timid and insecure she seemed. He usually picked women like this. When he put on his clothes again, she was crying but he was too comfortable to care. The next day at the office, he had personnel fire her. A few days later, she came to the office, asking to see him. He didn't let her in and hadn't seen her again until this evening.
After a second Gibson, Blake realizes he has missed the express train and will have to take the five-forty-eight local. He leaves the bar, forgetting his coffee ring, and walks to the station. At the station, he buys a paper and sits down on the river side of the half-full train. Blake is slender with brown hair and dresses in a customary fashion, without colors. His neighbors Mrs. Compton and Mr. Watkins are sitting nearby, but they do not speak. Mrs. Compton is a friend of Blake's wife, Louise, and as a result hears the details of their marital troubles.
Recently, Blake had come home to find no dinner on the table and instead, a half-empty bottle of gin. He immediately told Louise that he would not speak to her for two weeks, and marked it on the calendar. She could do nothing to stop him: her only attractions were physical and now that she was old, those were gone too. For the last nine years, their rooms had been separated by a bookshelf Blake had arranged there, a bookshelf with locked shelves so that his children couldn't see his books. It didn't seem strange to Blake that he and his wife were so estranged; this was the normal way between men and their wives, he thought.
Mr. Watkins is ignoring Blake because Blake's oldest son, Charlie, had recently befriended Mr. Watkins' son. He had begun to spend a lot of time at their house, even sleeping over, and it was affecting his dress and manners. Blake spoke to Mr. Watkins about it, and he took offense. But Mr. Watkins has long hair and a corduroy jacket, and his family are renters. It had to be done. The train's old, dark, and musty environment is comforting to Blake. The train begins moving, and Blake watches the landscape outside the windows change to industrial scenes.
Analysis
Like many of Cheever's protagonists, Blake represents the archetype of white male suburbia. He holds down a job as a corporate executive in Manhattan; he rides the commuter train in and out of the city each day; he owns a home in the New York City suburb of Shady Hill, the setting of many of Cheever's stories; and he has a wife and children, all while engaging in multiple affairs.
Yet the details of Blake's character set him apart from other, similar archetypal characters in Cheever's work. In "The Five-Forty-Eight," there is nothing sympathetic about Blake. His callous behavior towards Miss Dent, for example, demonstrates his lack of regard for other people. He is attracted to her insecurity, believing this will protect him from consequences. When he sleeps with her, and she cries, he ignores her. The next day, he fires her to keep things simple for himself, punishing her for an action they both committed. Later in the text, the details of Blake's home life make him appear even more grotesque. When he comes home to find his wife, Louise, drinking alone and presumably distraught, he wastes no time in punishing her by coldly circling a date on a calendar and vowing to not speak to her until that date arrives. He feels no remorse for these actions. Instead, he seems to believe that sexual harassment in the workplace and emotional abuse of his wife are constitutive of a normal life.
This concept of a normal life is very important to Blake. Like many other characters in Cheever's stories, Blake lives under the pressures of a world increasingly marked by factors of economic, social, and racial exclusion. He is preoccupied with behaving according to these norms. When he fires Miss Dent, he justifies his actions as "the only sensible thing" to do. When he nastily argues with Louise, it doesn't "seem remarkable" to him because it is what "every other man" does. He also dresses as if guided by the imaginary "existence of sumptuary laws." He looks down on his neighbor, Mr. Watkins, for breaking these very laws and living according to alternative rules. All of these details paint a picture of Blake as a man preoccupied with his image and social standing.
And yet for all Blake's striving to fit in, he is still an outsider. Blake's attention to the details of his appearance, for example, is a "protective" maneuver. This description suggests that Blake's social status is more insecure than he would like. Sure enough, the story soon reveals that Blake's idyllic suburban life fails to protect him. Trapped on the train with a murderous Miss Dent, Blake's neighbors ignore him. Perhaps Cheever was critiquing the suburbs for this malaise. As Timothy Aubry writes in John Cheever and the Management of Middlebrow Misery, "Suburbia doesn’t just exclude those outside its boundaries; it also excludes everyone living within the suburb... characters [feel] estranged from the suburban ideal they supposedly embody." Indeed, on one short ride of the five-forty-eight local, the very concept of the protective and secure neighborhood, so foundational to the American suburb, crumbles before our eyes.
As a result, Blake appears not just cruel, but also somewhat pathetic. In addition to his unexpected status as an outsider, he is also deeply sensitive. While walking on the streets of Manhattan, for example, he is hyperaware of the cold sensation of rain dripping down his back and the lights of Madison Avenue. His powers of observation suggest that while he may be cruel and unfeeling in the face of other people's suffering, he is also vulnerable to the world around him. Similarly, when he sees Miss Dent's reflection in the window on the street, he becomes oddly frightened. In that moment, he has the opportunity to confront her. His contempt for Miss Dent and his assessment of her insecurity might suggest that he would feel comfortable doing so. Instead, he panics and runs away. It appears that the old power dynamic between them no longer exists. The fact that it falls away so easily suggests that Blake's sense of power and self-importance were merely a facade, masking his true vulnerability. This half of the text concludes as that facade is about to be shattered by Miss Dent's arrival.
