She begs him to welcome Robert and chides him for having no friends, "period." She tells him that Robert's late wife was named Beulah, which he finds bizarre. The story jumps into its main action as the wife prepares dinner and the narrator glibly suggests taking Robert bowling.
They were interrupted by someone knocking, an interruption which pleased him. On it, he heard his own name spoken, a strange experience. She once asked the narrator to listen to one of Robert's tapes. She ended up throwing them up, but used the occasion to pursue a divorce, which was followed by her dating the narrator. They continued to exchange tapes as her life as an Air Force wife got lonelier and lonelier, until she finally tried to kill herself with pills. One year after leaving Seattle, she contacted Robert, and they thereafter began to exchange the tapes on which they would tell each other their deep secrets. The man she was waiting for in Seattle had been her "childhood sweetheart," and after they married, they lived a military life as he was transferred to bases. The narrator tells more of his wife's past. He admits he might not understand poetry. She showed it to the narrator when they started dating, but he didn't care for it. He ran his hands sensitively all over her face and neck, and the experience proved profound to the wife, who is an aspiring poet and has tried to memorialize his touch. On the last day she worked there, Robert (who the narrator continues to call "the blind man") asked to touch her face and she agreed. His wife had been living on the West coast with a man she was going to marry, and found Robert's ad seeking someone to read to him. They have kept in touch by mailing tapes to one another, on which each narrated his or her life in detail. The wife had worked briefly for Robert a decade before in Seattle. As the narrator and his wife live nearby, Robert arranged to visit, and is on his way. As the story begins, the narrator is troubled by the impending visit for reasons he can't quite explain, though he attributes it to Robert's disability.Īs the narrator explains, Robert's wife had died recently and so he was visiting her family in Connecticut. The old friend, Robert, is blind, which the narrator identifies as Robert's defining characteristic.
"Cathedral" is narrated by a man whose wife has invited an old friend to visit their home.
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