“The Fourth Alarm” was originally published in the April 1970 issue of Esquire. It was collected in The World of Apples (1973). It is currently most readily available in Cheever's Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America).

The opening is, happily, vintage Cheever—informal and intimate, deliberate and forthcoming—a paragraph that says, apart from its exposition, that here, fellow citizens, is the story we need to hear today: “I sit in the sun drinking gin. It is ten in the morning. Sunday. Mrs. Uxbridge is off somewhere with the children. Mrs. Uxbridge is the housekeeper. She does the cooking and takes care of Peter and Louise.” Not much, to be sure, to fret over, the early tippling notwithstanding. Not a hint of a shootout or the comparably melodramatic to and fro we might elsewhere hanker for. Nothing, in brief, but what Truman Capote called the “gossip” that is literature, the secrets—always dirty, always dire—that we'd rather the world did not know but which are, with only polite apologies to Chekhov, the true engine that makes fiction go. So hold on, for there is more: Our narrator, still another of Cheever's amused and slightly bent men, has a mistress, Mrs. Smithson, who is “seldom in the mood these days,” and a wife, Bertha, formerly a sixth-grade social studies teacher but now an actress in an all-nude Equity extravaganza called Ozamanides II. Yes, he is a gentleman of more than considerable means whose world, once meet with touch football and Dubonnet, has gone perplexingly (and fetchingly) cockeyed.

Though some might argue, even “correctly,” that Cheever's story does not start in proper until the night, some thousand words or more deep into the tale, when Bertha tells our narrator that she has been cast in a production in which “She would be expected to simulate or perform copulation twice during the performance and participate in a love pile that involved the audience,” I am here to say that, in part, the vexing of our critical expectations with respect to structure reflects the confounding of our narrator's expectations with respect to his heretofore settled and conventional world. “Oh, how wonderful and rich and strange life can be,” Bertha tells him, “when you stop playing out the roles that your parents and their friends wrote out for you. I feel like an explorer.”