The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (15 page)

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The mystery of a gratifying sense of identity that I don’t recall experiencing in Europe. In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah—a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast,
spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing. Then I take a deep breath, stand up straight, and the loathsome image falls away. I am no better and no worse than the other members of the gathering. Indeed, I am myself. It is like a pleasant taste on the tongue.

Perhaps I had less time for self-consciousness abroad.

   I dream that I travel through the mountains in an express train and make love to a woman I have never seen. And the body is a fool, this flesh and bone is a fool; philandering, complaining, demanding, the gullible dupe of con men and subversive agencies, capricious, cowardly, the essence of inconstancy.

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Skating on the K.s’ pond last night after eating too much ham. Eight-thirty. Many stars. No moon. Orion’s sword and girdle brilliant and all the other constellations whose names I have forgotten or never knew. I am reminded of my youth and its skating ponds, of the ardor for strength, courage, and purpose excited in me then by the starlight. It is nearly the same. My feelings may be less ardent, the stars seem to burn more tenderly these days, but my openmouthed delight in finding them hung above the dark ice is no less.

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Parties on Friday and Saturday, and on Sunday we take a walk. The wind off the river is very cold, but in sheltered places where the sun shines we can smell the earth and leaves and oh, I am very happy with all of this, the valley, my wife, my children, and the sky. And then I think of secrets and mysteries, those forms that lie way below our commonest worries. What is the sexual longing I feel when I step out of a railroad station onto the streets of a city where I am unknown? What sort of tenderness is it that I seem to need so passionately that my common sense is damaged? What is this mysterious need? In a crowded Roman trolley car at closing time on a winter night, someone touches me by chance on the shoulder. I do not turn to see who it is and I will never know if it was a man or a woman, a tart or a priest, but the gentle touch excites in me such longing for a sort of helpful tenderness that I sigh; my knees are weak. This is not a violet-flavored sigh or a Chopinesque longing; it is as coarse and real as the hair on my belly.

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By lewdness I mean just that: raised petticoats in kitchens and back stairs and long afternoons in bed when the sheets smell like the lagoons of Venice; but if my hands tremble with desire they tremble likewise when I reach for the chalice on Sunday, and if lust makes me run and caper it is no stronger a force than that which brings me to my knees to say thanksgivings and litanies. What can this capricious skin be but a blessing?

   In the morning I am tired and go into town. The sky is dark. It is raining. I walk around the streets near Times Square and look at the photographs on display of some ballroom hostesses. The first is not young, forty I should say or more, a motherly sort for a lonely sailor. A few loose strands of hair lie along her neck. She wears draperies to display the promise of her voluminous, soft, warm, and un-young front and gives to the camera the smile of a good-natured drudge. Another has marked Italian features, her front tightly corseted—two gleaming globes. Another reminds me of a childhood friend: adventurous, a horsewoman, much married, presently an alcoholic. Here are the same heavy brows, the light hair, the same look of freshness and desperateness. One wears a little gauze, her shoulders bare, and holds her breasts in her hands and she is the most touching of all, for she is bewildered. Since this seems to be what is expected of her, this is what she will do, and the face seems so immature that she cannot be credited with conscious regrets, but bewilderment, yes. She had, in her bones, expected something very different. “Which one you like best?” a man asks me. He carries a piece of pastry and a paper container of coffee.

I answer him cheerfully, but I think the romantic image of the prostitute today, in this country, this rainy morning, is indecent.

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Feeling poorly. The beating of my heart seems strained. I cough blood. My reflexes are slow. We go unwilling to a P.E.N. party. Driving into New York through a rainy dusk, the clouds in the west colored orange from the discharge of industrial waste; and I think of Rome, the tragedy of her incompetence at coping with the problems of a modern city—smoke and traffic—for who could ever explain to Luigi that he should not burn waste in his stove? At the party I meet M., a young admirer who seems to be his mother’s boy, and I think of how creative
such a relationship between us might be, but then I think that in this country it is colored with suspicion and anxiety, beginning with my own.

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And who are all these friends who seem so strange to us? The gamine. The man who puts on smoked glasses to walk through the rain and the dusk. The stiff man aboard ship with the phony English accent and the checked coat. The woman who complains of her husband’s impotence at a cocktail party. The man who drinks to refresh his bitterness. The pig. Forget them.

The most wonderful thing about life seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction. We may desire it, it may be what we dream of, but we are dissuaded by a beam of light, a change in the wind.

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Housework seems trivial, but for what it means. One of my greatest difficulties with women has turned on this. It begins with my grandmother. When she, through some breakdown in service or finance, was obliged to wash the dishes, the men of my family suffered. It was our fault that she, a distinguished, wellborn, and intelligent woman, was bent over a dishpan. If we offered to help, she would wave us away; but we had failed her, not only as providers but as men. The same was true of my mother. When she was obliged to do housework and wash dishes, the sense was always that she had been martyred by the inadequacy, the stupidity of the male sex. Why was this distinguished and intelligent woman suffered to wield a carpet sweeper? It was because her sons and her husband were next to worthless. I used to take the carpet sweeper away from her; I used to wash the dishes; but it never quite repaired the damage. The sense of guilt was always there.

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We recognize the force of the mystery that keeps us from wrongdoing, but what do we do when this force collapses: when the scale is tipped for evil? The scale is weighted, we know, with blue sky, common sense, and the breathing of our children while they sleep, but why, while we sleep, should it plunge downward?

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Sitting on the platform of the Institute, I see the famous movie actress in the audience. I give her a big eye and think I may get something in return but perhaps I kid myself. She wears a black dress, her front can be seen, a small gold cross. The feeling, whatever it may be worth, is of devastation. I am smitten. Here, I think, is the face that launched a thousand ships. For this pale hair, boys and grown men with families will run away from home. The crowing of a sweet child, the pleas of a lovely woman, the comforts of the hearth, the endearments of our grown children; nothing will matter. But this is no sloe-eyed, sinuous beauty. I am captivated by what seems to be the perfect sweetness in her face, and this through the long and tiresome citations, the heat, does not change at all. Later I see her on the stairs in a stronger light. The paleness of her hair is a dye and her face is painted. And in the still stronger light of day a little more is lost. But she still seems wonderful: a truly pretty woman.

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Read “The Deer Park” and tossed it into the fire. Much better than most of what I’ve been reading, although I think he imitates Saul or I imitate Saul or he imitates me. I have written first-person slang long before “Augie March” appeared and I’m not sure who began it but there has been enough of this carefree fellow. Of the principal character Elena, I know only that she is sloppy and depraved. This is not enough. I don’t necessarily hold with my kind of old-fashioned fiction, but if you throw it out you have to pick up something else. The candor does not concern me, but I sometimes wonder where he stands—as a participant or as a voyeur. There is this danger. The climactic writing seems to me not eloquent enough. But he seems to me an estimable man.

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A hassle. For four or five days such tenderness as I have to offer has been refused. Mary especially
maldisposta
on Saturday. While we are dressing P.B. enters and begins to strum the piano. “Doesn’t it sound nice?” Mary says sweetly. It does not. He is the kind of pianist who, should you hear him from the next room, you would swear was playing with his feet. She seems pleased to see him, or perhaps her displeasure with me is lessened. On Sunday I am all love and tendernes
but no soap. On Monday I quit this sullen task at three and, having a bellyache, take a Martini, and then my son for a stroll. He seems fair and strong to me: what we mean by life. At dinner I reproach Susie for eating butter with a fork.

“Shut up,” says she.

“Leave the table,” say I.

She does. Presently I suggest that if she would like to apologize she may come in and eat her strawberries.

“Let’s you and I go to the movies,” says Mary when she returns. Susie does not deserve to go to the movies because of her incivility to the master. I take my son for another walk. It has cleared at last. It is a summer evening, one of the few we’ve had this year. The light lies golden on the grass and warm. We walk. He picks weeds and eats them. I speak to him dolefully, as I used to speak to the dog. It seems that I have walked on these paths, this grass, under these trees too often, looking to the color of the sky, a chance star, or a flower for some understanding of my wife’s distempers. I have done this so often that it seems now I am tired—my considered choice of word with all its connotations of collapsed vitality. It seems that I must contest, not with the facts of our marriage, our relationship, but with the facts of some incident in her childhood that was enacted years before we met. I think of the rainy afternoon when her father lacerated her with a belt. I think of her early years’ having been lived near to his irascibility, his gifts for cruelty, and that she will never be requited with a tranquil life. She needs love, yes, but it seems that she also needs its opposite to feel alive: that her equilibrium depends upon an unusual degree of nastiness. It seems that in all these years of marriage I have been the merest visitor, stopping in after lunch on some rainy day in her childhood, but Mother and Father are expected at five and I will go away. I get angry. I speak passionately to my son, who does not understand a word and only makes sweet sounds of pleasure at the sight of the evening.

I stay away until they have gone to the movie and then, meanly, think of them eating popcorn in the gray light and watching the romantic misfortunes of Marjorie Morningstar. I grow angrier and angrier, and why should my emotions take such a violent turn? Nothing important has happened. I have mustered a sense of humor for much more trying situations. But I cannot control my ill temper, it mounts like a fire. The boy goes to bed and I follow him, but my mind still spins aroun
her intractableness, her obtuseness, and my lack of patience. Her approach to the children—I think—is often more wayward and perverse than loving. She showers them with presents, but the kind of loving and intelligent discipline I think they need is, I think, beyond her. I grow so excited that I take a sleeping pill, but as soon as I fall asleep the baby begins to cry. Walking him in the bedroom I think, how meanly, of Mary weeping childish tears over the disappointments of Marjorie Morningstar. I think I will write a rebuttal to the California poets: something in defense of the genteel tradition, something about sitting in a broken rocking chair in a remodelled toolshed where I make my living writing stories about the country-club set. But it seems that I have neither the wit nor the substance to write such a piece, and the idea does not afford me the escape from anger that I sincerely want. When the baby has fallen asleep I take another sleeping pill and just as I am about to fall asleep Mary comes up the stairs. “My God, here she comes!” I exclaim angrily. Then when she says that she enjoyed the movie I say, with shocking nastiness, that she is like the heroine, she is like Marjorie Morningstar. Now my heart is pounding so that I take a third sleeping pill and I am so angry that hateful, physical violence is in my plans. I will strangle her. So I compose myself and go to sleep.

Sitting on the toilet in the morning I am unforgiving: I have had it, I repeat to myself, and get into the garbage pail of a contemplated divorce. I don’t want a divorce; I want things to be exactly as they were, there having been much more good than bad in the relationship; I don’t want to part with my children and I suspect that I don’t want to part with the comforts of my home, a place where I can count on warm meals and company. I am afraid of living in hotel rooms and eating in cafeterias, and this seems to reflect on my courage. I am much too attached to cut flowers, to holding a seashell to my son’s ear to see the intent look on his face, to the smell of peonies (oh how brief) in the stairwell. But is it wrong for a man to make a house, a place where he can return in the evening? Is it wrong to avoid the venereal ghosts in cheap hotel rooms and the odd sticks who share your table at the Automat? I don’t want to make a life with my bachelor friends or be a dog in the households of the married people I know, bringing a bottle of wine for dinner or a present for the child. I don’t want my taste for domestic comforts to involve meanness or fear of the world, although I doubt that I can cope, with the equanimity and calm I cherish, with an empty hotel room.
This may all come to nothing. I would like it that way. Angry, I think: I will not drive her to New Hampshire. And at the bottom of this, I suppose, is some mean petulance, some wish to punish her. This is followed by an extensive digression on the subject of her car. I don’t want to drive her to New Hampshire if she is in a bad humor is what I seem to mean. But I expect that, for the trip, she will put herself into a charming frame of mind. In any case, I should not think in terms of nasty punishments. I hesitate to justify myself by saying that I have been forced into such a frame of mind, but if I am that susceptible, that easily moved in the wrong direction, that fault is mine.