The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (17 page)

   My brother, when he got offensively drunk here and when I reproached him later, used to say that he only wanted to educate his neighbors, but he did come into our comfortable house where our attachments are, as a rule, tranquil and affectionate, like a blast, a thunderclap of obscene misery, a man utterly unable to cope with the problems of his life, deaf to every appeal, his mind, his sentiments, and his body ravaged with alcohol, a stupid and impenetrable smile on his face, and in his heart a determination to destroy himself. And I think of the pleasures of our life together when we were young: hockey games on the ice pond, Emerson’s Pond, snowball fights, walks on beaches, rides on summer nights in the old roadster, high purpose, high spirit,
clowning and love. Now he is so drunk that he cannot walk from the chair to the table and when he gets there he can’t eat. He falls into a drunken sleep. He thinks the fault is hers. He wanted to leave at two and play touch football as we used to on Thanksgiving, but she delayed and delayed, she took two hours to dress, she denied him his touch-football game, this simple pleasure, and while he waited he got drunk. The fault is his, we all have to wait, but why in God’s name does she lead him into destruction?

•

Lunch at the Plaza. Truman Capote is in the men’s bar. His bangs are dyed yellow, his voice is girlish, his laughter is baritone, and he seems to be a conspicuous male cocotte. This must take some doing, but on the other hand it must be a very limited way of moving through life. He seems to excite more curiosity than intolerance. Almost everyone these days drinks a special brand of gin—Beefeater, House of Lords, Lamplighter—and vodka. I hear the orders come over the bar. The bartender calls to a handsome Italian waiter and they disappear into a broom closet, to straighten out their racetrack bets, I hope. But to someone familiar with a rigorous and a simple way of life these scenes might seem decadent and final, like those lavish and vulgar death throes of the Roman Empire that we see in the movies.

•

Waiting in a basement corridor of the Saratoga Hospital to have a chest X-ray I feel very tired and wonder when I will feel well again. It seems now that all my life is false—jerry-built—the structure is of the wrong design and set in the wrong place. What, I think, are the rewards of virtue? Respiratory infections, ulcers, and night sweats? Is it cant to turn from whiskey and debauchery and speak of the holiness, the dignity of life? But there it is, a most solemn and beautiful process. Here are our powers of foolish debasement. I deny myself to be myself.

Either because I am convalescent or hung over or because of the lights in this room, its remoteness and the heat from its radiators, I do not seem to find what I want. What I want is blue sky—some robustness, some escape from this perpetual half fever. Skiing on the lawn I seem to come close to it, some opening of the mind, some way of embracin
the world—the lightness, vitality, and movement that the prose I’ve been writing lacks.

•

Finish “The Music Teacher” today. Walk into town. The grandiose architecture along Union Avenue. The spectacle of an American small town on a winter’s day. Its stratified past, the rise of ground at the railroad crossing, the new bowling alley with a vestibule shaped like a tenpin, the faint flavor of England that hovers over the Episcopal church, dance music pouring out of the supermarket, the very fat dispatcher at the cabstand, her hair dyed and her face painted for some rendezvous, this plaintive, this complex and moving landscape of love and change. The high-school girls, their eyes mascaraed, their voices loud, their ways bold, followed by a pack of crotch-hitching boys.

•

“The Hill Town” finished and off and all right, I guess, although a little intense. On Saturday I feel fine; feel like myself at last. But Mary seems to me unhappy. Every surface and angle of life seems to frustrate and irritate her. She swears at the turkey and she swears at the mashed potatoes. I am in high spirits and contented with the children and the better I feel the more conscious am I of her unhappiness. After church I make a crude and foolish remark and there is a shower of tears. And I think that I cannot repair this again, there is nothing that I can do or say. I am not concerned any longer with my own happiness; I am concerned with protecting the children. After lunch we go skating at the B.s’. The ice is nearly a foot thick, black here and there, with stones and branches showing. The sky is a winter sky, a little overcast. The dogs are barking. I go up and down the pond, up and down, chasing a piece of wood with an old hockey stick, and I am very happy. This is my sanctuary, this is my pleasure. The ice rumbles and thunders. The wind sweeps off the little powder we have cut with our skates. It is cold. How I love this: the bare landscape, the color in the willows, the exertion, and the memories of a game. How far I am from the Borghese Gardens.

•

I dislike writing here about booze-fighting, but I must do something about it. A friend comes to call. In my anxiety to communicate, to feel
the most in warmth and intimacy, I drink too much, which can be two drinks these days. In the morning I am deeply depressed, my insides barely function, my kidney is painful, my hands shake, and walking down Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself. It is ten o’clock now and I am thinking of the noontime snort.

•

A dark day, the trees covered with ice and bent with the weight of ice.

“Poor Susie had to walk to the train,” says Mary.

“I am very sorry,” say I, “I would have driven her had I known.”

“Ha,”
says Mary.

“Please don’t talk like that,” I say. “It isn’t necessary.” But the damage is done. Gloom is universal. There is, to be said against myself, my fear of impotence; I may not be able to possess her. And there is the chance that she might do or say something that would make possession impossible. I have no taste for brutality. Love for me is love. It seems to me that she is unhappy, that she seeks the cause of this unhappiness in our marriage, and that it lies in some much earlier time of life. But that she cannot, quite understandably, face this.

•

Re my unpleasant remarks this morning, Mary absents herself at lunch with the baby and the dog. There is no note, no explanation. Although the valley is full of fog and the driving is bad, I am not terribly anxious. I drink whiskey and rail loudly to the kitchen walls. The gist of my remarks seems to be petulant. But what is the most reasonable and creative course to take? Things will fester if I don’t mention her absence. I will mention it calmly. I have no stomach for a quarrel.

Re the above: I am far from calm. My voice quakes with anger. “Where were you?” No answer. “Where were you and the baby?” She had gone to visit an old dressmaker she once employed in the city who has now married a lawyer and settled in the suburbs: a queer woman,
it always seemed to me, bony, shrill, and vulgar, with a Pekinese at her shins. At five I make a series of cocktails and wind an armature with Ben. He is not tremendously interested in electrical motors. What a nice father I am! How wise and patient. How many things I have constructed for him; how many more than most fathers. Mary goes off to sing, the baby goes to sleep in despair, and we three sit down contentedly to read; Ben reads “Tommy Titmouse,” Susie reads “The Turn of the Screw,” and I read Dante. When Mary returns I am very distant and cool. I read some more—wool-gather, to tell the truth—take a bath, make a curt good night, and sleep. The pump in the basement wakes me at half past three, my kidney aches, and my mouth is dry and sour. I go out to see if the cellar is flooded, but not yet. In the bathroom I smoke a cigarette and my anger at Mary’s having lunched with a dressmaker seems trivial and childish. How could I have got myself into such a rage? I am deeply and painfully ashamed. But then I rally in self-defense. I am not vegetative. I am easily upset. Why, then, invent ways of damaging my equilibrium? The pump grinds on and on and by half past seven, when I shave for church (Ash Wednesday), I seem to have committed in the space of eight hours the sins of anger, pride (what a marvellous father!), carnal self-admiration (what a flat stomach!), lustful fancies, and drunken sloth. In church the Epistle is majestic but my mind wanders. Now a clearing wind has sprung out of the northwest. I will think about Hell and the family.

•

For the record: On Valentine’s, I give Mary a string of pearls; she gives me a dish. I like china but I would have preferred a suit of underdrawers with hearts on it. I do not claim my pearls; I go to sleep before she comes to bed. I think tonight this fortress is not worth the assault, siege, ladder work, and sometimes broadsword fighting that might be involved. On Saturday we got to the K.s’ for drinks before lunch and I was very happy to be out of my own house. I think I will have an affair. Whom will it harm? Everybody from the infant in the cradle to the old gentleman in retirement in Daytona. But my own house seems dark and darkened by distempers and I do not have the strength or will to overtake them. I feel, most painfully, the lack of tenderness. This involves two things: the lack, and my inability to dress it with humor and love. Susie returns late from town and I am pleased to talk
with her. This was all I wanted. But I drink too much and in the morning my liver is painful. We go off to lunch at Z.’s, and sitting in this pleasant room with pleasant people I am at a hundred-percent loss. I can make the gestures, the noises, I can move from the chair where I drink to the chair at the table, but my mind and my spirit are in chaos. Randy at four, I go to bed alone at half past eight with a scalded liver. And lying in bed I lie in great fear of death: death as chaos; death as a force that exposes all the incompleteness in my work—stories half told or untold; journeys only begun; my sons not yet men.

•

And in my makeup there seems to be some kind of knot, some hard-shell and insoluble element that, as far as I can see, conforms to social usage and custom and contradicts the hankerings and declarations of my flesh. It has, I should say, functioned creatively; has made of my life a web of creative tensions. But today it matters less. Its threats, I know, are hollow. Since I am indebted to this mysterious persuasion, perhaps we can live as friends.

•

To Princeton on the three o’clock. The unrolling of this industrial landscape, powerful and ugly; but this is where they manufacture your vaginal jellies and your shoe trees, your inner tubes and your floor varnish, your girdles and your shingles, and if we demand so much how can we complain about industrial devastation? Princeton seems to me both tranquil and highly expensive. We seem much farther south. The ponds are stained with the streak of red dirt that runs south through Pennsylvania into Georgia. Distant chimes. Well-dressed youth. O’Hara comes to tea and I find him a fine gentleman but I run up against the old feeling that in the end I will turn out not to be varsity. In the final judgment it will be discovered that I eat my peas off a knife and that there is a hole in the seat of my pants. I speak to an audience of not much more than twelve. On the previous evening, three Beat Generation poets, one of them an advocate of buggery, drew a crowd of hundreds. But I am not very well known and may never be. Home again, pleased to see the landscape touched, oh so lightly, with the spring, and then once more the force and hideousness of the industrial stretches and the great marshes with their outcroppings of stone, their broken hoarding,
their tall grasses, a last sanctuary for the criminal, the pursued, the last natural hiding place in this part of the world.

•

Easter Eve: dyeing eggs and stuffing the turkey, all pleasant. Easter morning sunny and cool. To church with Susie and Ben. The church for once is full. I am delighted to hear that Christ is risen. I think that it is not against God’s will to have my generative powers refreshed by the face of a pretty woman in a forward pew or to wonder about the hairy and somehow limpid young man on my left. It is the combination of hairiness and wistful grace that seems to mark him. When I hear that Mary found at the tomb a man in white raiment I am incredulous. It is hard for me to believe that God expressed His will, His intent in such a specific image. But when I go to the altar I am deeply moved. The chancel is full of lilies and their fragrance seems as fresh as it is heavy; a sign of good cheer. And that this message should have been revealed to us and that we should cherish it seems to be our finest triumph. Here in the chancel we glimpse some vision of transcendent love, some willing triumph over death and all of its lewd guises. And if it is no more than willingness, how wonderful that is in itself. Walk with my youngest son in the sun. How my whole love of life seems to gather around his form; how he fills me with the finest ambitions. Birds sing. There is a little shimmer of heat. The moment of darkness is gone. He throws sticks into the water, which is a perfectly clear, shallow, and rippled scarf of light. He shuffles through the old leaves.

Later we go to the B.s’ for the Easter-egg hunt; but I am smitten suddenly with shyness, my smile is strained, my sensibilities are inflamed, I am round-shouldered and bent-necked and dreary and nothing but a pint of bourbon will straighten me out. I count on painkillers until ten, when I retire and, half asleep—courage, lustiness, cleanliness, love, charity, strength, industry, intelligence, vision—I recount to myself a dozen times those virtues I admire.

•

B. tells me Fred is suffering from something that happened to him before his adolescence and I think it may have been my birth. I have tried for years to uncover the turning point in his life but this had neve
occurred to me. This is a clinical or a quasi-scientific disclosure, but it seems to me as rich as any other revelation. I can readily imagine it all. He was happy, high-spirited, and adored, and when, at the age of seven, he was told that he would have to share his universe with a brother, his forebodings would, naturally, have been bitter and deep. They would have been deepened by the outrageous circumstances of my birth. I was conceived mistakenly, after a sales banquet. My mother carried me reluctantly and my father must have been heard to say that he had no love in his heart for another child. These violent scenes must have given great breadth and intensity to his own conflicts. His feeling for me was always violent and ambiguous—hatred and love—and beneath all of this must have been the feeling that I challenged him in some field where he excelled—in the affections of his parents. I have felt for a long time that, with perfect unconsciousness, his urge was to destroy me. I have felt that there was in his drunkenness some terrible cunning.