The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (26 page)

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He could separate from his red-faced and drunken wife, he could conceivably make a life without his beloved children, he could get along without the companionship of his friends, but he could not bring himself to leave his lawns and gardens, he could not part from the porch screens and storm windows that he had repaired and painted, he could not divorce himself from the serpentine brick walk he had laid between the side door and the rose beds. So for him the chains of Prometheus were
forged from turf and house paint, copper screening, putty and brick, but they shackled him as sternly as iron.

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So here is the day. What do you make of it? A brilliant morning, the light dealt out over the mountainous banks of the river. Cool. As I eat breakfast on the porch, my coffee smokes, the china cup is cold to touch. Last night I read Katherine Anne. How well she catches the essence of herself, the wit, the didactic style, the attractions of elegance. She fastens her slippers, shakes out the folds of her silvery dress, and fastens the belt as she goes out on a note of asperity and command. It is highly feminine, but a solid style. In some of the emotional scenes she strikes with exceptional accuracy that balance between the ritard of observation and the flow of feeling.

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Mary
maldisposta
this morning, but then I think how wonderful it is that this marriage should embrace such a multitude of misunderstandings, storms, infidelities, rivers of tears, and still continue on its way, some of the passengers bruised, but nothing serious.

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To get the difference in degrees of feeling at this time of life. It is Memorial Day. My persistent, my only memory of this in the past was of planting a garden at the farm; a garden that I thought, sentimentally, I would never see mature. I must go away. I spaded up the plot, eyed a sack of potatoes, and planted a patch. In the distance, at the four corners, I could hear the drums of the parade, and now and then a bar of music. My mother would have decorated the family graves with cornflowers and daisies. Now, having served four years in an army and seen many good friends killed in battle, I hear again the music of the parade. I try to remember the names of my dead friends. Kennedy? Kenelly? Kovacs? I can’t remember. Up from the river comes the sound of drums, and from time to time a bar of brassy and discordant music. It is very hot. I should scythe the orchard or do other work but I do nothing. It is a holiday, and I seem unable to give the day any other meaning. It is too hot to go fishing, it is too hot to cut the grass. Driving into the village to get a loaf of bread, I see the lines of heavy traffic o
the main highway. At four there is a long peal of thunder. It is as though the day had a rigid script, beginning with band music, patriotic speeches, suffocating heat, and idleness, sandwiches and cold drinks, and now the clouds piling up in the northwest and the sound of thunder—all seem a part of some ancient ceremony. I sit on the porch with my sons and watch the storm come down. I have lived through this day a hundred times, it seems, and not a blade of grass has changed. The lightning is yellow. It flashes on the porch like a beam of sunlight. The old dog is frightened and buries her head in my side.

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Fred comes. He is now a very heavy man, his girth so swollen that his naturally bellicose walk is close to a waddle. “Hi, guy!” he shouts. I wonder if he has come out to borrow money. “Congratulations on the new car,” he shouts. I explain that the car is borrowed, but I wonder, later, if he believed me. His manner is broad, hearty; and the heartier it grows the more retiring, narrow, and continent I seem. He has been drinking. “What you ought to do—” he begins, and I squirm at being made a receptacle of unwanted information. The more ruinous his life becomes, the more didactic, informative, and overbearing is his manner. “Now listen to me.… Let me tell you.… I know all about the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. You want me to tell you all about it. I know all there is to know. Just listen. Stop me if I talk too much. You want me to tell you.” But in the end he loses track of the subject, founders, forgets what it was that he was going to explain. There is a rampant force of self-destruction in the man, and I think he has counted so on gin as a painkiller that he has mangled his responsiveness. He has endured many disappointments, indignities, and injustices, and in his determination to rally he has developed a crude mockery of cheerfulness. Everything is wonderful, simply wonderful. Gorgeous. Life is gorgeous, life is wonderful. This is the harshness of despair. “Whatever else I have,” he says, “I have four beautiful children. Loving, wonderful children.” “I like D. very much,” I say, “and he’s very loyal to you.” He lifts his face, swollen now with years of drink, and says, “They’re all loyal to me.” I have seen them scorn and disobey him, and they have all run away from home. There is not a grain of truth in this pitiful claim to love. But now he looks like Mother, a painful and bewildering memory, and I remember our conversations—my
struggle for coherence, my desire to put one idea after another, to sort out good from evil, while she skipped, or so it seemed to me, from one wild half-truth to another, from one larcenous prejudice to another. The aim never seemed to be to communicate but to confuse, obstruct, and dismay.

While I am making him some coffee in the kitchen my little son runs in with the news that there is a snake in the yard. I follow him. “There, there!” he cries. I am slow to pick them out, but then I see three lethal pit vipers, writhing in the sun. Two have lost their old skin and are brilliant copper. One is still as dark as a stick. I go to get the shotgun. The gun-shy bitch begins to whimper and bark. The hunting dog begins to bark with joy. My brother, purblind but too vain to wear glasses, stumbles over to the snakes. “I’ll tell you what they are. I know all about snakes. Our place is infested with them. I’ll tell you whether or not they’re dangerous.” Mary begins to laugh at me. “He thinks all snakes are venomous,” she says. “Garter snakes, milk snakes. Please don’t kill them,” she says. “They’re quite harmless.” Before I can clear the yard, the vipers retire into the wall. “Helen Washburn was bitten by a copperhead last year,” Fred says, triumphantly. “That’s a help,” I say bitterly. “Vipers never grow over two feet long,” Mary says, “and one of those snakes was more than two feet. And anyhow, people never die of snakebites.” The vipers are a clear danger to my beloved sons. Why should she be put into such a contradictory humor? She looks up vipers in the encyclopedia and in the snake book. She is saddened at having to admit they are deadly, deathly. It is a personal defeat.

And in Fred’s ungainly walk there is a trace of furtiveness and haste—the hopeful gait of a man who has left a liquor store after having paid for a quart of gin with an unsubstantiated check. Will they call the bank before he gets out the door? Will bells and whistles sound, will somebody shout “Stop that man!”? He enjoys some relief when he gets out the door, but his troubles are not over. He enjoys a further degree of relief when he gets into the car, but his troubles are not over. The car floods, the car won’t start. (“I’m calling to check on the bank balance of Mr. Lemuel Estes.”) The battery, as he grinds the starter, begins to show signs of weakness. Then the motor catches, he backs out into the street, makes a right turn, and, when he feels safe at last, stops the car, screws the top off the bottle, and takes two or three long pulls. Oh, sweet elixir, killer of pain. Gently, gently the world reform
itself into interesting, intense, and natural arrangements. Thomas Paine drank too much. General Grant. Winston Churchill. He is in the company of the truly great. He stops twice on the way home and, having put away nearly a pint, comes into his house with that air of blustering good cheer, that heartiness that deceives no one.

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Without the lift of whiskey I wonder if I am not less than intelligent in facing my problems. I am fifty. Can I go on writing stories forever? Why not? I should think of myself in terms not of my age but of my work, which is barely half done. I think that I should move to a hotel, but then I think that I cannot leave my family; my eyes flood with tears, and I empty the whiskey bottle. I should take advantage of my maturity and not be dismayed at the loss of my youth.

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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

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It is after dark—just. A summer night, stars and fireflies. The last night in June. My older son stands on the bridge over the brook with a Roman candle. He is a man now. His voice is deep. He is barefoot and wears chinos. It takes two or three matches to light the fuse. There is a splutter of pink fire, a loud hissing, the colored fire is reflected in the water of the brook and lights the voluminous clouds of smoke that roll off the candle. The light changes from pink to green, from green to red. It makes on the trees and in the heavy air an amphitheatre or sphere of unearthly light. In this I see his beloved face, his figure. I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him. We have quarrelled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration. The candle ends with a loud coughing noise and voids a spate of golden stars and a smell of brimstone. He drops the embers into the brook. Then the dark takes over, but I think that I have seen something splendid: this young man, the weird and harmless play of colored light, the dark water of the brook.

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The first page of a new journal, and I hope to report here soon that the middle section of the Wapshots has fallen into shape. I expect that I will continue to report here that I drink too much.

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The O’Hara book—he is a pro, a gifted man. There is the sense of life being translated, but I think also an extraordinary vein of morbid sexual anxiety. I would like “The Scandal” to be clear of this. I think the difference is between a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life. He is good and rough and not so lacy as me, but I hope to come to better terms.

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The firemen’s bazaar. Seven o’clock. A July night. A rusted and battered backstop stands behind the circle of trucks and booths turned in against the gathering darkness like a circle of covered wagons. Parents and children hasten along the roads that lead to the bazaar as if it might all be over before they got there, although in fact they will get there before it has begun. The sumptuary revolution makes me feel old. Both the boys and the girls are wearing skintight pants, and there are many cases of ungainly and sometimes painful tightness. And in the crowd there are reminders of the fact that there are still some farms outside the village limits. I see a red-faced man, a little drunk, followed by an overworked woman who has cut her own hair as well as the hair of the four shabby children that follow. These are the poor; these are the ones who live upstairs over the shoe store, who live in the cottage down by the dump, who can be seen fanning themselves at their windows in the heat. When you leave at six to catch an early plane, these are the ones that you see at dawn, waiting by the bus stop with their sandwiches in a paper bag. But it is the children I enjoy most, watching them ride in mechanical pony carts and airplanes, suspended by chains from a pylon. Their brilliance, this raw material of human goodness. A very plain woman in the last months of pregnancy, who looks out at the scene calmly and with great pride in this proof of the fact that someone has taken her in his arms. Many of the girls have their hair in rollers half concealed by scarves. Like primitive headdresses and, in the darkness, like crowns.

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Our relationship remains in suspense. I have neither the boisterousness nor the virility to make the bridge or span between these two unrelated personalities, and I experience that bewilderment which always overtakes me when some obstruction in my sexual life is felt. I cannot reach out. I am afraid I may be rebuffed. I cannot transcend these fears. I glimpse the horrors of incompatibility; the power of lovers to mutilate each other. At nine-thirty my stomach begins to heave. It is difficult to breathe. I should be familiar enough with these symptoms to put them in their place, but they overtake me with such intensity that they seem to be not a part of life but all of life. I feel racked by the visible and the invisible world. My guts are drawn with pain.

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Light and shade, pleasant and discordant noises, the singing of the cleaning woman and the thumping sound of the washing machine are dealt like a series of blows. I cannot think of the stories I have to write without a sharpening of this visceral pain. I cannot invent terms or images of repose. I grant myself all the privileges of a liar, but there is no heart in my lies and inventions. There is nothing. There is neither ecstasy nor repose, there is only the forced illusion of these things. The span between living and dying is brief and anguished, and the soul of man is reflected not in snug farmhouses and great monuments but in fourth-string hotel rooms, malodorous and obscure. This is all there is. There is nothing. Tired but sleepless, lewd but alone, hopeless, drunk, sitting at the window on the airshaft in some other country: this is the image of man. I remember those midtown hotels, the Carlton in Frankfurt, the Eden in Rome, the Palace in San Francisco, hotels in Hollywood, Innsbruck, Toledo, Florence. Here is the soul of man, venereal, forlorn, and uprooted. All the rest of it—the cheering lights of morning, sweet music, the towers and the sailboats—are fantastic inventions, evasions, lies, vulgarities, and politenesses poorly invented to conceal the truth.

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A day like autumn, the light fresh, the wind sounding loudly in the trees. My family off to the mountains, and God bless them. The best I can do in these three weeks is to work hard and pull the novel into shape.
Perhaps I can go abroad in the fall. I must do something about finding a place to work. I cannot go through another winter like last winter.

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We rise from sleep all natural men, boisterous, loving, and hopeful, but the dark-faced stranger is waiting at the door, the viper is coiled in the garden, the old man whispers lewdly to the boy, and the woman sits at her table crying.