The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (27 page)

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So in the dark hours, awake, I think of the wind and the rain and in my arms a willing love, her dugs hardened against my chest, her hand where it belongs. The night air is fresh. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, lighting the legends on the all-night trucks. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, and I shall sleep, I shall sleep. I shall conquer death and anger and fear.

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Rows and misunderstandings, and I put them down with the hope of clearing my head. “I think it’s too hot to split wood,” say I. “Well, I don’t,” says Mary. “If it’s not too hot for me to rake, it’s not too hot for you to split wood.” “You do your work,” say I, “and I’ll do mine.” But I am in a bad temper, and I think of the W.s all ordering one another around, working not so much to accomplish anything as to ingratiate themselves with the old king, who was trying, in turn, to ingratiate himself with immortality. At dinner I try to explain my leaving to work on the book. “I feel sorry for you,” says Mary, “your life is so miserable. I really feel sorry for you. I won’t miss you, of course. If you could only figure out what you want.” I cut some edges, but I am angry, and returning to the kitchen I say (at dark), “Can’t you figure out after twenty-five years what it is that I want? I want your love, I want to see the children grow and take up their lives, I want to do a piece of decent work.” I am shouting. Then she says, “I am going away. I will take a little apartment and live there with the children. You are torturing me to death. You are torturing me to death.”

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Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fal
to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples.

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It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself, but when she is away I seem to have no scruple about spilling it elsewhere. I first see X at the edge of the swimming pool. He is sunbathing, naked, his middle covered by a towel. His voice sounds coarse and unpleasant. He speaks with a slight accent—Italian, perhaps—or perhaps a piece of faulty bridgework. He hogs the best chair, gives out aggressive emanations, says nothing that is not complaining or stupid, and we seem to be natural enemies. But then, a day later, I find him sitting beside me at the table, feel his gaze on me—soft, tender, and pupilless. He touches my shoulder. Suddenly he is all courtesy, kindness, and attention, and I see him in a different light. I see that he is handsome, well knit, but soft enough to do in a pinch. I think that a variety of hints or lures are sent out. He has met me before, he says, with Y, with Z. His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch. If he should put a hand on my thigh I would not remove it; if I should chance to meet him in the shower I would tackle him. But is this itchiness mutual or is it mine alone: is it only my tassel that is up, down, and sore as a boil? Does he sense this or is he thinking about yesterday’s tennis game or a check he hopes to get in the mail? I am determined not to be a supplicant, not to be compromised by my instincts, and so perhaps is he; these are the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation. But then there are the spiritual facts: my high esteem for the world, the knowledge that it is not in me to lead a double life, my love of perseverance, a passionate wish to honor the vows I’ve made to my wife and children. But my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this, and I am afraid that I may succumb to its itchiness. We are urged to take things as they come, to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world. I do not like his voice, his mind; I probably will not like his work. I like only that he seems to present or offer himself as a gentle object of sensual convenience. And yet I have been in this country a hundred times before and it is not, as it might seem to be, the valley of the shadow of death. And, whatever th
instinctual facts are, there is the fact that I find a double life loathsome, morbid, and anyhow impossible. So I hear in the night the lightest of rain winds, but it does not draw me out of myself, and when I hear the sound of a fine and covering rain my wish to find some peace in this ancient noise seems childish and unseemly compared to the perverse thrust in my middle. But there is some spiritual element in this drive, some hunger to be taken care of—to put down, for an hour, the intolerable burden of total independence. But I have been here before, and in the end it may be nothing, nothing. Why should I be tempted to throw away the vast delights of love for a chance shot in a shower? And I think I share this trouble with most of mankind.

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A dark and rainy day, and this rain does not seem to fall calmly from the skies of my childhood. It exacerbates my discontents. At noon I drink the vermouth dregs and lose my temper. Why can’t I bring calm and intelligence to this old house, this cozy room, this gentle rain? I am uncontrollably restless. I drive into town and buy a quart of gin. This helps, but not too much, and I must be careful not to succumb to distempers. The rug and the floor are filthy. The clock is out of time. I work on an airplane model with the boy. I clean the rug. Mary helps me. After dinner I sit in the dining room with a glass of gin. I am discouraged. I am close to despair. I watch an educational program on TV in which the fugitive John Milton and his accomplice Andrew Marvell speak eloquently about the ornaments of liberty. Sitting on a pile of cushions in a dirty attic, I think I endure a new degree of discouragement, although I know that I do not. I think that I will be unable to sleep, but I am mistaken. But waking at three or four I think that I have been selling ice cream, the seven flavors of discouragement. Thinking back over my work, I can find nothing to cheer me. But I sleep and wake again full of cheer, opportunity, hope.

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I take a train up the Hudson Valley on a brilliant autumn afternoon. Read, drink. Strike up a conversation with a heavy woman. Decorous. Educated as a schoolteacher, she has an accent that is prim and enlightened. She mistakes me for an Englishman and I lead her on. She is at first afraid of my intentions. Ultimately, I am afraid of hers. Sh
tells me the story of her life: the fortune lost in the crash, her grandfather the judge; she ran for county supervisor on the Democratic ticket, spent a night in the governor’s mansion in Albany. I do not listen carefully, and return to my roomette. I wake at three, bare-arse, my flower stiff as a horn vis-à-vis myself in the long mirror; and I think, Should we bring compassion to the exhibitionist hiding in the bushes of a public park, his pants down around his knees, or lingering in the Y.M.C.A. shower? Is this madness or is it the perversity of mankind? The track joints beat out a jazz bass, versatile, exhilarating, and fleet—some brilliant improvisation on the ardent beating of the heart—and the wind sounds in the brake boxes like the last records Billie Holiday ever made. These blues, these blues. I wake and dress before dawn. Ohio. The country flat. The light, rising in the east, shows the western sky, black as storm clouds.

The old lady sits down. “I will need more butter than that,” she says. Then she leans across the aisle and says, “Excuse me for speaking to you without having been introduced, but to see a happily married couple like you and your husband does my heart so much good that I have to say so. We don’t see many happily married couples these days, do we? I don’t know why it is. My own husband is gone. He went sixteen years ago. It sounds like a long time ago, but for me it seems like a moment. He was a minister. We had a nice congregation in Poughkeepsie. He had never had a sick day in his life. He had never had a toothache, a headache, a cold, he had never had a sick day in his life. Then one morning he woke with this pain in his side. Cancer. I took him to the hospital, but he simply wasted away. I had twelve specialists. When we all knew that the end was near, they let me take him home. He was lying in bed one afternoon and he said, ‘Mother, Mother, will you help me? I want to sit in my chair by the window.’ Well, I put my arms around him to help him to the window, and he went. He went in my arms. I had seven brothers and sisters, but they’re all gone.”

Two women come in. The waiter asks if they had a good trip to New York. “Let’s write it off,” they say gallantly. “Now we’re home. The good old Middle West.” They look out of the window at the fields, houses, pigsties, the distant groves of oak. The train blows its whistle—a diminished fifth. A mare with a foal, cows, and pigs run away from the track. All the way across Ohio and Indiana the farm animals are frightened by the train.

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I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; and thousands or perhaps even millions of museums where man’s drive to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women’s breasts and backsides, the colors of water, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses, the shapes of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe, are celebrated. Let us rush to see the world. They serve steak there on jet planes, and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to music and the sound of bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They have even invented engines to cut their grass. They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos, vast manufactories of all kinds. They explore space and the trenches of the seas. Oh, let us rush to see this world.

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To put down what I know as well as what I hope to know. To describe my alcoholic thirst beginning at nine in the morning and becoming sometimes unmanageable at eleven-thirty. To describe the humiliation of stealing a drink in the pantry and the galling taste of gin; to write about the weight of discouragement and despair; to write about a nameless dread; to write about the gruelling seizures of unfounded anxiety; to write about the horror of failure. The struggle to recoup an acuteness of feeling, the feeling that a margin of hopefulness has been debauched.

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Hung over after the holiday and feeling painfully worn, I go through the motions of waking, eating, dressing. Go to the train. I think on the platform that I may faint, spin around, and fall down, a searing pai
in my side. I breathe deeply of the north wind. A. joins me, and I stay close to him in case of trouble. On the train I tell myself, in a kind of panic, the long story of Donna Orieta, including her cocktail party. I have a drink at the Biltmore, where my hand is shaking so that it is difficult to get the glass to my mouth. A young man down the bar gives me a hound-dog look; when we succumb to alcohol we lose our self-esteem all the way down the line. Lunch at the club, where I am blotto, and go to the Biltmore to dry out. It is, as I have said before, a little like Hell. Fifteen or twenty naked men wander around. None of them is comely. The air smells of pine scent, as unlike the freshness of pine as anything in the world. A fat man in the shower soaps his cock. Does he have an erection? I look away.

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I skate; I knock a puck around with my son—the pleasures of this simple fleetness, this small prowess. The light on the snowfields, and I see it as I move, all purple and gold. Back here, the library flooded with the last light of day, chrysanthemums, Christmas music on the piano, Ben plays with the manger that we brought from Rome. The setting is nearly perfect, but I seem suspended in it; seem unable either to cast it down or to bring it to a climax. Shall I ask the As, the Bs, the Cs for a drink? Then my narcissism, if that’s what it is, will reach a climax. What a beautiful house, they will say, what a perfectly beautiful house. So the sun goes down, the fields turn blue, I turn on lamps and warm myself at the fire. What do I want: a furnished room, a doorway on a windy street?

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A dark, raw day, me cold and depressed. I might bring it off with a narrator; it means a lot of work. Finish the Nabokov, that violet-flavored nightmare. To construct a novel from footnotes is a brilliant eccentricity, but the homosexual king disconcerts me. Mary takes the boys off to see the Nativity play, and I sit around the dining room drinking and playing records; Schumann and Louis Armstrong. I plan a large cocktail party; I write a letter to the
Social Register
, I give my daughter away in marriage. I should read. I should write. I should translate a page of Italian. But all I do is drink and polish the candlesticks. Oh, to put it down, and to put it dow
with the known colors of life: the reds of courage, the yellows of love.

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I dream that I see my mother, leaving the state capitol in Boston, where she has gone to defend some good cause. She wears a long black coat with a fur collar, a tricorne hat. The flight of steps that separates us appears to be the steps of a Spanish church up which the last of a wedding procession is moving. When the procession has gone I go to my mother. “I’m very tired,” she says, “I’m terribly tired.” Her voice is small, a little cracked. Before I can reach her she falls. Her body begins to roll down the stairs, and I think with horror that she may go all the way, but the fall is stopped; she lies sprawled on the lifts.

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New Year’s Day, and I shall make something illustrious of this year. The entire nation is in the grip of an unprecedented cold wave. Villages and cities isolated. Men, women, and children without heat or food. Etc. J. writes from Iowa; Ohio, rather. He will return. The wind from the river is better. Young Ben, Susie, and I drink and play records. “Shall we open the Upstairs at the Downstairs in the Outdoors?” I ask. Is there something ridiculous about this man of fifty, dancing the Charleston?