The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (30 page)

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Like many men of fifty, I am obliged to ask for a raise and, like many men of fifty, I am confronted with a blameless, monolithic, and capricious organization, hobbled, it seems, by its own prosperity. The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another. I am accused of improvidence, and make several long speeches about how I am harassed by indebtedness.
The Saturday Evening Post
has offered me twenty-four thousand,
The New Yorker
has offered me twenty-five hundred, and I will take the latter, I’m not sure why. The important thing is to work and to insist on fair wages for the work I do. Like any man of fifty, I wonder what would become of my children if I should be taken ill, and I think that the miseries of illness have become more mysterious and acute as the world, its cities and populations, outstrips our comprehension.

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Fred calls. His wife seems to have left him; his daughters are about to leave. “I think I’ll sell this place,” he says. “It seems a little strang
to pull up your stakes at my time of life.” What is this, then? A family recollection of ingratitude, loneliness; the cruel denial of every reward. Industrious, unselfish, loving, having fed, clothed, and sent to expensive schools four children, taken his wife to Bermuda each year, he finds himself, at fifty-eight, the beginning of his winter, turned out to a furnished room, cooking his meals on an electric plate over the protests of the landlady.

And yet I think there is some sense that this loneliness is his destiny. Is this my family or is it the family of man? My grandfather is supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a half-wit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly, and forsaken places yearning for a house, a wife, the voices of my sons, and having all of this I find myself, when I am engorged with petulance, thinking that after all, after the Easter-egg hunts and the merry singing at Christmas, after the loving and the surprises and the summer afternoons, after the laughter and the open fires, I will end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by my children, an old man approaching death without a companion. But this must be some part of a man’s sense of destiny. We hold, like a trick of mirrors, an image of some fruitful old age—grandchildren bringing in the harvest—and hold as well a conviction that we shall be forgotten, made to suffer cold and hunger, on our last days in the world.

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I have a drink, go to meet Philip Roth at the station with the two dogs on leads. He is unmistakable, and I give him an Army whoop from the top of the stairs. Young, supple, gifted, intelligent, he has the young man’s air of regarding most things as if they generated an intolerable heat. I don’t mean fastidiousness, but he holds his head back from his plate of roast beef as if it were a conflagration. He is divorced from a girl I thought delectable. “She won’t even give me back my ice skates.” The conversation hews to a sexual line—cock and balls, Genet, Rechy—but he speaks, I think, with grace, subtlety, wit.

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A review of the “Scandal” seemed to me less an attempt to judge it severely and to give it its rightful place among books than to bring to i
a determined generosity and enthusiasm that would make the book a financial success and let us live in peace for a year or so. What moved A. to this generosity, this show of power, in fact, remains in the dark. Again, the cover story in its discretion, its cunning, rendered me as a serious and likable person when I could, on the strength of the evidence, be described as a fat slob enjoying an extraordinary run of luck. To use the word “love” to describe the relationships between men is inappropriate. There is, under the most exhaustive scrutiny, no trace of sexuality in these attachments. We are delighted to look into one another’s faces, but below the neck there is nothing to be observed. We are happy and content together, but when we are separated we never think of one another. These bonds are as strong as any that we form in life, and yet we can pick them up and put them down with perfect irresponsibility. We do not visit one another in the hospital and when we are apart we seldom write letters, but when we are together we experience at least some of the symptoms of what we call love.

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The old dog whimpers, cries in pain as she struggles to climb the stairs. She is the first one of us to grow old. In the twenty-five years that Mary and I have lived together we have known very little pain other than the pain of misunderstanding, childbirth, passing indebtedness, and head colds. We have, in fact, known very little in the way of change. We play the same games, walk the same distances, make love with the same frequency. When our parents were sick with age and dying, their care was never our responsibility. So the old bitch, her hindquarters crippled with rheumatism, is my first experience in the care of the infirm. I give her a boost from the rear and her cries of helplessness and misery are the cries of the old. These are the first sounds of real pain that this house, since it became ours, has heard.

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Reading “The Enormous Radio” I think, One fault is that I have written too much; that my motivations have sometimes been less than passionate. “Goodbye, My Brother” seems too circumspect, seems small. I like “The Cure,” but this is a look at madness with a superficial resolution—and yet I don’t intend to go any deeper into that storm. What is wrong, where do I fail? I seem neither sane enough nor mad enough. I seem not to have approached a well-defined vision of th
world. Can I charge myself with some discoloration, that unclearness I despise in the work of other men? And what should I avoid? Anything contrived, anything less than vital.

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Mary has the wind up about driving, and me, too. I take three gin drinks and drive my son to the station in Stamford. He needs a shave. The late-winter afternoon, the late-winter night. We shake hands gravely, although I would like to embrace him. Then I turn back. The sun has set. The winter afterglow is white, a glare. Against this are the greenish gas lamps of the parkway. The six-lane highway is crowded at this hour. The shapes of the trucks are monumental. They make a sound like thunder, and smoke pours from chimneys at their stern. They seem massive, deadly, and have for all their tonnage the wistfulness of obsolescence, as if one saw here in the winter twilight the last hours of the brontosaurus and the
Tyrannosaurus rex
. The throughway in this winter dusk looks like the end of an epoch. I can drive no faster than my vision and my reflexes, and the common speeds here outstrip these, and I pretend that Breitburd, a Russian, is with me for company. I point out how numerous and powerful are the cars, how well engineered are the highways, etc. I think of the two-lane roads west of Moscow, the log houses, women drawing water from a well. Turning from an unfamiliar road on to one that leads to my house makes such a profound change in my feeling that I see how provincial and domesticated a man I am. I am coming home; I am coming home.

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I bucket around the village. Cash a check; buy liquor, a dog collar. The new hardware store is vast and empty and seems to have been empty for months. They will not have the paint you want, the nails you want, the screws you want. “We expect the orders in next week,” says the clerk. He used to work at the hardware store on Spring Street, worked there for twenty years. I ask him if he doesn’t miss the village. He waves his hand toward the window and the view of the river, but his face is suspiciously red. This empty store, this red-faced man with nothing much to do is a piece of life. I go from there to the greenhouse, where the warm air smells of loam and carnations, and everyone, even the dog and the cat, seems very happy. The Z.s seem to have quarrelled. That’s my guess. I buy her a dozen eggs. “That’s all I’ll need for the
rest of the week,” she says. But after dark her smallest son comes down the hill with his flashlight to ask for a cup of flour. It is like running up a flag, a call for sympathy, a declaration of the fact that her husband has remained in town for dinner while she bakes biscuits to save the price of bread. The little boy is keenly aware of the importance of this hour, this task. “Did you have a very pleasant Christmas?” he asks as I walk him home in the dark. “Did you receive many gifts?” he asks, thinking himself for a moment a full-grown man. “Thank you very much,” he says when we part at the lighted door. “Thank you very much.”

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The old dog; my love. That when we bought her someone pointed out that she was swaybacked and had a rib cage like a barrel. That as a young dog she was disobedient, greedy, and wicked. That she tipped over garbage pails, ripped wash off the clothesline, chewed up shoes of gold and silver, destroyed the baby-sitter’s only spectacles, and refused to answer any commands; indeed, she seemed to laugh when she was called. She stole our clothing when we were clamming at Coskata, nearly drowned Mary in New Hampshire, and was a hazard on every beach. That she would retrieve a stick once or twice, but after that she would turn her back and pretend not to hear the command “Fetch.” How we left her when we went to Europe, how she nibbled most of the upholstery, how when she heard my voice at the kennel she jumped a fence and hurled herself at me. That the introduction of love in our relationship came that day at Welton Falls. The stream was swollen and knocked her off her feet, and rolled her down a little falls into a pool. Then, when we returned, I hoisted her up in my arms and carried her over while she lapped my face. That with this her feelings toward me seemed to deepen. Her role as a confidante during some quarrelsome months. That my daughter, returning from school, would take her into the woods and pour into her ears her complaints about school, about her father and mother. Then it would be my turn, and then, after the dishes were washed, Mary’s.

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The difficulties with upholstered furniture. How she began in her middle age to dislike long walks. Starting up the beach for Coskata she would seem to enjoy herself, but if you took an eye off her she woul
swing around and gallop back to the house and her place in front of the fire. That she always got to her feet when I entered a room. That she enjoyed men very much and was conspicuously indifferent to women. That her dislikes were marked and she definitely preferred people from traditional and, if possible, wealthy origins. That she had begun to resemble those imperious and somehow mannish women who devilled my youth: the dancing teacher, the banker’s wife, the headmistress of the progressive school I attended. There was a genre of imperious women in the twenties whose hell-for-leather manner made them seem slightly mannish. They were sometimes beautiful, but their airs were predatory and their voices were sometimes quite guttural. The time Susie put her off the jeep and she tried to commit suicide. How when I was alone and heard her wandering through the house my feelings for her were of love and gratitude; that her heavy step put me to sleep. Her difficulties in being photographed. That she barked when I talked loudly to myself. The book-review photograph, her figure arched with greed; the cigarette endorsement in which only her backside could be seen.

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A white sky at eight, white as the snow, cloudless and so brilliant that it lifts one’s eyes, with a faint pain, upward.

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Lift the weights and look at myself in a mirror, wondering when my muscles will appear. Read Nabokov. The lights of the winter evening shift and now, by chance, the coming of the night seems formidable, some blood memory of the Ice Age. Later, I go out. The temperature is way below zero and the air is unusually dry for this valley. It is that fine cold that seems to frost the hair in your nostrils, and that has some subtle fragrance of its own—faint, keen, and a little like ammonia. I wear only a sweater, but I am not uncomfortable. The timbers of the porch crack in the gathering cold and I am ecstatic. “I want to eat cucumber sandwiches and drink champagne and do it all over again,” he said, and she said, “Good night, my dear, you go to sleep, you go to sleep. Good night, my love.”

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After drinking and reading happily for several hours I decide that Federico and I should have a little fresh air. He does not like to coast.
He would rather watch mayhem on TV, or dress and undress a soldier doll. I force him out of the house. The orchard is a sheet of ice. The coasting is not only excellent, it is dangerous, but he hates it. He wants to get back to the house. He lies on his sled, dragging his feet, the prow turned uphill. I rattle down the hill, over the little pond and down the path to the woods. I am fifty-two, not drunk but plainly stimulated. Coasting seems to me a simple means of self-expression, a way of getting a little deeper into that last hour of a winter afternoon. I would like to share this with him, teach him to be unafraid, show him that as well as the world of his cozy room and his mother’s box of candy there is the much more beautiful world of the frozen orchard and the late-winter day. But I teach him nothing but dread and boredom, and deepen his distaste for the snow and the cold. He asks a question. I leave it unanswered and go into the house. From the window I see him lying on his sled, thinking wickedly of his father, and I say, “It breaks my heart to see a little boy who takes no pleasure in anything but pushing his head under the sofa cushions. I wish he could learn or be taught some pleasure in running, coasting, etc.” Then there is the question of whether or not he should go to see the James Bond movie. I decide against it, but the looks of reproach aimed at me by him and his mother alter my decision and off we go, when the dishes are done. A light snow is falling. The movie is erotic and gory, and I am angry at a seven-year-old boy’s being exposed to this. Although I have exposed him to similar movies myself. I am very angry, and think that a mother who takes a seven-year-old boy to such a movie should be censured. I hold my tongue but I expect my feelings are not secret.