The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (31 page)

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At the age of seven I conceived an indecent passion for the plaster cast of Venus de Milo that stood on the bookshelf, and, standing on a chair, I tried to look down those draperies that had, for so many centuries, concealed what I desired.

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I dream that I am walking with Updike. The landscape seems out of my childhood. A familiar dog barks at us. I see friends and neighbors in their lighted windows. Updike juggles a tennis ball that is both my living and my dying. When he drops the ball I cannot move until it is recovered, and yet I feel, painfully, that he is going to murder me wit
the ball. He seems murderous and self-possessed. I must try to escape. There is a museum with a turnstile, a marble staircase, and statuary. In the end I do escape.

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Who wants to fall in love, who wants the waiting for a voice, a footstep, a cough, who would choose this?

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The dentist has just returned from a sixteen-day Caribbean cruise. Grissom is in Gemini orbit. The barber is full of wisdom. In man there is a divine spark. I start a haircut, they start from Florida. Before I am finished with a haircut, they’re over Africa. Wonderful. And yet they can’t cure arthritis. We can maybe get a man on the moon, but cancer, arthritis, we can’t cure. But I have my health, thank God. As the man with the wooden leg says, I can’t kick. Get it? Ha, ha, ha, get it? If he kicks he falls down. I can’t kick. This is God’s country. God picked out this country for his blessing.

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So I wake thinking that everything will be nifty. In the mail there is a proof of an advertisement that is mostly a picture of me. I drive into town to get liquor for a party. I think of showing the picture to the liquor dealer, but I do not. I do show it to Mary, who says, “What are they going to do with it, pin it up in the post office?” When I object to the sharpness of this she says it was merely a civil question; there were no implications. I object vigorously. Two days later I still object. Should there be some way of seeing this humorously I would be most grateful. Gin seems to be the only way out. But there does seem to be some dreadful incompatibility between the sharpness of her tongue and my oversensitive, not to say childish, nature. The depth of my feeling seems to lie in the fact that I feel threatened and am, like any sensible man, wary of death. I wish I could forget this; and I shall try.

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So one seems to settle down into this darkness. Time has always mended things. The physical changes are most noticeable: the short step with the toes pointed out, the wounded and musical voice, the dar
scowl in the hall or the landing where one passes. Susie feels ill and I am afraid I may be to blame, so I retire to the balcony of the movie theatre where, like Estabrook, I have worked out or waited out so many problems of my life, transmuted into Apaches coming over the crest of the hill, beautiful women drinking wine, the collision of automobiles, airplane views of the Southwest. When I return the air is warm. There are no stars; there is nothing to see but darkness. They sit together and seem happy. Susie feels better; her face is clear. It begins to rain. I open the door to hear the sound. There is a single flash of lightning; a single recessive peal of thunder, and these most commonplace sounds make me absurdly happy. I am what I was—randy, light-boned, happy, all of this on the strength of the sound of water. I take a bath, open the window by my bed to hear the rain, curl up like a resentful child, and step into a panoramic and detailed dream where I turn on a water faucet to fill the ornamental pools of some great estate, hear Tallulah Bankhead complaining about her doctor, see a young woman wearing nothing but a brassiere, and am embarrassed by a flux of young writers who seem to be wearing bathing trunks. I make a lame joke.

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Good Friday. I neither fast nor make any other observation of this sombre time. I roam from the post office to the church, unsober. The central altar is dark, but on the left the priest has improvised a Mary chapel where there is a blaze of candles and lilies and someone keeps the vigil. I find all this offensive; say my prayers. The day is brilliant for half an hour; clouds come up swiftly from the northwest and now the day is dark.

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Easter. As I dress for church the iconography seems more than ever threadbare: the maidenly cross, the funereal lily, the lavender bow pulled off a candy box. How poorly this serves the cataclysm of the Resurrection. All the candles burn. Miss F. has worked day and night on the flower arrangements. The organist, truly raised from the dead, improvises a sort of polymorphous fugue. We raise our voices in some tuneless doggerel about life everlasting. These are earnest people, mostly old, making an organized response to the mysteriousness of life. What point would there be in going to church at daybreak to ridicule th
priest? But he does draw a breathtaking parallel between the Resurrection and the invention of television. I hope—I go no further—to avoid anger, meanness, sloth, to be manly; and, should I be unable to mend my affairs, to act with common sense.

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Swept by seizures of vertigo, diarrhea, sexual ups and downs, fits of laughter and tears, Mr. X entered into his Gethsemane, the 8:32.

A rainy day in town. I slip into a sort of sexual torpor. Anxiety may be the opening notes of this. On Twenty-third Street I am hailed by a friend from the Army. We have not met for twenty-three years and we lunch together, talking about the dead. K. was hit by an artillery shell. They never found his dog tags. Etc. We walk uptown in the rain. I am out of sorts. In the window of a store specializing in this sort of thing I see a photograph of a man wearing a cocksack. He seems to have shaved his body. For some reason, the picture strikes me as lighthearted and I think of poor H.

Have mercy upon them; have mercy upon them. The bright and seemly world they despised must, from time to time, have appeared to them as a kingdom. Lovers, men with their sons, the sounds of laughter must have made them desperate. With his hat pulled down over his eyes, his collar turned up for concealment, he studies the pictures of undressed men in a Sixth Avenue store window. They seem both muscular and abandoned. He crosses the street to a newsstand that specializes in this sort of thing, he glimpses the photograph of a naked man in a sailor hat, a thin-faced youth who appears to be removing his jockstrap. He goes west now to Broadway, where there is a picture of a naked youth lying in shallow waves, and another with his legs parted. His pursuit takes him up to the Fifties, where there are several newsstands decked with photographs of lewd and naked men. Have mercy upon him.

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Board the Century at dusk and ride up the river. One of my reasons for taking a train is to tie on a can, but I am not too successful. The bumpy roadbed gives me a hard-on and I climb down from my berth with the hope that Mary will be awake. She is, it seems, but pretends to sleep. I join her at dawn, when she is downright disagreeable, and
rub up against her thigh, watching the Indiana landscape. I think of my last trip—the travelling salesman who fell romantically in love with a large white pig, munching acorns in a grove of oaks. Dear Pig, are you willing? Piggy-wiggy, dear. Later in the day he was stung by lust at the sight of a naked plastic mannequin in a Toledo store window. I remember the horses running away from the train, the children waving, marigolds shining like fire around the doorsteps, a woman glancing out of the window at an automobile dump and exclaiming, sincerely, “Home sweet home!” The country is flat and unlovely. There are automobile dumps, sandlot ball fields, graveyards. The home of Alka-Seltzer. The huge industrial sweep of Gary, with pink ore smoke pushing out of its chimneys with an urgency that seems to me sexual. The slums, the federal housing, Chicago. Mary complains about the smell of the hotel, the smell of the train, the smell of the world.

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When we were in college and used to go up to the river, Aunt Mildred used to urge us to swim without trunks. “Who cares about a little thing like that?” she exclaimed, although in the cases of Howie and Jack it was far from little. She used to sit on the pier where we swam. She had cut eye slits into the pillowcase, which she wore over her head to protect her from the ell-flies. She would sit there looking like an ill-dressed member of the Klan, while we porpoised around naked in that fine clear water. One afternoon she showed up with an old-fashioned box camera and without removing her hood snapped pictures of us diving and swimming. I didn’t suppose the pictures would be any good, because of the age of the camera and the difficulty of focussing it through a hole in a pillowcase and I knew that she wouldn’t dare have photographs of naked men developed at the drugstore in Howland. I don’t know where she had the pictures developed and I didn’t see them until thirty years later, when we sold the camp. Mildred was long dead. The pictures had been successful.

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I think I think of the book not as narrative but as bulk, texture, color, weight, and size. I would like to shake my composure, to howl, to penetrate. I hope, this day next year, to have another book done.

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At 7
A.M.
Mary wakes me and points to a turtle on the lawn. This is a snapping turtle, three and a half feet long, the largest I have ever seen. He moves like a sea turtle, well off the ground. His head is immense; his tail is scaled and spiked. It would be pointless to dwell on this prehistoric anomaly, this vengefulness of time. I get the shotgun and put two Super-X shells into his head. I see the head thrown back and up by the shell, he rises to his feet and falls, and I go upstairs to shave. Mary calls to me that he is moving, and I look out of the window and see him walking towards the mint patch and the pond. I take the gun again, and this time put four shells into his head. I then resume shaving, but he continues to move, and in the end I put ten shells in his head before he is dead. We start down the road to Providence. I have a drink before we leave, and nip along the road, and I think that to catalogue, idly, the vulgarities of our time—the trailer with stained-glass windows, the man who writes jingles for the highway commission—is useless unless we can describe clearly the world that we desire. The turtle seemed to possess the world much better than I—I with a shotgun, my hands shaking from a cocktail party.

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You have to be patient and you have to like people, says the cabdriver in Washington, shortchanging me two dollars. S. and I walk to the White House. I find the face of the President tragic. He leaves the platform by mistake, and I see his wife lead him back into the music room. Her smile is forced and weary, and it is like looking into the raw material—the exaltations and backaches—of any lengthy marriage.

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I sleep with my head in T.’s lap, and wake as we are entering Moscow. Oh, how exciting the world is at dark, I think—entering some city and watching the lights go on. The people everywhere carrying yellow leaves. Autumn moving over the broad reach of Europe. London. Autumn roses and forest fires in the Crimea. Red and yellow trees in Georgia. Cold after dark. The roads blocked by sheep. We were the last swimmers in the Caspian. The parks in Kiev were yellow. A bitter fog in Moscow. Today is the arrival of the cosmonauts, the deposition of Khrushchev. As I walk back from the embassy, groups are marching in from every direction carrying flags and posters of Brezhnev. Truckload
of men and women. I buy lunch and watch TV. No excitement. I have a hangover and an unsavory mind. It is that hour when the seemly world appears useless, worthless. We go to the theatre and see a stunning performance of Brecht that ends with the Communist salute. I eat caviar alone in the main dining room and am excited. I sleep.

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Yevtushenko’s recitation in the medical school. Sharp tiers of desks, the place jammed. Zhenya wears a shirt. The breadth of his bony shoulders, the length of his arms, the size of his fists. The sharp nose, the unrelieved intensity of his face, views of his broad forehead, the impact of this being his role. He has a flat head. He recites for two hours without a note and is given dead chrysanthemums. I seem to love him as I love most natural phenomena.

The deluxe train to Leningrad. Rainy midnight. Red plush. On the radio a soprano sings “Vissi d’arte.” So we travel, drinking vodka in good company. The train whistles, smells of coal gas, the sombre beauty of Leningrad. Views of the river from the Winter Palace. Back through the suburbs of Moscow at daybreak. The Ambassador’s lunch. A fuse blows during the cocktail party. Dinner back in the Sovietskaya with the Updikes. So I get kissed and leave Russia with a tremendous confusion of feeling. All the rest of Europe seems much more successful, orderly, but I think of Russia as lovable, vast, pathetic. The women in Amsterdam are beautiful; their heels make a fine click on the floor. The table linen is white, but in some ways I prefer the Ukraine Hotel—gloomy, impractical, and smelling of unwashed socks. My Russian memories seem to be fading. I try to recall the brilliance of Zhenya’s face, his airs. I see the Berlin Wall, flowers, graves. H. speaks of the last days here, the streets on fire, the lions loose, the world that has outstripped our nightmares, our subconscious. I found the ruins ghastly and impressive. So I shall go home on Saturday.

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When we say “Christ, have mercy upon us,” we don’t ask for a literal blessing, I think. We express how merciless we are to ourselves.

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Waking, one thinks, The rain will come, and after the rain, my love. First I will hear the sound of water and then the sound of he
footsteps on the stone floor of the corridor, the hall. But what is this hall and why does it have a stone floor? Am I involved in towers, moats, stupidities, and fancies, are these the foolish terms in which I phrase love? Troubadours in fancy dress. There is thunder, lightning, and then rain. I hear first the rain and then her voice from the driveway below the house. She is tired and I leave her unmolested, but see, as I get into bed, through the transparent cloth of her nightgown the darkness of her fuzz: fragrant, delicate, it seems to me a flower.

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I long so for love that it seems I long for the love of God. But I do not follow Rilke on the prodigal and the love of Him. I go with Ben to the town dump. Two scavengers. One is the stooped cretin who lives with his old parents in the house by the pear tree. The other is a young man who glares at me with a hatred I find mysterious. My son explains that the look of hatred is the look of a scavenger. Scavenging is a most intimate business, and no one wants to be discovered at it. I scythe, wash in the brook, wash in the hose, swim at S.’s with Mary and my son. The lawns are a brilliant green, the sky stormy and clear. A hot night. I fall asleep before I am joined.