The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (41 page)

The first thing is to write a note, and I do this. Then I must pack. This takes, I think, another drink. Shirts, drawers, Seconal and Miltown, a brown suit for the seduction and a dark suit for the party. What next? Call New York and reserve a room. But why go to all this trouble? says the voice of Inertia. Why not go to the B.s’ and have a drink in front of their fire? Change, move, enjoy your freedom, says Stamina, and I call New York and reserve a room. But what about dinner? It is already too late to make a date, and I don’t want to dine alone in a hotel. Watching the light fail, I think that the traffic will be heaviest at this hour. I am in no rush to get to the city. I put into the oven a frozen serving of Salisbury steak with sauce, take the tires and the car cover from the back of my car, have another pleasant drink, and the
eat my steak. Now night has fallen, and I am a little drowsy. Why not take a nap and leave for New York at around nine? I can walk the streets and go to bed early so that I will be particularly potent for H. after lunch. I lie down and fall into a deep—not to say drunken—sleep for an hour. Then I stir myself once more, carry my bag out to the car, write another note, fill my flask, and drink a little more, because it is a well-known fact that I cannot drive when I am sober. I start the car, find that the speedometer is broken and that I have no gasoline. I head for the nearest gas station—a few miles away—and observe that my vision is bad, my driving dangerous. I think this is because my head cold has weakened my alcoholic tolerance. I turn back at the gas station and drive home. I destroy the note, cancel the hotel reservation, unpack my toothbrush and my pills, undress, and climb into bed. I sleep soundly.

•

It is the morning of the day when I will see H. Mary’s contemptuous and weary voice cannot reach me in any way, since I am the beloved of a young, beautiful, and passionate woman. I take three heavy scoops to relax for the train trip, although I’m not quite sure they take hold. On the train I sit beside a good-looking woman who seems appalled and terrified by my presence and perhaps by the fumes of gin that must roll off me. I hope to reassure her by reading the
Times
very carefully—including all the editorials, financial page, and sporting section. This seems to work, and a little past Yonkers we get into a pleasant, sympathetic conversation. I am early, and, like all countrymen who are early in the city, I begin to walk. I walk up to the Sixties, cut over to Fifth, have a drink, walk down to Forty-second Street, loiter in a bookstore, and finally beat my way back to the hotel. I have a head cold and am not sober. I go up to H.’s room.

It is not as good as it was a year ago. I somehow—hooch and a head cold—can’t get quite on the beam. She’s left her husband, and had, I guess, several affairs with celebrated cocksmen, and her infatuation for my thighs seems to have waned, if not died. She is still terribly pretty, and her figure is astonishingly beautiful, the breasts high and full, the waist very small. She is a year older, and I think I can see this in her face. It is a year during which she worked very hard, and there are new lines around her eyes. Her shine is a little dim. Her hair is a curious shade of pink, some hairdresser’s triumph. It cannot be caressed ardentl,
and I dislike this, but I don’t say so. I am very happy in her company but not, as I was last year, ecstatic. She laughs at my jokes and says that I look much better than I did. Stoned and with a runny nose, I don’t see how this could be possible. We lunch and return to the room, but the kissing is halfhearted, and when I suggest a fuck she says gently that she somehow doesn’t feel like it. The fish she ate for lunch … I say it doesn’t matter. She is expecting a friend at three, and before that, after a display of drunken foolishness, I kiss her goodbye.

On the train home I sit beside a drunken salesman, who calls everyone by his first name and who is marketing a portable oxygen mask. He urges me to try it, and I do—with no appreciable effects. I think this terribly funny, but when I reach home and start to tell my story Mary says, “I would like to hear your funny story, but I have to go to the bathroom.” I don’t terribly mind the statement or even the fact, but I do mind that it seems to display a kind of feeling that I don’t understand. I talk freely about H. I see no reason—and this may be my stupidity—why I shouldn’t.

•

Palm Sunday, and I do not go to church to receive that leaf, or frond, that is meant to bless my house. Last year I was in a plaster cast; this year I am on the ropes. On the evening of our anniversary it seemed as though things might be as they had been, for better and for worse. It was the best hour we’ve had in months. But things are dim in the morning, and grow dimmer, I think, as the day passes, until by late afternoon Mary has stopped speaking altogether. I wash a Seconal down with whiskey and check out.

•

So New York-Fairbanks-Tokyo-Seoul and off into the country of love. Why should it be so like the seasons—a cruel winter and a clement spring? Loving and being loved, I hear the mourning doves. It has been more than a year since their singing—billing—has meant anything but regret, bitterness, and mystification.

What, then, do I remember vividly? The fishbone pines in Fairbanks. This outpost. The light in the sky is gray, but there has been no diminishment in its brilliance for fifteen hours. The faculty wives from Akron, wearing dead flowers and carrying bottles of hometown water.
What a waste of time to ridicule them. They are out to see the world, and what is wrong with that? They will have some excitement, pleasure, a dossier of colored photographs, and diarrhea, athlete’s foot, anti-American riots, and the peril and fear of sudden death in the Bering Sea. The smog in Tokyo obscures the city and its mountain. The cabdriver wears a surgical mask. “Made in Japan” was a watchword of my youth. Almost everything for sale in that paradise—the five-and-ten-cent store—was made in Japan. Goldfish, toys, screwdrivers, can openers, beads were all made in Japan. That city, bombed and firestormed, is long gone, but on street corners you sometimes see an old house with curved eaves that was made in Japan.

•

Whatever happened to Johnny Cheever? Did he leave his typewriter out in the rain? Anyhow, he was never known as Johnny by anyone but his friends C. and L., who changed all names to suit them. Eddie, Neddie, Howie, Robbie, and even Petey. Did he write a very clean story? A story about love? A gray day, rather like dusk at ten. J. appears at the pool. He has a kind of looks or beauty that, this afternoon, seems to set him apart from the rest of us. His teeth—their number, size, and whiteness—seem false, although I’ve been told that they are not. There is a little gray in his Neapolitan curls, and a small but definite bald spot. The features are splendid, the manner is beautiful but manly. He tries, he has in fact been coached, to conceal his lack of education. A rich woman, no longer young, would dream of such a consort. I know him to be genuinely loving, a good fuck, and good company, but he seems, unlike the rest of us, to have an appearance that can be merchandised.

•

Thunder wakes me at midnight. I go from room to room, closing the doors and windows. A bolt strikes close to the house. I smell cordite. What will we find split in the morning? The birch, the tulip tree, the ash? The dogs are frightened, the lights go out. I mount my beloved, and off we go for the best ride in a long time.

•

I cannot describe the Mass without describing my friend, and I cannot describe him in these pages. He was genuinely volatile, eccentri,
capable of great physical and intellectual velocity. He never spoke to me of his conversion to the Church of Rome. I cannot guess at his motives. He is buried outside the gates of that city, and the Mass yesterday was performed without his remains and without his widow, who is in London. The architecture of the church was contemporary and highly decorative along lines that in their conspicuous simplicity seemed Oriental to me. What I mean to say is that the usual threadbare iconography of Christendom—the worn carpets, the tarnished vigil lights, the vestments from Brussels—were all gone. Behind the chancel was a rotunda of pale-yellow marble. All the colors or the lack of color was what one finds in a Shinto shrine. An enormous figure in an attitude of blessing hung behind the altar. The three priests faced the congregation. One wore white robes, one’s robes were ornamented with fishes, and the third’s with a new moon and a cross. In spite of all this elegance, the architect had miscalculated acoustically, and I couldn’t hear the Epistle, the Gospel, or the eulogy. The Mass was in English, but I thought it beautiful—a full choir and organ thundering in with the responses. But what one thinks is what it must have cost—one sees Mr. F. on the telephone talking with the priest. “He was a very brilliant associate and we would like a suitable ceremony.” “Organ?” “Yes.” “A full choir will come to a thousand.” “Money, under the circumstances, is of course no consideration, and we will of course make a substantial contribution to the church.” “Would you like one, two, or three priests?” “Three, please.”

We were a small congregation—really a handful—but he was never a man with a circle of friends. We seemed outmaneuvered by the richness of the church, and surely we were outnumbered by the choir.

•

Happy, happy, happy. I spend the afternoon boiling lobsters, swim, suffer a mild seizure of gin nastiness, plan to take Federico fishing, but we can find no plugs, and the bait store is closed. I see S. tomorrow, but, since Mary is yielding, I have no wish or need for clipping and kissing behind pantry doors. A brilliant day.

•

So we see once more the serene novelist whose antics have bored us for ten years. He is left alone from noon until dark and goes to pieces.
He reads, misreads, drinks, snoozes, repeats vulgar and stupid anecdotes at great length, and is contemptible. I must do better.

•

E. comes over, and we tell each other the stories of our lives; two men of fifty-eight in an empty house. The talk drifts toward money. This does not annoy me as it did. I remember little of what was said. Beautiful, beautiful D. is now sixty years old and proud of the fact that she has been screwed by at least a thousand men. I think of swimming, but I am lame from pushing the mower—this is unusual—and feel tired. The sulfa drug I take seems soporific. I eat a cheese sandwich and a piece of melon in the twilight, take a bath, and go to bed before the stars are out. I wake—I don’t know the hour. I am soaked with sweat and shiver convulsively at any touch of the night air; but there is some serenity to this condition. I am sick and I am calm. I dream that some maid is driving nails into the highboy. I explain to her that it is three hundred years old (a lie). “Well, it’s about time you threw it away,” she says. I see my family—Susie, Rob, Ben, Linda, Mary, and Federico—and how much I love them, how perfect is my contentment! This seems to be not love but a perfect equation in which light is exchanged. And, half asleep, I think I see some way of getting back into my work. It is the old image of spatial arrangements—not tables and chairs but abstract form. The light is sombre but not dim, not soft, a strong, pure gray light. By moving the forms, by changing the spaces between them, something seems to be accomplished. A voice from somewhere says, This is neither erotic nor spiritual. I see a rock pool in Maine, filled at high tide. I wonder if there is any erotic cause for my excitement. I think not. The pool seems beautiful and serene.

•

Make love in the meadow; me not peerless. I scar my naked hip on a wild rose.

•

Thunderstorms, polished air; the light seems honed, buffed, and, late in the day, strikes from a low angle. I swim at around four, but the poignance of a swimming pool in September seems to have lost its legitimacy for me. The pool is real enough and is the crux, the trut
of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun and I lie naked on them. Happy, happy.

•

A story by Hemingway, most of which involves a young man’s four-hour fight with a thousand-pound broadbill. Just as they try to gaff the catch the line breaks. There is courage, endurance, and blood, and the young man’s character is formed in the rigors of the contest. There is the old four-stress cadence—“We lived that year in a house on a hill”—sometimes beautiful and sometimes monotonous. I remain mystified by his suicide.

•

The place where they all went. This could be a dream. Who are they? Old girlfriends; barmen; barbers; the friends you make on beaches, on boats, in the army; maids; gardeners; clerks; salesmen; backgammon, football, Softball, and bridge partners; all those for whom you felt intensely, briefly, and who have vanished, who, for all you know, might be dead. They are not. They live, those hundreds, on a key between the inland waterway and the Gulf of Mexico, a place that has to be reached by boat. Why have they, so to speak, given up; why have they retired; why have they stopped mixing drinks, cutting hair, cracking jokes, writing books and poetry, teaching school, meeting lovers, dancing, raking leaves; why have they stepped out of that landscape where they seemed to belong? They don’t seem to know, or if they do they seem unwilling to say so. They are not terribly old or infirm. They are mostly in their early fifties. Their smiles are still friendly, a little retiring these days, but they still have the gift of making a most casual exchange—setting a drink on the bar—seem immediate, friendly, and absorbing, the citizens of an easygoing planet. Why did they all go away?

•

Rain in the night. Three
A.M.
Very fucky but no cigar. At nine we go up the hill to see the night-blooming cereus perform.

•

Today gloomy and humid. I walk the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond, and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.