The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (51 page)

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The holiday parties we go to might be described as provincial. This would be adequate but not truthful. We go on the night of the Fourt
to see the fireworks at the club, something I first did perhaps twenty-five years ago. It is a pleasure to see so much of my life. The vast Palladian façade, built on the bones of murdered workers, and the men and women spread over the lawn are thought to be a show of wealth and privilege (although my friends from prison would say that it ain’t got no class) and I remember, unwillingly, the villa of a papal duchess. But here is the grass, the crowd, the twilight, and the terrible dance band playing “When the Red, Red Robin.” One has heard the same dreary music for so long that one would expect the players to be infirm, but they are youthful, and so what one encounters is enduring vulgarity. The buffet supper is over. The light is dimming. The band begins to struggle with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and very, very slowly the diners get off their chairs and onto their terribly expensive shoes. A little flag, constructed of fire, is ignited. Its sputtering can be heard, and one section of a crimson stripe falls to the grass. There is some applause, some cowboy hoots, and then, with a half-dozen mortared detonations high in the air, the show begins.

I watch the man, barely visible in the darkness, who ignites the mortars with a flare and then runs like hell. There is some enormous universality and excitement in the way he ignites a fuse and takes off. This is youth, this is the excitement of a summer night, this is mischief, this, in fact, is sin. This is also my partiality to a rudimentary participation. I canoe on the Main and in the canals of Amsterdam and Venice.

I get to know the quality of the water, the distances in terms of strength, and enjoy the privileges of a bystander. The fireworks are mortars and set pieces. They seem quite traditional. There is the French school: pale colors that arc at the zenith and give, for half a second, the illusion of a rotunda. There are the Neapolitan extravagances of red and green, and the phosphorus waterfalls. We sigh like lovers at the fire, applaud the fire, estimate the cost of the fire. We are charmed by the fire. “Mother can’t find her largest diamond,” says a young woman. Her “a” is improbably broad. It would excite the suspicions of a busboy. “What do you think someone from a place like Russia would think about this?” a young man asks. Oh-ho. I remember my old-fashioned friends who used to call across theatre lobbies remarks such as, “Lisbon was divine, but the King has laryngitis.” So the last chain of mortars jars our eardrums, fills heaven with fire, and we go back to the exclusive parking lot.

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So, I feel lost, and doubly lost because I’m not sure where I am. Climbing the hill to get the paper, I seem to be going down a dirt road to swim in some lake. The feel of dirt under my bare feet and the breadth of the kitchen garden on my left—or the cut hayfields on my right—will diminish my sense of being lost, as will my swim in a cold lake. And so here, rather than venting my candor and my amorousness, I spade the fallow garden and weed the stairs. And today I will clip the hedges and fertilize the tomatoes. I think about my aloneness, about the many things that are meant by this. I claim to be thrilled by the indifference of the young because it gives me a sense of my self—my carcass and my intelligence—that has the robust ring of truth. And I am of that generation that can remember when every cash register had a small, marble shelf. Suspected coins were flung against this to tell by their ring whether or not they were counterfeit. It was to become for some of us a metaphor for good and evil, with a dependence upon the verb “rang.” So I feed the tomatoes as well as the Swiss chard, and, finding no love letter in the mail, I view both my losses and that which is beyond and above them, that which has always been represented by the mountains. The inclination to sadness is plain; so is the robust laughter from the mountains, and, while I am not quite content with this, it is enough to keep me moving. Pedalling up the long, gradual climb, I see both myself and my adversary. I display a kind of hasty optimism that seems comical. Velocity seems to be all that I’ve ever possessed. I pass a house where the vegetable garden is planted every spring and is always, by July, a thick wilderness of weeds. Is the man always transferred to another job? Do they divorce or simply take a long vacation in Europe? And then I pass the house that stands forever in the darkness of a grove of maples, susceptible to dampness, rot, and human depressions. A homosexual couple once lived there, quarrelling bitterly about hairpieces, etc. I then pass the beautiful garden of the two brothers who used to pump gas at the station. From the open windows of the house I hear two highly cultivated voices discussing the price of fried chicken. These are rich and educated women, and I wonder have the brothers married, do they have successful sisters, what is this foothold in the upper class? A burst of music explains the voices as television, and I shift gears and coast down the long hill with the wind in my face. I
remember at Bennington, on an autumn afternoon, drawing a tub of water and turning on the TV. I got into the tub and pretended that the room was full of people. It was full of voices. But I am tired of such loneliness.

I read some stories of mine. Their preciseness galls me; I seem always to be plugging at small targets. I hit them all right, but why don’t you get the 12-gauge double-barrel and go after bigger game? And the lack of genuine climax galls me, too. I have been racked by a big orgasm as often as there are stars in heaven, but I don’t seem to get this down. However, I think the stories an accomplishment.

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So my hours of happiest comprehension seem limited. They are roughly from six to eight in the morning, and it is now half past nine. For reasons, perhaps, of decorum, comprehension, or dishonesty I recast my dilemma in the light of those days when my brother left for Germany and I lay on the sofa crying for him. The sofa was a ridged, Victorian piece of furniture constructed for straight-backed callers taking a cup of tea. This I remember vividly. I wept for a love that could only bring me misery and narrowness and denial; and how passionately I wept. And so I weep again (not really), and go out for dinner looking, really, for nothing but company and warm food.

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A new journal, and since more than half of the last novel was encompassed in the last journal I hope that something will be accomplished when I complete this. Alone, and much less lonely (I claim) than I am with my wife, I eat sketchily and the first thing I think of when I wake is that I must have lost weight. I will weigh myself. By a loss of weight I mean that I will have recouped some of that youthful beauty I never possessed, that I will be kissed and caressed and worshipped. I see how far all of this is from the realm of common sense. Anyone who caressed and worshipped this old carcass would be someone upon whose loneliness, fear, and ignorance I preyed. This would be the exploitation of innocence. This I see as I swim so briefly through that part of the stream that represents common sense. I will get into other, more seductive, waters, but there is always the chance that I will return to this.

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I go into town to see F., a charmer, an Eastern European with just that margin of irresistibility that is necessary for the world of film. Then I go down to see H.’s show. It is sold out, but I get a seat in the last row of the balcony. She’s a very attractive woman, and I feel estranged in my balcony seat, and it would be vulgar of me to review the intimacies we have enjoyed—but none since the snow melted, and this is August. Instead of taking her to supper, I leave before the end, walking to the station. I look, rather wearily, for the prostitutes, but there are none. There are tourists in the city, men and women with children, and young men with their arms around the slender waists of their girls. The beauty of girls seems to have dimmed for me, and the truth is that I no longer have the kind of bone that is needed. This, I trust, will pass since I have a bone in the mornings. But am I growing old, and should I accommodate myself to this? When does one’s spirit yield to one’s chemistry? The last time I scuffled with a woman the lingering perfume on my skin and my clothes lasted for three marvellous hours, and I remember the skein of L.’s hair across my face. But there is at corners, waiting for traffic lights, the sense that the time has come to part with all of this. Is this supine; is this less than courageous? Will I be content with one-night, one-hour stands, really, when, after I have come, I wonder why they don’t get dressed and go away?

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So, as an unnatural and undeservedly lonely man, I go to the diner for supper. The waitresses are all meant for us, and I love them. Bringing me bread and butter and a glass of ice water, she is like the dove bringing a green branch to the ark. I hear a couple behind me. “All you want to do,” says the man, “is to pick a fight. Whatever I say, you’ll use it as a springboard for a fight. If I order celery and olives you’ll pick a fight over that.” He seems to have got all my wife’s lines, and, remembering them, I think them perverted and unnatural. They are quite insane. I have never, I think, thought of my wife with more finality. But I have only nine days here before we go to the sea, and so I will wait for the beaches and the Atlantic. Walking around the place that contains so much of myself, I feel that to live here is not truly a compromise, that it does not suffer the lack of light, the malodorousness o
a compromise. So I shall cut wood, set some stones. Answer your mail, pay your bills, go to the dry cleaner’s and the laundromat.

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This is truly the worst kind of day the Hudson Valley can produce. Its Precambrian memories are refreshed, and the vines, some of the earliest in botanical history, grow with great rapidity. The light is melancholy, the air is lethal, everything one touches is wet, and I, of course, am lonely. Yesterday, doing what the Boy Scout Handbook forbade, I observed that my imaginary partners are chosen not for reasons of sentiment but for their obscene expertise. Mary calls and seems both friendly and intelligent, and I glimpse the landscape of my marriage as a fertile and well-lighted place, where I can be malicious and untruthful. This does not last for long. The chairs and tables all speak in complaining, embittered, and hateful voices. “How long,” the stove asks me, “has it been since you have heard in this room a clear and loving voice?” It was twelve years ago, on the night when I first returned from Russia. “My mother wanted me to be a boy,” she cried, and let me hold her passionately.

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This is a splendid sea. I play backgammon with a young man for most of the afternoon and come out two games behind. Into the village I drive to A.A., which helps immensely, and where I think I see two gays sitting in the corner. I think I am completely mistaken and that the fault is mine. A woman confesses to her sins. She weighed 280 pounds; she couldn’t climb a flight of stairs; she couldn’t drive; she couldn’t do anything but drink, and even that was difficult because she would vomit most of the first bottle. I think of my mother at Christian Science Testimonial meetings, confessing to having been so enchained by the flesh that a cancer was destroying her. And so we say the same; our confessions all deal with self-destruction and love. Look away from the body into truth and light! We find, in these church basements, a universality that cuts like the blade of a guillotine through the customs we have created in order to live peaceably. Here, on our folding chairs, we talk quite nakedly about endings and beginnings. When I leave the church the village has the charm, eclipsed for me, of a restoration or a stage set. The nostalgia is openly false. The beauty of the architectur
is striking and splendidly preserved, but the clash of a whale-oil port is nowhere; and how absurd to look for it. This is a place for vacationers, mildly in search of a quaint past and a nice answer.

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This is the sort of seaside hotel about which people used to write romances; here one met the lady with the dog, here old Aschenbach came in his woolly underpants, watching a youth sport in the sea.

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I could write to X that when I say I need you what I mean is that I need the swiftness with which you respond to the importunacy of my needs, and that when I am with you I am as close as I have been to another person in some months. I could write this, but I will not, because some of it is bullshit and because it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I could write a humorous report on the bicycle situation here, but I really ought to try to be serious. The only urgency I seem to feel is the urgency—and the mysteriousness—of my sentimental and my carnal drives. I seem to be married no more. Mary is charmed by the simples of the Atlantic—its iconography—which is truly the iconography of birth, and she walks up and down the shore and covers the windowsill with shells and stones that have a spectrum of great delicacy and beauty. She comes to the breakfast table with thistles and beach-plum sprays, bayberries and other wild and delicate specimens evolved by the prevailing southwesterlies, and while she is charmed and charming I am moved mostly by a sense of parting.

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The runt, the vagrant, in the pew ahead of me in church. I notice first the unwashed, uncut, uncombed brown hair partially concealing tipped ears that someone would describe as elfin. The pallor, I think, is Polish, never having been near Poland. From the cowlick one can anticipate every thread of his clothing, either lifted from some bin in a charitable bureaucracy or bought in some back-street, downhill, cut-rate Army & Navy store. The north-woods-lumberman’s jacket is colorless and seems made of bad, thin air. There is no point in holding up for scrutiny the sketchy wash trousers and the wet sneakers with their knotted laces. “You are twenty-three? twenty-four?” you might ask.
“I’m thirty-five,” he will say. “I know I look young.” What he means to say is that he looks undernourished and immature, and when he stands for the Gloria he has the posture of someone waiting in line for a handout. He is waiting in line. He will always seem to be waiting in line. Utterly alone, picked up by your headlights at dusk standing on the road shoulders of Route One Million, possessing nothing but his clothes and maybe three dollars, he will seem to be standing in line. But he is on his feet for the Gloria, drops loudly to his knees at the first hint of prayer. Where did he learn his High-Church ground rules? He is, I conclude, imitating the woman ahead of him until I see him slide into base seconds ahead of her when we switch from the Epistle to the Gospel. So he learned them in line, I conclude, learned them in some church orphanage, where you lined up for the Holy Eucharist before you lined up for the boiled egg and the day-old bread. He leaves the church ahead of me, and the priest asks, “You’ve been away?” “Yar,” he says. Then he turns to me, very brightly, and says
“Hi!”
I can’t imagine where we met. I think he cut the ivy off my chimney two years ago. What do I want? I want to fatten him, mature him, dress him, and send him to Yale. Driving my car around the block, I crank down a window, planning to speak and ask him where we met, but he, of course, has vanished. Those are his accomplishments. He can queue up and vanish.