The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (52 page)

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I wake from a dream or reverie of last February, or this February, or some February to come. I am working at West House. I wake at six or seven, drink coffee lightheartedly and naked in the kitchen, dress and walk through the snow to the garage, where I kiss beloved B. and am given a plate of scrambled eggs. Back at the house, I work until one, when I eat my sandwiches and take a rest. The days are getting longer, but it starts to get dark at four, and I put on my skis, and pole happily around the widest circle. I come in after dark, take a shower, and am dressing when I hear G. at the door. She is a loving, intelligent, and beautiful woman, and why should this be so remarkable? You will say that is the old chimera, but why should a loving, beautiful, and intelligent woman exist only in the imagination of a lonely man? Her hair is dark. This, I think, is a new note. She is not terribly young, but her face and her skin show no trace, no trace of age that can b
seen by these old eyes. I am not sure what we do—we might do anything—but whatever it is we are contented with one another. I seem to take her to a restaurant, and we spend the night together. In the morning we have a terrible breakfast in some roadside place, but the coffee is good. This seems to me a poem, or perhaps a song. And I wake happily from another dream in which I think I live and walk in an accomplished, representative government that is efficient, visionary, and victorious. Bureaucracy has vanished, along with smallpox, and we have gone on to better things.

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I was crowding forty when I stood under an apartment-house canopy and planned to write “Oh, what can you do with a man like that!,” and so on, through the end of “Goodbye, My Brother” and those other stories and novels that record my break with irony and dismay. And here is that New York at the close of the Second World War that so few of us remember: one stood in line at Rockefeller Center; the 20th Century to Chicago was on time; almost everybody wore a hat. The singular force of time through which one seems to swim let me describe everyone with gray hair until my own head turned gray when everyone else’s hair went brown.

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Mr. Ross insisted on a degree of decorum. One could not, of course, use a word like “fuck.” One complained, of course, and published stories elsewhere, but I, it seems, had my own concept of decorum, and when Mr. Ross used the word “fuck” at the lunch table I would jump. Having noticed this, Mr. Ross would, at lunch, throw a “fuck” in my direction now and then, to watch me jump. He was, himself, not a decorous man, but he taught me that decorum can be a mode of language—born of our need to speak with one another—and a language that, having been learned, was in no way constraining.

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So, he stands in the forest, making his choice. On his left is the girl, dressed in white, with yellow hair—golden, really. Any gesture or movement she makes—picking a leaf off her skirt—seems to involve an increase of light. The other is dark-haired, dark-eyed; even the luminousnes
of her skin is dark. She is slender, long-breasted, with very long fingers. The girls represent—quite unoriginally—night and day, gravity and weightlessness, the sun and the moon. The girl with yellow hair represents a boundless chain of lighted rooms; the easy talk and laughter of friends and lovers; healthy pride, and a winning score. The other represents one room, and that quite small and unlighted. She is contentedly friendless and her appetite is for out-of-season grapes. And yet it is the declivity of her back that his fingers seem to want to trace, and by fingers, of course, I mean something very different. So he stands in the forest, asked to choose between the boundless light and a darkness whose only charm is mystery. But what he overlooks is the fact that lightness and darkness have their own opinions. If he has invested in tax-exempt municipal bonds, thinks the girl with yellow hair, are they insured? Can he get a taxi on a rainy night? Will he be cross at the fact that I am always ten minutes early for everything, everything, and that I eat candy bars between meals and leave the wrappers in ashtrays? Does he snore? thinks the representative of darkness. Does he have a morning cough? Does he have no consideration at all, since it is twenty minutes past the time for my blood-pressure pill, and I am allergic to the roses with which this forest is filled? He even overlooks the trees, who have their own thoughts and anxieties. A virulent rust, invisible to the eye, can wither the mightiest of them. A wisteria vine, no more today than a strand of hair on the trunk, can bend and break the spine of an oak. He stands in Arden—a forest whose richness and profundity he can never comprehend, deceived as he is by the importance of his choice.

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There is a degree of
mensongerie
in some of our loves, but this seems most exaggerated in the love of men. Chucky was a runner-up in some three-round provincial golden-gloves contest eighteen years ago, but he now swaggers around the steam room like the winner he never was; and the lovers he mounts, young or old, seem to feel transported to the manly world of fighters. It is as though some old whore claimed to have been the centerfold in the most golden days of
Playboy
. She wouldn’t make any such claim. And so we have an enlarged—and, I think, unsavory—element of delusion and regret. We are all, sooner or later, shadows, but we are not overwhelmed.

Floating around in melancholy, I recall my claim that my life was brightly lighted by the sun until my adolescence. But there is a photograph of me, taken, I think, when I was seven, that would refute this. The face is of a boy whose father regretted his conception and wished that he was not alive. We, the fatherless, sit around trying to top one another’s tales, and I think myself lacking the love of a father, and, living with a father who wished me dead, think I’ve won the game. The truth is impossible to arrive at, but, even when I was in my twenties, he closed and locked the door in my face. So I think I have never used the scene where the doctor comes for dinner, and I will put this down. I remember my father’s detestation of me as I feel for the roots of some destructive vine—the vine, of course, being my bewildering love. To be mistaken in love, to—like Capote—take a lover who will strip your apartment of all its valuables, is something that can be parsed in fifty ways; but it seems to me no more than the mysteriousness of love. It has always been dangerous; its other face has always been death.

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An overcast and foreboding sky—not really dark, because there is light in the woods when I walk the dogs—but a serious sky. It is very cold. Only a little snow falls. See the old man, walking through the woods, pouring into the ears of his dogs the griefs and frustrations of his marriage; and on the hill at the edge of his land are the graves of five former dogs, into whose ears he poured his laments, even as they lay dying. Oh, why does she spit in my face? Why does she knee me in the groin? Why has she not spoken to me now for eighteen days? The dogs pick up the scent of deer these days and find the walks exciting.

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So, thinking of H., I think of her as a sunlit playing field, into which I have, often enough, jogged out with my football, ready for fun. But then, to be honest, there were the days in which I hid in the bushes at the edge of the field; there was the hockey game I missed because I couldn’t find my skate laces; and the football scrimmage I sidestepped because my jockstrap was either stolen or misplaced. In short, I have been a coward. In retrospect, I think myself blameless, but this darkness in my nature seems inexpungible. I have been a coward, and perhaps it is cowardice that we see in this old man, haranguing his dogs with tales of his unhappiness.

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My son drives me to Mt. Kisco to pick up my new car. He seems happy with his wife and thus estranged from us, and this is as it should be. The new car stalls driving away from the dealer, and there seems to be something wrong with the ignition. I buy groceries at an A. & P. strange to me. There is for some reason no music, and this I miss. The customers seem to me unclean, stupid, and gross, and I see that this level of perception—this seizure of morbid sensitivity—cripples my usefulness as a man. My sympathy for the young women at the checkout counters is outrageous. I want to gather them all in my arms and take them off to Arcadia. I seem tired, and I sleep. Meeting my daughter at the train I observe again how like an enemy I judge the boots, hats, voices, and faces of these men and women who are merely waiting to take a train into the city. I seem to think they plan the destruction of Western civilization. I talk with my daughter, cook supper, and go to a meeting in a smoke-filled parish-house basement where all but two of the audience are shabbily dressed. I remember my happiness with a burlesque company when I was very young.

•

I have no perspective at all. After the interviewers leave, I drive the maid home and walk with the dogs. My sexuality is highly irritable and distorts my view of things. The last of the light has that splendid and indescribable glow that one finds only in winter twilights. Now, for the first time, I see color in the trees. So, there will be spring and summer. And, walking up the hill carrying the garbage pail, I see a holly leaf on the drive. I am as thrilled as Leander was when he saw the green from Advent on the chancel carpet. The nearly black, hard leaf with its thorns means potency and vigor. That it means nothing at all is unimportant. It is important that I am stirred.

I become myself; and so I will try to review what has contributed to my painful sense of loss. My mortality is what I begin with, manifested by my sexual drives. These excitements have always been random, and when I have refused the love of men it has been, I like to think, a choice and not a force of repression. The present problem, if it is that, began a year ago when I found myself alone in a squalid motel with a young man who had none of the attributes of a sexual irregular. We embraced briefly, declared our love, and parted. We have since then met four or five times, but I have thought of him often. The importanc
of this is impossible to judge. It could be compared to an infection that threatens my well-being, but that is dormant much of the time. Such is my injured heart. He married for the second time in December and left my letters unanswered. What I expected from him was easy companionship, lewdness, and some relaxation of the rigors of living with a wife. On my return from Russia, I suffered a violent spasm of alienation. Darkness, for example, offended me. To read a book, I would turn on six lamps. The only house I have ever owned struck me as dirty, confusing, and costly. In the piles of mail, I found a letter from him, and it was the first that I opened. He hinted at the indifference of his marriage and hinted—no more—at his love for me.

It is impossible for me to describe what followed. I am highly susceptible to romantic love. I remember weeping bitterly over D. and L. I became engulfed in the anticipation of an erotic romance that corroded and destroyed that self-possession that defines a man. Yesterday at lunch I experienced that intoxicating arrogance of the self-declared alien, the sexual expatriate. I am unlike you, unlike any of you eating your wretched lunches in a Greek diner. I am queer, and happy to say so. At the same time, the waitress is so desirable that I could eat her hands, her mouth. This is the cardinal sin of pride. I rest, I sleep. How reluctant I am to admit to taking a nap. Somewhere along the line, my thinking, my chemistry, my genitals, and my spirit are restored; and that makes it possible to continue that voyage or pilgrimage that is one’s life. I am not sure of the hour of day. The taste of that given bread and salt that is my life is in my mouth. This would seem to be God’s will. I walk the dogs. I skate and tire very quickly. I cook dinner, drive to church, watch a thrilling movie on TV, and sleep happily in my skin for the first time in what seems to be a year. My most despicable moment, I think, is in the post office. There is a woman there in a very cheap fur coat, with two children. The coat has been sprayed with something that promised to make it gleam like mink, but the skin is the skin of a mongrel. The woman’s eyes are protuberant. So are the eyes of her two small children, and I regard all three with loathing and regard myself as contemptible for scorning these innocents. I experience the arrogance of a man committed to a wayward cock. This morning, eating bacon and toast, my galling otherness has been conquered. I am not at the Connaught, or the Cairo Hilton, or the Bucharest Minerva. I am in my own house. That I will suffer all these agonies again is likely, bu,
having come through them so many times, I know that they are not a destination. Even now, writing this, I feel the painful threat of confusion and loss behind the bookshelf and outside the window, but I am happily a man sitting on a chair.

•

It is a week since I waited in this drafty kitchen for my lover. It all seems to have worked out wonderfully, although the composure I enjoy on waking seems not to last deep into the morning. What the hell is a man who made half a million dollars last year doing in an art colony where he sits alone in a room that is obviously furnished in the aftermath of a disaster? The chair he sits in comes from some kitchen. The narrow, threadbare rug belonged in some hall. The bed or cot is one of those expedient surfaces on which we fuck those people whose last names escape us. But what about the white bureau with a keyhole for every drawer, delicate hand pulls, a mirror held up with such narcissistic chasteness that it seems to ask, Who is the fairest of them all? How in hell did this bastion of middle-class chasteness—this repository for sachets, laces, old dance cards, fans, dried flowers, preserved rose leaves, broken beads, and perhaps a pearl-handled revolver—how did this find its way into this bleakest of rooms? There must, of course, have been a flood. Only a natural disaster of unprecedented sweep and violence could account for this feat of dislocation. There must be a chamber pot in the closet, and that half-burned candle in its wretched glass holder is left over from yesterday’s thunderstorms, when all the lights always went out.

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I seem to have some vision of the waywardness of man and the blessings of velocity. I remember C., driving me to dinner with his wife and sons, blindly stopping the car on the road shoulder, making a wild grab for my cock, and kissing me on the ear. I was polite—no more—and so we continued on to the dinner. And I think of an article in yesterday’s
Times
in which Ada Huxtable discusses the architecture of roadside restaurants, meant to catch our sympathies at any speed above fifty miles an hour. There was, long ago, the practical decade, followed by the restorations and the progressive architects, working in their own idiom. What she does not observe is that this nomadic, roadside civilizatio
is the creation of the loneliest travellers the world has ever seen. Quick-food stands that resemble the House of the Seven Gables, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Parson Capon house are not picked for their charm or their claim to a past; they are picked because we are a homeless people looking at nightfall for a window in which a lamp burns, and an interior warmed by an open fire, where we will be fed and understood and loved. The rash of utterly false mansards, false, small-paned windows, and electric candlesticks is the heart’s cry of a lonely, lonely people. And after opening a thousand rough-hewn doors, with their false, wrought-iron hardware; after warming ourselves at electric fires and reading a menu that is a reproduction of something from the century before last; we feel that the past will not feed and warm and understand and love us; and so we go on to the future; to the space between the stars where our love is waiting; we eat our wretched food in rocket ships, flying saucers, and pieces of Mars and the moon. Surely we will be understood there. And so one sees this great, nomadic nation on roads built by blackmailing unions and the lobbies of contractors, manufacturers, truck-fleet owners, and politicians of all sorts. We see a great people turned nomadic in their passionate search for love.