The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (53 page)

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Absolute candor does not suit me, but I will come as close as possible in describing this chain of events. Lonely, and with my loneliness exacerbated by travel, motel rooms, bad food, public readings, and the superficiality of standing in reception lines, I fell in love with M. in a motel room of unusual squalor. His air of seriousness and responsibility, the bridged glasses he wore for his nearsightedness, and his composed manner excited my deepest love, and I called him the next night from California to say how much he meant to me. We wrote love letters for three months, and when we met again we tore at each other’s clothes and sucked each other’s tongues. We were to meet twice again, once to spend some hours in a motel and once to spend twenty minutes naked before a directors’ lunch I had to attend. I was to think of him for a year, continually and with the most painful confusion. I believed that my homosexuality had been revealed to me and that I must spend the rest of my life unhappily with a man. I clearly saw my life displayed as a sexual imposture. When we met here, not long ago, we sped into the nearest bedroom, unbuckled each other’s trousers, groped for our cock
in each other’s underwear, and drank each other’s spit. I came twice, once down his throat, and I think this is the best orgasm I have had in a year. We slept together, at his insistence, and there was some true pleasure here in discovering, I believe, that neither of us was destined to exhaust the roles we were playing. I remember the acute lack of interest with which I regarded his nakedness in the morning when he returned to bed after having taken a piss. He was merely a man with a small cock, a pair of balls, and a small ass suitable for cushioning a chair or a toilet seat and for nothing else. The remembered exactions of women played some role in this for me. There was no anxiety on my part about whether he had a climax. I took a shit with the door open, snored, and farted with ease and humor, as did he. I was delighted to be free of the censure and responsibility I have known with some women. I could spar with him if I felt like it, feed my cock into his mouth, and complain about how smelly his socks were. And I was determined not to have this love crushed by the stupid prejudices of a procreative society. Lunching with friends who talked about their tedious careers in lechery, I thought: I am gay, I am gay, I am at last free of all this. This did not last for long.

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To interrogate oneself tirelessly on one’s sexual drives seems to me self-destructive. One can be aroused, for example, by the sight of a holly leaf, an apple tree, or a male cardinal bird on a spring morning. As deeply rooted as they are in our sentimental and erotic lives, we must consider that our genitals can be quite thoughtless. They count on us for discretion, cleanliness, and gratification. Without our considered judgment they wouldn’t have the life span of a butterfly.

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A bright day—cold, “fresh,” as we say in other languages; me, horny. In the evening paper—in this provincial, small-town newspaper—one reads that a Cuban couple, solitary, hardworking people, who had no friends, lost their son in a drowning accident in the municipal swimming pool and committed double suicide. They closed the garage door, connected a garden hose to the exhaust pipe of the car, and suffocated in each other’s arms. “They were so unhappy after they lost their son,” said the neighbors. “She cried and cried. She used to embroider a lo
and knit and crochet, but after they lost the boy she didn’t do anything but cry.” Mr. Nils Jugstrom, returning from his job at the Townsend wire factory, noticed a cedar chest on the road shoulder of Route 23. It was a good-looking chest, nearly new, and he pulled over to the side of the road. Opening the chest, he found the mutilated body of a man with dark hair and a full mustache. It was some time before he could get a car to stop, and call the police. He sat alone by the corpse while hundreds of cars, hastening home, passed him with an indifference that he took personally. Deaths, this afternoon, are confined to the local nursing homes. Mrs. Cherryweather found a burglar in her shower stall, carrying her TV. While she called the police he escaped out a window. The high-school lacrosse team made four scores in the last eight minutes of play and defeated Haverstraw seven to six. I like smalltown papers.

To have been expelled from Thayer Academy for smoking and then to have been given an honorary degree from Harvard seems to me a crowning example of the inestimable opportunities of the world in which I live and in which I pray generations will continue to live.

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None of us can clearly remember those years at the turn of the century when the exalted arts of painting, sculpture, and music became so chaotic, so lost in an area of metaphysics that they had neither the vision nor the intelligence to exploit, that they surrendered their spiritual responsibilities and left to literature, and to literature alone, the responsibility of continuing that dialogue—vital to the life of the planet—that we and our kind carry on with one another, with our landscapes, with our oceans, and with our gods.

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When I was a young man, I woke one morning in the unclean bedsheets of squalid furnished rooms, poor and hungry and lonely, and thought that some morning I would wake in my own house, holding in my arms a fragrant bride and hearing from the broad lawn beyond my window the voices of my beloved children. And so I did. But there was in the air some deep, continuous sound that I had not imagined, and, going to the window to see if it was raining, I saw that the day was brilliant and that the sound I heard was the brook—a reward that m
most desperate imaginings had overlooked. The bounty of things, as it so often is, had been richer than my imagination of it. And so I wake this morning. I hear again the roar of the brook. I sleep alone these days, having been exiled from my own bed, closet, and washbasin by a troubled wife. All I hold in my arms these days is a memory of the girl on the Murad cigar box. But my children are comely and loving and self-possessed and walking over those parts of the world that interest them; and my daughter once kissed me and said, “You can’t win them all, Daddy.” And so I can’t.

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I recall coming into Rome on the train at dusk. I can’t remember from where I was returning, but I was returning to a wife or a mistress and a circle of singing children. It was a hot dusk. The train was passing through that shantytown at the edge of the city, where the houses are no more than sheds, redeemed by the wild fertility of their small gardens. In one of these small gardens a naked young man was bathing himself from a pail. I expect he was getting ready to wait on table at some trattoria on the Gianicolo. I saw nothing of him other than his youthfulness, the whiteness of his skin, and the thickness of hair at his armpits and crotch. I loved him. Oh, how I loved him! That he might be a cretin with bad breath and a grating voice would never occur to me. So I entered the city and the circle of friends, deeply saddened to think that I had left my heart in the slums, deeply saddened and walking with the stoop of a guilty impostor. Now that I’m an old, old man, such waywardness seems only some part of life’s richness.

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M. calls and will likely arrive tomorrow. I could have told him not to come, but the alternatives are sinister. Reading old journals, I convince myself that the constants in my nature are healthy; as a man with a vegetable garden, I simply mean healthy as a plant that answers to its description on the package, that has a practical response to the soil and the climate and produces a surprisingly abundant and nutritious crop. The aberrations in my nature seem to me merely shadows, aberrant and passing storms. That I have homosexual instincts seems to me a commonplace. What is extraordinary, I think, is the force that was brought to crush these instincts and that exacerbated them beyond thei
natural importance. Whether or not we spend the night together seems of no great importance. I enjoy his company. I am lonely.

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So the grail, the grail; and anyone who thinks of this in terms of genitalia is a contemptible noncombatant. The grail, the grail! It fills one’s mind in the early morning as one’s skin is filled with ardor. There is no question of compromise or defeat. One wants only to make an exemplary contribution, and if this is accomplished one’s ending is inconsequential!

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And there is the face, which is the most important experience for me and which seems to escape me. I am waiting for someone to arrive on the train. It is toward the end of the afternoon. The train is late. The taxi driver leaves his cab. He is youngish. There is really nothing very specific about him. He is, I think, ugly. If he ever went to a dance—which I doubt he would—he would have trouble getting a date. So, to this stranger, whom I very likely will never see again, I bring a bulky and extended burden of anxieties like the baggage train of some early army. Does he live with his wife, his girl, his mother, his drunken father? Does he live alone? Does he have a small bank account, a big cock, is his underwear clean? Does he throw low dice, has he paid his dentist’s bills—or has he ever been to the dentist’s? We see the light of the approaching train in the distance, burning gratuitously in the full light of day. At this sight, he takes a comb out of his pocket and runs it through his hair. Is the comb broken? Is his hair dirty? That is not for me to observe. What I do see in this gesture is the man—his essence, his independence; see in his homely face the beauty of a velocity that does not apprehend the angle of repose. Here in this gesture of combing his hair is a marvel of self-possession, and the thrill is mutual and is, it seems, the key to this time of life.

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One wouldn’t want to love oneself. That damages our usefulness. One wouldn’t want to pursue the past. That is bad for the posture. And one wouldn’t want to be one of those old men who take out their cocks and clear their throats as if they were about to write, with their seminal discharge, one of those lengthy postwar treaties that will crush th
national spirit, surrender the critical isthmus, and yield the mountain passes to the enemy.

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My son and his beloved are down when I return to the house. That I should see him enjoy the love of a loving, comely, and intelligent young woman is an enormous contribution to my sense of things. But I have forgotten to mention the light of this day. It is emphatic, terribly clear, and seems in its force and in the force with which it throws shadows to declare the year’s end. “I will not go swimming,” I say to Mary, “because I will cry.” “I understand,” says she. I do not swim (for other reasons) but the pool, dark so early in the afternoon, with its few fallen leaves, would be a powerful experience. Spreading fertilizer on the upper terrace, I think that my son will go and I will never see him again. This is not the worst of my thinking for the day, but it is contemptible; as it will seem contemptible later to think that I should have been born in an earlier period when I would have been better understood. Today is where I live; today gives me my gravel, my essence, the bulk of my usefulness. So I begin by thinking that all I possess is a belief in life’s purposefulness. I have not seen my wife so happy as she has been during these few days with our son. And since I see her happy, can’t I help her to continue to be? Perhaps I fail. I will invite her to go with me tonight. She will refuse. That I could insist is a possibility. If the clash that may lie ahead of me seems merely a misunderstanding of our times, wouldn’t this mean that I must take the posture of one of those stooped trees that stand traditionally beside the water, mournful and a good example of what some young tree would not want to be?

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Loneliness I taste. The chair I sit in, the room, the house, none of this has substance. I think of Hemingway, what we remember of his work is not so much the color of the sky as it is the absolute taste of loneliness. Loneliness is not, I think, an absolute, but its taste is more powerful than any other. I think that endeavoring to be a serious writer is quite a dangerous career.

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I have experienced the force of the past in my own life; the profound love of my brother. That I would turn away from this and take lover
and delight in them and marry and raise splendid children would, it seems, in no way diminish the fact that my own true love was my brother. That it was a sterile and a perverse love does not in any way diminish its profundity. So it sounds like the drone pass on the old-fashioned organ, and no matter how many green meadows I sport in, it seems that I will always regret having left my dear old brother.

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Reading old journals I find Mary railing at me for my lack of virility, and perhaps her disappointments were serious. I find myself enormously happy in her arms. My random bones are listed with candor, and this is some part of the richness of my life. When I am given love I seem quite contented. Such merit as my work possesses is rooted in the fact that I have been unsuccessful in my search for love.

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So I shift my skating, late in the day, to S.’s pond, where the ice is pristine, but where the reaches are limited. On the big pond you can skate straightaway until you’re tired. Here you skate in a circle. The days are longer now. At four I will tire, before the sun sets. The sky is mixed, but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty—a moral beauty. By this I mean that it corrects the measure and the nature of my thinking. Space, perhaps, is what I mean, but there is the moral beauty of light, velocity, and environment, which seems profoundly sympathetic. I drink tea and jaw and skate until dark.

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So Sexagesima with Ben. Humor quite bridges any complications about taking Holy Communion with my son. In my prayers, however, I cannot include a second wife for him, or even a third. Another wife, another family, other children—all things that may happen—are absolutely unimaginable. So is my own separation. I wish I could be given some perspective on this old man on his knees in an obsolete church building, quite incapable of imagining that his son, kneeling on his left, whose intense marital unhappiness he has seen at first hand, will ever marry again.