The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (56 page)

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So, M. comes, and thinking that my malaise might have something to do with being crouched over a bicycle we walk up the dam path. We meet some people—virtual strangers—whom I once assailed on Cedar Lane and urged to take this walk. They are out to see the autumn foliage, so why do they all wear dark glasses? They have with them a fat dog. I am thoroughly happy with M., and I believe he feels the same way with me, and it is a happiness that I have never known before. I look, quite naturally, for its limitations, and when my great, dear friend gestures toward a field of golden leaves I admire the lightness but I have no wish to write a poem, as I would with a girl. This is not a lack but it is a difference, and I do feel strongly that we both have work to do. Parting with M. is truly sweet, but in the morning I wake in the arms of an imaginary girl.

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M. and I go to the Pyramid Mall, a shopping center that is four or five years old but that I have never seen enjoy a sense of prosperity. Urban renewal is struggling to refresh the old center of the village with an axial sense of merchandizing which goes back to the horse-and-buggy days. The automotive strip and the rudimentary village compete with each other, a competition that is heightened by the price of gasoline but made unequal by the use of tax money. I have never seen this mall thronged, festive, or even modestly prosperous. There are many ornamental fountains meant to contribute to the gaiety of the place, but these have been dry for years. The interior of the bank is a replica of some cabin in a space vehicle on TV. Galaxies can be seen through portholes in the walls; the walls are luminous; and the ceiling is concave. In the line at the teller’s window there is a clinically obese woman in pants and a dwarf with large ears, and in this scene with its suggestion of space one feels that travel in the darkness beyond the stars is retrogressive and that we are hurtling away from that civilized force of selection that has taken aeons to develop. And, judging the scene along moderately conservative lines, what do we find? Vistas, acres of merchandise without the imponderable allure of style and without a trac
of quality. The lack of custom has left the clerks either embarrassingly overanxious or bored and rude. There are three theatres. In one, an old comic is playing the role of God in an amiable farce about life everlasting. The second film is a charming, low-budget account of high-school mores. When we open the door on the third film, called “Caligula,” we see someone sucking a cock, and lest we should doubt the authenticity of this we are shown the ejaculation splashing into an antique ewer. None of these three theatres has any audience to speak of. Back in the mall again we notice that the music, the universal music, is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” We pass a short, elderly woman in tennis shorts who is carrying a battery-operated flashlight that is at least two feet long. This, along with so much else that we see, will never be explained. If we are hungry there are a dozen places to eat and the food is, without exception, that barbarous holiday fare that has been fried and enjoyed at ceremonies and festivals since the beginnings of civilization. This is the food one ate at the execution of the first of the kings, the quartering of the traitor, the hanging of the witch, and the crucifixion of the Saviour. It is not all fried, but much of it is, and you can eat it with your fingers, picking it out of a cornucopia of leaves or a cone of paper while you ride a horse, or paddle a canoe; while you drive a car, or walk up a mall or rialto with your arm around the waist of your beloved. And on TV last night I saw a man speak emotionally about the new beginnings he felt with the Reagan victory. He said with great sincerity that the voters had chosen Reagan for his economic and his foreign policies. One would not want to be supercilious, but I can discern neither. I would describe Reagan’s partisan as being slightly ill-favored. His hair was a little thin, his eyeglasses were a little thick, and he wore a heavy, V-necked sweater under his jacket. This seemed to give him some discomfort. He moved his shoulders a good deal and stretched now and then. His symbol for the Carter Administration was a tattered flag, and he spoke with such deep emotion of Carter’s failure to control the currency and the oil crises that his account began to sound autobiographical, as if the Carter Administration had been responsible for his personal sorrows, his rained-out picnics and sexual hang-ups, his acquaintance with melancholy and loneliness. I thought that I had never seen this before and that it helped to explain the vote. Someone said that if gasoline cost more than a dollar a gallon and we had two-digit inflation the incumbent would be defeated. This seemed to make sense.

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I turn on the TV, but George C. Scott is about to defend, with his life, a bridge in the last war with Germany. Actors impersonating combat—the agonies of death and the glory of victory—have been made ridiculous by documentaries. We are all too familiar with the facts to take seriously the spectacle of an actor pretending to die in an artificial trench. I read about Nancy Mitford and remember being in the next cabana to her on the Lido. Just think of that! She was with Victor Cunard and they were guests of an Italian princess whose name I cannot remember. I never met her, but I’m inclined to suggest that I knew her well. Mussolini gave her father his title, and I once went swimming in her pool with Lord Somebody. Nancy Mitford’s brother-in-law—a somewhat broken-down felon—once paid me a compliment. I sleep well and wake to think of a young woman. I shave, build my fire in the hutch, and go to the village, where I buy a paper and a container of coffee. I am one of the few men you can see coming into McDonald’s with a container of coffee so that they won’t suffer any delay in getting their caffeine. There is a couple—a mother and son, I think. She is one of those women of such exhaustive plainness that you wonder about the moment of conception. What could have compelled anyone to penetrate her? But perhaps she is an aunt. She seems quite happy. The boy is adolescent—twelve or thirteen—and dressed in a yellow costume with a yellow cap with a visor. This seems to be one of those mornings of his life when his strength, beauty, and agility have only just been revealed to him, and while he waits for his scrambled eggs and bacon he poses, absolutely without grace, catches a happy glimpse of himself in some reflecting surface, and pretends, for a minute or two, to fly. They take away four breakfasts, and I expect them to get into a car and drive to the home where Daddy and Sissie are waiting, but not at all. They sit down at a table and attack the four breakfasts with an efficient and experienced air, as if they did this regularly.

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So, I aim at a longer working day and get unhappily overexcited. I don’t find the serenity that I seem to remember while working on “Falconer.” It could be a simple question of health, or how many cups of coffee I drink. I cycle the new route, and toward dark and with this room at long last quite warm, I seem to enjoy some repose.

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I am at loose ends. I go to A.A., this in the parish-house kitchen, an interior that is of first importance to no one. Rummage sales, festivals, and door-to-door fund-raising resurrected the place ten years ago, but now half the fluorescent lighting blinks erratically and half the cabinet doors hang askew. So people talk with absolute candor about the bewilderments of life. “Yesterday was a memory, tomorrow is a dream,” says a man who is dressed like a gas pumper and has only three front teeth. From what text, greeting card, or book he took the message doesn’t matter to me at this hour.

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So, I wake this morning and think, What but a truly great country could freely elect for its Chief Executive a faded and elderly cowboy actor whose veins are so calcified and whose memory is so depleted that he can seldom remember the armchair opinions he expressed at yesterday’s lunch?

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And walking and bicycling and wandering I think myself a bad father, and I think that this decision is to be made not by me but by my sons, and I think that by commenting on my loves and my deepest anxieties I jockey myself into the position of a bystander, a traveller, even a tourist, for by claiming to enjoy a degree of perspective I seem to be planning to move on to some other country. I like to think that this is a passing depression, and that I will live the role of a father with the authority of true love and truly be a man of my time and my place.

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So on my knees in church I am grateful for the present turn of events in my marriage, and I pray it will continue, although I do see that some of the difficulties seem to be part of my immortal soul and that these difficulties were at times made tolerable by my drunkenness. The complexity of my nature seems represented by the morning after the birth of a son. This was what I most wanted in life; it was to be for the rest of my natural life a source of boundless pleasure. He was to be not only an enthusiasm but a salvation. Experiencin
and anticipating this great fortune on the balcony of our apartment in Rome I saw a sports car loaded with drunken bucks racing down the street—for Ostia, I guessed—and I deeply longed to be with them. So, this longing beyond the perimeter of what I ardently desire seems often to be with me. But I have been to Ostia with the bucks, and with them my longing for the permanence I have left is much more painful. So on my knees the first Sunday in Advent I pray for courage.

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The drug I take for epilepsy seems to leave me rather sleepy and unresponsive. That seems to be my message for the day.

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This is my eighth or ninth day on Dilantin, and I feel poorly. I am expected to pick up my medical records, take the dog to the veterinarian, and find someone to drive me to the hospital for my chat with a leading neurologist. I don’t seem able to do much else, although I will try to answer the mail.

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We dine with M.’s teacher, and I will observe that I find myself less than brilliant. When orthodoxy is discussed, I recall that perhaps twenty years ago I discussed this on a porch in Providence, Rhode Island, where a couple whose names I can’t remember gave a large dinner party in our honor. Mary wore a becoming dress that I recall as being vaguely Japanese. What I said was that one cannot, in the space of a lifetime, improvise a code of good and evil, and thus one must resort to tradition. In the morning I am constipated and do not go to church. I go early to Shop-rite to buy cat food. One might describe the few shoppers as ambassadors of a new world. They seem quite strange to me. The air is filled with music. “It came upon a midnight clear,” sing a hundred angels, “that glorious song of old. With angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” I think of that mural in Moscow, at the Hotel Ukraine, which depicts the peaceable kingdom of the Communist world. Poets read their verse to masked steelworkers, and farmers sing as they reap the harvest that will enrich them and their friends. The irony in both cases seems mostly poignant. I thank a stranger for holdin
a door open for me. “You are very welcome,” he says with charming enthusiasm. We wish each other a good day.

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There is a story in the
Times
about toxic waste being buried across the river. I might be able to use this. One novel begins with the Fourth of July, one with Christmas Eve, one with the introduction of a man from the upper classes into a penitentiary, and I would like this to open with nothing less urgent. There is the old man and his skating and the news that the pond is poisoned. This is a possibility, but I don’t feel it deeply. In
The New York Review of Books
I read a piece on the fact that the American people, in choosing Reagan, chose to vote for an irrecapturable past, a character who is no longer found among us, a landscape and a set of circumstances that vanished long ago.

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Monday morning at the S.s’. The hostages are being released but the TV commercials have not been suspended, so we have fond wives and mothers interrupted by exhortations to buy shorts and underwear. The inauguration will be upstaged, to some degree, by the release of the hostages, but I suppose they can exploit this. A speaker this morning said that the new Administration would be strong and powerful. No hostages will be taken while Reagan is President.

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It is that time of year when small colleges with American Indian names and low-digit R.F.D. addresses write to say that the faculty and the student body have enthusiastically chosen me to receive an honorary doctorate in humane letters. Yesterday I regretted two. As I tell it I will claim three.

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So, at the mortal risk of narcissism, I am that old man going around and around the frozen duck pond in my hockey skates, stopping now and then to exclaim over the beauty of the winter sunset. And I am he who can be seen in the early summer morning, pedalling my bicycle to Holy Communion in a High church where they genuflect and use the Cranmer prayer book. I am also he whose loud cries of erotic ecstas
can be heard through the walls of the Millstream Motel. “You can’t go on living like this,” says my lover. I’m not quite sure what is meant.

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So, the old man says, “None of you are old enough to remember the thrill of a consummate civilization. It was a passing phenomenon, rather like the pleasures of light, although we have come to know that light can move worlds. The dates are quite loose, but it would have been sometime between the two wars with Germany. It would be most obvious if you were a young man or woman from Oklahoma, or Salt Lake City, travelling to Paris, or Vienna, or even London. You would be leaving a painful condition of provincial loneliness for some capital city where men and women were all burgeoning in their relationship to one another, in their inventiveness in industry, the arts, and other forms of understanding, as if our lives might be something much more various than a paradise. It was a fact, happily remembered by other old men and women and authenticated by the legislation, the wealth, and the music and painting of that past. But it seems now that we have only our memories, and the provincial loneliness of Oklahoma has become universal.”

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I do have trouble with the dead hours of the afternoon without skating, skiing, bicycling, swimming, or sexual discharges or drink. I read some Graham Greene, whose mastery I admire, but at about twenty minutes to seven I suffer a loss of memory. I know, perhaps, who I am, but I am not very sure of my whereabouts. It may be of some significance that this always happens as I am called to the table. This time I find the seizure uncommonly depressing.