The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (57 page)

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I wake terribly blue, and try to remember how often this has been the case; how often I have written about the man who cries at ballgames and Fourth of July parades. I think of how substantial is the gift of prayer; and I am on my knees. And I think of the susceptibility and loneliness of youth, of how this contributes to youth’s drive and youth’s beauty.

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The last Sunday before Lent, and this is in haste. The light is brilliant, and my spirits are high, and since this is the first of the month I know these high spirits will be lasting. Remembering my letter to O’Hara, I think, on my knees in church, that I believe in narrative as invention. What I mean to say, of course, is that I believe in narrative as revelation. And in writing to Federico I would like to say something about our closeness having some of the elements of chance and that we are rather like travellers taking the same road, gifted or equipped with remarkable instruments of divination, since the road is seldom travelled, or that at least gives that impression.

And it is with a marketplace that we confound those anthropologists who consider society to be largely a creation of anxiety, theft, and cowardice. We do not gather at that pass in the river to increase our numbers so we can defend ourselves from the tribes in the north. We gather here to exchange our potatoes for meat, our fish for baskets, and our greens for new breads. We are also gathered here to meet our wives, compete in contests of strength and skill, listen to the storyteller recount the night the wolves appeared, watch the thief’s right hand be chopped off, and get fairly drunk. The fragrance of our social origins is what gives Buy Brite some of its excitement.

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At the bank I see D.C., a slender black who does carpentry. “Nails have gone from ten cents a pound to a dollar thirty. You can’t keep your head above water.” An Irishman behind me, who excites my dislike, goes on about how terrible these times are. “Oh, they are terrible,” says D. “All the governor wants to do is build prisons. And they sent that woman to prison for killing her lover, but I know a man who shot his friend right in the face and didn’t get six months. He just paid off the right judge. You get three raps for stealing now, you get life. Life! Buddy’s brother got three raps for stealing, and they locked him up for eighteen years. He had to serve twelve. But one of my girl friends went to this Arab country for her vacation where if you steal anything they cut your hand off. I mean, you see a pocketbook lying in the street, you try to find out who it belongs to. You go into a store and you want to buy something and the owner isn’t there you go out in the street and find him. If you don’t they’ll cut your hand off.” “I suppose,” th
Irishman says, “that the judges are corrupt, the lawyers are crooked, even the weather is worse than it used to be because of pollution, but if you buy one of them Japanese cars you’ll throw ten Americans out of work. It’s just terrible, everything is just terrible.”

And only a few hours later an attempt is made to assassinate the President. That he rallies seems to me splendid. That the Chief Executive of a very great nation is felled by an assassin and upon rising says “I forgot to duck” proves the inspired closeness of language and spirit. We seem perhaps closer to the light than we were in St. Petersburg and Sarajevo.

I have a traction bed installed and invest a hundred thousand dollars in an energy-saving transportation-improvement bond issue. M. arrives and it is a great pleasure to meet him. This friendship—with its great potential for confrontations, scandal, blackmail, arrests, suicides, and other tragic ends—seems to me intrinsically easygoing and quite natural. When we embrace briefly at the station before he leaves the car to take a train we both enjoy a mastery over some territories of loneliness that seemed endless. Holding him in my arms and being held in his, feeling his cheek against my cheek, I seem to understand the Copenhagen airport in a snowstorm, or Istanbul, or Cleveland.

This cannot go on forever, this could not possibly be solemnized—it lasts for only a few hours, and I think, sentimentally, that one never asked for more.

So I sit at the kitchen table, drinking black coffee and thinking of Verdi. Through government aid I heard, in the last week, the last scene from “Il Trovatore” and the Requiem Mass. And so I think of the enormous contribution Verdi made to the life of the planet and the enormous cooperation he was given by orchestras and singers and the enthusiasm of audiences. And I think what an enormous opportunity it is to be alive on this planet. Having myself been cold and hungry and terribly alone, I think I still feel the excitement of an opportunity. The sense of being with some sleeping person—one’s child or one’s lover—and seeming to taste the privilege of living, or being alive. This sense of privilege or opportunity seems to hint, and no more than hint, at other worlds around us. This seems a singular experience.

My neck is lame; and last night I read at the church and lost the last page. What is there to say of the evening? My wife seems to be quite simply the air I breathe. It is a spring night, a lovely spring night.
We walk from the church to the club and at the foot of the street one can see the full sky, a wall of light.

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So, awakened first by a cat and then by an old dog, I find myself drinking coffee at quarter to six. I am prone to complain, but prone is what I am. It is the old litany. I have no closet, no shirt drawer, and because I invested a hundred thousand in mortgages, I have no ready cash. If the governor can unsnarl an ecclesiastical battle between the Roman and the Greek churches he will be united in holy matrimony on Saturday to a twice-married Greek opportunist whose affairs are, at the moment, under congressional investigation while his gubernatorial affairs are even more chaotic. For the lack of a budget, a million state employees will go hungry over the weekend and more than a million men and women will die for lack of the medicine bought by Medicare. And the old man on Tuesday night who said, “You’ll have to speak louder. I may not be able to hear anything you say. My wife threw my hearing aid into the washing machine last night. $400. Of course I don’t have to listen to her anymore, do I? Ho-ho-ho. Everything evens up. The rich have ice in the summer, and the poor have ice in the winter.”

So, at six I write that all I know is the importance of love, the smell of fried food, and the music of the rain.

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So, this is upon my return from a week or so in the hospital. There was an early morning when I suffered intense pain. Then there was that part of my consciousness that declared that I was not alone. When I asked who was with me I was told that it was God. It made the pain much easier to bear. When there was another seizure, an hour later, the knowledge that I was not alone was a powerful support.

So, on waking I think of completing the book, but now I feel an invalid. Reading Calvino, who is very close to Pirandello—a master—I find him unsympathetically cute. I am in the wrong country, but I shall return.

So, since sickness seems to be no part of the story I hope to tell, I have almost nothing to say this morning. I finish the Calvino book, which I think one should read although I find it terribly arch. I play
recording of myself reading “The Swimmer” and think it quite good. I watch the Yankees play in Detroit before an empty stadium because everybody in Detroit is broke. Waking, I hear first the three-axle, eighteen-wheel trucks of dawn and then the first birds to sing at daybreak. I seem to hold Mrs. Z. in my arms; and all it seems that one ever wanted was a blonde whose breasts were a little larger than one remembered them. That my claim to simplicity can be challenged is well known. However, this seems to be the destiny I seek—or the past I instinctively recall—as I lie in bed in the first of the daylight admiring the songbirds.

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I go to the doctor, who does something I see no reason to describe; but I feel much better. Indeed, I feel myself this morning. Mary seems bewildered, and when I think that I am not alone in this dilemma I may be sentimental, but it does give me some latitude or—you might say—generosity. So there is a great deal to do.

A Turkish murderer, escaped from an Istanbul prison, attempts to assassinate the Pope. “God have mercy on his soul” is what I say, and had I been asked for a reaction I would have said that I would pray. Many of the celebrities questioned speak of the chaos of the modern world. It seems to me that this is something one accepted years ago. It is a point of departure and not an observation. I will pray; I shall pray; I am praying.

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I have talked with both Mrs. Z. and R. Her voice has its familiar harshness; she is the pretty girl who loves her jackknife and it seems that what she has is something I must have in the women I enjoy. Her voice summons none of the profound music that stirs me when I talk with R. on the telephone, although I have never found anything to say to R. over the lunch table. “Compromise” is not the word to describe my affairs, I think, because my engagement is, I think, very deep, although it appears highly diverse. Mrs. Z. seems, quite unbeknownst to her, to have at times the pathos of a foundling. R. will support me when I am tired. Mary has shared most of her life with me. Last night when I was losing at backgammon there was a hint, or perhaps a memory, of her crying to my opponent, “Beat him, beat
him, beat him!” This was long ago and these recollections accomplish nothing.

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Iole, who has worked for us for so many years, who first came to us one rainy evening in Rome, is now troubled by the sickness of her oldest brother in Rome, her thankless job, and the search for a new apartment. She is not a southern Italian—she claims to be a Roman—but when she is troubled her nose seems to take on another dimension, her eyes sink, and her voice is sorrowful and loud. Mary goes to solace her; not I. I am not guilty, and I have nothing but admiration for Mary’s kindness. They will talk mostly about the children, whom Iole has helped to rear. Later, I come into the kitchen and find Mary mending a Roman lamp G. brought me from Jerusalem. It has a relief of a naked man and the flame sprang from his genitals. A cat knocked it to the floor and Mary mends it. She also mends a Japanese bowl that she bought, I think, at Altman’s and a decorated china seashell that might, during the years when people smoked, have been used as an ashtray. She has mended the afternoon for Iole, and now I see her mending with dexterity and cleverness these broken things. Unworthiness is not what I feel, but in watching her mending, in knowing how, these days, mending is of the first importance to her, I know that some part of me is wayward and clings to its sense of brokenness.

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So I think that “Oh What a Paradise It Seems” is completed. I will rewrite the supermarket story and whatever else seems mistaken, photocopy these, and try to find someone to drive me into the city. I do not want to take the train.

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I take the dogs into the rainy woods and fertilize the rhododendrons, and, feeling poorly, I return to the house. The dogs are wet and muddy, and while they dry on the porch I put on the headphones of my tape player and listen to the Bach Concerto for Two Violins. I think the circumstances striking: an old man with two old and muddy dogs. He listens while two violin virtuosi perform one of the great masterpiece
of Western civilization. He listens to this with headphones—he is quite alone in his enjoyment, and his aloneness on the rainy landscape is increased when the concerto ends and he hears the hearty applause of thousands, the noise as they get to their feet, and their shouting. He seems to laugh or cry. The dogs, who can hear nothing but the dripping of the rain gutters, look at me with concern. They are afraid, perhaps, that I have gone mad and will forget to feed them. Ben comes. We are both mistaken in thinking that this is Father’s Day.

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This is upon my return from two weeks in the hospital, and I feel as though I had returned from the grave. That the kidney that was removed was cancerous is something, it seems, given the opportunities I possess, that I could pass over lightly, but I am regrettably morose and self-indulgent about the possibility of my death. I pray that this will pass. On my last night in the hospital I slept without medicine. Waking a little before dawn, I went to the window. The room was air-conditioned and the window was sealed. There had been a thunderstorm, and there was some rainwater on the screen. There was light in the sky and there were lights as well as a few lighted boats along the western shore. When I returned to bed it seemed that these were lamps, maintained by some woman of a very gentle and beautiful disposition. Judging from her voluminous dark hair, lightly confined by tortoiseshell pins, I take it she was of my mother’s generation, although she was quite plainly not my mother. I will always remember my mother climbing, fully dressed, into that barrel in which she conquered Niagara Falls. I dwelt on the sweetness of this woman with her lamps, and I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.

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The doctor removes the stitches. M. is late. One of the disadvantages of homosexual love is waiting for a man. Waiting for a woman seems to be destiny, but waiting for one’s male lover is quite painful. He is twenty minutes late, but when he arrives he packs my things, oversees my departure from the hospital with tenderness and dispatch, points out interesting changes on the drive home while gently caressing my leg, and upon our return removes my clothes, washes and changes my
bloody dressing, and delights and engorges my sexuality. The seriousness of this is something I have failed to assess. I hope and pray that the decisions I should make will be revealed. I do feel, this morning, that our being together for two weeks might make our parting intolerable. There are letters to write and bills to pay.

So the day passes on which I seem to have risen from the dead, but toward the end of the afternoon—well past its apex—I conclude that these are the last weeks or months of my life. There seems to be some genuine fatigue and sadness here, as well as some contemptible narcissism. Self-love, one reads, is characteristic of our time; and here is self-love at its most intense. I will not live to see my dearly beloved son marry in February because I would be more successfully conspicuous if I died. This is, of course, loathsome, but I seem to lack the vitality at 11
A.M.
to say so.