The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (18 page)

Here then are three worlds—night, day, and the night within the night. Here are the passions and aspirations of the dead, moving freely among us with malevolence and power. Here is a world of open graves. Here is a world where our imagery breaks down. We have no names, no shapes, no lights, no colors to fill out these powers, and yet they are as persuasive as the living. Out of his window he can see the city shining in the light of day and he adores it but he will be motivated less by this vision than by his remembrance of a scream heard in a dark stairwell fifty years ago. They seem to destroy him and to counsel him to destroy me. We seem to be at one another’s throats. We hear the lashing of a dragon’s tail in the dead leaves, the piteous screaming of a child whose eyes are plucked out by a witch, we smell the damps of the snake pit. This suggestion or disclosure seems very important to me and I pray it will be as helpful to Fred.

•

After dinner we hear “Tosca,” which I think tremendous. I read “Oblomov” in this empty house. The big window stands open. The loud night sounds on the terrace outside make me uneasy. But what can I be doing that would trouble the unquiet dead? I sleep and wake at dawn—partly my bladder, partly the vigorous noise of nest-building going on among the birds. They can be heard dragging sticks over the
tin gutters. They are all singing loudly. Then up springs my capricious muscle, all ready for fun. Downstairs I hear my friend coughing and flushing his toilet. I think about trout water but I resent this forced cheerfulness: I wade down the stream, pool after pool, catch a big trout, and use my hat as a landing net. My muscle keeps up its nagging and complaining and I do not want love or beauty or lewdness, I only want to get back to sleep. I fall asleep at last and have a sweet dream in which I crash a cocktail party at J. P. Marquand’s. I am well liked and passed gracefully from guest to guest. Toward the end P. appears to be with me and when we speak Italian several guests speak Italian with us. At the end my brother appears, drunken, apologetic, and intractable. He comes to spoil the party, not because he wants to, but because he is driven by unreasoning forces. When he was a boy, and after my birth, there was a party in the neighborhood. He was not invited and he went to the house and threw a stone through the window. Now he is reliving this incident in our lives and in my dreams. I wake feeling rested and happy.

•

I must think of alcoholism as a progressive disease. It has been for a week or longer that I have, on almost every day, drunk too much. There is also the question of my being denied my desires. This has also been a matter of a week. Even before dinner is put onto the table, I am discouraged. “As soon as the dishes are washed,” says Mary, “I am going upstairs and going to sleep.” This may not be conscious but I think it is intentional. One thing or another. Last night such an array of metal rollers, curlers, and pins that it was discouraging. I awake with a thorn in my groin and think sentimentally of prostitution. Why should the whores be persecuted, arrested, and thrown into jail when all they mean to do is to lead us out of the dilemma, to let us live peacefully with ourselves? And I think of a man who has been denied for six weeks, who is in an agony of desire, who is driven. Where can he turn, where can he go?

•

I take Ben and his friends down to the river fishing. Spiders and bumblebees among the rocks on the embankment. The potency of this place, this milieu. Cinders, beer cans, the rusty siding, a freight trai
pulling a hundred cars disappearing around the bend, an old man emptying his bladder for the third time in an hour, boys throwing rocks, tough angler in a rowboat—he picks on little kids and makes jokes during catechism—the slow smiles of the Saturday passengers in a train as we wave. A dead-end place but a very peaceful one. It is very peaceful to sit here drinking beer, although I am afraid that the boys will fall off the railroad bridge into the cove. What I am afraid of, it seems, is that I will have to dive in after them. I am a coward.

•

Walk in the garden with Federico. He is full of beans. My love muscle is restive. Federico admires the granite lion and the marble dog, he stuffs the faucets with gravel and is not obedient. It will rain. I pick him up in my arms and he falls into a deep sleep. “Oh, I love you,” I say as I carry him. “You are my best; you and the singing of the cardinal birds dissuade me from lust and anger.” I go with Ben to the doctor and he slips his finger up his rump and knocks his b–ls together. What a strange life this must be—this seascape of rumps. There is on his face and in his manner the trace of a terrible loneliness. Mary watches a flock of yellow finches in the garden. There must be fifty. I embrace her and hope to declare my intentions for the evening but in the kitchen there is some unpleasantness. I am oversensitive but what can be done? Anyhow, my desires persist. I help Susie with her homework and go upstairs early but it is already too late. The lights are off. Her eyes are shut and there is so much hardware protruding from her brow that an embrace might be dangerous. You could put out your eye.

All my kind feelings have been turned into bitterness and anger. I sit on the edge of the bathtub smoking and I resent being forced into this position but if I should earnestly try to explain it I might be answered with peals of callous laughter. I am very angry and I think I have some insight into the bewildering passions of a murderer. And I think that a perverse woman can sometimes, as with my brother, destroy a man. She denies with ridicule his deepest means of self-expression, his whole power of love. He should take a mistress but where will he find one? His secretary is too skinny and has bad breath. It would be indecent to attack the maid. A is too fat and B is too short and C is too passionate and D is not passionate enough and so forth and so on. Oh, she has excellence and kindness, I know, but I do not feel like going on m
knees to ask her favors. This morning I feel sad and tired although I hope for the best. She is standing at the window watching the yellow finches in the garden. There are fifty—very shy—and at each movement or voice from the house they fly up into the trees, the hemlocks. Then when it is quiet they come down—yellow, and like a fall of leaves on a cold wind.

I go into town and decide to lunch with a pretty girl, but when I look up her number in the telephone book my eyes have grown too weak for me to read the pages. I must, to the amazement of a man behind me, strike a match and hold it close to the book to find the number. We will meet and so I walk on the streets for an hour, up past, by chance, the house—the windows—where Mary and I first became lovers. A fine day, and the weather has brought more beauties, more freaks, more everything out onto the sidewalk. It is a spectacle. It is spring and I am happy and will meet a pretty girl at a bar. The bar is dark and full of advertising men. They all seem to drink here regularly; they talk about what happened last night and the night before. R. comes in, very pretty, we lunch and I leave her at her door. I feel better, I am not depressed; there are plenty of pretty women in the world and I am not unattractive. I am cool to Mary. Why should I worry about her intractableness? We go to a concert—three quartets: Mozart, Debussy, and Beethoven—and it is the music that persuades me that I should try to understand Mary, that my emotional responsibilities lie here. This seems to be the purport of all the melodies. Later, when we are together in the bathroom, my desires seem maniacal. “I had lunch at the Nautilus,” she said, “and it was expensive and awful. First I had a floury cup of clam chowder and some old salad, some leftover salad. Then mackerel, very greasy and not fresh. I can still taste it. And some awful broccoli.…” Oh please, please, I groan, please hurry. There is some difference of opinion here.

•

Wake at six to a day of such beauty that it seems as if this corner of the planet was all one bloom, all opening and burgeoning, and there is more here than we can say: prismatic lights, prismatic smells, something that sets one’s teeth on edge with pleasure. The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined, the maple tree, it
leaves not yet formed, that is astounding in its beauty and its succulence and that is not itself but one of a million trees, a link in a long chain of experience beginning in childhood.

Rogation Sunday. There are two known worlds, the visible and the invisible, and this drop of wine and crust is the link between the two. I seem to see the chain of being, reaching from beneath the earth up into the sky. And I think of the prayers that rise up into the chancel: Shall I sell my beer stock? Shall I stay away from Mrs. Piggott? Shall I enter Ralph in Princeton? Shall I turn in the station wagon? But among them some of worth, some of the deepest yearning.

•

The lower school here burns down. A rambling frame building with turrets and amendments, saturated in creosote, it seems to explode in flame. Ten minutes after the old teacher smells smoke, it is a pillar of fire. The firemen can’t approach it, the heat is so intense. All the surrounding trees can be seen to wither. Here is the savage power of fire, the smiting force, which, like so much else in life, evades precautions and is ruthless. Within half an hour everything is gone, the clothing, the children’s toys, the souvenirs of travel and athletic prowess, the rich precipitate of their lives. At three o’clock they possessed an environment. At three-twenty they are naked and dependent upon charity. The bitter smoke.

•

Year after year I read in here that I am drinking too much, and there can be no doubt of the fact that this is progressive. I waste more days, I suffer deeper pangs of guilt, I wake up at three in the morning with the feelings of a temperance worker. Drink, its implements, environments, and effects all seem disgusting. And yet each noon I reach for the whiskey bottle. I don’t seem able to drink temperately and yet I don’t seem able to stop.

•

My forty-seventh birthday and I feel neither young nor old, sprightly in the middle, and pray that I will have done a decent book by the forty-eighth. Shaving, and trying to come to terms with myself, I think that I am a small man, small feet, small p—k, small hands, small waist, an
that these are the facts. I must confine my attentions to little, little women, sit in tiny chairs, etc. And then I think of how I hate small men, those whose incurable youth is on them like a stain. How I hate small feet, small hands, small-waisted males who stand behind their small wives at cocktail parties in a realm of timid smallness.

•

I would like a more muscular vocabulary. And I must be careful about my cultivated accent. When this gets into my prose, my prose is at its worst.

•

A four-round booze fight, beginning when I take Susie into town and get a nervous stomachache in Ardsley. There is the usual psychological turmoil and I drink two Martinis before lunch and feel very playful. I seem entitled to these drinks. As the afternoon wanes the turmoil waxes, and when I get home I think I deserve a few cocktails. I know that in the morning I will have to take care of Federico—I can’t work—and with this as an excuse I drink after dinner. In the morning I feel sick, disgusted with myself, despairing and obscene. I have a drink to pull myself together at half past eleven and begin my serious drinking at half past four, when I also begin the cooking. I have my excuses. My prudence has been destroyed and when I’ve finished with the dishes I take a tonic dose of nut-brown whiskey. On Saturday I feel even worse. I have a drink before lunch. This seems to leave me with a sick headache, nausea. After dinner we have to pay a call on La Tata; this is a mandatory courtesy, and S. keeps filling my glass with Scotch. On Sunday I feel the worst. I take Federico for a walk. At a quarter after eleven I write an attack on the evils of drink. Then I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin, and vermouth, whatever I can lay my shaking hands on. Now the bout is over and I am myself again, but I wish I could be done with this.

At the station, Federico and I wave to the trains. The engineers wave to us, sometimes the conductors and the passengers raise their hands. Down the river in the morning light comes the train from Chicago. The windowsills of the coaches are lined with paper coffee cups. The first-class passengers sit alone in their roomettes, and how muc
alone one can be in these places. The dining car is closed. The waiters have stripped off the tablecloths and dressed in their street clothing. Everything is in readiness, although it will be an hour before they reach New York. The ladies have on their hats, they hold their gloves and bags. And in this delay, this dogwatch, this point of readiness we wish them, my son and I, Godspeed and a pleasant arrival. We hope that they will be met at the station by their friends or their family or that they will go to some place where they will be greeted with affection, trust, and sometimes love. We hope they will not end up in a hotel room.

•

I stopped smoking Saturday because it seemed to give me painful indigestion. But at a party on Saturday night I must have smoked a package of cigarettes. I smoked three cigarettes before noon on Sunday and one in the afternoon. I smoked two or three on Monday. On Tuesday I smoked one. Today, Wednesday, I have smoked none and it is a quarter to ten. My chest promises to clear up and it is a pleasure not to have a bronchial wheeze like a rusty gate. I cough in the morning but I cough without a sense of guilt. However, the withdrawal from nicotine leaves me quite dizzy, and we have to drive tonight to Sherman. It might be dangerous. And yet having come this little way I hate to return to a world where I am dependent upon cigarettes and, when travelling, upon cigarettes made, it seems, of twine and dead leaves. We will come back to this. My head is not where it belongs.

I read “Where Angels Fear to Tread.” When he writes of the love of beauty and the love of truth he writes with purity and eloquence and we seem to be in a place of some elevation; but in fact we are watching two spinsters and one unfledged male steal a child and cause his death. The death of this child seems to be idle and repulsive and I think that in fiction, much as in life, we may not, without good reason, slaughter the innocent, persecute the defenseless and the infirm, or speak with idle malice. He has grace, sometimes elegance, and I think of the charge of vulgarity made against my prose. If it is vulgar, and it may be, it is an honest vulgarity, an incurable or congenital vulgarity, a vulgarity that lies close to my heart. But when he speaks of the invincibility of society I envy his lucidness; again, when he describes the vision, I can’t recall how, of the nature of our transactions here as a trial of what i
is men might accomplish. I catch him turning an epigram on the Sacraments, that is, that they are not the facts that they are not meant to be.