The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (21 page)

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A sixteen-year-old boy is arrested for selling pornography and sentenced to six months in the pen. His first offense was stealing hubcaps. The judge says that the sentence is the most sorrowful task of his fifteen years on the bench. He is a friend of the family. He admires the boy’s parents. He compliments them on their intelligent efforts to cure a wayward son. He hopes that the boy’s term in the pen will help to cure him of his lawlessness, will teach him to become, as he says, “a component of society”; and I hear in these words some contemptible prudery that seems to me worse, more of an impediment, than the boy’s failing. I can imagine the scenes with the parents, their deep bewilderment and sorrow. Why, while other boys win national scholarships for scientific research, develop their athletic abilities, and lead cleanly and adventurous lives, should their son be destined to sell obscene pictures under street lamps to his schoolmates? I think of X, who posed for indecent photographs but was never apprehended, and R.’s friend in Naples who supported his four children in this way, most cheerfully. “The hours are good, signore, and the wages are fair, but it is difficult, one must always seem ardent, even when your head feels like a squash, and the girls are often not beautiful.” In Naples it is nearly acceptable, it is almost comical; but not here. But there is something to be said for the boy. Perhaps he has no other way of impressing himself on his schoolmates; perhaps he has inherited his father’s colorlessness, that he is driven to distinguish himself in this way. His interest in obscene pictures is natural enough, and through selling them he receives something like the admiration of his classmates and may make enough money to run away. This may be sentimental, but the prudish judgment from the bench seems to restate a false, a shabby vision of pureness that could be the beginning of the trouble.

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Mary greets me at the door in utter confusion. She means to draw a look of composure over her feeling of revulsion but I step in too quickly
for her to complete the maneuver and see how unwelcome I am. She cannot speak to me or look at me.

“Would you like to take a rest?” I ask, as kindly as possible.

“How can I?” she asks. “I have to put up my hair.” It all seems comical, but it is a bitter comedy. What vast amounts of misery the spirit can absorb and still rebound, still refresh itself.

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An unseasonably warm day: fevers in the blood. I walk with Federico. The sense of odors, exhalations, escaping from the earth is volcanic. The whole county stirs like a crater. The imperative impulse is to take off my clothes, scamper like a goat through the forest, swim in the pools. The struggle to sustain a romantic impulse through the confusions of supper, the disputes, the television, the baby’s bath, the ringing of the telephone, the stales of the dishpan, but I have in the end what I want and I want this very much.

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Tonight, dirty movies at the fire house. In the audience will be some of the police, perhaps not the ones who arrested and sent to the pen for six months last week a sixteen-year-old boy, but members of the same force. What is their reasoning? Is this all well and good for men of thirty, and criminal for boys? I can’t see it; and for me the horror, the gruelling shame of watching, on a screen, a naked woman performing gross indecencies on a man with a long scar on his buttocks.

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A philologist and his wife from Brown for dinner. One of the generation of Bazarovs. His ambition is to determine, by the use of electrical computation machines, the basic structure of language. Word values and evocations can be determined, he tells me, by machinery, and thus successful poetry can be written by machines. So we get back to the obsolescence of the sentiments. I think of my own sense of language, its intimacy, its mysteriousness, its power to evoke, in a catarrhal pronunciation, the sea winds that blow across Venice or in a hard “A” the massif beyond Kitzbühel. But this, he tells me, is all sentimentality. The importance of these machines, the drive to legislate, to calibrate words like “hope,” “courage,” all the terms we use for the spirit.

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I think, walking with Federico on a spring day, that I will walk with X, find some cold lake or pool, swim in it ballocksy, and have my dirty way with his rotund arse. I let the reverie spend itself, and what does it matter? There is no X, and coming on a cold pool at this time of year I would not want to swim or do the other things I seem to want, but there does seem to be in my head some country, some infantile country of irresponsible sexual indulgence that has nothing to do with the facts of life as I know them. But what interests me is the contradictions in my nature, in anyone’s nature, their grandioseness; that in the space of a few minutes I experience crushing shame and then swim into some pure source of self-esteem and confidence that wells up like a spring in a pond. And half asleep I wonder if I do not suffer from some uncured image of women, those creatures of morning, as predators, armed with sharp knives.

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Mary says that my presence is repressive; she cannot express herself, she cannot speak the truth. I ask her what it is that she wants to say and she says, “Nothing,” but what appears in some back recess of my mind is the fear that she will accuse me of being queer. I think this is ridiculous, the area of sensitivity that clings to an old wound. I know my skin, indiscreet and capricious, and can cope cheerfully with all of its ridiculous and romantic yearnings, but I wonder if any of this affects my son. He seems very ready to love me and we play catch on the lawn. At dinner Susie refers to my imminent death and I fly up like an old hen and must learn to have more reserve. I drink too much and have this morning an incoherent memory of what went on. My eyes are sore.

   B. says, about our moving to the country, that the biggest difficulty may be Mary’s melancholia. It is a strange thing to say, although he is the master of strange remarks, but I wonder again if something isn’t going wrong. Her face seems so drawn, her lips set in pain or anger. I walk with Federico up to the ridge. The setting sun appears to be advancing toward the earth, its shape is so clearly incised in the atmosphere. Its color is a curdled red. Now the fruit trees are all in bloom. The Russian violets have bloomed and gone in the space of a week. Now there are periwinkles, primroses, other violets all in bloom. Bu
I am badly disposed and with no reason. We make love and yet I feel forlorn and feel forlorn this morning. A lovely summer day and the birthday of my son and wife. I am writing two pages a day. I should make it four or six.

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I do a little work on the island, six or eight pages, and leave three days earlier than I had planned. Sit and talk with a pleasant, aging investment banker. Observe nothing of the land below. An overcast day in New York. The baneful green glass windows not really a submarine world, not the world in the light of a storm, not even a nightmare world; these travellers, some of them with orchids, moving in a poisonous green light. My homosexual anxieties seem allayed or cured by this change and motion, and I cheerfully watch the people come and go. I think I see a madam and two girls. The madam appears to be a substantial matron—extensively dyed dark-golden hair, a double rope of pearls, a nice tan, only a trace of calculation in the face. The first girl must be nearly fifty but her skin is still white and soft, her arms are round. She wears a hat nearly as big as a wastebasket and shaped like one, but made of the black lace and satin we associate with underwear. The second has green eyes, wears a huge mobcap, her hair dyed red and her lips a coral color along lines that do not conform to her mouth. She sits beside me, and from the heat of her body comes a nice perfume. I am delighted, tickled. Her manner is very genteel and prim, comically so, but at the bottom of her gentility there is some crudeness in speech, some mispronunciations. “My home was in Connecticut,” she says, meaning to evoke swimming pools, golf links, but evoking instead the back streets of Bridgeport. I would like to buy her dinner and a drink and go back to her apartment for the night but I am sweaty and rumpled and have no fresh clothes and do not. Perhaps I should. As her taxi draws away she wriggles her gloved fingers at me. I take the train out, feeling contented and substantial. Mary seems happy to see me, and the baby, also the others. We have a pleasant dinner but when I go upstairs she is asleep.

The morning is very dark and the sense of the house is oppressive. I am served my breakfast with a scowl. I go into town, but when I return I feel that something has gone wrong. The fault may be mine. The faces on the street cut at my sense of self, my happiness. I a
afraid of having an unsuitable erection. This is morbid, this is neurotic, but much that I see is morbid and neurotic. Very few of the faces I look into seem cheerful and self-contained. I read my stories and some of them seem to me good—“The Wrysons” very bad. Here is a contained, almost a complacent prose, and the substance of the story is nasty, nothing more. I wish my line were stronger, more vigorous, more involved, I wish I could strike a different level of seriousness. Lunch with B., home on the train, my cod sore. Mary cleaning the broom closet in the kitchen. She has repaired the toilet seat, which I should have done, painted the front door. I try to catch the roughness of my own nature, try to see how difficult I am, but there seems to be no bond between us, I seem to have no way of appealing to her. I feel that she does not love me, that she does not even imagine a time when she might. All the means of intercourse seem broken down. She seems crushed with unhappiness, with despair. I give the baby his bath, at the table I reproach Susie for grabbing a sugar doughnut and she cries. I ask why the table should seem so unpleasant and at the back of my mind is the knowledge that Mary’s father’s table was always a battlefield. I feel that I must speak and yet I do no good. I give the baby his bath, warm his clothes at the fire, and dress him. I read him stories, give him a bottle, and put him to sleep, virtuous I. Susie is out, so is Ben. The S.s come, the S.s go, I watch an old movie on TV.

   The boat strike goes on and our plans are unsettled. Work in the garden, sweat, the S.s for drinks. Sickle the backyard, play badminton, go to a garden party. I see a woman I have been blaming for three years for her divorce, but now it occurs to me that perhaps her husband was a neurotic sorehead and that the fault was mostly his. Talk freely with Mary and tie a can on. A beautiful summer’s day. Shifting winds.

Memorial Day. A new notebook. A man wearing a powdered wig and a tricorne carries a bass drum past the liquor store. I do not take my younger son to the parade, as I would have done two years ago. I have grown this old, not to say jumpy. Taking Ben to see “The Bridge on the River Kwai” I think of X, who, suffering from melancholy, walked through the city looking for moving pictures that dealt with cruel and sudden death, torture, earthquakes, floods, and assassinations—with any human misery that would, briefly, make his own burdens seem lighter. And sitting in the movie I wonder if this
cafarde
, this immortal longing, this mysterious and stupendous melancholy from which I seem to suffer is no more than common alcoholism. So I look yearningly at the soft stars, but they will do me no good. I think of moral crises, but when have I known the taste of abstinence and self-discipline?

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To describe human misery in all its vastness and intensity without creating an air of disqualification. To trim misery of petulance and morbidity, to give pain some nobility. But can one do this—can one handle tragedy—without some moral authority, some sense of good and evil?

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Having drunk less than usual, having, as my father would say, gone light on the hooch, I find myself, for the first time in a long time, free of the
cafarde
. Quarter to nine. Eastern daylight saving time. It would be pleasant to consider this a simple matter of self-discipline. Thunder and rain in the middle of the afternoon; the first of the month. Our
primordial anxiety about drought and its effect on the crops, the crops in this case being three acres of lawn and forty-two rosebushes.

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In thinking of the book, I would like to avoid indecency, but to overlook the fact that we have, after a long struggle, achieved a practical degree of sexual candor would be like perching on a stool and writing with a quill pen by candlelight. We have the freedom to describe erotic experience, and it seems irresistible.

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Since we lack a well-defined sense of good and evil, we find it impossible to invent a villain, and villainy is essential to the dynamics of narrative. The lecher is no longer villainous; in fact, his prowess is a virtue. The usurious banker is admirable; the bugger belongs to a minority that deserves our understanding; the murderer merely needs psychiatric help. It seems to me that the young come at this with less self-consciousness than we, and, feeling instinctively the need for villainy, conclude, perforce, that the adult world is at fault. Clean, decent, lusty, youthful procreative men and women are the targets of their anger and their scorn, while their only real fault is their inability to evoke a figure of evil. Cancer is villainous, but the devil seen through a microscope is lacking. In the end, we may put horns and a tail on death, that most innocent fact.

The congress of church organists produces fewer odd sticks than I expected. Several of the men would have passed in business; one of them actually appears to be athletic. And one of them—a small man—has a harried or demented look. The women have that look of widowhood or bereftness that sometimes seems to follow a life dedicated to music. Two of them are plump, florid, and dressed in pink. One of them has a liverish face that is deeply and unremittingly incised with pain. She appears to have been crying continuously. The national, cultural, and economic differences in the houses of God are abysmal. The painted memorial windows in the Polish church need repair. The church itself has a vast and institutional bleakness. The Stations of the Cross are bloody and vulgar. The floor is dusty. But, even so, there is something here: the unequalled poetry of our faith, this vast reflection of human nature, the need for prayer, love, the expressiveness of grief. Christ Church in Greenwich is a triumph of wealth and Trinitarianism in thi
leafy corner of the United States. In preparation for a wedding, florists are tying white stock to the ends of the pews. This scents the air, not with sweetness but with an exciting smell of earth. The stained-glass windows are explicit, gloomy, and dated, but they have, like everything else in this house, the authority of great wealth. There is no baroque foolishness about the organ, no liquid and nostalgic reach. It is straightforward, wrathful, and thunderous, and has in its fainter ranges an echo like some sweetness of remorse. To be buried from this chancel would, it seems, assure one a place in Heaven.