The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (22 page)

•

The first land we see from the airport is France—Normandy, I guess. Gardens and rivers. Then the Alps rise up to the snowy massif—Mont Blanc; the massif makes a second horizon, and along the shore one sees Nice, Monte Carlo, Elba, and the house where we will stay. Like those people who, as the boat approaches Nantucket, point out loudly the houses of friends, we, approaching the coast of Tuscany, do the same. It is close to noon in Rome. Mary seems bewildered and disappointed. Ah, yes, she says when she hears the coach horn on a bus. And it is the coach horns. The smell of coffee, the sound of bells. We go to the Eden and spend the afternoon shopping. I am drinking gin at a coffee bar when two Americans come in to discuss, in sign language, some hot dog sandwiches displayed in the window. I speak loud Italian and express in this way some of my divided feelings about my own country. We go to the villa for cocktails and see from the terrace the city like a painted backdrop; we hear the famous bells.

•

   In all the fields, after the rain, men and women go out to gather snails. We climb the hill to San Filippo. The noise of traffic, sharp and loud, comes from the curved road below us. I see a house across the valley that reminds me of Pennsylvania—a particular measure of verdancy and tranquillity. The massive beauty of the Spanish fort. There is no festival, but just before dark the sounds from the village below us are the sounds of a country fair—bells, music, laughter, the hum of voices.

   One sees here, in the space of an hour, the reversal of sexual roles. In the country the sky is black, there is thunder, and the farmers star
coming in from the fields. The men ride comfortably astride their asses with bottles of good wine hung from their saddles. The women walk behind them, each carrying forty pounds of firewood on their heads and leading a fat sow by a rope. Along the Via Véneto some women stride along determinedly, each holding a guide book in one hand. Their husbands follow behind, sheepish, stooped, and depressed. Their clothes do not fit, and each carries in his breast pocket three cigars, two pens and a pencil. In a bar a man in shirtsleeves mumbles something to his wife, and she replies, in a voice that is light and tearful, “Well, it makes no difference to me.”

   So, we fly home. On the plane a heavy woman, a spinster, perhaps a schoolteacher, with flying gray hair, who takes from her pocketbook a dozen glass animals she bought in Venice and, unwrapping them one by one, holds them up to the light. Beside her a sexually uncommitted youth with large, well-cared-for hands, a pissy smile. In front of them a young man with a determinedly manly air, gruff voice, a manner that is both hearty and unfriendly. But halfway through the flight he finds an area of agreement with his companion, a soldier, and puts down his gruff and manly airs at the same time he puts down his paperback mystery. Now his face is clear, comely, pleasant to see; his smile is open; he seems as easy as a swimmer; and I think of the great energies we spend in imposture. As the plane approaches home again he is gruff and manly. And ahead of them an American, travelling with his wife and three children. His wife is brisk and attractive, but I think one could never find a Roman with so browbeaten an air as his. All the lines of his face are falling lines—formed, it seems, by worry, fatigue and disappointment. He looks—oh, so much more than his wife—like someone crushed by the cares of the household; he has the look of someone who has changed a diaper three times in half an hour. Now and then a little light comes into his face, and one sees that he must have been high-spirited and cheerful some years ago, but he seems to have lost his cheer in the dishpan.

   And the expatriate—a woman, I think—returning. Speaking Italian in the grocery store, stripping the gears on the car, and in a sense using these accidents as a springboard to explain to friends that she has been living abroad. How romantic.

•

The dog days go on. I read the Hemingway book. This arouses those mixed feelings we endure when some intact part of adolescence clashes with the men we have become. When I was a young man, my absorption in his work was complete. I imitated his person and his style. He writes with the galvanic distortion that gives the illusion of a particular vision; that is, he breaks and re-forms the habitual rhythms of introspection. I think I think his remarks about Scott’s cock are in bad taste, as may be the quarrel between Stein and her friend. I am for some reason embarrassed by his references to walking home on the dry snow and making love.

•

It was Sadie Hawkins Day at the country club. Women chose their golfing partners and paid for their drinks and their dinner. The double-entendres about balls kept them all laughing merrily from morning until night.

•

I read with great pleasure “Youth” and “The Secret Sharer”; but concerning the last I would like, at this time of life, to scour any hint of twilight from my work. There will be time enough for that. I would like to write something like Delacroix’s “Sardanapalus.”

•

In the men’s room at Grand Central there is a scene not quite comprehended. Two men, I do not see their faces, are pretending to fasten their trousers but are in fact exposing themselves. Presently, the show ends, and they go away, but I am shaken and mystified. Later, while I am having my shoes shined, one of them returns. His whatsit as well as his backside is on display, and the opportunities that he represents seem to me dangerous and fascinating. Here is a means of upsetting the applecart in an intimacy, a word. One could, with a touch, break the laws of the city and the natural world, expose the useless burdens of guilt and remorse, and make some claim for man’s wayward and cataclysmic nature. And for a moment the natural world seems a dark burden of expensive shoes, and garters that bind, tiresome parties and dull loves, commuting trains, coy advertisements, and hard liquor.
But I take Federico swimming and find myself happily a member of the lawful world. Decency, courage, resoluteness, all these terms have beauty and meaning. There is a line, but it seems in my case to be a very faint one. I seem to move only on a series of chance recognitions, and when there is nothing recognizable about the face, the clothing, or the conduct I seem threatened by an erotic abyss. The sensible thing is to stay out of such places.

•

I don’t know how I will plan my three weeks alone here. I have no compelling work at hand. Loneliness is a kind of madness, but to take a room in town would expose me to questions and tensions for which I have no answers and no cures. My fatherlessness may be at the bottom of some of this, and if it is I would like to go on to something else, take another step, although I may resist maturity.

•

Either my age or some change in my humor makes the heaviness of the air in the valley these days depressing. At three there seems to be some intensification of this. The air appears to be smoky. There is a double note of thunder in the southwest. I observe that should the rain not come, should the storm not break, I would be bitterly disappointed. Then the storm moves around to the east and finally strikes the valley. The air is aromatic the instant the rain falls. Ben cuts a paper airplane for his little brother. The old dog will not leave my side.

•

There is a flight of black birds, starlings I guess, from the B.s’ woods. They come in twos and threes, in dozens and larger numbers; they seem, like the leaves in autumn, to unwind from the dark woods. This is no season for migration. They cross the sky travelling from the B.s’ woods to the S.s’ in thousands; one had not known there were so many starlings around. My son bets me a penny that we have seen the last of them, and when we have made the bet another flight unwinds. Later, we see swallows in pairs, and, later, bats. The woods that stand all around the sky darken. It is beautiful, I think, more beautiful than the rest of the world, as if some curious competition went on between Tuscany and the Hudson Valley.

•

A bright, fine day and I accomplish nothing. Ben goes off with his effeminate friend at four. Federico and I walk over to the greenhouse to get some rosemary. We stop to watch a football game. The grass is green, its greenest; the trees are still full-leaved and beginning to color. Such a pure light shines on the cliffs of the river that the shadow, black, seems like a darkness deposited in the stone, on the stone, by the passage of night. It is a handsome scene—the well-dressed men and women, the brilliant red-and-maroon football uniforms against the green playing field. But my son, I notice, is not here—neither he nor his friend—and I wonder where they are. Are they cobbling each other as I sometimes did, in a damp toolshed, while the irrecapturable beauty of the autumn afternoon begins to fade? The beauty of the day seems to add some acuteness to my feeling. As we walk toward the temple of love, Mrs. V. speaks to us. Her face is clear in the autumn light, the features still striking, vigorous, and colorful. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat, covered with autumn flowers and leaves, that she bought in Spain, she explains, many years ago. “What a beautiful scene,” she says of the football game. “How beautiful motion is, isn’t it? I love trains. I was born and brought up within sight of a railroad track. I like to see the sparks fall off the brake box, the lighted windows reflected in the cove. I can also remember the horsecars. I’m not quite sure whether they were drawn by horses or mules, but they were very light. By jumping up and down on the back you could nearly upset them.” We say goodbye and go on, and she stands by the temple—an old lady, an autumn day, a garden close to ruin. Back at the house, Ben shows up and I ask him angrily to come in for a minute. I ask him why he didn’t go to the football game, why he didn’t have supper with his friends, where he has been. What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people, but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. I ask him why he isn’t out there playing, working as a linesman, bringing water to the players, and I do not seem to remember going to the meadow to play football one day and being overtaken by—what? shyness or cowardice?—and hurrying by so no one would invite me to play. So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt. And yet, for all the depth and bitterness of m
feeling—bitterness and tenderness—the scene lacks a degree of reality, the suburban sky seems to reflect a bland, an unserious light. Yes, there is some longing here, some real longing here, for a more tempestuous, more genuine atmosphere. What has gone wrong, that we should all seem to be made of paper and straw? What is the world I wish to achieve for myself and my sons? What would be a better scene for this discourse? God knows. A mountain pass, a long beach, the darkness just before a storm. Why does the man teaching his son to get out a fishing line, as I have done; the gallant old lady reminiscing about horsecars; me pouring onto the shoulders of my fair son the guilty vices of my adolescence—why should we seem to be no better than the characters in a vulgar situation comedy? By turning my head I can see the ancient cliffs of the river, still scored by the volcanic powers that shaped the planet, the days of creation, so why, as we quarrel, as his character is being made or unmade, should the air that my beloved son and I breathe seem so domesticated, so bland, so thin? Let us away to Italy or St. Botolphs.

•

Tired in the morning, and I tire myself mostly with drink and conviviality. I find the drive tiring, gruelling. I observe the works of man and nature—the fair pastures along the parkway and the grace of the elms. Farther north, some of the maples have colored—these incendiary colors that are so lambent they lie outside the spectrum. Up into the granite hills, the granite mountains, the fine, light air, carrying all the fragrance of the land so clearly, the deep blue of the shadows, rain-lights. I kiss Susie goodbye, and wish her good things in Italian. We have already been to church. Let us all make something decent and admirable of our lives. I dine on creamed chicken in a candlelit barn. In bed, my teeth ache, my heart is painful, my chest is sore, my back is lame. I dream that the atomic bomb is exploded somewhere off the Battery. Whose? Ours? I hear the hellish noise and see the mushroom cloud. Many men throw themselves into the harbor, shouting, “Let’s get the hell out of this world.” Mary wants to do this, but I say, “No, no, we will stay alive, we will do something with our lives.” But my skin has begun to burn, and I realize it is too late. I am waked by a church bell that rings all the hours and has a pure and gentle note. I hear all the hours rung but five.

•

I spend the night with C., and what do I make of this? I seem unashamed, and yet I feel or apprehend the weight of social strictures, the threat of punishment. But I have acted only on my own instincts, tried, discreetly, to relieve my drunken loneliness, my troublesome hunger for sexual tenderness. Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life. I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.

•

In town to the Institute. Dogged, it seems, by the need for some crude erotic imagery, I take a drink at half past ten and cure myself at least of this. The lunch is pleasant, and I enjoy my friends. Waiting for the 3:19 I think that now I will be at peace with myself at last. It seems so. The scouting, the defensive tactics, the forced forgetfulness all seem over. My war with the world is ended or suspended. As we come home on the train the conductor calls our attention to a swan in the river. I think the graceful white bird in the icy water is a good omen, talisman, portent.

But at three or later I am awake. I hear a boat on the river. There seems to be a ringing sound in the air. The tap in the bathroom drips. I think of C., think that I had from him signs and words of love, but that I cannot fit myself into such a relationship. My younger son speaks in his sleep, and I think that I will make something fine and decent for him. I invent a first-class-passenger list for a midwinter sailing. Fall asleep and wake feeling like myself.