The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (35 page)

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I spend a lot of time these days writing funny letters to the dying. “Charlie only has two more weeks to live. He doesn’t know it, and he’s still alert, and if you had the time to write him a letter I think it would cheer him up.” “When I pushed Hazel’s wheelchair onto the terrace this morning she said that she’d love to hear from you. She’s failing.” “Eleanor has lost her sight but she still likes to be read to, and I’d love to have a letter from you to read to her.” Etc.

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The high polish of these splendid autumn afternoons puts me at a loss. I don’t like to return to the office, and I seem to have no chores around this place. Walking alone can be a bore. The Ralph Ellisons stop by, having returned from Oklahoma City. He speaks of the Negro slums, now demolished, in lyrical terms. A source of vitality, music, violence, and sex. He has returned to all his old haunts—drugstores, cousins, friends, and saloons—and found this review of his past a deep kind of discovery. “It was wonderful,” she says. Thank you. I am, like Z., obsessed with my unhappiness, and seeing how easy they are with each other deepens my misery.

I read some “Lolita,” which seems to me a little putrescent. Here is the inalienable fascination of perversity—known, I think, to all men. At dinner we talk about Horace Gregory, and the conversation seems warm and easy. I should bring more warmth and patience to the table. But something goes blooey, and I am too drunk to recall the collision.
I say, foolishly, that I have done her a favor. Mary says that she hates to have me do anything for her or the children because I gloat over their dependence upon me. She says that I gloated over driving Ben to work this summer and that I reviled Susie for her extravagances. I don’t think I really gloat, but it can be observed that she thinks I do. This would explain why she is unwilling to let me get her a cup of tea when she is sick, why she is unwilling to spend my money. Things worsen and grow ugly. I ask what kind of a woman is it who, being approached tenderly, says that she has to put the potatoes in the oven? She says that she can’t bear to be gentled by an impotent man. I ask her what made her think I would be impotent, and she says, “You’d better be careful, you’d better be careful.” I go upstairs and watch an old movie. We meet in the bathroom, where I ask for some gesture or token of love, some glance, and she makes a face. Then, in a rage, I shout at her in full voice, “You cannot make a grimace when someone asks for love.” Just before dark I take her in my arms. I am sick with a need for love. She lets me hold her for a few minutes. I say that I will promise never to shout at her again if she will promise not to make faces at me. She says that she will make faces at me when she is provoked. The worst of it is that my son must hear this abuse, as I heard my parents quarrel when I was a child. I think I and my drunkenness are not completely to blame. Her attitude toward me does not seem to parallel the facts, to shift and change as events shift and change. She seems prejudiced, and her prejudices seem to come from a time of life before we met. I do not often gloat over things done. When she speaks of my impotence I say that I am not impotent with other women. This is a damned lie, since all I’ve done is neck with other women. I love her; she is really all I’ve ever known of life, but I think that to be independent would not kill me, although there is the problem of drunkenness. I cannot ask for forgiveness—who is there to forgive me?—but I can make an effort not to shout within my son’s hearing. I cannot judge whether or not I’m drunk, but any resolve to drink less would be hypocritical. I am now, at ten o’clock, thinking of a gin bottle. I wish to be loving and simple and loved, and I will remain hopeful.

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Shaken with liquor, self-doubts dimmed slightly by a Miltown, I board the nine o’clock. I am in misery. Every man on the train seems richer, more virile and intelligent than I, and there are no beautifu
women. The man in front of me seems to be a Magyar; an identifiable racial type. The skin is dark; the eyes are brown; he is bald with a thin fringe of gray hair, and he has the kindly smile of an old friend, who is dead. He does not resemble my friend at all, but he seems to have the identical smile, as if this expression—this transparency—were a quality of light and existed independently of one’s features. I am shaky and constipated. I get a shoeshine and decide that I am too far gone to sit in a barber chair. Walking and air will help, and I start pounding up Madison Avenue. I notice mostly that the girls are pretty and that the bars I pass are shut. I admire Breuer’s new building and go to see P.’s sculpture, which I find less vigorous and exciting than I had hoped. Then down Madison Avenue I pound, and you may have seen me at quarter after eleven, trying the door of each bar I passed and finding them all locked, the night-light burning, the bottles behind bars. I go all the way back to the Biltmore to find an open bar, and then wonder, Will my shaking hands be able to get a glass to my mouth? I manage, and after two drinks am well enough to sit in the barber chair. I am recognized; I speak Italian; I observe that in the forty years I have been coming here half the barbers have died. I discharge my duties at the Century and take a bus downtown. This is the first time I have ridden a bus in many years and I seem, through inexperience, to suffer a form of sexual nakedness. Glancing into the eyes of a strange woman, I am provoked. I jog home on the local, falling asleep over a copy of
Life
. Businessmen sleeping on trains appear, whatever their condition may be, discouraged, helpless, and lost. There is a pretty girl across the aisle, and I seem to inhale her. I can’t see enough of her, and she makes me both happy and languorous. I go to bed at half past eight and have a horrendous dream in which Mary is made president of the college. There is a hint of ruthlessness here. I remember watching her father seize a position of power. I retaliate by having a homosexual escapade, unconsummated, with Ronald Reagan. Walking on Madison Avenue, I had been tormented with the thought that my sins would be discovered, although I claim to have committed no sins. My children will vilify and disown me, my loving dogs will bark at me, even the cleaning woman will spit in my direction. Where is mercy, where is forgiveness? It is everywhere.

I have dreams of a density I would like to bring to fiction. We are summering in Nantucket, and I write a letter to some friends in Texa
who are planning to visit us. I give them detailed instructions on how to reach the island, using both an atlas and a road map. A woman reminds me that she wore my old clothes during the bombing of Britain. At daybreak, I feel unloving and make no passes and invent a fantasy in which Mary says, “I think I had better tell you that B. and I are in love. I think you ought to know. X has refused to give him a divorce.” I am bathed in self-pity, limpid as gin. But how can I gentle a woman who treats me with scorn? Remain hopeful and keep your pecker up.

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All Hallows’ Eve. Some set piece about the community giving a primordial shudder, scattering the mercies of piety, charity, and mental health and exposing, briefly, the realities of evil and the hosts of the vengeful and unquiet dead. I see how frail the pumpkin lanterns are that we light on our doorsteps to protect our houses from the powers of darkness. I see the little boy, dressed as a devil, rattling a can and asking pennies for
UNICEF
. H
OW
thin the voice of reason sounds tonight! Does my mother fly through the air? My father, my fishing companions? Have mercy upon us; grant us thy peace! Although there seemed to be no connection, it was always at this season that, in the less well-heeled neighborhoods of the village, “For Sale” signs would appear, as abundant as chrysanthemums. Most of them seemed to have been printed by children, and they were stuck into car windshields, nailed to trees, and attached to the bows of cabin cruisers and other boats, resting on trailers in the side yard. Everything seemed to be for sale—pianos, vacant lots, Rototillers, and chain saws, as if the coming of winter provoked some psychic upheaval involving the fear of loss. But as the last of the leaves fell, glittering like money, the “For Sale” signs vanished with them. Had everyone got a raise, a mortgage, a loan, or an infusion of hopefulness? It happened every year.

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I belt down a great deal of bourbon before lunch, futz around. Buy flowers for Mary. The simple pleasure I seemed to take in flowers is vanished. Oh, well. We go—a little rain is falling—to see Pasolini’s “St. Matthew.” I have been told that Pasolini is homosexual, but he photographs the faces of his people lovingly and beautifully, and his sexual life is no affair of mine. As we leave the theatre, it is rainin
heavily, and I throw my jacket over Mary’s shoulders and feel myself to be seventeen, eighteen, no more. At home I drink some whiskey and brood. I am sad; I am weary; I am weary of being a boy of fifty; I am weary of my capricious dick, but it seems unmanly of me to say so. I say so, and Mary most kindly and gently takes me into her arms. I don’t make out, but lie there like a child. Patience, courage, cheerfulness.

So with one word, one word, she mends the wreath of hair. Oh, mend the wreath of hair, make the rain fall, scatter the ghosts. And I seem, most unjustly, to accuse myself.

So I am gentled and gentled and gentled.

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When D. was a kid he liked to dress up in girls’ clothes, and in his sophomore year at college he had a love affair with his roommate. This was gratifying sexually, but it corresponded in no other way to what he expected from love. His roommate was comely and athletic. D. was puny. His roommate claimed that he did what he did only as a convenience or a favor. D. was the lover, his roommate was the beloved, and he was a demanding, cruel, and callous beloved. After his graduation, D. went on to New York and got a job. His homosexual or narcissistic instincts were estimable, but he was unwilling or unable to enter into another love affair as painful as the affair in college. He went to a psychiatrist named Jacks three times a week for five years, trying to understand or cure or alter the clash between his homosexual instincts and the desire to marry and raise a family. At the end of five years, he met a young woman whom he loved. Jacks was doubtful about D.’s ability to marry, but he went ahead in spite of Jacks and seemed very happy—he seemed ecstatic. He loved his wife, he loved his way of life, he loved his children, and yet all of this had not changed his narcissism. In trains, public places—everywhere—he seemed to seek out men younger than he, whose features and tastes corresponded in some way either to his own features and tastes or, perhaps, to those features and tastes that he lacked when he was young. He went to another psychiatrist—Jacks had died—who encouraged him to sublimate his narcissism in various ways. He fell in love with a young neighbor—a married man with two children. He desired the neighbor ardently, dreamed of him, and tried to sublimate this by helping his friend. He got him a job, got him a raise, and advised him on everything including the purchase o
a new oil burner. He did not admire his image in the mirror—he could see clearly how gaunt and lined his face was—but he loved it more than any other face that would appear in his lifetime, and boarding a train he would look around for some young man reading a paperback copy of Dylan Thomas whom he could help. There always seemed to be some young man around the house receiving help. D. never touched them, and if they touched him, as they often did, he would put them away gently, half faint with desire. I only mention this to point out that everyone’s life is not as simple as yours.

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Wet lunch at the club. Taking a taxi home I ask the driver to leave me off at Hawkes Avenue. He thinks I’m crazy. “Let me take you to where you’ve paid to go,” he says, but I ask him to let me off, and walk home. It is very cold and the cold air seems as stimulating as gin. I pound along the road, dragging the heels of my loafers with pleasure. Why is this? It is the kind of irresolute or sloppy conduct that used to trouble my father. I think I enjoy dragging the heels of my loafers because it was something he asked me not to do, thirty-five years ago.

Mary is resting in bed and, fully dressed, I lie down beside her and take her in my arms. Then I experience a sense—as heady as total drunkenness—of our being fused, of our indivisibility for better or for worser, an exalting sense of our oneness. While I hold her she falls asleep—my child, my goddess, the mother of my children. Her breathing is a little harsh, and I am supremely at peace. When she wakes, she asks, “Did I snore?” “Terribly,” I say. “It was earsplitting. You sounded like a chain saw.” “It was a nice sleep,” she said. “It was very nice to have you asleep in my arms,” I say. “It was very, very nice.”

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Nailles’ memories of his marriage were unromantic, even crude. He seemed not attracted to the conventional beauties. MaryEllen cutting the autumn roses, MaryEllen in a ball gown, MaryEllen weeping at the news of a friend’s death. Instead of this, he remembered a night when Tessie had got sick and vomited on the floor beneath the grand piano. It was about 3
A.M.
when he let the old dog out and got a mop and a pail and started to clean up the mess. The noise woke MaryEllen, and she came downstairs in her nightgown. Looking up from beneath th
piano, he was deeply moved by her beauty. She got some paper towels and went on her hands and knees to help him. When she was done she stood, striking her head smartly on the piano lid. The blow hurt. Her eyes filled with tears. He, naked, kissed away her tears and led her over to the sofa. He pulled her nightgown up above her breasts and laid her there. Another night, she had asked him to lay her before she took her bath. Then she drew her tub, and he joined her in the bathroom and sat naked on the old toilet while she shaved her legs. “If I don’t have a hot lunch,” he said, “I get loose bowels. Cheese gives me loose bowels too.” “Cheese constipates me,” she said. She went on shaving her legs. It was lovely, lovely, lovely. It was what he remembered.

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Fend, fend, fend off the gin with the
New York Times Magazine
section. My resolve collapses at eleven. I walk the boys to the archery range, set up a target in the orchard. Sneak two bourbons and read some more of the
Times
. An article in defense of the Asiatic war. The timbre of the man’s intelligence offends me to the point of desperation. The metaphors are vulgar, the syntax is evasive, the analogies are massive and dishonest, but what I experience most is a sense of alienation and despair: the knowledge that in any conversation it would be impossible to impress—let alone persuade—this stranger with one’s own opinions.