The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (36 page)

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I take Mrs. Zagreb out to lunch. Oh, what a rascal! I think she’s a little crazy, but the effect on me is stimulating, and we both chat excitedly about our terribly interesting lives. We could talk all afternoon. She let the cabdriver (very good-looking in an Italian sort of way) buy her a drink and the bartender (he must have been good-looking; he’s very tall but he’s pretty old) drove her into New York. I take a nap, and wake with a stupendous feeling of magnanimity and love. Mary is upstairs, correcting papers in bed, but when I feel in her pants she puts me off. I don’t care. I sail off to the florist’s and buy flowers for Mary and Zagreb, thinking two women are better than one. What a rascal, what a libertine! Z. gives me a French kiss. Swept along on my magnanimity I walk the dog over the hill, noticing how like flowers (pansies) are the dog’s tracks. A leaf, some leaves. I do not much lift my eyes to the clouds from whence cometh this, the light of this winte
afternoon. My house is brightly lighted, and Mary is in the kitchen making rolled beef, which I like. We are all happy, it seems, until at dinner Freddy begins to bawl. I finesse this, but something has gone wrong. I ask Mary if she has read Merwin’s poems. “I’ve read several of them twice,” she says, and goes upstairs to correct papers. But now she seems to me stern, unfeminine, more than I can master, and, at the thought of screwing, my cock begs to be excused. What is this? I think with pleasure and without shame of how feminine and sensual X was; of how, having dressed to make a telephone call, X, on returning, stripped and bounded back into bed. I also remember how sappy X was—the sense of having been disinfected, the bitten lower lip. I read until ten, when I find Mary in bed. I am given a sweet kiss, but she is asleep when I return from my bath. She is wakeful during the night, but when I ask if I can do anything she answers impatiently. Keep your pecker up.

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It seems—or it seems to me—that it is terribly difficult for Mary to thank me for anything. When I gave her an electric typewriter for Christmas, she refused to open it, look at it, or acknowledge it in any way. She not only did not thank me; she did not speak to me. Exactly eleven months later, she came to me in the dining room, gave me a kiss, and said, “Thank you for the lovely, lovely typewriter.”

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The house was dark, of course. The snow went on falling. The last of the cigarette butts was gone, the gin bottle was empty, even the aspirin supply was exhausted. He went upstairs to the medicine cabinet. The plastic vial that used to contain Miltown still held a few grains, and by wetting his finger he picked these up and ate them. They made no difference. At least we’re alive, he kept saying, at least we’re alive, but without alcohol, heat, aspirin, barbiturates, coffee, and tobacco it seemed to be a living death. At least I can do something, he thought, at least I can distract myself, at least I can take a walk; but when he went to the door he saw wolves on the lawn.

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The fact of the passage of time seems, to my great surprise, a source of sadness. One can put a sort of varnish on the facts, but one canno
change them. In the space of a day you find that the barber, bartender, and waiter who have served you for twenty-five years are all suddenly dead. Waking in high spirits is a matter of stepping out of one’s dreams into an aura of love and friendship, but to take a roster of one’s most vivid friends is crushing. X sits in a wheelchair being read to by a nurse. Y cruises the Mediterranean in his twin-diesel yacht, suffering terribly from boredom. M. is a reformed alcoholic with a damaged brain, trying to sell magazine subscriptions over the telephone. A. is an unregenerate alcoholic, bellicose, absentminded, drunk for three and four months at a time. These were the men and women one rose in the morning to meet, talk, walk, and drink with, and nearly all the brilliant ones are gone. I think of Cummings, who played out his role as a love poet into his late sixties. There was a man.

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Our conversation goes, by my account, like this. Me: Good morning. She: Good morning (
faintly
). Me: May I have the egg on the stove? She: You know I never eat eggs. “Goodbye,” I say, after breakfast. (
Silence.
) “Would you like a drink,” I ask at five. “Yes, please.” “This book is very interesting,” I say. “It must be,” she sighs. I chat during dinner, but she remains silent. These are the words we exchange during a day.

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Bright stars and intense cold when I go to bed; in the morning the bluish darkness of another snowstorm. The usual Friday festivities. I take Mary to see “Zhivago.” It would be fun to parody the screenplay. The battlefield scene ends with a closeup of a pair of eyeglasses. Not broken. There are many such cues: fur hats, flowers. Cuts from opulence to poverty. A rich and loving young couple ride their sleigh through the snow. Camera up to a lighted candle in a frost-rimmed window. Dissolve frost, and we see a very poor and loving couple. Terrible music, and all the sets are overdressed. Overdecorated. A ballroom frilled with drifting snow. The passengers crowded into a freight train for days have gleaming linen, lustrous hair, brilliant complexions. Watching the hero and his blonde in bed, I think how long it’s been since I’ve been involved in some volcanic, unseemly, irresistible, and carnal affair. Is this age? Will I never be caught up helplessly in the storms of history and love?

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Palm Sunday. Ten above zero. I get to church before the doors open, and am badly chilled. This, I suppose, because I’ve harmed my circulation. Miss F. has arranged the palm fronds in a fan above the purple cloth of Holy Week. She sits at a distance from her father. There is a blond young woman ahead of me who has a nervous habit of shifting her head that I find charming. Her taffy-colored hair conceals her face. I want to see it, but then I am afraid I will be disappointed. What am I doing here on my knees, shaking with alcohol and the cold? I do not pray, but I hope that my children will know much happiness. I believe that there was a Christ, that he spoke the Beatitudes, cured the sick, and died on the Cross, and it seems marvellous to me that men should, for two thousand years, have repeated this story as a means of expressing their deepest feelings and intuitions about life. My only noticeable experience is a pleasant sense of humility. Kneeling at the chancel, I notice how expertly the wooden lamb holds in the crook of his leg the staff of Christ’s banner. The acolytes have red dresses and muddy loafers. Leaving the chancel, I see the face of the blonde and I am disappointed. I take home a palm frond, not to cleanse my house of its ills but to demonstrate that I want my house to be blessed.

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And the sad men, the lonely men, those who are unhappily married, drop to their knees in garages, bathrooms, and motels asking God to help them understand the need for love. Unbelievers, every last one of them. Who is this God with whom they plead? He is an old man with a long white beard like a waterfall. Why do they, adult and intelligent men, behave so ridiculously? They seem forced to their knees by a palpable burden of pain.

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Not drunk, not very drunk in any case, I decide that we should have our quarterly talk. “Things aren’t going well,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says she. “Do you think this is the way a man and a woman should live together?” I say. “No,” says she. “Well, let’s talk.” Her face is strained and pale, the eyes not protuberant but brilliant, the brows well up. “You destroy everything you love,” says she. “I love my children,” say I, “and I haven’t destroyed them.” “Let’s
leave the children out of this,” says she. “I love my friends,” say I. “You don’t have any friends,” says she. “You simply use people as a convenience.” Then we go into the routine where she says she wishes I could see my face. This is followed by the fact that I deceive myself, that I am a creation of self-deception. She’s said this before, and once offered to tell me some terrible truth about myself and then said it was too terrible. I don’t know what she’s aiming at here. Is this homosexuality? Has she determined that I am a homosexual? I have had my homosexual anxieties and experiences, but I find women much more attractive than men, and think it fitting and proper that I make my life with a woman. She then says that she knows herself absolutely, and that I know nothing of myself. This sort of judgment—which is how I think of it—bewilders me. How can any adult claim to know himself much better than another does? There seems to be some impermeability here. It seems to me unnatural. I don’t understand it at all. I say that I am a loving person, and she asks how can I be a loving person, since I never see anyone? There is a digression here on the loneliness of the novelist, but I do see people and I do go out to them directly and warmly. I ask—it seems to me one of the few aggressive points I make—if she is afraid of being dependent. “I am,” she says, “completely independent of you.” I say that as a provider I’ve given her whatever she wanted. She says I haven’t. She then says that I’m very funny about money with the children. I say that I’ve given the children whatever money they wanted, and that I’ve never reproached them. What does she mean by “funny”? She doesn’t wish to discuss the matter. I say that I’m not much of a banker. She assents, laughing bitterly. There is much more, but I seem unable to recall it this morning. I mention the love I feel for my sons. “That’s the only reason I’m sticking around,” she says, getting to her feet. “Is that what you’re doing?” I ask. “Sticking around?” “You take advantage of everything I say,” she says. “I wouldn’t have said that,” say I, and covering my poor, poor cock with my hands I kiss her good night, take a Nembutal, and check out. Waking in the morning, I summon up my girls, but they do not come. It is she, who has indicted me as venomous, emotionally ignorant, a bad provider, self-deceived, whom I desire. I don’t, I won’t, admit that this is sexual masochism. There is too little evidence for this in the rest of my life. I sincerely doubt that this is a wishful repetition of my mother’s dominance. I think maybe it’s just bad luck.

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On the morning of my daughter’s wedding, it is raining. I climb into Mary’s bed, and she climbs out of it and climbs into mine. Later, naked, I urge her to sit, naked, in my lap, but she makes some exclamation of distaste and turns on the television. I find these rebuffs a serious depressant and, using this as an excuse, I take a little gin with my orange juice. Mary descends on my eggs, but she is quite welcome to them. On the street, a north wind is blowing the rain. On Fourteenth Street, two men, one of them with a peculiar head of yellow hair—it is dyed or perhaps a wig—slink out of a lunch counter. I think they are queer and that they are going to spend the day shoplifting. I buy an umbrella and some aspirin, and step into a dark, pleasant bar where I drink one and a half Martinis. Another faggot comes along the sidewalk. He wears moccasins, no socks, green velour trousers, and a sweater; but his means of locomotion is what interests me. He seems sucked along the street like an object in a wind tunnel, although there is no wind to speak of and no source of suction. Ben is at the hotel, and we dress and go off to Lüchow’s. There is the desperate scene where I can’t find Susie, and finally we reach the church. She seems frightened, and I am pleased to give her my arm and some support. This is a scene I have imagined countless times, and now it is being done, is done. I observe nothing of the reception beyond the fact that it is beautiful. “What a beautiful party it is!” I keep exclaiming. Where is the keen-eyed observer who could pick out the wrinkled skirt, the time-ravaged face, the drunken waiter? There is a sharp exchange with Mary. I have drunk so much that I cannot count on my memory, but I think—or claim to have suggested—that we must make some plans for ending the party. “You,” says she, “are the spectre at the feast.” The best thing to do is to assume I provoked this. Later, I drink whiskey in our maid’s kitchen and speak broken Italian. I return at dark. It is raining. Ben is on the porch and I embrace him and repeat the remark about the spectre. “I’m on your side, Daddy,” he says, “I’m on your side.” I should not have done this. I don’t really want him on my side.

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I have a drink at quarter after eleven. Go to the B.s’ at noon. I sleep and wake and drink and sleep again and wake and drink. I suggest that we discuss a separation or a divorce. We will sell the house, divide the
price, etc. She can go and live with her beloved sister in New Jersey. This is all preposterous and drunken, and, hearing the songbirds in the morning, I realize that I don’t have the guts, spine, vitality, whatever, to sell my house and start wandering. I don’t know what to do. I must sleep with someone, and I am so hungry for love that I count on touching my younger son at breakfast as a kind of link, a means of staying alive.

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But Monday morning. Overcast. 9:30. I will go to the dentist in half an hour, and I would like a drink. I write, at breakfast, the biography of a man whose dependence on alcohol was extreme but who, through some constitutional fortitude, was able to ration his drinks, to exploit alcohol rather than have it exploit him. He never drank before noon and, after his lunch drinks, not again until five. It was a struggle, it always would be, and by the time he was fifty he realized that there would be no suspension of the fight. He would never be able to pass the whiskey bottle in the pantry without sweating. On Saturdays and Sundays he would paint screens, split wood, cut the broad lawns of Evenmere, looking at his watch every ten minutes to see if the time hadn’t come for a legitimate scoop. At five minutes to five, his hands trembling and his brow soaked with sweat, he would get out the ice, pour the beautiful, golden whiskey into a glass, and begin the better part of his life.

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Now Thursday morning. Twenty minutes to eleven. I am in the throes of a gruelling booze fight. I think a tranquillizer will retard my circulation. I could cut grass, but I am afraid of pulling my ankle. There is really nothing to do but sit here and sweat it out. I can write myself a letter. Dear Myself, I am having a terrible time with the booze. Ride it out.

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Waking at dawn. A new dream girl. This one is Chinese and has a magnificent arse, small breasts. She is followed by another, who wears a sweater the color of raspberry jam and a string of very small pearls. Then I am in Rome in the big apartment, attended by A. I am, as I usually am in these reveries, an invalid, eating from a tray. I ask he
for the big blue pill. It is a large capsule, the color of the sky. I take it with a glass of water, and she retires to the front room to work on her book about Byron. As I slowly lose consciousness, the sound of her typing fills me with happiness. How unlike me. I wake in the late afternoon. The function of the blue pill seems to be to spare me any of the tedious hours of day or night. It is always a fresh morning, a brief noon, a massive twilight. I never experience the pitiless tedium of 3
P.M.
When I wake, A. asks if I want a drink or a cup of tea. She makes me a galvanic drink and herself a cup of tea. Then, as I bask in the effects of alcohol, she draws herself a bath and dresses, very elegantly, for a reception at the T.s’. When she kisses me goodbye her kiss is dry and tender. She leaves a blue pill on the table, and as it begins to get dark I take this, squirm sensually in the sheets, and go back to sleep again. She wakes me when she returns at ten, orders some supper from the café on the corner, and tells me about the party. Then she undresses, climbs into my bed, and after we have fucked I take another blue pill and will know nothing, not even a dream, until nine in the morning, when I am waked by the maid who brings me breakfast. Sleep is my kingdom, my native land, I am the Prince of Sleep. Do we see our age in the poverty of our dreams? The threadbare dreams of middle age.