The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (47 page)

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J. calls, T. calls, A. is the last to call. I lunch with T. and meet A. at the train. He smiles as he runs up the stairs, smiles both with his mouth and, it seems, with his hips. As he crosses the waiting room there is less of this. I take his hand with deep ardor but release it to turn the steering wheel of the car. I am profoundly stirred, but there appears to be no intellectual equivalent. A. seems, and no one else does at this point, to magnify the incongruities between my social and my erotic drives to the point of combustion. It is all forgotten in a night’s sleep, but I would like a better understanding of myself. Ben calls to say he has been offered a good job. My eyes fill with tears of happiness. I think of my father’s sentimentality, aimed more often at the world around him than at me. He could weep over a fading rose. I think I will not write A. until he writes me. I must do “The Cardinal.”

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A letter from A., who refers to my beauty, my boyishness, and my lucidity. I snap at this bait so greedily that I cannot see my foolishness. I try to imagine the cynicism that would have been involved had I, at twenty-four, flattered my elders. We laugh at dinner, and while I am upstairs I hear the little dog singing. Susie arrives, quite high, and I am a little apprehensive about hubris, but I have no advice to give her. We go up to the pool, but I do not swim because my shoulder is still lame. So to bed; and at daybreak this Thursday seems like something placed in my open arms, placed on my lap; a bulk, a richness of light and darkness.

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I read a short-story anthology from which I have been conspicuously excluded and see how right they were to leave me out. The tone of the stories chosen—most of them excellent—is much more substantial and correct than my flighty, eccentric, and sometimes bitter work, with its social disenchantments, somersaults, and sudden rains. I do see why some people describe my characters as weird; I see this before it gets around the corner.

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At the A.A. meeting, I try to work myself into a conversation, but with no success. I sit alone, not uncomfortably. The first speaker is an alert, vigorous woman, whose legs have gone. The second is a very fat woman with a long history of arrests, jails, nut wards, suicide attempts. “I used to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds,” she says. It looks to me as if she still weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The next is an elderly runt, the kind of social steerage whose enlistment the Navy used to encourage. One also saw them in the infantry. Great at doing their own washing and ironing; reliable and punctual when sober; and, with or without a record, moving with the dancey, back-to-the-wall airs of a convict. His voice is close to inaudible. He repeats himself. He describes contracting to gold-leaf the dome of the Baptist church. He sold the gold leaf and gilded the dome with paint he bought at the five-and-ten-cent store. After fifteen years the dome, he says, is still shining; but we all know the Baptist church well, and we know it has no dome. The next is a large, young man, not fat but close to it. He wears
cotton pullover that shows his voluminous breasts and belly. His dark hair is long, and a thin lock hangs directly in front of his right eye. He removes this from time to time with a toss of his head. For me this is painful. My own right eye grows lame. Lying on a sidewalk outside a bar, he shouted that all he wanted was a little peace of mind, a minute—or maybe two—of being at peace with himself. All he wanted, after sixteen years of drugs and dope, was a minute of this and he never got it. My eyes are wet. The aggressive woman speaks again. She gave away her washing machine (while drunk) and had to take her washing to the public laundry, where she drank from a pint in the toilet. Shopping at the supermarket, she suddenly abandoned her groceries, drove home, and drank a half-pint of bourbon in the coat closet, exclaiming wow, wow, wow. The confessions are too lengthy, I guess, but in spite of my recognition of these cruelties, and my wet eyes for the fat man, the confessions seem to me to go on for too long, and I entertain the thought of a drink. There is no subject and no predicate for what I feel. This I don’t know, but I do know, moving blindly, that the answer is, “Nix.”

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I wake at six. Last week I heard the bells of Trinity while I spaded the garden. This Sunday I will go. Kneeling, I am too deeply moved to shape a coherent prayer. I would like my daughter’s happiness, some largeness of my comprehension, but my feeling is inchoate and close to tears. One wouldn’t want to cry in the chancel, would one? The candles, the fires, are countless, and much of the force of this ritual is ancient and bold. I believe in God the Father. What a courageous declaration! The movements of the priest, the acolyte, and the communicants are like some vestige of a pavane. It is the tower bell that rings as we approach the mystery of the Eucharist. I am deeply moved. Leaving the church, I greet the priest, who has changed from his very heavy vestments—an inheritance from the haggard chorus boy who used to bless this flock—into the service white. “Good morning, John,” he says. He is the same priest—unnamed and uncalled-for—who gave me Communion when I was last thought to be dying. I’ve not seen him since. There is no mention of God’s will. We settle for an ardent handshake and loud laughter. We are both crying. The rain is so heavy that going from the church to the car and from the car to the house I get so wet that I have to hang my clothes to dry in the kitchen. I would like to call him, but I do not.

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Uncommonly hot and humid. Reading Henry Adams on the Civil War, I find him distastefully enigmatic. I find him highly unsympathetic, in spite of the fact that we breathed the same air. Walker Evans once said that he was queer, and this struck me as an idle remark; but his descriptions of Milnes and Swinburne, and the posthumous gossip of the period that is, alas, known to me, bring the matter up once more. Absolute self-knowledge is, I believe, never a claim of a thoughtful man. The enormous, subjective prejudice that manipulates so broad a field as our memory is only a glimpse of the prejudices and whims that affect our judgments. So here is vastly connected Henry in London, quite androgynous and absolutely incapable of admitting any such condition. Here is the distortive force of society, and here is a most unnatural bloom. He praises a father he would happily murder and anticipates Freud’s illuminating the Commandments with Oedipus Rex. Honor thy father, that thy days may be long.

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So we have The Return from the Mountains. I’ve been content these three weeks, and one source of my contentment has been the conviction that I can see my limitations from a different altitude and in the light of a different time of day. “Hi,” I shout. The response is faint. I lean for a kiss. There is none. If my questions are answered at all they are answered with a sigh. The groceries I bought are worthless, the corn is questionable, and would I mind if it is thrown away? “Not at all!” I exclaim, which means that it will be served. This is perversity and madness. She sweeps the floor, empties the wastebaskets, and spends the next two hours cleaning the refrigerator. Federico and I go for a swim. “She does not do this because she is mean,” says Fred. I do not embrace him or shake his hand. I don’t know what to say to him. I’ve lived with his brother through the same scene, and his brother now considers me contemptible. I can say to myself—to no one else—that his brother is full of shit; but I do realize how mysterious and beautiful his person is, and that judicious reproach, or even common sense, are cruelties in this case. I have been told to avoid emotional crises and extremes of heat and cold. This triumvirate will kill me. My heart is racing, from an emotional crisis. The sun is hot. The water is cold. So the scene is set for my assassination, but I must go into the pool to wash off this emotional uncleanliness, and so I do.

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I am afraid to enter the house. I read on the porch. When I step in to get a drink, Mary asks in a sweet voice if I would like some crackers and cheese. So it is the old routine that her brother used to call Pavlovian, but this, perhaps, is taking it too far into the past. Clearing the table, I must struggle to keep from throwing the serving dishes onto the floor, but this was true—I remember this in detail, even to the figure on the carpet—when I was fourteen and alone with my parents. “Dear heart,” she says to Fred at table. Out from under my feet goes another rug.

So through another summer night to the parish house, where I see people I like muchly. And I see how and why and how cleverly I catch the sound of the wind changing its quarter, the loudening clash of night sounds, and the moon’s being not quite full. I am troubled by the fact that this eccentricity can be used by me to justify my other eccentricities; to justify sexual engorgements that I will always doubt. And driving home through the summer night—through an uproar of noise (including the great horned owl in rut) and a confusion of odors—I think how contemptible is a woman who accepts her livelihood from a man for whom she has nothing but scorn and loathing. But what are her alternatives; what, then, is she to do? Neither of them can afford to set up separate households.

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New journal. The right front tire needs air, and the car needs gas. This morning I am sad; quite naturally so, I think. That is, no unease is involved. I seldom wake in a vile humor, but I am often thrust into one. Seeing, in an unspeakably vulgar TV show, a man and wife touch each other lightly and tenderly, I am stricken. I always remember L. saying, “But I deserved better.” There is, of course, no such law. I think I know enough about the possible relationships between men and women to name my marriage as obscene and grotesque. I think there is nothing wrong in taking inordinate pleasure in the company of someone who will smile at me over the eggs. I’ve been breakfasting alone for years while my wife in the kitchen screams obscenities at the refrigerator. But it seems not quite right to put onto the shoulders of someone else the burdens of this miscarriage. I don’t think I have anything to worry about other than alcohol.

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The sad day is followed by an emphatic morning, and all my anxieties about drink and unrequited love and other masks of death are gone, as if my prayers had been answered. So I wander around the dining room restating the fact that any image of the Divinity will involve me in a taxi accident and a delay on my way to the airport where I would have boarded a plane that will crash, killing everyone aboard; that it is His hand that maketh me to stumble and thus avoid the adder; that it is He who led me safely by the hornets’ nest before they could swarm and sting me to death. One is dealing with a mystery, and it is the depth of this mystery that accounts for the crudeness of those images that overlook our prayers: those old beavers with golden hats, those sappy angels, those grave and stupid apostles and prophets.

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Up the river to Yaddo for the first time in many years without the company of alcohol. I remember promising myself that I would not take my flask into the toilet until Hudson. I remember, on the wall of some seminary, a large representation of Christ nailed to the cross. I remember (I was coming south early in the spring) a baggage cart on some platform, heaped with bundles of green palm leaves for the coming Sunday. Those were pleasant times, and so are these. When I was a boy I thought as a boy. The duck blinds, I see, are gone. A ruined house and a ruined castle are appealing, not at all like derelicts but, as the light pours through the gutter windows, like some graceful spinoff of our passion for building. The river is rough, but I can’t find evidence of a wind strong enough for this, and I guess it could be a tide rip. I think of bridges I may be too frightened to cross, of my fear of through-ways, but all of this is remote. My only unease is over the intensely intellectual nature of my pleasure. Alcohol at least gave me the illusion of being grounded. I count now on cutting and splitting wood, swimming in cool water, orgasms, and perhaps gluttony. I may simply mean a good appetite. In Albany, I lack identity because I have no credit card, but I don’t hurl myself into this sort of crisis. At the bus stop I drink iced tea and admire the restoration of a building across the street. On the bus I sit beside a sleepy drunk, but my nose must have lost its keenness because I can’t smell alcohol. He has been fucking all day, he says, an
is going to rent a building and fill it with pinball machines to fleece the young.

So here. There are flowers from A., and presents. If he loved me as I love him he would always be there; he would have met me in Albany; spent an afternoon hanging around the bus stop. We meet in the back of the house as I go in for dinner. We kiss. I’m getting cheeks these days from everyone. After dinner we walk around the lakes. When I put my arm around him he seems both heavier and taller. I ask if he will be my lover, and he refuses, both kindly and politely. I have no response, certainly no pain. I enjoy his company and would enjoy his skin, but I miss neither. I could be unpleasant. I could call him a bore. Any unpleasantness at all here would be wicked. I shall ask him for little or nothing, but I shall not say so. Someone says that one of the members here is a sex goddess. I am wakeful and think that I can seize this opportunity. In the morning I look forward to seeing A. and the goddess in that order. I will kiss A., most lightheartedly, hold his hand at breakfast; kiss the goddess, and slip my hand around her waist. But how can this man, genuinely male and solid, kiss another man with such tenderness and pleasure, and plan to love the young woman with the long hair? It seems quite possible without any loss. I just don’t happen to have been invented by an advertising agency. The message is: Praise be to thee, Oh Lord, of Thine own have we given Thee.

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Halfway through the meeting I have a deep seizure of melancholy. Looking out of the window, I admire a maple that has begun to turn and think how like a rose it is—some enormous rose tree. I long to be out of the yellow plush chair and the other constraints of the afternoon. I also long, or I might, for A., although I would not cross the street to see him. And then I see that it is not he whom I love but someone in my remote past, in my emotional substructure, whom I loved. My brother, I suppose. I would have destroyed most of my lasting relationships for his sake. I sometimes find his company distasteful, but I remember, in Iowa—sometimes in bed with a lover—enduring the deepest longing for him; perhaps the deepest longing for something unlikely or something of the past. After the meeting I pass a football with J. and P. I go to the cocktail party wearing a sweater. These are all stabs at the past, but why should I worry, since I think them successful? “Yo
are pale,” says J., and I am suddenly tired. My toothache and my cold become serious. I am sick. I have wanted the other side of the medal, and now I have it. I have it through most of Sunday, when I have a fever and am slightly delirious. I remember what I want, no more. Pieces I used to play on the piano, friendships of all sorts. I stagger a little when I walk, and this is the darkness that I sought. At its worst it is regressive. My father will come home, not—as I’ve written—with a new fishing lure, but with a new marionette theatre. That’s what I really wanted. And I think of my family—mostly my brother and sometimes my mother. We are in a group photograph—me usually on the far right or in the background, usually holding a glass. We seem printed in some color other than the rest of the group, but we do not have the intelligence to understand this, and thus we will always be a little ungainly, a little foolish, and at times intensely unhappy. So, past my fever, I wake again with nothing to say, really, but a thanksgiving.