The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (9 page)

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The winter fires of New York burn everywhere like the ghats in Benares. On the valueless land north of the ship canal some children, dressed like aviators, are burning a Christmas tree. An ashcan is blazing on the banks of the river. Rubbish fires glow in the backyards of Harlem. Farther south, where a slum is being cleared, there is a large conflagration of old lathes. Another rubbish barrel and another Christmas tree are burning on Ninety-sixth Street. On the curb at Eighty-third Street an old wicker table is being consumed with fire. In a vacant lot in the fifties some children are burning a mattress. South of the United Nations there is a big fire of cardboard cartons behind a grocery store. Many fires burn in the gutters and backyards of the slums; there are bonfires of wooden crates in front of the fish market and on Battery Park, untended, an iron basket, full of waste, lights the gloom as all these other fires do on a winter dusk when the dark begins to fall before the lights go on. So think about “The Housebreaker.” You’re damned near broke once more.

   To church this morning. I think I will be confirmed. The idea that I take this morning is that there is some love in our conception; that we were not made by a ruttish pair in a commercial hotel. I can reproach myself for being plainly neurotic and for dissembling my inadequacies with worship, but this leads me nowhere.

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S. says, “I never have a drink before dinner, because if I did I’d be too sleepy to watch TV. Sometimes my hubby has a Martini and the funniest things happen. When he has a second Martini he always tells me that I speak beautiful French. We were in the same French class in high school, and I always got A’s, and he never could understand French at all. He always remembers this when he has a second Martini. Then when he has a third Martini he begins to chase me around the house.”

R. asks, “Does he often drink three Martinis?”

S. says, “Oh, goodness, no. Just on the Christmas holidays.”

R. asks, “What does he do when he drinks three Martinis and you’re not around?”

S. says, “Oh, I trust my hubby. Why, I’d trust him alone on a desert island with two hundred women. He’s a one-woman man. His father was like that, too, and so were all his brothers. It runs in the family.”

R. says, “Don’t trust him with me.”

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There is a time to write and a time to walk and a time to reflect and a time to act and I come unwillingly to this journal today, wanting to do something less reflective and feeling that I sometimes strip myself of my most reasonable attributes, bent over this machine. However, any feeling of good health ought to be able to withstand a little looking into. Firstly Ash Wednesday on 125th Street. The spring sunlight spreads along the uptown streets. This is a poignant and unsettling light and Gawd, was I ever depressed. Then in the morning up into the mountains, taking a valley road up through the Berkshire hills and mountains; milk country, I guess. Thinking how unportentous is this journey to the north; how all your premonitions of death are no more than that, than premonitions; how all your journeys to Samarkand are for old ladies with empty heads. Patches of snow here and there; the hills like the winter coats of animals that we see; hock-deep in mud at the door to the barn; then the fume-colored mountains seem to strike us between the eyes and we raise our heads, our shoulders we brace. The air is finer to breathe and late in the day we follow a pass along the banks of a river which has written its black course crookedly in the ice. From farmhouses here and there we smell the wood burning in the cookstove.
In the villages we see old ladies, two by two, helping one another over the ice. The farm is lighted when we get there and as in all ski places the heat in the rooms is so intense that we sweat and feel short-winded. And then we ski and I like to ski.

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You meet a classmate, someone like that, on the street, and accept an invitation to dinner. As soon as you step into the apartment you know that something is wrong. Your hostess has been crying and your old classmate seems to be drunk. It isn’t that he staggers, but he seems to have hit the recognizable nastiness of some drunks. If you refuse the peanuts, he gets sardonic. Before you get to the dinner table he has begun to abuse, vilify, and ridicule his wife, and in the middle of the soup he tells you that she is a dirty slut. She seems to be a plain, sweet-tempered woman. She is crying and he is accusing her of all kinds of improbable filth when you get your hat and coat and leave in the middle of dinner. Ten or fifteen years pass and, leaving the theatre one evening, you are hailed by your old classmate again. He has the same wife with him and looking curiously into her face you see that she seems to be contented. Their apartment turns out to be near where you’re living and you share a taxi and stop in for a drink. Everything is pleasant for ten minutes and then your old classmate asks his wife why she doesn’t make some sandwiches; why doesn’t she get off her fat arse and do something useful. She begins to weep and goes into the kitchen and when you get your hat and coat he begins to shout after her that she’s a bitch, a dirty slut, a whore.

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And what does it matter if, on our entering the poorly heated stone church on Sunday, the priest with his candles and bells reminds us of some rite or initiation in our childhood—some hayloft or woodshed ceremony when we were inducted into the mysterious order of the Green Hornet—what does it matter? What does it matter if our minds wander to subjects unsuitable for prayer, or if we study the burst cushions or sniff the perfume of the woman ahead of us or review our sex life or dream of hot coffee or say the responses in a voice louder than the voice of the man across the aisle, what does it matter?

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Easter; the altar blazing with candles and white flowers; a baseball game in which, for some fishy reasons, I do not play; and yet baseball is like a sacrament and if you take one you should take the other. However, there is no sense in going into a tailspin over this. It is not that we pray for continence; it is that we seek it.

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A dance in Hastings; cocktails, wisteria, etc. “I’m just going to introduce myself,” a haggard woman with straw-colored hair said. “I’m here and I’m just going to introduce myself to everybody and enjoy myself. C. won’t introduce me to anybody, but she’s never neglected to ask me to these dances. I’ve never been able to get to one before, but she always writes and asks me. For three years she’s been asking me to these dances. The children tell me the only reason she asks me is because she expects me to clean up the mess, but I’m not afraid of a little work and while I’m here I’m going to enjoy myself.”

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Jim Agee died yesterday in a taxicab. He was very generous to me and I think perhaps it would be hypocritical and dishonest of me to go to any services for him. We were not good friends. He had many gifts of friendship, much vitality. Our pace was different, but beyond that I don’t know why we weren’t sympathetic. Today is largely dappled—masses of darkness and brilliance, all of it moving. It is a landscape and a time of year when it is impossible to harbor any bad feelings.

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

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Thunderstorms in the night and at half past three a settled rain. At half past five, the gray skies dourly lighted and rabbits on the church lawn. Coffee with A. and then up to the West Branch, a nearly empty world. A heavy succulence in the woods after the smashing rains. Grass root and flower root and the leathery-smelling stream taking a sensual hold on the mind. The water smoking after the rain and turbulent, her
and there. Humid and still in the pools. Water dropping off the pines. A trout rising in the deep pool under the maple. Below the surface of the brook a still world, Avernus, of round stones. All the dead men in Parson’s pond and the slender margin between the dry world and the watery. The chill through my waders and hug of the water. Nereids I think of, and the hairy river gods. There is a mingling here, at daybreak—the air heady with laurel and water on which the heart-shaped dogwood petals sail—of sweetness and lewdness, too. Maidens and satyrs both. At the crossing below Harcourts, the little bridge made of maple saplings is sprouting leaves. Against the bridge a thick cuff of white scum. At my back the brook speaks with the tongues of “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians”; we do hear the brook speak in all these tongues. And thinking of fleshly things: of that which can illuminate and darken the conscience; of that which tempts us to peer under window shades and all other kinds of lewd follies; and that also which furnished us with tenderness and patience. This gentle larceny of feathers that we commit. Then the light of the sun fell into the valley; humid and golden. And then upstream the trout strikes with the noise of breaking dishes: a clatter, and we have him. The rod bends, and through the clear water we see him sound, this way and that, silver and rose, our sunken treasure.

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Sitting in a chair on the stones before the house drinking Scotch and reading Aeschylus, I think then of how we are gifted. Of how we have requited our appetites, of how we have kept our skin clean and warm and satisfied our various appetites and lusts. I would not want anything finer than these dark trees and this golden light. I read Greek and I think that the advertising man across the street may do the same; that given some respite from war and need the mind, even the mind of the ad salesman, inclines to good things. Mary is upstairs and I will have my way here, very soon. This is the sharp thrill of our mortality, the link between the rain-wet stones and the hair that grows from our bodies. But it is while we kiss and whisper that the children climb onto a stool and eat some sugary sodium arsenite that is meant to kill ants.
There is no true connection between the love and the poison and yet they seem to be points on the same map.

The child is vomiting. Into town on a Sunday night to get an antidote. For this corner drugstore, a Sunday night is its finest hour. All its prosperous competitors have shut. It is the only lighted store on the street. The jumble of displays in the window—a picture of Pythagoras, Venus in a truss, douche bags and perfumes—is continued in the store itself. It is like a pharmaceutical curiosity shop, a fun house, a storeroom for cardboard women anointing themselves with suntan lotion, cardboard forests advertising pine-scented soap, bookshelves and bins filled with card-table covers and plastic water pistols, and a little like a household, too, for the druggist’s wife is at the soda fountain, a neat, anxious-looking woman with photographs of her three sons in uniform arranged on the shelf at her back.

When we leave the drugstore it is a summer twilight and the street is nearly empty. Then down the street swagger the hoods, two by two, stinking of marijuana and baying like she-wolves at the new moon. They are strange to us, for how to fit them into the picture? Greece, and a poisoned child and the whispering in bed—they are strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.

Back through a summer night, noticing for the first time the smell of honeysuckle. The child is sick but we continue our whispering; put out the lights. Then I dreamed that I seduced L.E. and believe me it took some doing and I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

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This house, charming and medicinal. The accrual of many summers. The kind of books that guests bring—orphans now. Glass saucers and clamshells, painted, on rainy days, with anchors and leaves. All the walls matchboard; some of it a silky yellow, or lighter, almost white, and in the western rooms where the storms blow and the roofs leak th
wood is the dark color of tobacco. Creaking wicker chairs, in which to watch the sunset. The staircase, like a companionway, scarred at the turning by many heavy trunks; and the whole house like a frail sounding board, creaking in the night winds with a glassy sound—a sounding board for the rain.

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Walked up the beach with Mary for a picnic. Gin in the thermos. Swam ballocksy. Tried to do the tender act but was gently dissuaded. Thinking of the vividness of need, of the sea, of fire, and of sexual desire. How readily, in a manly state, the beauty of the world appears to us. How blue and fine the sky, and how loud the thunder of the sea. Up to the sea pond to get many clams and scallops. Back here to make love at six and seven—the children downstairs playing chopsticks on the piano. The sun was low but not setting, and from the bed we could see, out the long narrow windows, the bay and the sandbar and the ocean beyond it and the nineteenth-century flavor that clings to this old coast, for the Coffins’ dreams of Spanish esplanades and Japanese lanterns and band concerts are as much a part of the past as the whaling relics. And the joy of lying together in our skin under these pleasant lights. The children go out to play kick-the-can.

Later, to the inn for dinner. While we were drinking our coffee some college kids came in and ordered beer and began to dance to the recorded music. At the first notes of a German waltz, I grabbed Mary by the waist, and we began to dance. Then, one by one, the young kids left the floor and drifted off into the lobby. We were spoiling everything with our middle-aged ardor. When we gave up dancing and went back to our table I heard one of the kids in the lobby say, “It’s all right now; they’ve quit.” Then they all came back and danced. Walking out the front door of the inn, we saw some waiters playing tag with children. Back here to sit in chairs on the porch and admire the distant lights of Nantucket and the evening wind.