by John Cheever
Stew around and make a half-arsed attempt to stop smoking. Write some letters. Break down at ten past ten and cross the railroad bridge to the cig machine. Read some Mailer and decide that his prose has better tone than mine. Acute discontent. Knock off at a quarter to four. A cold winter afternoon. Drive the cleaning woman home with Federico. Stop at the liquor store, where he gets a lollipop and I get gin and whiskey. Driving back home, past the prison and down by the river, the sky is gold, so gold that my cupidity is aroused. It is like the gold standard, the source of the legends of gold. An inscrutable wall of light. Back home I knock out some ice cubes, give the local paper a shake, and stand by the glass panes of the storm door thinking of the lover’s sense of crises, the lover’s fine sense of crises, the lover’s sense of the hour of day, the lover’s fine sense of hearing. Some part of the sentence seems to stand, and standing at the door I seem to find myself for five minutes: straight, spare, clearheaded, neither young nor old, and not much concerned with age, not concerned at all. What has been the matter: too much gin, too much smoke, too much crap of all kinds. So I make a drink and light a cigarette.
•
Touch and go with the booze, and I must have been disagreeable. At the table I accuse Mary of being negative. I do this freely and unfairly, since one by one the members of her family have taken me aside and asked if I didn’t find her impossible. This is no way to behave. And I can’t remember how the night ended. I read Nabokov, who is florid and who now and then makes a mistake and puts me at ease: brings me down from the ideal of “the lover’s fine sense of crises,” from my ideal of a prose that carries its vitality like a scraped wire. Something in between. But nearly every time I think of a story I see it set up in the magazine opposite a cartoon; and I must realize that the people who read my fiction have stopped reading The New Yorker; I must realize that the breach here is real and happy. I have spent the last three months trying to write three stories, wanting money, really: wanting to prove to myself that I can. I think I’ve wasted some time but I don’t think all of it is wasted.
•
My sense of morality is that life is a creative process and that anything that chafes or impedes this forward thrust is evil and obscene. The simplest arrangements—trees, a line of bathhouses, a church steeple, a bench in a park—appear to have a moral significance, a continuit that is heartening and that corresponds to my whole sense of being. But there are speculations and desires that seem contrary to the admirable drift of the clouds in heaven, and perhaps the deepest sadness that I know is to be absorbed in these.
•
Mary sings at a Methodist church, a little, frame, brown-stained, self-respecting barn of a place that must have been a country church when it was raised but that is now crowded out by a firehouse, grocery store, apartment building, etc. We are early, and as we wait the old women of the neighborhood appear, some of them with sticks and crutches. Many of them wear Christmas-tree ornaments on their coats. They wear feathers and beads and are painted like savages. I notice the talismanic significance of mink. These are poor people and cannot afford pelts but every woman there sports a piece of mink as the women of Rome wear a talisman against the evil eye. One has a mink hat, another has mink buttons on her coat, another has a cloth coat woven to look like mink, another has a muskrat coat dyed like mink, even little children have mink cuffs, some scrap of the magical fur.
•
We drink champagne and have a fine supper. “Oh, I’m so happy,” Mary says, stepping into my arms, and it seems to me that I can feel the happiness of other people in the houses around us. I think that everyone is happy tonight. Susie and I go to church and I am very happy at this, for, whatever my doubts are, this gospel of the Prince of Peace, born in a stable, expresses my deepest feelings about life. Two meddlesome vestrymen regulate Communion. Some strays, who have wandered in to hear the carols, are mystified by the liturgy. Across the aisle I see the face of a boy home from college: the son of a friend and neighbor. He has a sharp nose, his hair is a little long, and he reminds me of H., and it seems to me that in this relationship I may have been sinful, a force of corruption; but there is a great difference between these two faces. In this one there is authority, skepticism—the color is high and fresh—and he looks out at the world with a fitting tolerance and humor for this time of life. Another boy, home from college, comes into my pew and we share a hymnal and there is something so pleasant about this exchange, how well we get along with one another, how sometime the meeting of strangers is like a bath in the finest brine. Home, we put the presents under the tree and fill the stockings; and I think back over the psychology of the hour: the authorities of goodness, Santa Claus and the heroic cowboy, in whose image and likeness we hope to be created. There is something like a nightmare in this excess of presents—crystal glasses, velvet robes, a shrimp dish, trucks and cars—but somehow, not soberly, I grope from some other, less bewildering, meaning in this nightmare and I think that with these foolish excesses we struggle, intuitively, to express our convictions about the abundance of life.
•
Skating at the B.s’, first time out. Gray ice, a little rough. The wind swings around to the southwest and the day gets warmer as the ice melts. In the night, on the southwest wind, a torrential rain the sum of whose thousands of sounds is to raise in my mind the image of an English beauty in a colored advertisement for soap. Her hair is a subtle gold, and there is a blush on her cheeks. In the morning the dark curtain of rain is still falling and I am miserable with anxiety about the sump pump, the oil burner, and the laundry ceiling, a piece of which falls. To Holy Communion—with B.—where I think of how we obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us—a look at the poor quality of my devoutness and at the desirability of the posture of prayer, the attitude of solemn thanksgiving.
Two drinks before lunch, and then I take the boy for a walk. The rain has stopped, the air is fresh and soft, the wind has begun to move around to the northwest where it will settle. It is clearing. A beam of light, three yards wide and five miles long, falls through the mountains and across the river and into this moves a coal-burning freighter, the smoke from her funnel knocked forward by the wind over her bow decks, heightening the general impression of dishevelment. We watch a train come in and carry off a handful of passengers with bags. As I pass the B.s’, Mr. B., who is not a friend, asks me if I think the rain is over. “I want to take the kiddies over to the skating rink at Bear Mountain,” says he, looking suspiciously at the clouds, “but I wouldn’t want to go if I thought it was going to rain.” I assure him that the wind is moving to the northwest and we walk on. The brook is flooded with brown and noisy water. D. and his friends are building a dam. Past th mulberry trees, at the highest point of the road, the air is fragrant and warm, and here is a persuasive imitation of spring complete with bird-song, brilliant green grass, and a pleasant feeling of languor. The boxwood smells like a cat’s lair. Later, we carry the tree and the wreaths across the lawn to burn them on the dump, and I remember my trip north at this time last year with the deceased trees, still wearing a little angel’s hair, fired summarily into the ditch beside the tracks. The boys are playing football. And the wind is now out of the northwest, powerful, shaking the big trees with a percussive sound. It is all much more dramatic now. The wreath flares up. The smell of burning holly and hemlock is like a vital perfume of life: salt water and the breasts of a woman. Turning, we see that the sky to the north is lilac and sapphire and in the southwest an implacable wall of gold so pure, so brilliant, that it is my cupidity that is excited; and it is all thrown around, these colors and lights, in prodigious disorder.
•
I wander around the city. Here and there I see a face that reminds me of the sheer delight we take in one another’s company, and I mean all kinds: friendship, horseplay, inventiveness, tenderness, and the darkest coupling. And here and there I see a face that reminds me w
ith deep sadness of the fact that I am not young anymore, that I have suffered some losses and am not content, and that the sense of standing on a curb, looking out levelly at the world, as a young man does, is gone. I have my pleasures, God knows, and there is a thrust of life in me that time has not changed, but my eyes are no longer clear, my skin firm, or my hair bright. However, some girls still seem to like me, and you can’t have everything. And here and there on the street an impression, a figure, seems inflicted on me; a figure in a belted trenchcoat hurrying up a side street. The figure seems to be one of supreme misdirection. There is some sexuality here, but of what sort? And the young men in cuffless trousers and Italian shoes mean to be attractive but attractive to whom? There is no doubt about the intentions of the men on the Corso, but these youths seem to me mostly to be flirting with the image in the mirror.
•
Susie comes home with news that she is on some sort of probation. Her negativism, her digressive negativism are thought to be bad attitude in class. Our conversation begins in soft voices but then I begin to shout, she cries and throws herself onto her bed, I order her to get up and eat dinner and tell her if this were in Italy I would hit her over the head with a piece of wood, and Federico, catching the harsh or ugly notes in my voice, begins to cry. We sit down to a gloomy table. I read. At eight o’clock sharp the wind springs out of the north with gale force, an inundation of snow and rain. Susie goes for a walk in the storm. Later I speak with her. “I’m indifferent,” she says. “I’m a mass of intelligence adrift. I don’t care if I sleep in the street.”
“Oh, you don’t,” say I, as the wind flings the rain against the windows. “Would you like to go out and sleep in the street this evening?” Here is sarcasm, fruitless and obscene. I apologize and plead with her for friendship, and lying in bed I ask myself, How can she be indifferent to the beaches of Nantucket, the city of Rome, the pleasures of skiing, the promise of love and friendship?
At four, Federico wakes with a scream. “Get the mother out of the way,” he says, and goes back to sleep. What is going on in his mind? Ben is also awake and is afraid of the dark. Getting back to sleep I seem to enter the rich color and shade of a tapestry and lie under lemon trees in whose dark leaves there are many doves. Later, I fancy a very lewd orgy but without any sense of shock or revulsion. I seem to have come to terms with my bones and these courses of speculation and I hope it does not mean any loss of moral awareness.
•
Snow predicted. It begins at around nine in the morning, a dark sky but a hesitant and unimpressive fall. By ten o’clock the ground is covered. By eleven you hear the whining noise of a car stuck in a drift. By twelve all the back roads are closed and there is almost no traffic on the main highway. Schools close. Offices close. There is some primitive camaraderie in this convulsion of nature. I help to shovel the station platform. Mrs. M. suddenly turns on me a burst of confidence about Mrs. V. “My deah, she is ruthless and dishonest.” She has the mind of a strong and ruthless man. By half past two there is ten inches or more of fine powder. My friend and I take a walk. Perhaps it is he, I think, who basks in my admiration. I think of animals in this weather, says he, cows and sheep, the doves in their cote. We walk through the Italian garden, all its form now somehow comical and absurd. Dunce caps of snow on the baroque pedestals. The boxwood hedge paved wit snow. A peak on the heraldic lion. As we walk up the lawn the fall is so thick that we can’t see the big house. I shovel a path and play with my sons. How pleased we are with this turn in the weather. A stray dog appears and disappears. Just before dark, before we draw the curtains, a blue light of great intensity fills the valley. In the dark, Ben and I take a walk. The snow is still falling, blowing. In the few lights, in the few streetlights, it shines with a hardness and a brilliance that is unlike its insubstantialness; it shines like cut steel. In the morning A. calls to cancel the trip and the speech. I stand by the bed with the telephone in my right hand and a stiff cock in my left and this is I.
•
Mary, showing me a piece of marble that I bought for her in Rome, says, “I must be kind and gentle, otherwise you would never have given me this.” And I wonder, Is murder one of her considerations? I have wanted to wring her neck but I never thought of braining her with a rock. If she did brain me, I think it would be me as an image of someone else.
•
Federico’s third birthday. I would like to write him a fine book and then another and then another, but I must take care of myself. Drank and smoked too much again last night, but coming toward the house—the sapphire lights of a winter day and cardinals whistling in the fir trees—I think that perhaps I can do it, perhaps I can make some sense of it.
Mary complains of fatigue at lunch and my response to this, both affectionate and bitter, is enlarged by a recollection of her mother’s complaints. And I also, unfortunately, recall her father’s—God rest him—preposterous performance in the kitchen. He mopped the floors when anyone came through, he guarded the stove as if it were a symbol of his honor, he raged and swore at the burdens that were put on him, but if anyone tried to help him by making a piece of toast or squeezing the juice out of a lemon he would go into an insane tantrum. Here are the unreasonable and insatiable hungers of our egotism. He was tired, he was overworked, he was misunderstood, his brilliant intelligence was wasted, and how he struggled, hour after hour, to put himself into this position, to transform himself, so to speak, into a cruel and an idle lash. I ask if I shall cook breakfast in the morning but I am not allowed to cook bacon because I leave it too greasy, I may not poach eggs because the maid doesn’t get the yolk off the plates, and I cannot heat milk because I will scald it and stain the pot. These endless obstructions.
•
A sixteen-year-old boy is arrested for selling pornography and sentenced to six months in the pen. His first offense was stealing hubcaps. The judge says that the sentence is the most sorrowful task of his fifteen years on the bench. He is a friend of the family. He admires the boy’s parents. He compliments them on their intelligent efforts to cure a wayward son. He hopes that the boy’s term in the pen will help to cure him of his lawlessness, will teach him to become, as he says, “a component of society”; and I hear in these words some contemptible prudery that seems to me worse, more of an impediment, than the boy’s failing. I can imagine the scenes with the parents, their deep bewilderment and sorrow. Why, while other boys win national scholarships for scientific research, develop their athletic abilities, and lead cleanly and adventurous lives, should their son be destined to sell obscene pictures under street lamps to his schoolmates? I think of X, who posed for indecent photographs but was never apprehended, and R.’s friend in Naples who supported his four children in this way, most cheerfully. “The hours are good, signore, and the wages are fair, but it is difficult, one must always seem ardent, even when your head feels like a squash, and the girls are often not beautiful.” In Naples it is nearly acceptable, it is almost comical; but not here. But there is something to be said for the boy. Perhaps he has no other way of impressing himself on his schoolmates; perhaps he has inherited his father’s colorlessness, that he is driven to distinguish himself in this way. His interest in obscene pictures is natural enough, and through selling them he receives something like the admiration of his classmates and may make enough money to run away. This may be sentimental, but the prudish judgment from the bench seems to restate a false, a shabby vision of pureness that could be the beginning of the trouble.
•
Mary greets me at the door in utter confusion. She means to draw a look of composure over her feeling of revulsion but I step in too quickly for her to complete the maneuver and see how unwelcome I am. She cannot speak to me or look at me.
“Would you like to take a rest?” I ask, as kindly as possible.
“How can I?” she asks. “I have to put up my hair.” It all seems comical, but it is a bitter comedy. What vast amounts of misery the spirit can absorb and still rebound, still
refresh itself.
•
An unseasonably warm day: fevers in the blood. I walk with Federico. The sense of odors, exhalations, escaping from the earth is volcanic. The whole county stirs like a crater. The imperative impulse is to take off my clothes, scamper like a goat through the forest, swim in the pools. The struggle to sustain a romantic impulse through the confusions of supper, the disputes, the television, the baby’s bath, the ringing of the telephone, the stales of the dishpan, but I have in the end what I want and I want this very much.
•
Tonight, dirty movies at the fire house. In the audience will be some of the police, perhaps not the ones who arrested and sent to the pen for six months last week a sixteen-year-old boy, but members of the same force. What is their reasoning? Is this all well and good for men of thirty, and criminal for boys? I can’t see it; and for me the horror, the gruelling shame of watching, on a screen, a naked woman performing gross indecencies on a man with a long scar on his buttocks.
•
A philologist and his wife from Brown for dinner. One of the generation of Bazarovs. His ambition is to determine, by the use of electrical computation machines, the basic structure of language. Word values and evocations can be determined, he tells me, by machinery, and thus successful poetry can be written by machines. So we get back to the obsolescence of the sentiments. I think of my own sense of language, its intimacy, its mysteriousness, its power to evoke, in a catarrhal pronunciation, the sea winds that blow across Venice or in a hard “A” the massif beyond Kitzbühel. But this, he tells me, is all sentimentality. The importance of these machines, the drive to legislate, to calibrate words like “hope,” “courage,” all the terms we use for the spirit.
•
I think, walking with Federico on a spring day, that I will walk with X, find some cold lake or pool, swim in it ballocksy, and have my dirty way with his rotund arse. I let the reverie spend itself, and what does it matter? There is no X, and coming on a cold pool at this time of year I would not want to swim or do the other things I seem to want, but there does seem to be in my head some country, some infantile country of irresponsible sexual indulgence that has nothing to do with the facts of life as I know them. But what interests me is the contradictions in my nature, in anyone’s nature, their grandioseness; that in the space of a few minutes I experience crushing shame and then swim into some pure source of self-esteem and confidence that wells up like a spring in a pond. And half asleep I wonder if I do not suffer from some uncured image of women, those creatures of morning, as predators, armed with sharp knives.