by John Cheever
•
A bright, fine day and I accomplish nothing. Ben goes off with his effeminate friend at four. Federico and I walk over to the greenhouse to get some rosemary. We stop to watch a football game. The grass is green, its greenest; the trees are still full-leaved and beginning to color. Such a pure light shines on the cliffs of the river that the shadow, black, seems like a darkness deposited in the stone, on the stone, by the passage of night. It is a handsome scene—the well-dressed men and women, the brilliant red-and-maroon football uniforms against the green playing field. But my son, I notice, is not here—neither he nor his friend—and I wonder where they are. Are they cobbling each other as I sometimes did, in a damp toolshed, while the irrecapturable beauty of the autumn afternoon begins to fade? The beauty of the day seems to add some acuteness to my feeling. As we walk toward the temple of love, Mrs. V. speaks to us. Her face is clear in the autumn light, the features still striking, vigorous, and colorful. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat, covered with autumn flowers and leaves, that she bought in Spain, she explains, many years ago. “What a beautiful scene,” she says of the football game. “How beautiful motion is, isn’t it? I love trains. I was born and brought up within sight of a railroad track. I like to see the sparks fall off the brake box, the lighted windows reflected in the cove. I can also remember the horsecars. I’m not quite sure whether they were drawn by horses or mules, but they were very light. By jumping up and down on the back you could nearly upset them.” We say goodbye and go on, and she stands by the temple—an old lady, an autumn day, a garden close to ruin. Back at the house, Ben shows up and I ask him angrily to come in for a minute. I ask him why he didn’t go to the football game, why he didn’t have supper with his friends, where he has been. What I claim to feel is that he has turned his back on the beauty of the autumn day, the green playing field, and the decent people, but what I really fear is that he has been indulging in the vices of my own youth, smoking cigarettes and masturbating in the moldy-smelling woods. I ask him why he isn’t out there playing, working as a linesman, bringing water to the players, and I do not seem to remember going to the meadow to play football one day and being overtaken by—what? shyness or cowardice?—and hurrying by so no one would invite me to play. So I seem to pour onto his broad and tender shoulders all my anxiety, my guilt. And yet, for all the depth and bitterness of m feeling—bitterness and tenderness—the scene lacks a degree of reality, the suburban sky seems to reflect a bland, an unserious light. Yes, there is some longing here, some real longing here, for a more tempestuous, more genuine atmosphere. What has gone wrong, that we should all seem to be made of paper and straw? What is the world I wish to achieve for myself and my sons? What would be a better scene for this discourse? God knows. A mountain pass, a long beach, the darkness just before a storm. Why does the man teaching his son to get out a fishing line, as I have done; the gallant old lady reminiscing about horsecars; me pouring onto the shoulders of my fair son the guilty vices of my adolescence—why should we seem to be no better than the characters in a vulgar situation comedy? By turning my head I can see the ancient cliffs of the river, still scored by the volcanic powers that shaped the planet, the days of creation, so why, as we quarrel, as his character is being made or unmade, should the air that my beloved son and I breathe seem so domesticated, so bland, so thin? Let us away to Italy or St. Botolphs.
•
Tired in the morning, and I tire myself mostly with drink and conviviality. I find the drive tiring, gruelling. I observe the works of man and nature—the fair pastures along the parkway and the grace of the elms. Farther north, some of the maples have colored—these incendiary colors that are so lambent they lie outside the spectrum. Up into the granite hills, the granite mountains, the fine, light air, carrying all the fragrance of the land so clearly, the deep blue of the shadows, rain-lights. I kiss Susie goodbye, and wish her good things in Italian. We have already been to church. Let us all make something decent and admirable of our lives. I dine on creamed chicken in a candlelit barn. In bed, my teeth ache, my heart is painful, my chest is sore, my back is lame. I dream that the atomic bomb is exploded somewhere off the Battery. Whose? Ours? I hear the hellish noise and see the mushroom cloud. Many men throw themselves into the harbor, shouting, “Let’s get the hell out of this world.” Mary wants to do this, but I say, “No, no, we will stay alive, we will do something with our lives.” But my skin has begun to burn, and I realize it is too late. I am waked by a church bell that rings all the hours and has a pure and gentle note. I hear all the hours rung but five.
•
I spend the night with C., and what do I make of this? I seem unashamed, and yet I feel or apprehend the weight of social strictures, the threat of punishment. But I have acted only on my own instincts, tried, discreetly, to relieve my drunken loneliness, my troublesome hunger for sexual tenderness. Perhaps sin has to do with the incident, and I have had this sort of intercourse only three times in my adult life. I know my troubled nature and have tried to contain it along creative lines. It is not my choice that I am alone here and exposed to temptation, but I sincerely hope that this will not happen again. I trust that what I did was not wrong. I trust that I have harmed no one I love. The worst may be that I have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie.
•
In town to the Institute. Dogged, it seems, by the need for some crude erotic imagery, I take a drink at half past ten and cure myself at least of this. The lunch is pleasant, and I enjoy my friends. Waiting for the 3:19 I think that now I will be at peace with myself at last. It seems so. The scouting, the defensive tactics, the forced forgetfulness all seem over. My war with the world is ended or suspended. As we come home on the train the conductor calls our attention to a swan in the river. I think the graceful white bird in the icy water is a good omen, talisman, portent.
But at three or later I am awake. I hear a boat on the river. There seems to be a ringing sound in the air. The tap in the bathroom drips. I think of C., think that I had from him signs and words of love, but that I cannot fit myself into such a relationship. My younger son speaks in his sleep, and I think that I will make something fine and decent for him. I invent a first-class-passenger list for a midwinter sailing. Fall asleep and wake feeling like myself.
To track again these emotional ups and downs with the hope of illumination. As I write letters on Saturday morning, the problem of C. asserts itself and finally dominates my thinking and my feeling and leaves me tense, excitable, and uneasy. Working it out in terms of fiction I think that I am the one who receives the letter and the twenty-dollar bill and that C. reappears, that there is a melodramatic speech in which I compare him to death. I drink to forget my troubles, but this only seems to deepen the abyss, and I think that if we met again it would be on the same terms, that it would mean an abdication of my personality, that there is nothing we could do together but drink gin and destroy each other. My flesh seems to yearn for C.; my mind takes a very different path, and I suffer despair and melancholy. I remember meeting a Danish actress on Vesuvius and thinking, after leaving her, that I was sick with love. I remember going into a movie theatre one morning, thinking that my life was nearly over, and helling over the roads of Fairfield that evening, thinking that I would live forever.
But I am melancholy because my sexual boisterousness is lost. I take a walk with A. The snow is deep; the footing is bad; I have blisters on both feet and do not see the countryside. The roar of the waterfall swells. I make a vain, an egotistical remark, and A., for the first time in this long and helpful friendship, turns on me the hard-bitten, implacable face of New England censure, of the laws of survival.
•
I suppose it is all tied up with my romantic agony. He leaves just before dark, and alone in the living room I feel sick—with what? Sick over a morbid and hopeless love, sick over my inability to resume the life I’ve chosen. We go out for dinner, and Mary, across the room, looks pretty and I remember the hundreds, the
thousands of nights when I have sat cheerfully through the anecdotes, the arguments, the games, with the thought of a jolly hour in bed to keep me humorous and alert. But now my vitals seem sapped, I throw bad dice, I despair. But at home Mary takes me in her arms, kindly, tenderly, and I am myself. I have what I want, and waking in the morning, stiff and randy, I am as high as at dusk I was miserable. As I walk up from the station in the cold north wind some dream of love seems to spread out before me, golden ceilings and garlands of fruit, and gigantism and richness. We make love in the afternoon, and now the new house resumes its importance for the first time in months; we talk about painting the kitchen. So there are, I suppose, two faces to this: my fear of being caught in a world that bores me, and the sexual richness of my marriage. I think—foolishly but, nonetheless, with pleasure—of the house, of greeting guests, of pointing out the river view from the terrace. I am back in my own jolly country. Now the image of death is laid, it is insubstantial, and now that it is over, now that I am unafraid, I think that I wil write C. a letter. But by doing this wouldn’t I begin the whole cycle again, wouldn’t I betray some incurable taste for melancholy?
•
The closing; and so I have at last bought a house. Coming home on the train, Mary speaks of the complexity of our lives—the red coat she wore to the hospital in Rome when Federico was born—and it does seem rich and vast, like the history of China. We move books. To Holy Communion, where I first express my gratitude for safe travels, luck with money, love, and children. I pray that our life in the new house will be peaceful and full. I pray to be absolved of my foolishness and to be returned to the liveliness, the acuteness of feeling, that seems to be my best approach to things. I remember walking in the autumn woods six or seven years ago when, in a powerful rush of feeling, I felt that my participation in life was a participation in something vivid and magnificent. It is a dark morning. The window above the altar shows only a few dark colors. Sleet, and, in the afternoon, snow. The driving is bad, we cannot move, and I find the suspense galling.
•
On Monday we pack. My feelings are mostly confused, painfully so, and are still confused today. On Tuesday the furniture is carted off, but I have no clear feelings about this house, now empty, where we have lived happily and unhappily for so many years. I remember coming to the place alone, with a box of books. I was ten years younger. In the dirty, cold, and empty room I had an enthusiastic vision of a dinner party—lights and pretty women—myself (yes, yes) in dinner clothes, and it all came true. “We gave a dinner party for eighty-five,” I told the young man, “the night before we sailed for Italy.” We eat precooked frozen dinners off tinfoil plates, and I think of a family who customarily do this, and who speak to one another in advertising slogans. “Aren’t these garden-fresh peas in fresh creamery butter delicious?” “And this tangy, zesty Swiss steak is served in such generous portions!” Even the littlest child has something to say along these lines. Even the babe in arms sings a commercial. Mary goes off to sing with A., and I am left alone in what seems to be a haunted house, but haunted by whom? The oil burner stinks and the fumes are so bad they make the baby ill. A.’s wife calls to ask where her husband is. “We’ve married wanderin minstrels, haven’t we,” she says, “you and I?” I am sore but keep my temper. On Wednesday morning I wake asking for valor, courage, strength, largeness of spirit, all good things, and seem to have a few of them. We move. The new house is empty, and long after we have put down our rugs and arranged the furniture, long after the friends have come and gone with flowers and wine, after the pictures have been hung and the curtains drawn and the lamps lighted, the image of the empty house—cat smell in the upstairs hallway, and scuffed and faded paint—is much more vivid than all our arranging. The image of emptiness is for me a kind of horror. The lamps and flowers seem transparent. The arrangements go on through Thursday and Friday, and on Friday afternoon the snow begins to fall, and falls steadily for twelve hours. Old Mrs. L. once said that I should not be too sensitive, and I don’t seem to be able to take her advice. My feelings about heating plants are conditioned by the fact that the heating plant in the old house frequently broke down and once blew up. There is a leak in the guest room. The oil burner seems erratic. I had a drink at half past eight.
•
More snow. Ben’s school bus is late, and I bring him home. Shovel snow, blessed snow, until half past three, whereupon I drink too much and am unpleasant about the dressing room. Wake in the night to hear the domestic machinery making its own decisions. First the oil burner, then the icebox, the vacuum pump, the sump pump. I seem less anxious, more thick-skinned, I hope. I hope that inch by inch we will take possession of this house, this place. It does seem to be a struggle. Wake to a dark morning, heavy snow falling. I drive Ben to Scarborough, and there is that fine sense—adrenaline, I guess—my mouth dry but some new reserves seem called on. Mary is unforgiving, and I shovel snow for my good health, and I seem to move, through this simple exercise, from despair into hopefulness. I see the buds on the trees, I can imagine how it will look in the summer, I seem to hear my daughter’s voice from the shore of the pond. I almost—but not quite—get into the beauty of the scene, away from the anxieties, an old man’s rancorous feelings for winter.
•
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about my sexua clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of my discouragement—I seem to glimpse it in my dreams—my despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window; to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.
•
He was one of those Americans who had suffered in the middle of their lives a serious mental and spiritual breakdown. I have never observed it in any other country. The male menopause is, as we know, an old wives’ tale, a legend, and has nothing to do with the facts of the case. I have seen this trouble overtake so many that we might point out the symptoms. You can single out their faces at the railroad-station bars. They were mostly handsome, but now their handsomeness is harried with worry, and sometimes gin. Mostly, their hands shake. Their friends, if they are left with any, say that X seems to be going through some sort of psychological crisis. It usually begins with sharp discontents about their business life. They have been treated shabbily and cheated out of the promotions and raises they deserved, but their position at this time of life, their security, is too precarious to allow them to express any grievance. They are sick of ball bearings and bedsheets or whatever else it is they sell. Sexually their wives have come to seem unattractive, but they have not been able to find mistresses. Their friends bore them. Their children seem, oftener than not, strange and ungrateful. The financial burdens they have been forced to assume are backbreaking. All of this is true, but none of this would account for the wanton disappointment that engorges them. Something of more magnitude, something much more mysterious than these bare facts would show, has taken place. Valor, lustiness, hope—all these good things seem to have been misplaced.
He finds the noise of his wife’s voice insufferable, he strikes his favorite son with a piece of firewood. He is lost, as lost as anyone on the side of a mountain, and yet the way in which he reached this tragic wilderness is hidden from him and from the rest of us. There is one down near the service bar drinking a beer. Here comes another, in at the door. That man in a silk shirt drinking a Martini is one of the, and there is a fourth gazing at his wristwatch, although it makes no difference to him whether it is three, or four, or five in the afternoon.
•
I think unconcernedly of C; I see the idiot grin, the uncut hair, the bohemian suit, the Desert boots, the ungainly shins, the lively body with its restlessness, its thrust—the pure waywardness. And I think o
f our cloudy feelings about the sexual commerce between men—that it is a legitimate but an unsatisfactory field of investigation, that it is undignified and sometimes comical.
•
I make no headway, and yet it seems best to come here every day and try. It is not easy. I have had winters before and will have them again, and do not seriously doubt that they will end—the winters—but it is not easy. I am reminded of the weeks and months in Rome when I saw nothing with the right eyes but a cobweb gleaming in the sunlight and an owl flying out of a ruin. Thinking of X, who was tyrannized by a fable of herculean sexual prowess but who was, like the rest of us, clay. The books and stories he read and the movies he saw stated or implied a lurid and nearly continuous eroticism, but when he seized his bony wife in his arms he was mostly frustrated. Why couldn’t he get into the fun, the sport? Why weren’t his days and nights, like every other man’s, a paradise of wenching? Was he growing old? Was this the rumored falling off? Should he stand serenely and watch his leaves fall to the ground? Should he retire, and leave the field to younger men? But if there was some diminishment of prowess there was none of yearning. How he longed for that sensual paradise where he had so happily lived, where the noise of the brook and the sounds of the rain seemed to celebrate the skin.
•
Poor X. Anxiety kneed him in the groin, and he felt his lights and vitals succumb, one by one. He was afraid, among other things, of long bridges. He knew the symptoms. As he approached the bridge there would be an excruciating tightening of his scrotum, especially his left testicle, and a painful shrinking of his male member. As he began to ascend the curve of the bridge it would become difficult for him t breathe. He could fill his lungs only by gasping. This struggle to breathe was followed by a sensation of weakness in his legs, which would presently become so uncoördinated that he could legitimately worry about being able to apply the brakes. The full force of the attack came at the summit of the bridge when these various disturbances would seem to affect his blood pressure and his vision would begin to darken. Once he was over the summit there was some relaxation, but the seizure would leave him so weak and shaken that—he had discovered—he could not raise a cup or glass to his mouth for an hour or two. Once, at the airport, he had ordered a cup of coffee and, trying to drink it, had slopped it all over his clothes. You must have had quite a night, the man beside him said, and what could he say? “No, no, I went to bed early. It is only because I am afraid of bridges.” He had not let his anxieties halt his travels—he had never stopped the car—but once, driving to Albany, he had hugged the west shore of the river until its course narrowed at Troy, where there was a little bridge he could cross without too much difficulty. He kept a flask of whiskey in the glove case, and if he anticipated an unusually violent seizure he would stop the car and strengthen himself with whiskey. That these were false sufferings, he knew. And he knew that compared to the realities of pain they were contemptible, and yet how could he cure them, how ever could he admit them to his wife? As so often in the middle of life, he seemed forced to play a role for which there was no demand. Dressed, so to speak, in a doublet and tights, his well-memorized script in his hands, he seemed condemned to wander forever backstage. Onstage, the characters hurdled sofas and made declarations of erotic love.