by John Cheever
I feel hung over, relaxed, sensually wakeful and contented with things. I go for lunch to a hotel grill. At the next table a man says, “Well, when I get fed up I tell myself look, go somewheres and start over. You can do that, can’t you? Just pick up and go somewheres else like down South or out West and start all over again.” He picks the paper off four sugar lumps and drops it with great gentility onto the floor. When they have finished the vegetable soup, London broil, and apple pie, his companion, as he stands to leave, takes two crackers out of the bread basket, makes a sandwich with the leftover butter, and stuffs this into his mug.
“I’m Lila,” says the waitress, a pleasant woman of forty. “Would you like something from the bar? And here,” she says, “is your ice-cold dry Martini, lemon peel, just as you ordered. I’m putting it down with my right hand. That’s quite an effort for me. I’m left-handed. It’s an effort for me to do anything with my right hand. Now, I don’t know whether you’ve been here before—you look familiar—but when you’re ready to order I’d recommend the club steak, the London broil, or the choppe sirloin. With French fries and a tossed green salad. French dressing. Yes, dear.” She is a friend to me, she is a friend to the world, and what I can see so clearly is the daughter or niece she is sending to college. She will major in modern languages and get a job at the U.N. But Lila seems to be a creation of a series of obvious needs. Some man has done her wrong, left her to bring up a fatherless child, but she has learned patience and compassion and—what’s more—that the world is full of lonely, worried, and troubled men, and she makes, in my case, a very successful effort to turn this half-hour lunch into something easygoing and affectionate. And I think also of those people whose position in life seems immovable, of those who seem driven into their thankless pursuits like the nails in the floor. The clerk in the Turkish bath and the three masseurs; the elevator operator on Twenty-third Street; the old man who sells cigarettes on Second Avenue. You go around the world ten times, marry, divorce, raise your children and see them married, move from here to there, but when you return you find them where you left them, running the elevator, selling new brands of cigarettes. So I must work, and I think I can.
•
There is no point in my regaling myself with trifling injuries (you reflected on the quality of my mother’s carpets, etc.), nor in my trying to determine what part the past plays in my so easily abraded feelings. What I must face is the small quantity of inferior work I have been turning out. Neither the novel nor the play possesses any form or shape or substance. It is not that I would mind going down in history as an inconsequential writer; it is that I would mind most bitterly going down as a writer who has wasted his gifts in drunkenness, sloth, anger, and petulance. I am no longer dealing with the common disadvantages of need, a poorly lighted room, a stomachache. I am dealing with time, with alcohol, and with death.
•
For what it may be worth: hung over on Saturday. Walk in the woods with Ben. Shoot at tin cans. On Sunday the dog wakes at six. She will have to have her breakfast, says Mary, and so I give the dog breakfast. It is not yet light. I try to get back to sleep again in the spare room, but the dog dumps a load on the floor, whines, chews the ligh cords, etc. I miss church. It is not a good way to begin the day. I drink some gin at half past eleven and Susie and I play recorder duets. I wash the lunch dishes and take care of the boy. I embrace him. My eyes fill with tears. But after playing a little touch football I feel much better. Susie and I cook supper, and I wash the dishes. The dog dumps another load on the floor, and I am enraged. I drive Susie to Mamaroneck and, driving back, regale the dog with my troubles. I plan this morning to go into town and look for apartments. But I do not. Now, I would not want to be the kind of sorehead who rages on about his disappointments but who is too slothful, lazy, drunken, and bilious to get off his arse; who claims to be indifferent to the play of firelight on the panelled walls, but who will endure every sort of humiliation rather than leave his cozy fireside; and yet it seems that some of my indecision is legitimate. I cannot afford an apartment in town, and I have put so much money and time into this house that I am entitled to at least a touch of reluctance about leaving it. So I shall today try to be hopeful and conduct myself like a loving and intelligent adult.
•
And so it is over as suddenly as it began; at four or five on an overcast afternoon, unseasonably warm for November, her step becomes light, she sings in the hall for the first time in six weeks, and I have my way.
•
I lay a fire, drink some gin, watching the last rosy light of this winter day pour in at the western windows. These wooden walls, old pictures, yellow silk chairs are what I wanted, so why does my admiration of the scene seem fatuous? In the pinewoods the last light glows like coals. We dine with the B.s, who seem unhappy but not unhappy about being unhappy. On a scrap of paper one reads: i am miserable and i wish my mummy and daddy would not fite. The first day of a new year. I pray to finish the novel by spring.
•
I have not repaired the shutter on the west window. I have not got sand for the driveway or mixed fuel for the chain saw. I have not taken my clothes to the dry cleaner’s. Cutting into the roast and finding it underdone I have, without saying a word, been able to accomplish devastating emanation of disgust and disapproval. Serving the flounder I have, by way of petulance, helped the family generously and given myself a boiled potato and a spoonful of grease. I have unjustly accused my wife of unfaithfulness, and called my only and beloved daughter plain and friendless to her face. I have been drunken, dirty, unkind, embittered, and lewd.
•
I spend the day, as do many others, in watching Glenn orbit on TV, and I torment myself for not working. Once the man is in orbit, the crowds leave the beach. It is always, for me, a moving sight, to see people pick up their sandwich baskets, their towels and folding furniture, and hurry back to the hotel, the motel, the cottage, the bar. Their haste, their intentness, is like the thoughtlessness of life itself; and something will always be forgotten—a pair of sunglasses, an inflatable rubber raft, an old man, a roll of film, a pimply youth with a volume of poetry. They will be remembered briefly as we remember the dead, but no one will go back after dark to look for the sunglasses, or cheer the old man. My heart gives a heave as they hurry off, as if I could see here the forces of life and death. The end of the ballgame, the last hour of the county fair.
•
Ossining-Tampa. P. and I leave in the fresh morning light. The quiet boy who wants to be a novelist; his little sister carrying a plastic horse; my friend. The heavy morning traffic, the overcrowded roads. The unreality of the massive city in the glancing light. The sense of travel as a sense of painful dislocation. The shabby building at the airport. Windowless. Artificial plants. Benches for waiting. Women in furs. The Florida-bound crowd whom I join so late in life. A man with a copy of Variety, three pretty children, a Scotch nursemaid with a head of long hair. A man with a beret. As soon as we are airborne, the woman on my left takes a plastic kit out of her handbag and begins to paint her nails. The man on my right introduces himself; “Pleased to meet you, John,” he says. “I have a little present I’d like to give you.” He gives me a gilt tie clip containing a thermometer. No, he doesn’t manufacture them. “I just give them away because I like to. I travel a lot. I give away two, three thousand a year. It’s a nice way to make friends, and I like to make friends.” We discuss the people we know who are dying of cancer. He tells me the complete story of his life. Three anticlerical jokes. The lion who says grace, the brigadier, and the cardinal. He seems, telling his life story to a stranger, to be a large slice of my country, my people. The white silk shirts the stewardesses wear have come undone at the back. They keep tucking them in, but they come undone again. A crew member wanders aft. He looks to have a terrible hangover, and I think the stewardess gives him a drink. We rent a car in Tampa, and drive south. Ugliness, but why bother to say so? Don’t forget the fellow with a lighthouse
on his front lawn.
Walk along the beach. The sea slams its bulkheads, its doors, shakes its chains. Drink gin in the hot sun and feel very happy. Waking in the morning, I suffer an excruciating melancholy. I long for my wife, I long for my sons. We swim before breakfast. Pelicans, willets. The smell of wood smoke. Bitter. A warm, moonlit night. This, I guess, is a tropical evening, and my love is far away. I wake at two or three. Cats fight. A dog jogs under my window, jingling his rabies and his license tags. Then suddenly I feel for my wife and my sons a great power of love. I don’t swim before breakfast, and, after, I feel lost, melancholy, homesick. I don’t know what it is. I am afraid that something may have happened to my family, although I know that my fears bear no relationship to the truth. I chain-smoke.
•
We cross a bridge where many old people are fishing. There are so many old. The main highway, the Tamiami Trail, is lined with supermarkets, diners, night clubs, seashell-and-driftwood shops, billboards advertising developments; this is the misspelled, the-burger, the-rama world—herburgers, Steerburgers, Smorgoramas. The pet cemetery and crematorium—animals guaranteed to be buried above water level. Trailer camps stretch for miles under the palm trees. There is a listless air in the back and side streets of Sarasota. The light is bright. It is hot. Old people snooze on bus-stop benches. Turn me around three times and I couldn’t say if I was in Los Angeles or Sarasota. The atmosphere of domesticity seems dense. Mother, father, sister, and brother walk past the little frame house where the Gypsy palmist recites the past and the future. Next door is high colonic irrigation. This atmosphere of domesticity seems to abrade my aloneness. What a fainthearte traveller! We go to a jungle gardens. Admission $1.50. The old sit on benches watching flamingos, egrets. Here again are mother, father, sister, and brother. The warm air seems suffused with their kindliness. An old couple point out to strangers that a white peacock is asleep under a bush. Mostly Southern and Midwestern accents. We drink in one of those places where, on a platform, there is a set of music stands and a trap drum covered with a waterproof. We eat in a Royal Pancake Palace. The customers are mostly old. So back down the Trail, me with a painful feeling of emotional suspense. At home, surrounded by my family, I would say that this was the pain, the bite, of boredom. Now I call it the pain of aloneness. Drink seems to be the only cure. So what I am dealing with may be no more than crude alcoholism. And so I drink to kill the pain, and so I wake again in the night to think of my wife and my children. I seem to call out their names not in longing but in contentment. In the fullness of the hopes I hold out for them. So the day begins with the same pattern of longing, unease, thirst. There are only two more to go. The strangeness of time, the strangeness of personality. And how the figure of a young man in white sneakers, seen at the end of a museum corridor, has in fact no claims on my life or my person as I best know it but seems for a moment to be my executioner; yet the executioner mask may conceal a comely face. The day is overcast, the tide and the sea are high. We go fishing and catch nothing. We drink at twelve sharp and things pick up. We swim in the surf and things shift quickly from pain to pleasure. The high, the noisy sea is more like home, more like my coast. We go to the usual cocktail party; we will have been to seven. A round-faced, small-eyed man says, “By gum, he’s as straight as a piece of string.” Mrs. C. tells me the details of her husband’s death. The wheelchair, the hardening of the arteries—this great, genial athlete; and there might be a scene of women watching flamingos and discussing in detail the death of men. After drinking the time passes easily. Wasn’t it a pleasant day? we ask.
•
I bring home from church a green length of palm, not strong in the conviction that it is blessed and will bless my house but in an impulse of love. And to write, to get down the church with its yellow, varnished floor; the homely memorial windows commemorating the dead in tearful shades of lavender and blue; the stink of hassocks and pew cushions, precisely like the smell of the cushions in the barn cupola; the discreet perfumery, like flowers smelled from a great distance; the sense that this is some reconstruction of the smells of my childhood; and then, to go a step further, that this is the smell of the turn of the century, some fading distillate of the late eighteen-nineties. But then, moving into this gloom, is the measure of the Mass. The language has the sumptuous magnificence of an Elizabethan procession. The penultimate clauses spread out behind their predicates in breadth and glory, and the muttered responses are emblazoned in crimson and gold. On it moves through the Lamb of God, the Gloria, and the Benediction until the last amen shuts like a door on this verbal pomp; and the drunken priest puts out his lights and hurries back to his gin bottle, hidden among the vestments.
•
It is not the facts that we can put our fingers on which concern us but the sum of these facts; it is not the data we want but the essence of the data. It is the momentary and overwhelming sense of pathos we experience when we see the congregation turn away clumsily from the chancel; the encouragement we experience when we hear the noise of a stamping mill carried over water; the disturbance we feel when we see misgiving in a child’s face. She is carrying schoolbooks and waiting for the traffic light to change. The carnal and hearty smell of bilge water, the smell of must in the cold pantries of this old house. A continent of feeling lies beyond these. We call them apprehensions, but they have more fact, truth, illumination than the wastebasket, the gunrack, and the cheese knife. Why be afraid of madness? Here is a world to win, to discover.
•
He could separate from his red-faced and drunken wife, he could conceivably make a life without his beloved children, he could get along without the companionship of his friends, but he could not bring himself to leave his lawns and gardens, he could not part from the porch screens and storm windows that he had repaired and painted, he could not divorce himself from the serpentine brick walk he had laid between the side door and the rose beds. So for him the chains of Prometheus were forged from turf and house paint, copper screening, putty and brick, but they shackled him as sternly as iron.
•
So here is the day. What do you make of it? A brilliant morning, the light dealt out over the mountainous banks of the river. Cool. As I eat breakfast on the porch, my coffee smokes, the china cup is cold to touch. Last night I read Katherine Anne. How well she catches the essence of herself, the wit, the didactic style, the attractions of elegance. She fastens her slippers, shakes out the folds of her silvery dress, and fastens the belt as she goes out on a note of asperity and command. It is highly feminine, but a solid style. In some of the emotional scenes she strikes with exceptional accuracy that balance between the ritard of observation and the flow of feeling.
•
Mary maldisposta this morning, but then I think how wonderful it is that this marriage should embrace such a multitude of misunderstandings, storms, infidelities, rivers of tears, and still continue on its way, some of the passengers bruised, but nothing serious.
•
To get the difference in degrees of feeling at this time of life. It is Memorial Day. My persistent, my only memory of this in the past was of planting a garden at the farm; a garden that I thought, sentimentally, I would never see mature. I must go away. I spaded up the plot, eyed a sack of potatoes, and planted a patch. In the distance, at the four corners, I could hear the drums of the parade, and now and then a bar of music. My mother would have decorated the family graves with cornflowers and daisies. Now, having served four years in an army and seen many good friends killed in battle, I hear again the music of the parade. I try to remember the names of my dead friends. Kennedy? Kenelly? Kovacs? I can’t remember. Up from the river comes the sound of drums, and from time to time a bar of brassy and discordant music. It is very hot. I should scythe the orchard or do other work but I do nothing. It is a holiday, and I seem unable to give the day any other meaning. It is too hot to go fishing, it is too hot to cut the grass. Driving into the village to get a loaf of bread, I see the lines of heav
y traffic o the main highway. At four there is a long peal of thunder. It is as though the day had a rigid script, beginning with band music, patriotic speeches, suffocating heat, and idleness, sandwiches and cold drinks, and now the clouds piling up in the northwest and the sound of thunder—all seem a part of some ancient ceremony. I sit on the porch with my sons and watch the storm come down. I have lived through this day a hundred times, it seems, and not a blade of grass has changed. The lightning is yellow. It flashes on the porch like a beam of sunlight. The old dog is frightened and buries her head in my side.
•
Fred comes. He is now a very heavy man, his girth so swollen that his naturally bellicose walk is close to a waddle. “Hi, guy!” he shouts. I wonder if he has come out to borrow money. “Congratulations on the new car,” he shouts. I explain that the car is borrowed, but I wonder, later, if he believed me. His manner is broad, hearty; and the heartier it grows the more retiring, narrow, and continent I seem. He has been drinking. “What you ought to do—” he begins, and I squirm at being made a receptacle of unwanted information. The more ruinous his life becomes, the more didactic, informative, and overbearing is his manner. “Now listen to me.… Let me tell you.… I know all about the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. You want me to tell you all about it. I know all there is to know. Just listen. Stop me if I talk too much. You want me to tell you.” But in the end he loses track of the subject, founders, forgets what it was that he was going to explain. There is a rampant force of self-destruction in the man, and I think he has counted so on gin as a painkiller that he has mangled his responsiveness. He has endured many disappointments, indignities, and injustices, and in his determination to rally he has developed a crude mockery of cheerfulness. Everything is wonderful, simply wonderful. Gorgeous. Life is gorgeous, life is wonderful. This is the harshness of despair. “Whatever else I have,” he says, “I have four beautiful children. Loving, wonderful children.” “I like D. very much,” I say, “and he’s very loyal to you.” He lifts his face, swollen now with years of drink, and says, “They’re all loyal to me.” I have seen them scorn and disobey him, and they have all run away from home. There is not a grain of truth in this pitiful claim to love. But now he looks like Mother, a painful and bewildering memory, and I remember our conversations—my struggle for coherence, my desire to put one idea after another, to sort out good from evil, while she skipped, or so it seemed to me, from one wild half-truth to another, from one larcenous prejudice to another. The aim never seemed to be to communicate but to confuse, obstruct, and dismay.