The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  So in the morning I say, Leap, my heart, my spirit. Nothing else will do. They must leap.

  •

  Mr. Y hides in the broom closet, watching his wife through the keyhole to make sure she is not putting DDT in his dinner. The vie from a keyhole is quite broad if you are able to move about, but he is not. She goes to and from the pantry, where the poisons are kept, but he can’t tell if she’s dosing his food with paprika or with something more lethal. She puts the plates on the table and calls, “Supper is ready.” She steps out of the kitchen, and he is able to make his escape, retreat to the pantry, and then reënter the kitchen as if he had been in some other part of the forest. “My, that smells good!” he exclaims, of the sauce. “Yes it does, doesn’t it?” she says. “I put a little oregano in it.” Her smile is wicked, victorious. “What were you doing in the broom closet?” she asks. “Oh, nothing,” he says. But the field is hers.

  •

  Mr. Bierstubbe reached deep into Mrs. Zagreb’s dress and lifted out her breasts while she stroked his back and said, “Be good, be a good boy.” Her tits were as big as turkeys, they gleamed like marble and tasted to his thirsty lips as soft and various as the night air. But when he woke on Sunday morning Mrs. Zagreb’s breasts had turned from a treasure into a torment. They seemed to surround him, to fill the air of the room, to follow him, tempt him, dangle and wobble in front of his nose. They followed him to the train, settled themselves beside him, followed him down Forty-third Street to his club, and when he had a drink before lunch his hunger for Mrs. Zagreb’s bosoms nearly overwhelmed him.

  •

  A. rolls his eyes at his wife and groans, significantly. Well, all right, she says. He strips off his clothes and waits at the side of the bed. She goes down to the kitchen, puts four blankets into the washing machine, blows a fuse, and floods the kitchen. “But why,” he asks, standing in the kitchen door, naked and unaccommodated, “why when I ask you for tenderness do you wash blankets?” “Well, I was afraid I’d forget them,” she says shyly. “Moths might get into them.” She hangs her head. Then he sees something touching and pitiful here, some irresistible wish to be as elusive as a nymph, but she, being much too heavy to sprint through the woods, is reduced to putting blankets in a washing machine. But he would understand that her determination to seem elusive was as strong as the drive in his middle; he would put his arm around her and lead her up the stairs.

  •

  I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of ambiguities, this marvellous atmosphere of untruth; and I am interested in his methods and find them very sympathetic, but his imagery—the shadow of a magician against a shimmery curtain, and all those sugared violets—is not mine. The house I was raised in had its charms, but my father hung his underwear from a nail he had driven into the back of the bathroom door, and while I know something about the Riviera I am not a Russian aristocrat polished in Paris. My prose style will always be to a degree matter-of-fact.

  •

  In the 1890s my father chanced to be in Munich, and, either because it pleased him or because he needed money, worked as a model for an architectural sculptor. He must have been a handsome young man and I know that his trunk must have been well developed since, until close to the end of his life, he worked out for an hour each morning with barbells, dumbbells, and Indian clubs. The sculptor portrayed him as a sort of Atlas or male caryatid and incorporated his figure into the façade of the old Königspalast Hotel, which was destroyed by Allied bombing in the forties. I saw the hotel when I took a walking trip with my brother through Germany in 1935 and saw the unmistakable features of my father, holding on his shoulders the lintel of that massive hotel. Later, in Frankfurt, I found my father’s image holding up the balconies and roofs of the Frankfurter Hof. My father was obviously not the model for all these caryatids, but once I had made the association it became obsessive and I had the impression, not unpleasant, that a great many apartment houses, hotels, theatres, and banks were supported by my father’s noble shoulders. The war did surprisingly little damage to buildings of this era, and I seemed, only recently, to encounter my father holding up the façade of a hotel in Yalta. I recognized him again in Kiev, supporting the bow windows of a whole block of apartments. He was everywhere in Vienna and Munich, and in Berlin one saw him maimed, disfigured, and lying in a field of weeds near Checkpoint Charlie. Since he had begun his life on the sunny side of the street, having been employed mostly in supporting those lintels under which the rich and the fashionable passed, it became distressing to see how the light passed from these buildings and neighborhoods and that in time th appearance of my father’s head and naked shoulders usually implied a fourth-rate hotel, a bankrupt department store, an abandoned theatre, or an incipient slum. It was in the end a relief to get back to my place in Kitzbühel, where the buildings are made of wood.

  •

  Shea Stadium. A late summer night. In the clubhouse I look around me with arrogance. Who do these people think they are? They think they are who they are. Fathers with sons. Some good-looking women. The sense is that one is having dinner not in a ballpark but in some city on the way to a theatre, which makes the spectacle of the ballpark when one enters it apocalyptic. The sod gleams. This is indeed a park. I think that the task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting out the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.

  •

  The battle with booze goes on. I weed the chrysanthemums and hold away from the bottle until half past eleven but not a second longer. To the S.s’. He has been drinking at the club. His tongue is loose; his mind has lost its equilibrium. After dinner he slumps on the sofa and falls into a drunken sleep, his head on his chest, his eyeglasses on the tip of his nose. Thunder and lightning, a sudden rain, a suddenly released fragrance of freshness. “How I love to hear the sound of rain,” said the banker.

  •

  Woolgathering, oh, woolgathering. It is the day of the civil-rights march in Washington. After lunch we drive to a public beach, Croton Point. An abundance of trash cans, turnstiles, ticket windows, men and women in county-park uniforms, worn lawns, pretty willows, water the color of urine, which smells, to my long nose, like an open sewer. A plump lifeguard sits in his tower blowing his whistle, and shouts commands through his electrical megaphone at every infraction of th numerous regulations. It is disconcerting to realize that this gravelly beach, this contaminated bay are all that much of the world knows of these pleasures. I regard the bathhouse with some apprehension. There is a memory here, adolescent, pubescent, of making it with boy chums in the briny chambers; of my friend hanging around the open shower, looking for big ones. Not me, I think. But this seems more an anxiety than a memory, and looking among the few bathers I am struck not with the delights of the flesh but with its mortal boredom, pimply backsides, halitosis, ill tempers.

  •

  I horse around with the children and a football. Sharpen a carving knife in the kitchen. Mary gives me a shy and passionate kiss, a loving kiss. My memory is full of holes and craters, but I cannot remember when it last was that Mary made an open declaration of love. So we are one another’s best once more; and it was not so long ago, two or three weeks, that I glumly ate some hard-boiled eggs and thought of her with bitterness and worse.

  •

  Ben’s dog dumps three loads on the library floor. In the morning I trash her with a rolled-up magazine. An hour later Ben asks, “Did you notice that Flora has difficulty walking? To get to her feet seems to give her much pain.” So I conclude that I have broken the spine of my son’s beloved pet. I am the sort of man who thinks twice about swatting a fly and when I step on an ant I step on it carefully, to give i
t no pain. To harm an animal troubles me deeply; to harm an animal loved by my son is crushing. Mary seems to abet my troubles. She reports that my son is in agony; that I might have harmed the bitch, since she has such frail hindquarters. I drink some Scotch, seize a piece of bread and cheese, and stumble out of the house into the woods. I am convinced that I have killed my son’s dog. Regard this man of fifty-one, then, lying in a field, gnawing on a piece of bread, his eyes filled with tears. I have killed my son’s dog; I have killed my son’s affections. It was an accident, but this is no consolation. I walk up the path to the dam, and this simple exercise refreshes my common sense. It may also clear the whiskey in my head. When I return, the dog is better, and when we take her to the veterinary there seems to be nothing wrong with her. S much of one’s vitality is spent on false alarms; and I think, perhaps unjustly, that Mary was able to create an atmosphere of morbid anxiety, something like the mysterious powers her father had to extend a feeling of condemnation and doom over his domain. Is this neurotic, is it, as I once thought, some discernible power of darkness? In the afternoon mail there is a letter saying that two pieces have been bought. I am jubilant, but when I speak the good tidings to Mary she asks, oh, so thinly, “I don’t suppose they bothered to enclose any checks?” I think this is piss, plain piss, and I shout, “What in hell do you expect? In three weeks I make five thousand, revise a novel, and do the housework, the cooking, and the gardening, and when it all turns out successfully you say, ‘I don’t suppose they bothered to include any checks.’ ” Her voice is more in the treble than ever when she says, “I never seem able to say the right thing, do I?” She strays up the driveway. I don’t understand these sea changes, although I have been studying them for twenty-five years. For three weeks we have enjoyed transcendent passion, love, and humor. Now this thinness. I cannot control it—a chance telephone call, a dream, can bring it on. So she wanders away not only from me but from us all.

  •

  I would like not to do the Swimmer as Narcissus. The possibility of a man’s becoming infatuated with his own image is there, dramatized by a certain odor of abnormality, but this is like picking out an unsound apple for celebration when the orchard is full of fine specimens. I’ve done it before; I would like to do better. Swimming is a pleasure, a gulping-in of the summer afternoon, high spirits. It is natural and fitting that a man should in some way love himself. So it is natural and fitting that the roof leaks, but it is hardly universal. So the people who drain their pool are merely a threat. By the time he reaches it, the water will be deep enough for a dive. With Pygmalion there is the need to dignify the situation, to make it urgent.

  •

  The Swimmer might go through the seasons; I don’t know, but I know it is not Narcissus. Might the seasons change? Might the leaves turn and begin to fall? Might it grow cold? Might there be snow? But what is the meaning of this? One does not grow old in the space of an afternoon. Oh, well, kick it around.

  •

  So the battle against hooch and tobacco goes on. I seem, so far as tobacco goes, slightly ahead; it’s tied up with the hooch. When people are sick I think, You might feel a little better if you didn’t smoke quite so much, etc. It is impossible to work.

  •

  In church, on my knees before the chancel, I see, with a crushing force, how dependent I am on alcohol. It is an agony, and one not illustrated by these colored windows, stone walls, the ancient costumes of the acolytes. One needs an alkali desert, dry streambeds, a range of cruel mountains. Pick myself up at half past eleven, paddle the kayak with Ben. Waking, high-hearted and randy, I think with scorn of the book. Why should one turn the powers of the imagination onto the subject of a woman having a tragic love affair? Why should one worry about stink-finger, the wanton glance? Throw it out the window.

  •

  During the day it seemed to me from time to time that our grief, my own grief, was orgiastic. Walt Whitman being read over the funerary drums. “Hail to the Chief” played to the coffin. The beauty and the sorrow of the widow. I cried like a disappointed child, stuck out my lower lip, screwed up my eyes. He was a splendid man, and the most one can do is take his excellence as an example. What came to me as a surprise was the love he inspired. The perhaps excessive grief, the questions of taste may have expressed the emotional inflexibility, the involuntary hardening of our hearts, the small use we have for tears in our way of life. I was offended at the pride with which the TV announcer described the numerousness of the mourners as if this were competitive, as in a sense I suppose it is. There is something wonderful to be observed here about the goodness of men’s hearts and souls. One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.

  I continue to find it difficult to work here. At eleven I go up to see the services on TV. It is His Eminence Cardinal Cushing, Gods advocat, who, God forgive me, sounds the note of mortal boredom. The rites are arcane, the voice is harsh, the Latin sounds neither living nor dead, and over it all an Italian tenor sings the “Ave Maria,” a piece of music I dislike intensely. I am most moved by the smallness of the President’s coffin. The rush of dignitaries seems comical. Traffic is delayed, as it is everywhere, and it seems that his path to the grave is more tortuous than his way through life. There are the Black Watch pipers, the Air Force pipers, and rifle drill by some Gaels. It might have been simpler, but it is difficult to make choices, I expect, under a burden of grief. I should do this and that, give the hours of my day worth and purpose, but the best I do is stand at the window and watch my sons play football on the grass—Ben favoring Federico, who runs in the wrong direction. M. plays. He seems not effeminate but uncommitted. Knee-high boots, a black leather jacket, a large tail. He is a hat swiper. It is the game he plays. “It’s too bad it happened that way,” he says of the President’s assassination, “but we had to get rid of him.” He calls the other boys “niggers.”

  •

  Like many men of fifty, I am obliged to ask for a raise and, like many men of fifty, I am confronted with a blameless, monolithic, and capricious organization, hobbled, it seems, by its own prosperity. The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another. I am accused of improvidence, and make several long speeches about how I am harassed by indebtedness. The Saturday Evening Post has offered me twenty-four thousand, The New Yorker has offered me twenty-five hundred, and I will take the latter, I’m not sure why. The important thing is to work and to insist on fair wages for the work I do. Like any man of fifty, I wonder what would become of my children if I should be taken ill, and I think that the miseries of illness have become more mysterious and acute as the world, its cities and populations, outstrips our comprehension.

  •

  Fred calls. His wife seems to have left him; his daughters are about to leave. “I think I’ll sell this place,” he says. “It seems a little strang to pull up your stakes at my time of life.” What is this, then? A family recollection of ingratitude, loneliness; the cruel denial of every reward. Industrious, unselfish, loving, having fed, clothed, and sent to expensive schools four children, taken his wife to Bermuda each year, he finds himself, at fifty-eight, the beginning of his winter, turned out to a furnished room, cooking his meals on an electric plate over the protests of the landlady.

  And yet I think there is some sense that this loneliness is his destiny. Is this my family or is it the family of man? My grandfather is supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a half-wit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly, and forsaken places yearning for a house, a wife, the voices of my sons, and having all of this I find myself, when I am engorged with petula
nce, thinking that after all, after the Easter-egg hunts and the merry singing at Christmas, after the loving and the surprises and the summer afternoons, after the laughter and the open fires, I will end up cold, alone, dishonored, forgotten by my children, an old man approaching death without a companion. But this must be some part of a man’s sense of destiny. We hold, like a trick of mirrors, an image of some fruitful old age—grandchildren bringing in the harvest—and hold as well a conviction that we shall be forgotten, made to suffer cold and hunger, on our last days in the world.