by John Cheever
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On the morning of my daughter’s wedding, it is raining. I climb into Mary’s bed, and she climbs out of it and climbs into mine. Later, naked, I urge her to sit, naked, in my lap, but she makes some exclamation of distaste and turns on the television. I find these rebuffs a serious depressant and, using this as an excuse, I take a little gin with my orange juice. Mary descends on my eggs, but she is quite welcome to them. On the street, a north wind is blowing the rain. On Fourteenth Street, two men, one of them with a peculiar head of yellow hair—it is dyed or perhaps a wig—slink out of a lunch counter. I think they are queer and that they are going to spend the day shoplifting. I buy an umbrella and some aspirin, and step into a dark, pleasant bar where I drink one and a half Martinis. Another faggot comes along the sidewalk. He wears moccasins, no socks, green velour trousers, and a sweater; but his means of locomotion is what interests me. He seems sucked along the street like an object in a wind tunnel, although there is no wind to speak of and no source of suction. Ben is at the hotel, and we dress and go off to Lüchow’s. There is the desperate scene where I can’t find Susie, and finally we reach the church. She seems frightened, and I am pleased to give her my arm and some support. This is a scene I have imagined countless times, and now it is being done, is done. I observe nothing of the reception beyond the fact that it is beautiful. “What a beautiful party it is!” I keep exclaiming. Where is the keen-eyed observer who could pick out the wrinkled skirt, the time-ravaged face, the drunken waiter? There is a sharp exchange with Mary. I have drunk so much that I cannot count on my memory, but I think—or claim to have suggested—that we must make some plans for ending the party. “You,” says she, “are the spectre at the feast.” The best thing to do is to assume I provoked this. Later, I drink whiskey in our maid’s kitchen and speak broken Italian. I return at dark. It is raining. Ben is on the porch and I embrace him and repeat the remark about the spectre. “I’m on your side, Daddy,” he says, “I’m on your side.” I should not have done this. I don’t really want him on my side.
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I have a drink at quarter after eleven. Go to the B.s’ at noon. I sleep and wake and drink and sleep again and wake and drink. I suggest that we discuss a separation or a divorce. We will sell the house, divide the price, etc. She can go and live with her beloved sister in New Jersey. This is all preposterous and drunken, and, hearing the songbirds in the morning, I realize that I don’t have the guts, spine, vitality, whatever, to sell my house and start wandering. I don’t know what to do. I must sleep with someone, and I am so hungry for love that I count on touching my younger son at breakfast as a kind of link, a means of staying alive.
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But Monday morning. Overcast. 9:30. I will go to the dentist in half an hour, and I would like a drink. I write, at breakfast, the biography of a man whose dependence on alcohol was extreme but who, through some constitutional fortitude, was able to ration his drinks, to exploit alcohol rather than have it exploit him. He never drank before noon and, after his lunch drinks, not again until five. It was a struggle, it always would be, and by the time he was fifty he realized that there would be no suspension of the fight. He would never be able to pass the whiskey bottle in the pantry without sweating. On Saturdays and Sundays he would paint screens, split wood, cut the broad lawns of Evenmere, looking at his watch every ten minutes to see if the time hadn’t come for a legitimate scoop. At five minutes to five, his hands trembling and his brow soaked with sweat, he would get out the ice, pour the beautiful, golden whiskey into a glass, and begin the better part of his life.
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Now Thursday morning. Twenty minutes to eleven. I am in the throes of a gruelling booze fight. I think a tranquillizer will retard my circulation. I could cut grass, but I am afraid of pulling my ankle. There is really nothing to do but sit here and sweat it out. I can write myself a letter. Dear Myself, I am having a terrible time with the booze. Ride it out.
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Waking at dawn. A new dream girl. This one is Chinese and has a magnificent arse, small breasts. She is followed by another, who wears a sweater the color of raspberry jam and a string of very small pearls. Then I am in Rome in the big apartment, attended by A. I am, as I usually am in these reveries, an invalid, eating from a tray. I ask he for the big blue pill. It is a large capsule, the color of the sky. I take it with a glass of water, and she retires to the front room to work on her book about Byron. As I slowly lose consciousness, the sound of her typing fills me with happiness. How unlike me. I wake in the late afternoon. The function of the blue pill seems to be to spare me any of the tedious hours of day or night. It is always a fresh morning, a brief noon, a massive twilight. I never experience the pitiless tedium of 3 P.M. When I wake, A. asks if I want a drink or a cup of tea. She makes me a galvanic drink and herself a cup of tea. Then, as I bask in the effects of alcohol, she draws herself a bath and dresses, very elegantly, for a reception at the T.s’. When she kisses me goodbye her kiss is dry and tender. She leaves a blue pill on the table, and as it begins to get dark I take this, squirm sensually in the sheets, and go back to sleep again. She wakes me when she returns at ten, orders some supper from the café on the corner, and tells me about the party. Then she undresses, climbs into my bed, and after we have fucked I take another blue pill and will know nothing, not even a dream, until nine in the morning, when I am waked by the maid who brings me breakfast. Sleep is my kingdom, my native land, I am the Prince of Sleep. Do we see our age in the poverty of our dreams? The threadbare dreams of middle age.
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I think of my brother’s ruin—that boy of summer. Whatever happened? Quarterback. Drinking Coca-Cola in the field house. Captain of the undefeated hockey team. Happy with his friends, nimble with his girls, he loved his muzzy and dazzy. Oh, whatever happened? Married in the church of Christ, randy in bed, quick at business, a loving father, lucky at cards and dice—what happened? Did he find his wife in someone else’s bed? As the order vanished from his own affairs, he sought to order the world. “This is the way you do it.” “Listen to me.” He pissed in the umbrella stand, drop-kicked the roast beef, waved his prick at Mrs. Vanderveer, and called in the morning to ask if everyone was all right. He spent that year in New York. Went around with an art director who lisped. Lumbered after the Madison Avenue whores. “I never drink before lunch,” he said, and maybe he didn’t, but he certainly used it after the twelve-o’clock whistle blew. Six Beefeaters and a beer, and then it was time for the afternoon drinking to begin. He broke his ankle in a soccer game, locked himself up in the bedroo, and drank ten quarts of Gilbey’s. Oh, whatever happened? He had his first attack of claustrophobia at LaGuardia Airport. He thought he would suffocate, and he always carried a flask after that. He was such a charmer. He was charming at his clubs, charming at his parties, and when he broke down he was charming at Alcoholics Anonymous. And he was terribly misunderstood. In this respect he was practically a nut. Nobody knew the score, and when he told them they wouldn’t listen. But where did the self-righteousness come from, the pained and beatific smile, the pose of moral superiority? “If I know one thing, I know that my children love me.” You can draw a line easily enough from the summery boy to the club drunk, but where did the priggishness, the homely maxims, the phony hopefulness come from? “I’ve always done the best I knew how to do. No one can say that I didn’t.” How could he have come so far from the frisky quarterback, the locker-room horseplay?
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My ancient Uncle Hamlet, that black-mouthed old monkey, used to say that he had enjoyed the best fifty years in the history of his country and that I could have the rest. Wars, depressions, automobile accidents, droughts, blackouts, municipal corruption, polluted rivers. He let me have it all on a platter.
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The cafarde, and how mysterious it is in its resistance to good fortune, love of all kinds, esteem, work, blue sky. I try to console myself with thinking of all the great men who have suffered similarly; but reason has no ef
fect on the bête noire. It could quite simply be alcohol, since alcohol is the sure cure.
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Off we go to Ben’s commencement. So spread out in folding chairs on a grassy quadrangle on a summer’s day—this seems to be a rearguard action of the genteel. A few women cry as the graduating class marches in. The boys are a mixed bag—long hair, short hair, handsome, homely—but the force of good and evil in a hundred lives is felt. When they are seventeen and eighteen, their faces still have the purity of caricature. The vast noses, the wide-set eyes, the big mouths, all thes things that time will regulate and diminish are intact. Rising to our feet, we sing loudly, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” Here are the same faces one sees on the Nantucket boat. The tranquillity of the ceremony arises from the fact that we are a community of values. We went to the same schools and colleges and parties, we summer on the sea islands, there is an unusual sameness to our clothing, our incomes, our diets, and our beliefs. Winthrop Rockefeller gives the address. “Would that the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle were in our midst today. Would that Einstein could be with us. You have been given the tools of education. How you apply them is your responsibility in this world of bewildering and accelerated change. By the year two thousand, we will have perfected our technological society, but what about the soul of man?” The prizegiving is interminable, and I go out to the car and have a drink.
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Hammer puts a dime in the lock of the men’s toilet, and enters it, but not for the usual purpose. He gets to his knees in the privacy of the toilet, bows his head, and says, “Almighty God, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men …” When he has finished his prayer he stands, dusts off his trousers, and takes a flask from his pocket. He fills the cap with whiskey, making appreciative groans.
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Lace an uneasy stomach with gin, cut grass in the heat, swim in S.’s pool where the water is stinging cold. Zowie. Dress in the clothes of an eighteen-year-old. One of those old men with white hair you see racing around in two-seater convertibles. Mary talks as if she had a cold, and when I ask if she has she says she’s breathing through her mouth because I smell so horrible. I seem to suffer from that degree of sensibility that crushes a man’s sense of humor. Nothing important has been said, nothing that can’t be forgotten in an instant, and yet I seem to see in the remark so much of her character and our relationship. S. is going to Stratford to see some Shakespeare. She is dressed in bright colors. Her friend the widow is in black lace and I think she is not this old. Overdressed women going to the theatre. Rob and Sue come out, and I swim again with them. They stay fo dinner, but somewhere along the line a drink too many. Ben, having quarrelled with his girl, is reunited with her, but I spend a lot of time kissing her, and she doesn’t mind. What about a man making out with his son’s date? What about that? L. sits in his Mustang, vomiting between his knees. The hair is very long, the face too small, undistinguished, the complexion bad. He is too drunk to drive or do anything else, and we put him to bed. I talk with his father on the telephone—a patient, loving man who is not alarmed by his son’s drunkenness. My own son is drunk, opinionated, insensitive, and sentimental about the collapse of his friend, roughing his hair and saying, “I’m sorry you’re sick.” It gets all mixed up, and all I can recall this morning is that: the girls, the vomiting, the London broil, Rob reading Conan Doyle, my empty glass.
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A round for me, or so I claim at nine. I dream that I wrestle a spry Negress in the library apartment at the Academy in Rome. P. is in the next bed, trying to make out with someone I don’t recognize, who keeps saying, “You’re just wasting your time.” At dusk Ben and I cut the playing field at the Children’s Center. Father and Son engaged in charitable acts. I agree to take Mary and Federico to Rome and interview Loren, but Mary does not seem cheered. They go off to the movies, and I wander through the house saying loudly, “How happy I am to be alone, how happy, happy, happy I am to be alone.” I drink on the terrace, wish on the evening star, chat with the dogs. The doctor calls. I think of him as a young man with an uncommonly round face, round eyes, and an enthusiasm for medical science that does not include any knowledge or respect for the force of pain. He seems to possess some vision of a rosy future in which there will be pills to cure cholesterol and melancholy, pills for sloth, lust, homosexuality, anger, anxiety, and avarice. “Try this red one for your fear of planes,” he says enthusiastically. “Try the yellow one for your fear of heights. Take the white one when you have the blues.” Pills, pills, what beautiful pills they have these days. They’re working on an elixir of youth, but they haven’t quite got the bugs out of it. I’m confident they’ll have it next year.
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The H.s. They live in a modest house on the hill, without servants. They have no children. He is a thin, thin-faced, markedly unattractive man, whose lack of substance or color seems emphasized by a mustach that might have been drawn with a grease pencil. His clothing seems cheap and his shoes have a papery look. She is also thin. They look rather alike except for the mustache. She wears no jewels. No paintings hang in their living room, and the Danish furniture might have been bought in the village. The remarkable thing about them is that their declared income for the year was two hundred and fifty thousand, but the tax collector claims that their return was one million six hundred thousand dollars short. They paid a tax of one hundred and fifty-six thousand. What can they do with this kind of money?
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Rain in the night, and as it falls straight into the valley it seems to be an undoing, an unloosening sound. I feel as if I were unravelling a snarled fishing line. Happily.
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The cafarde followed Hammer, but followed him without much guile, either because it was lazy or perhaps because it was an assassin so confident of its victim that it had no need to exert itself. On Friday, Hammer flew to Rome and checked in at the Eden. On Saturday morning, he woke feeling cheerful and randy. He was just as cheerful on Sunday, but on Monday he woke in a melancholy so profound that he had to drag himself out of bed and struggle, step by step, to the shower. On Tuesday he caught the train to Fondi and took a cab through the mountains to Sperlonga, where he stayed with his friends, the G.s. He had two good days there, but the bête noire caught up with him on the third, and he took a train for Naples at Formia. He had four good days in Naples. Had the bête noire lost track of its victim or was it simply moving in the leisurely way of a practiced murderer? His fifth day in Naples was crushing, and he took the afternoon train to Rome. Here he had three good days, but he woke on the fourth in danger of his life and made arrangements to take the noon plane to New York. So, by moving from place to place, he could count on two days or sometimes three each week in which he felt himself to be a natural man. The cafarde always followed. It was never waiting for him at his destination.
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Reading old journals, I find that the booze fight and the cafarde have been going on for longer than I knew. I guess I’m stuck—a little stuc, at least—with the booze fight. Old journals help, but there is a strain of narcissism here. At the back of my mind there is the possibility of someone’s reading them in my absence and after my death, and exclaiming over my honesty, my purity, my valor, etc. What a good man he is!
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I dream: Enabling legislation was passed by Congress yesterday making it a statutory offense to have wicked thoughts about President Johnson. Suspects will be questioned by the F.B.I. with the aid of a lie detector.
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I find on the floor of Ben’s room an unmailed letter to L. He may have meant me to read it, and I put this down with the hope that I won’t mention it to Ben. He is alone, he says. He is crying. He is alone with Mum and Dad, the two most self-centered animals in the creation. Dad wanted him to drive west in an old car, but he’s bought a new car that he likes and that has a long guarantee. Dad thinks he’s so great to have given me a car, but the only reason I got it is because I k
now how to handle him. He gave me a long speech on responsibility, but he was so drunk he couldn’t remember it in the morning. I told him where he could put his car.
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