The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  That voice in the dark that gives me so much advice says, “You will not be as great as Picasso, because you are an alcoholic.”

  I have a homosexual dream, which deals muchly with the spirit. I do not know in whose arms I lie; I know only that he will take care of me. He will pay the bills, the taxes, balance the checking account, and drive the car through the storm. “Were you lovers?” she asked him. “I wouldn’t use that word,” he said. “It was more like an improvised contact sport, scored or punctuated by ejaculations.”

  It was two or a little later. He was woken by his wife, who was crying in her sleep. A heavy rain was falling. She called a man’s name three times: “Matthew, Matthew, Matthew.” Was this in love or anger, and who was Matthew? He knew two Matthews, but neither of them seemed threatening. She went on sobbing, and he thought how puerile was his concept of a woman. He had reduced this continent of memory and longing into a pussywussy, a yummy snatch. The loudness of the rain woke her. “You were crying,” he said. “Yes,” she said, “I had a nightmare.” She moved away from him and fell asleep again.

  •

  I drink gin and read some stories of mine. There is the danger of repetition. Walking in the woods, I heard a man shouting, “Love! Valor! Compassion!” I followed the voice until I saw him. He was standing on a rock shouting the names of virtues to no one. He must have been mad. The difficulty here is that I wrote that scene ten years ago. Oh-ho.

  •

  The hour between five and six is my best. It is dark. A few birds sing. I feel contented and loving. My discontents begin at seven, when light fills the room. I am unready for the day—unready to face it soberly, that is. Some days I would like to streak down to the pantry and pour a drink. I recite the incantations I recorded three years ago, and it was three years ago that I described the man who thought continuously of bottles. The situation is, among other things, repetitious. The hours between seven and ten, when I begin to drink, are the worst. I could take a Miltown, but I do not. Is this the sort of stupidity in which I used to catch my brother? I would like to pray, but to whom—some God of the Sunday school classroom, some provincial king whose prerogatives and rites remain unclear? I am afraid of cars, planes, boats, snakes, stray dogs, falling leaves, extension ladders, and the sound o the wind in the chimney; Dr. Gespaden, I am afraid of the wind in the chimney. I sleep off my hooch after lunch and very often wake feeling content once more, and loving, although I do not work. Swimming is the apex of the day, its heart, and after this—night is falling—I am stoned but serene. So I sleep and dream until five.

  •

  It seems to me extraordinary that Mary should have summered here every summer of her life; that here is a place, a hill, a dozen simple cottages, and a mountain view that she can return to and find, at least in spirit, unchanged. The famous gardens are dead and so is the gardener. A few roses bloom, choked with weeds, and the three greenhouses have lost some of their panes from the weight of snow, but who any longer wants catalogues of ruin, who any longer studies the sadness of fallen greenhouses? The mysterious spirit of the place—I think it mysterious—remains. There is here and there Charlie’s violin music, Bertha’s second year German Grammar, moldy copies of the Vassarian, and Grandpa’s telescope. Things of the past outnumber the new toaster, the new coffee machine, and the new refrigerator. Walking up from the beach, we are unique as one can only be in the summer. Who are they? They are the W.s, and everybody else is less secure, intelligent, and interesting. The cottages are simple frame buildings. Planks are laid on the rafters, and the shingle nails stick through the ceiling. The electric lines are naked and black and are strung through the rafters with porcelain insulators. I wake at night and hear the rain on the shingles. I have not heard this for years. The roof not only receives the rain—there are leaks here and there—it seems to amplify the sound, and with some erotic or infantile thrill I hear the sound increase and louden. Now the storm passes over, the wind blows, and water showers onto the roof. I am three years old.

  Thirty years ago, when we were courting, I used to leave the guesthouse, where everyone seemed asleep, and walk, naked, through the woods to this cottage, where we made love. Thirty years later, I still want to make love, but I am given no encouragement and my drive is not great enough to overwhelm the few bitter things that are said.

  •

  Is Halloween as a masquerade confined to this part of the world? I don’t recall it in Massachusetts. A rainy night. Groups of childre wander along the edge of the road, disguised as skeletons, animals, and there is even a fairy princess. A boy wears a cape, and a headdress of oak leaves. He must have an artistic mother. The children’s only uniformity is that they all carry large shopping bags for the candy they will be given. At the station I give a ride to a stranded nun. “I will say a special prayer for you,” says she. The train seems to be making its last journey.

  I think, yesterday morning, that I can bring it off: I mean a book. Try, try.

  •

  New York, Moscow, Tbilisi, Leningrad, Moscow, New York. I have the jet blues as well as the booze fight. It is not that I have difficulty recalling the trip. It is that I cannot always give my recollection significance. A wicked man, asleep on a 707 halfway across the Atlantic, seems a figure of the purest innocence. The stale sandwiches in the London in-transit lounge. We go to the Bolshoi for one of those old-fashioned vaudeville performances—an orchestra, a recitation, a mezzo-soprano. I nearly fall asleep. Waking before dawn, I have the traveller’s blues. If there is a knock on the door shall I jump out of the window? There are no exits, fire escapes, or stairs in the Ukraine, and in case of fire we will roast. I drink vodka for breakfast, and we fly to Tbilisi. The first feast is with a family, and all the toasts stress this. The oldest man is toasted first, then the youngest. I find this very moving. The next feast is in the mountains near the Turkish border. I see two women walking along the road with bunches of autumn leaves. Are they going to make medicinal tea or are they going to put the leaves in a vase on a table? Geese, pigs, cows, and sheep wander over the road. A bus collides with a bull. We come to the center of the province, a place of the most outstanding bleakness. This is what Russian literature and Russian song are about. In the distance are the mountains covered with snow. It is dusk in the corridors of the headquarters of the Central Committee. The clocks are broken. The toilet is smeared with shit and urine. In the main square there is a statue of Lenin and there is a cow. So we drive up into the mountains for our feast. The next feast is at the N.s’, where Mrs. N. spills wine on the tablecloth. When we reach Leningrad it is 3 P.M., dusk. The city this time seems shabby and depressing. The Winter Palace badly needs a coat of paint. We have a quarrel on the banks of the Neva, the only quarrel during this trip. I love my son so intensely that it amounts to a capillary disturbance. I also loved his brother, but that was different. We rush around Leningrad, dine at the Europa, where I find the dances depressing. Why is this? I think the tall woman with the short man has on her face a look of implacable sexual discontent. He seems to be giving her a dry fuck. Is this because my bladder is inflamed with vodka? We go to the opera, and hook the midnight train. The Kremlin in the morning. The disinfected atmosphere of most offices, except for the shoeshine machine. Our guide seems thrown into life with a more desirable velocity than I enjoy. He is definitely very engaging; definitely engaged. There is a cast in his right eye that makes him seem irresistible. I think that I may faint. The table seems to swim.

  The Winter Palace at six. A dark night on the Neva. Snow. Will I have vertigo on the grand staircase, as I once did in Washington? I want a drink, a cigarette, a friend, a more intimate source of light and heat. I think of myself sitting on the B.s’ sofa with a second or third drink, chatting merrily with Mrs. X in French. Now I experience a terrifying sense of nothingness. Would such a life be tolerable? Would I not cut my throat? Is this what my friends in the prison experience? So we drive back through the snow to the hotel, where I
drink half a glass of vodka and dress for the opera.

  Why is it so difficult for me to bring into focus the image of a young man with thick eyelashes on the plane from Tbilisi? Is this a temperamental infirmity, a national trait, a sort of neurosis? Why, watching some kilted pipers crossing a bridge in Ireland, did I feel that my life was passing by? What is this unhappy mystery?

  The flight back from Moscow is painful. A gray day. If I feel well enough tomorrow I must do the eight stories.

  •

  In town with D. His 65th birthday. The face is strong, his gray hair is long. We do not mention his remarkable wife, who choked to death during lunch a month ago. His mistress has called him in Australia and asked him to marry her, and I suppose he will. The barbershop at the Biltmore has been cut in half, and there are only three barbers on the job. Do people get their hair cut elsewhere or don’t they get it cut at all? One used to have to wait, reading copies of The Tatler. What is the significance of a dying barbershop? The barbers are all old friend, and we talk in Italian. I spend a dollar in tips for being whisk-broomed and drink a Martini at the bar, where there is a new, and more attractive, painting of a nude. The face seems unusually sensitive. But as I walk up Madison Avenue the city escapes me. What has happened to this place where I used so happily to pound the sidewalks? Where has my city gone, where shall I look for it? In the Playboy Club, the Century Club, the Princeton Club, or the Links? In the steam room at the Biltmore, in L.’s panelled apartment, in the skating rink, in the Park, in the Plaza, on the walks where someone behind me makes tonguing noises with his or her mouth? I don’t look. I know the city well, why does it not know me? A pair of well-filled boots, pretty legs, a tossed head. A restaurant where all the lights are pink, and so my hands are pink, and pink is the face of my friend. Everybody is pink. Fifteen or twenty men stand at the urinal in Grand Central. Their looks are solicitous, alert, sometimes wistful. They use the polished marble as a glass for pickups, and most of them are fondling or pulling their various-sized and-colored cocks. Why does the sight of fifteen or twenty men jerking off seem more significant than the string music in the Palm Court? One young and attractive man, the point of contact concealed by a raincoat, is making an accelerated jerking, as if he was approaching juice time. These are the darkest days of the year, and when the 3:40 pulls out of the tunnel into the Bronx it is nearly dark, although very few lights burn in the new housing developments. Perhaps everyone is still at work. By the time we reach the river, it is dark, and the only water traffic is barges and tugs. When I was younger I would wonder about the tug crews, wonder about what they would have for supper. I no longer much care. In the early dark the barges seem like mangrove islands—shoal water—you could wreck your boat. Three men behind me are talking loudly about the collapse of the government, the railroads, the U.N. Is this really the end of a world, as they seem to think it is? The men beside me seem so gored and emasculated by time that I look away. One has no gray in his hair, so I suppose he is rather young. His face is finely lined, rather like a woman’s. He opens his briefcase busily, but it contains nothing but a printed brochure. Will such a weary face be welcomed anywhere? The face seems incapable of any sensual provocation or response. But when it is time for him to leave he jauntily slaps on a sealskin hat with a bright feather cockade and braces his shoulders in his raincoat. He’s ready for the next round. I wanna go home, I wanna go home. I’ve lunched and had my hair cut, and now I am exhausted and I wanna go home.

  •

  My daughter says that our dinner table is like a shark tank. I go into a spin. I am not a shark; I am a dolphin. Mary is the shark. Etc. But what we stumble into is the banality of family situations. As for Susie, she makes the error of daring not to have been invented by me, of laughing at the wrong times and of speaking lines I have not written. Does this prove I am incapable of love, or can love only myself?

  •

  I read “Bullet Park,” which is an extract of my most intimate feelings, and wonder why it should have antagonized Broyard. Is there some discernible falling off, some trace of my struggle with alcohol and age? It is a struggle, but I have come through before, and pray that I will bring it off again.

  •

  In the middle of Sunday afternoon I think that perhaps my dishevelled and unpunctual muse will return. I seem to stand above the characters at hand as if they were pawns on a chessboard. Chess, however, is a game I never learned to play. My mind approaches some unsavory matters, and I put Serkin on the record player and seem to enter into some community of accomplished men, who are passionately concerned with their deepest intuitions about love and death. The music, especially the Schubert, sounds like a powerful narrative. I see the stream, the Roman bridge, the leaves on the trees, the flaxen-haired woman leaning from her casement window. The dialogues are much more forceful and moving than any dialogue in any of the books on my table. I would like the story to be called “Glad Tidings,” but I’m not sure where I go from there.

  •

  It seems today that all I can write is letters. I am too shaken to take the car to the garage. I think of P. inviting me drunkenly to take a nap in his room. What was intended, and are these fleeting hints at erotic tenderness between men natural? What men have I desired? A strange in a shower in Guam twenty-five years ago, who seemed so comely and so natural that I felt disenfranchised. What did I desire? Is this some force of self-love?

  •

  My incantation has changed. I am no longer sitting under an apple tree in clean chinos, reading. I am sitting naked in the yellow chair in the dining room. In my hand there is a large crystal glass filled to the brim with honey-colored whiskey. There are two ice cubes in the whiskey. I am smoking six or seven cigarettes and thinking contentedly about my interesting travels in Egypt and Russia. When the glass is empty I fill it again with ice and whiskey and light another cigarette, although several are burning in the ashtray. I am sitting naked in a yellow chair drinking whiskey and smoking six or seven cigarettes.

  •

  An interview. A young woman. Her eyes are nice, and her figure is fine, but she was not quite the right flavor. I didn’t make a pass; I didn’t even kiss her. I nag myself with the usual questions and come up with the usual answers. Early and happily to bed. On with the blue skies.

  •

  Good Friday. No mourning doves sing; no bells ring.

  •

  I’ve put it down before, and I’ll put it down again, but when I remember my family I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places, and I was always the last to go. They were always stamping out of concert halls, sports events, theatres, restaurants, and stores. “If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll sit through that …”; “That umpire is a crook”; “This play is filthy”; “I didn’t like the way that waiter looked at me”; etc. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that’s the way I remember them: heading for an exit. It has occurred to me that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and disguised this madness with moral indignation.

  In the summer my father used to play three or four holes of golf before breakfast, before he went to work. I sometimes went along with him. The links were only a short walk from the house. The course wa set above the river, and from the first fairway he played you could see down to Travertine and the blue water of the bay. Early one morning, he noticed something hanging from a tree in the woods beside the fairway. He thought it was perhaps some clothing left there by the lovers who used the woods at night. As he walked down the grass, he saw it was the body of a man. The face was swollen and contorted, but he recognized his old friend Harry Dobson. He cut down the body with a pocketknife and called Dr. Henry from the nearest house, although he should have called the police. He gave away his clubs that afternoon and never played golf again.

  •

  In my dreams or reveries—I’m not sure which—I walk along the carriage drive at Yaddo with a man about whom I know absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he wears
a dark-blue cashmere suit. He bumps into me in a suggestive and amorous way, and I do not protest. He puts his arm around my shoulders and says how much he likes me, and I say that I like him. We disappear into the woods. I’m not quite sure what happens, but it’s profoundly gratifying. We dine at different tables, keenly and happily aware of each other. There is nothing flamboyant. We observe the force of scandal. We approach his room by different stairways and spend the night together. I also imagine us holding hands in a movie. Since, as I see it, nothing of the sort could possibly take place in fact, what room has it in my sleep? There is no such man. With the exception of Endymion, the only homosexuals I’ve seen there aroused my vigorous uninterest. X was silly and narcissistic, Y had a dental plate that clacked, and Z spit when he spoke. Their sexual tastes seemed to be the product of vanity, stupidity, and bad luck. But dreaming gives me the license to invent this anonymous and manly spirit in a cashmere suit. Is this narcissism; is this some impediment of my nature, put there by my unhappiness with my father? How the light of day, the fire, bolsters and hones my ego. With my eyes closed in sleep I seem to be a very different man. The moral quality of light.

  •

  The incantation this morning is that I can cure myself. The problem is, can I? Is this thing bigger than either of us, Mabel?

  •

  Wake at three in the morning and seem to have in my mouth that single grain of sand, that hair, that means my life. Oh, I will have it all back, once more—the work, the girls, and money to burn. Things are less golden at seven.

  •

  Sauced, I speculate on a homosexual romance in prison. Sober, it doesn’t seem to amount to much. Who would it be? A much younger man. Why would he find him beautiful? That the dynamism between youth and age was as powerful as the dynamism between men and women. That he feels the man shaken with the paroxysm of an orgasm, so like pain. They were both men, and the drama of sexual difference was lost. Stacy was hirsute, Johnny was smooth. He would not mention his infatuation to the psychiatrist. Why should he? Under the circumstances, or perhaps under any circumstances, it seemed most natural. Why should he consider it distorted, and root through his childhood to discover the origins of this distortion? He had hated his father, because his father was cruel, stupid, and dishonest. He had not loved his mother, because she did not allow this. There is the set piece about having been merely furloughed from his adolescence and its disorders. That they developed no expertise. They never kissed each other. They simply embraced, caressed, and fondled one another’s genitals. Sodomy and fellatio were impossible for both of them. Stacy wondered if this was inhibition, repression, some bow to the society that had imprisoned him. Why wonder? He was content with this rudimentary horseplay, and by “content” I mean that when he was holding and being held by Johnny, the absorption of his flesh, his memory, and his spirit was complete. And then there is the scene in the visiting room with his wife and perhaps his children.