by John Cheever
•
Loneliness I taste. The chair I sit in, the room, the house, none of this has substance. I think of Hemingway, what we remember of his work is not so much the color of the sky as it is the absolute taste of loneliness. Loneliness is not, I think, an absolute, but its taste is more powerful than any other. I think that endeavoring to be a serious writer is quite a dangerous career.
•
I have experienced the force of the past in my own life; the profound love of my brother. That I would turn away from this and take lover and delight in them and marry and raise splendid children would, it seems, in no way diminish the fact that my own true love was my brother. That it was a sterile and a perverse love does not in any way diminish its profundity. So it sounds like the drone pass on the old-fashioned organ, and no matter how many green meadows I sport in, it seems that I will always regret having left my dear old brother.
•
Reading old journals I find Mary railing at me for my lack of virility, and perhaps her disappointments were serious. I find myself enormously happy in her arms. My random bones are listed with candor, and this is some part of the richness of my life. When I am given love I seem quite contented. Such merit as my work possesses is rooted in the fact that I have been unsuccessful in my search for love.
•
So I shift my skating, late in the day, to S.’s pond, where the ice is pristine, but where the reaches are limited. On the big pond you can skate straightaway until you’re tired. Here you skate in a circle. The days are longer now. At four I will tire, before the sun sets. The sky is mixed, but there is some blue, and the motion of skating, and the lightness and coldness of the air involve quite clearly for me a beauty—a moral beauty. By this I mean that it corrects the measure and the nature of my thinking. Space, perhaps, is what I mean, but there is the moral beauty of light, velocity, and environment, which seems profoundly sympathetic. I drink tea and jaw and skate until dark.
•
So Sexagesima with Ben. Humor quite bridges any complications about taking Holy Communion with my son. In my prayers, however, I cannot include a second wife for him, or even a third. Another wife, another family, other children—all things that may happen—are absolutely unimaginable. So is my own separation. I wish I could be given some perspective on this old man on his knees in an obsolete church building, quite incapable of imagining that his son, kneeling on his left, whose intense marital unhappiness he has seen at first hand, will ever marry again.
Look at him, look at him. A second marriage is not in his aesthetics.
•
On leaving church, he goes off to run twenty miles, and I go off to skate. There are only a few people on the ice. A due-north wind blows. I enjoy myself and return later in the day. It is Sunday. There are perhaps fifty people scattered over the miles of ice. The voices seem to me to have the lightness of voices heard on a Mediterranean beach before this coast was lost to us through the savagery of pollution. And so these bright and scattered voices remind me of something not lost but vanished. Here is the extraordinariness of people who occupy themselves on a beach. Some of the charm of the scene may be that falls—pratfalls, graceful declines, ball breakers—are some part of the scene, and we will all likely fall before the skating ends at dark. And so up and down we go, around and around, with a degree of self-centeredness that seems to have nothing to do with pride. We seem to approach a state of innocence. Up and down we go, completely absorbed in the illusion that fleetness and grace and speed are our possessions and had only to be revealed. We fall, but so does everyone else.
•
In my small town the dogs are without exception high-spirited and without exception mongrels—but mongrels with marked characteristics of their parentage. You see a smooth-haired poodle, an Airedale with short legs, or a dog that begins as a collie and ends as a Dane. These mixtures of blood—this newness of blood, you might say—has made them a spirited breed and they hurry through the empty streets, late, it seems, for some important meal, assignation, or meeting, quite unfamiliar with that loneliness from which the rest of the population suffers.
•
So, let us assume that you have been given something to say. Something to do is quite simple. You can take your bicycle to Mt. Kisco and ski to the dam. At dinner, B. mentions watching two couples taking the train into the city for some sort of celebration. “Twelve dollars is really a good price for a dinner these days—but don’t eat too many of the hors d’oeuvres. They serve these great hot hors d’oeuvres, but if you eat too many of them you can’t eat the dinner.” He describes their clothing, their accents, and persuasively imagines what the dinner i the restaurant will be like. This reminds me of a scene—Gide, Nabokov, Woolf, or Cheever—where one’s insight into the lives of strangers becomes uncontrollable, and one becomes some part of the tragedy. This seems to have been a story I wrote many years ago, and seems to be the image of infinity I have recently been obsessed with. This is the image of the young man in an art gallery looking at a drawing of a citadel besieged by barbarians. He does not yet know that he is being besieged by barbarians himself. I think it is in Nabokov that we try to intercede in the assassination of a character and find ourselves powerless. So what one has is the observer travelling on a train. The traveller’s discernment enables him to describe two couples who are going into the city to celebrate a wedding anniversary. The traveller will guess the source of their clothing and its cost, the rooms where they live, the food they eat, their occupations and incomes but then we will come to that point where the observer is tragically involved, simply through having committed himself to observation without restraint. This is a story I seem to have written, and I believe it’s been written by others. “Stop, stop, stop—don’t look any further,” may be spoken by one of the objects being observed. You could use Venga, the sorceress in Bulgaria—or change that to Romania. That is, looking into a crystal ball, or dealing a pack of cards, she finds herself tragically involved in what she sees. To put it simply, she says, “This cave will fall onto us, and we will suffocate.”
The most extraordinary thing about these mornings is le cafard. There seems no reason for this, other than the fact that I sleep in a poorly ventilated room, because both I and the old dog with whom I sleep are inclined to get chills. On waking, I find myself in a lethargy for which I have no words. This would be lessened were I with a lover, and that is a long tale that I will tell later. The first sound I hear may be Mary going to the kitchen to make coffee. Then I hear my dear old dog wagging his tail as my beloved son goes to the bathroom to shave for the day’s work, having just run eight or ten miles. Much is expected of me during the day. There is writing to be accomplished, a rich and various correspondence to be maintained, vast sums of money to be banked if that is my inclination, landscapes spread out for skating, skiing, and bicycling, all of which I greatly enjoy; and yet I suffer a lethargy which cannot be distinguished by a name or a description. Thi is not despair; this is not even the Eastern Carpathian Monday Morning Blues; this enjoys a dreadful force that escapes language.
•
So, Federico leaves. This seems so deep in the skein of things that I have no perspective. On a rainy Saturday afternoon we go together to the movies. We see Dustin in “Kramer vs. Kramer.” When we leave the theatre it is growing dark. We walk together across a parking lot. I seem to hear my voice. I am jawing on about film techniques, about the new spectrum that eliminates the light of day. I mean only to say that here is a tall young man with his old father, walking across a parking lot on a rainy dusk on one of the last days of March. I remember—fleetingly—driving him home from school as a boy. We sometimes stopped for a hot pizza and sometimes for fried chicken. None of this is very vivid, although it was at the time. He has, for me, completed cutting an apple tree with the chain saw. I remember, not vividly, his saving my life when a birch fell onto me. So I say that what I love is the world that lies spread out before him. It is nothing so simple as this. It
is nothing so simple as this.
•
A book comes, of which I am the subject, and Mary says, “People write those books for practically nothing.” This is my reading of the line, but only self-destruction would be accomplished by giving the line seven—or ten—readings. I seem to be up against a clinical situation and to be giving this a clinical response, which is less than excellent. I have come to feel that my failing in every way is imperative to her sense of being alive. I don’t know whether I should say this to the children. On that very snowy night before I left for South America I slammed around the streets here in my front-wheel-drive, not at all anxious about having to walk if the car was stuck. S. was having his autograph party. I went to his and had him inscribe a book to Mary. The drive home was great fun. The car gave an exceptional performance. Mary was in the kitchen watching TV. I gave her the book. She looked at me with utter confusion and said, “You really are a nice person, aren’t you?” This seems to reveal the fact that only as a perverted brute, scorned by the world, can I be accepted. Should I mention at lunch that I have been asked to make the commencement address at her colleg she will say, “Think of all the people who must have refused. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. I hate that college, anyhow.” I do feel that it is important to her that I be loathsome, and I think this perception will be, may be of some help.
•
So, I wake a little before dawn—at dawn, in fact. There is light in the air, light in the room; and I can see my clothes on the floor where I left them. The sound of birdsong has begun to be heard, and in the distance—somewhere in the southwest—there is the rumble of thunder. The old dog is asleep or is pretending to be asleep, and I think the thunder might frighten her. There is a flash of lightning, and I count to nearly twenty before the noise of this explosion reaches us. The storm, then, is twenty miles away, I think, and may take another course, sparing the old dog an attack of misery. There is another flash of light, the explosion seems more immediate, and the old dog wakes and whimpers. Then I think that H. is in the East, and how much I love her. I seem to fill with light, a curious radiance rather like the fire of gunpowder. How simple and powerful it all seems. We were meant to love each other. My fear of dogs, her allergy to artichokes, her nearsightedness, and my deafness have nothing to do with the case. We love each other, and so I lie in bed and worry that the thunderstorm will frighten the old dog, but I worry about little else. The light and the discordant racket that birds make increase, and the thunderstorm sulks off toward New Rochelle. This all seems to me a most natural course of events. I have known this marvellous feeling before—known it with other girls, known it with men, known it with that wife who refuses these days to let me enter her bedroom. It seems to me quite as natural as walking.
•
And I think that my wife has cooked for me for forty years. This seems to me one of the great labors of history. She has often served me with bitterness; she has often refused to speak to me when she summoned me to the table; but night after night for a decade less than half a century she has brought food to the table. And I think, lying naked in the early light, that this is an enormous task. And I also think that I have found the will to leave and that I will take none of my quaint souvenirs, since this is firstly the home of my children.
•
So sitting on the porch, reading an uninteresting book, I suffer a loss of memory. I do not know who I am or where I am. This is easily corrected with movement—I efficiently plant a row of broccoli—but I think it must be observed should it worsen. I think I mentioned it to the doctor and got no response. It is the sense of a level of consciousness that I do not comprehend: some firmament beyond mind, very like the structures in space—this is the imagery—but, for a moment, overwhelming. I am not in this world; I am merely falling, falling. Examining this, thinking (because of our psychoanalytical habits) of some form of guilt, I think I may, as a young man, have tasted some ultimate in futility—getting off a trolley car in Boston on a winter night—and fled from this with a velocity that now claims me as its victim. It could be, of course, that my old heart is not pumping blood into my old brain.
•
I weed the peonies, pretending to be some old Irish gardener, long dead. I do recall Mary’s line when I asked sentimentally of the flowers, “Oh, where did you find them?” “I picked them,” was what she snapped. I truly think she is unpleasant today. I sing loudly to the old dog, “I picked a lemon in the garden of love, where only peaches grow.”
•
Tomorrow is my 68th birthday and I am uneasy, although not painfully so.
•
In the evening paper one reads that an estimable woman of sixty has, upon her return from a party at the boat club, been strangled. Robbery could not have been the motive, since the corpse wore diamond earrings. The names of ten men have been published. They have been charged with public lewdness in the urinal of the railroad station. But how were these convictions arrived at, and what sort of life can one lead after having been publicized as a public lewd? Turn the page and see how disturbed Sissie and Brozzie are. Muzzy blew the shit out of Dazzy with a 20-gauge shotgun. She then wrote notes to the kiddies, telling them about their dentist appointments, an expected oil delivery, and the plants to be watered. How can these people move about in the world, how can they know love and the pleasures of friendship? Deep in an embrace, she will say, “You must know that my mother killed my father and herself.” “You must know that I was arrested for public lewdness twenty-three years ago.” “You must know that my mother was wearing these diamond earrings when she was strangled.” Can love surmount these confessions? I see them on that island, my favorite island, my favorite island where all those friends and lovers you thought had been overtaken by infirmity or death are going happily from the restaurant to the beach or from the beach to the bowling alley.
Oh, give me a world of soothsayers and chimney sweeps!
•
And so, what is the fear, the nameless dread? It is, quite simply, the loss of one’s powers. One’s intelligence, one’s memory, one’s gifts as a lover. One has seen the grossness of madness. Dismounting from my bicycle at the head of the hill here to speak with the Z.s, I do not know where I am. This, I expect, is a fleeting seizure of amnesia.
•
Yesterday I drive to the village to cash a check I have forgotten to bring with me. Going down the hill toward the bank, I see how the mountains of the west shore reach down to the Hudson. The foliage is full grown now, and the day is sunny with clouds that now and then throw a passing shadow. The mountains and the water seem quite beautiful, and it is a deeply emotional beauty; it seems to me a memory of some happiness I have known and lost, and that I am happily in pursuit of. But the memory is strong, powerful. I can smell the flooring of the porch on which I sit while I wait for my beloved to finish whatever she is doing (combing her hair, or boning the fish) and serenely watch the shadows and the light move over the wooded mountains and the river. I have been here.
•
In the thirties and forties men seemed to fear homosexuality as the early mariners feared sailing off the end of the ocean in a world supported on a turtle’s back.
•
A single sentence has been spoken on this lovely summer morning—an overt contradiction—and now she has gone into her room and close her door. And it seems that I must remember—that it is my responsibility to remember—how happy I was as a lover, a husband, a father, a friend, and a neighbor. But now I have no wife, and Mrs. Z. has completely departed from my consciousness. R. enjoys no urgency. I have friends and neighbors and children, and it is not that I lack a wife; I am possessed, but by an exhaustive opposite of what is meant by a wife. This is quite a militant performance, involving castration, public humiliation, and disgrace, and, I suppose, crucifixion if the equipment were available. And is it any wonder that from time to time we encounter a sexually bewildered male?
•
And in my
memories of happiness there are, God knows, some thorns, and there is the fact that I was a younger man. I insist that I still possess a capacity for happiness. I think of F. calling from Wilmington to ask, “Weren’t we happy, Johnny? Weren’t we really happy?”
•
The brute force of loneliness would account for our most spectacular carnal escapades, those erotic collisions in underpasses on rainy midnights. You’ll never know whose teeth marks were left on your ass and your forearm, come the morning.
Reading about old age, I am pleased to know that chemicals can account for the depression that seems to overtake me these mornings. Lying in bed with a wish to die, I am happy to know that this is an excess of tryflexon and a tax on my valvular plimbits.
•
This is a story to be read in bed on a rainy night in an old house near a winding and seldom travelled road, with perhaps a view of some mountains, and within walking distance of a stream where one can fish and swim.
•
Old age seems to have presented me with two discernible changes. I think these constitutional. One is an increase in fear. In reading of a Vermont winter I think not of the skiing or the mountains in a morning light; I think only of the cold as some premonition of death. I think only of pain. And watching on TV a film of some waves breaking on shore in the early morning, I think how far I have gone from this light, this freshness, this sense of being a happy participant. The last time we went to the sea my wife was intensely unhappy. But I think that I must honestly assess both my fear of winter—of death—and this loss of facility in imagining happiness on long beaches.