The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (32 page)

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Oh, to be so much a better man than I happen to be.

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My difficulties continue, and I can’t determine where the blame lies. I sit in a chair under a tree. It is raining. The rain is light. I can hear it fall on the leaves, but the leaves of the tree make a shelter. I think—I have been drinking—that I must speak with Mary, make some stab at candor and perhaps approach love. This may be tactless and stupid. In any case, I speak. “You’re just making up one of your little stories,” she says. I say that the remark is spinsterish and irrelevant. I speak of those weeks following my return from Russia when I received, for the first time in my marriage, a vocal declaration of love. I ask if she doesn’t remember this; if it wasn’t true. She replies, “I wish you could have seen your face when you asked that.” I cannot settle on any motive for this. Does she think I despise her so deeply that any declaration of love is ridiculous? Or does she mean to say that I am ugly?
She claims not. But how cruel it would be for a woman to call her lover ugly. The children return from the movies and I sit with them in what seems to me a fragrance of reasonableness. Returning to bed, I think I shall suffocate.

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In the morning there is the familiar anxiety. I fear that I have done and said some irrevocable things; that I have ruined my marriage and exiled myself. I feel both tender and horny. But opening a gin bottle at noon I think that the only declaration of love I have ever received has been rescinded. This is merely at the sight of a gin bottle.

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The Skidmore girls, some of them are beautiful. One’s head swims. Watch for the inch or two of thigh you’ll see when they mount their bicycles; watch the bicycle seat press into their backsides. Some of them, much less beautiful, muster a sense of humor and get by on this. Some of them have nothing at all. It is hot, and as in all small towns people complain more bitterly than they would in some larger place. The broad porches are still open, with their straw rugs, wicker furniture, tables with vases full of flowers, copies of the
Reader’s Digest
, and, at four, a pitcher of nice lemonade. “It’s our outdoors living room,” said Mrs. L. A bridge lamp burns at night. Crossing the park where I once saw a woman steal marigolds I think with sudden love of my son Federico; I think with shame of those quarrels he has overheard. How can he grow straight and courageous as he must in a house where there is so much that is bitter and frigid? I am sorry, I am heartily sorry, my son. I love you and will try to stay at your side. Girls pass with shadowy cheeks, with round cheeks, with no cheeks at all. No dogs bark. Have they passed a leash ordinance? I think of what I may do to C.B., but I won’t put this down. I am plagued by some circulatory distress, a whiskey thirst, and the bitter mystery of my marriage. They all three go hand in hand.

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The lollipop clock in front of Edelstein’s jewelry store stopped twelve years ago at five minutes to six. A blizzard was raging and the hands of the clock, still at five minutes to six, solidly commemorate the snow-burie
streets, the stalled train, the barely visible street lights, the stillness. The clock in front of what used to be Humber’s hardware store stopped at 9:10 on an April evening when the store caught fire and was gutted. That was ten years ago. The boredom and the aspirations of a small backwater on an April evening belong to the second clock. They sometimes ask, What kind of a town is it where we have two stopped clocks on the main street? It’s that kind of a town.

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People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worser, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

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I cut the grass, hoping to improve my spirits, but then I hit the bottle with such vehemence that nothing is gained, much is lost, and this morning I feel sick. I read a biography of Dylan Thomas thinking that I am like Dylan, alcoholic, hopelessly married to a destructive woman, etc. The resemblance stops with alcohol. Once the idea of divorce had occurred to Mr. Halberstrum, he found himself unable to uproot the possibility. It established itself with the tenacity of a thistle. His manifest responsibilities to his children began to seem unreal. He knew how deeply bewildered they would be if he divorced—that this action might be a serious impediment to their growth as men and women—but the ardor with which he dreamed of being free of a way of life that seemed unnaturally debased and crooked made the sufferings of his children distant and powerless. Boarding the 8:23, he thought of divorce. The mountains and the river spoke of divorce. The noise of midtown traffic urged him to divorce. He looked during the business day for associates who had divorced and thought them the happiest of men. He approached his lighted house in the evening with a reluctance that was physical. It was a struggle to climb the stairs. He stooped with despair when he heard her slippers in the upstairs hall. A man with no religious training and no faith at all, he was forced into the emotional and physical attitudes of prayer. “Dear God,” he sobbed, “restore to m
my patience, my faith, my powers of love; let me forget the bitterness that has passed; set me free from resentment, petulance, and anger. Amen.” But she had traduced him lengthily twice in a week and responded to his cozening with a swift kick. Now her voice was soft in the evenings, but it did not reach him. Let us pray.

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Mrs. Hammer had begun her monologue. Hammer, who had been reading
Time
, took off his glasses and watched her. Her color was high, her style was vivacious, her eyes flashed. He had said or done nothing to commence the scene. “If you think you’re going to make me cry,” she explained, “you’re mistaken. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. I can tell by the way you look. You’re thinking that I’m sorry for what I said last night. You think I’m going to ask to be forgiven.” She laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t ask for your forgiveness if my life depended upon it. You hate me, you loathe me, but I couldn’t care less. I used to worry, but I won’t worry anymore. There’s something wrong with you. I think your mother did something to you, and, of course, you never had a father. I think I know what’s wrong with you, although I’d hesitate to tell you to your face. It would seem too cruel. I won’t give you the satisfaction of a divorce, because it would upset Dora. If I know one thing, it’s that Dora loves me. I’ve protected her from your drunken rages. I’ve given her the only loving-kindness she’s ever known. Oh, I know you’re jealous. You’d like to think she loves you, but she doesn’t, and she never will. You think you’re a great lady-killer, and I suppose some women see something in you, but the trouble is that you don’t have any men friends. Men don’t like you. When I took the train on Tuesday all the women on the platform asked me how you were, but not a single man mentioned you. Not one. You’re always talking about your sexual needs and desires, but if you spent a little more time out-of-doors you’d be more like a normal man and not so sexy. You never go fishing anymore. Well, you almost never go fishing anymore. Well, when you do go fishing you almost never catch anything. Of course, there are exceptions. Well, I may be wrong about this, and if I’ve said something stupid, how you’ll gloat over it! Oh, look at you. If you could only see how smug you look! If you could only see how happy my little mistake has made you! Well, at last I’ve done something to please you, I’ve brought a little sunshine into your life. I wonder how long I’ll have
to wait before you remind me that the last time you went fishing you caught three trout. Oh, well, I’ve made you happy. It’s still in my power to make you happy.” Laughing bitterly, she left the room.

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And in Nailles’ happiness, his stubborn insistence upon the abundance of things, his passionate love for MaryEllen, I seem to sense some obtuseness. How could any woman of character live and breathe in so close, unremittent, and airless a love? “I love you, I love you.” He said it every day, seizing her buttocks, thrusting his tongue into her mouth. “I love you, I love you,” morning, noon, and night. I sense some obtuseness, but I merely sense it; I cannot see it, judge its altitude or nature as one sees the Atlas Mountains from Gibraltar. He is incurable. When MaryEllen—or some earlier girl—said that his love was crushing, he would be bewildered. Envy, sloth, pride, anger—all these things could be crushing, but not love. Standing on his porch on a winter night, naming the few stars that he knew for his son and exclaiming loudly over their brilliance and the beauty of the night, he might appear to her to be a fool, an unredeemable fool. “Oh, it’s so beautiful out there!” he would say, his breath still smoking, the sharp perfume of cold coming off his clothing. “Why do you cry?” he would ask. “Why do you choose to cry on such a beautiful night?”

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Someone had written something in the fresh snow. Who could it have been—the milkman, a boy, some stranger? And what would he have written—an obscenity, a calumny? What the stranger had written was: “Hello World!”

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He had a concession at the bowling alley. He called it the pro shop, sold equipment, and drilled and plugged bowling balls with some rented machinery. It was dark that afternoon, but you could see him in the darkness, talking into a wall telephone. He had been talking for three-quarters of an hour. He lowered his voice when I came in, but I heard him say, “She’s wild, that one, I was into her three times, and she
buzzbuzzbuzz.”
He said he’d call back, hung up, and turned on a light. He was a tall, bulky man with a vast belly—proof of the fact that ther
is little connection between erotic sport and physical beauty. His thin hair was most neatly oiled and combed with the recognizable grooming of the lewd. On his little finger he wore a flashy diamond, flanked by two rubies. His voice was reedy, and when he turned his face into the light you saw the real thing, a prince of barroom and lunch-counter pickups, reigning over a demesne of motels, hotels, and back bedrooms—proud, stupid, and serene. His jaw was smooth, well shaven, and anointed, a piney fragrance came from his armpits, his breath smelled of chewing gum, and he had the eyes of an adder. He was the real thing.

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Waking, I think that as a social impostor I have gone to some pains to conceal the fact that in the house where I was raised there was an automatic piano. It was called a Pianola and had been won by my father in a raffle. It was not in the living room, where we entertained, but in an obscure room to the right of the hall, yet on Sunday mornings before going to church I would happily pedal away and loudly sing the words of hymns, and on weekday evenings I would play “Dardanella,” “Louisville Lou,” “Lena from Palesteena,” or if I felt serious the “Barcarolle,” a little Chopin, or my favorite, the “William Tell” Overture, with its storm on a mountain lake. The Pianola was an ugly object, stained the color of mahogany, somewhat scratched and battered by me, but it was a source of great pleasure, which I seem to have veiled as a vulgarity or to have supplanted with a glistening parlor grand, some Schumann on the rack.

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As I wait for the train, a youth in tight white pants sets off the usual alarm signals, but then I notice that he wears the jacket of a school where I am known, where indeed one of my dogs lives. I ask after my friends on the faculty, ask after my dog, and the air between us is pristine and cheerful. It is facelessness that seems to threaten one, strangeness, a sort of erotic darkness, an ignorance of each other, except for the knowledge of sexual desire; but standing in a public urinal and being solicited by a faceless stranger one senses some definite promise of understanding oneself and of understanding death, as if the natural and sensible strictures of society, raised in the light of day, were to
heavy a burden for our instincts and left them with no immunity to the infections of anxiety and in particular the fear of death. Run, run, run ballocksy through the woods, put it in the brushes of nymphs and up the hairy bums of satyrs and you will know yourself at last and no longer fear death; but why, then, do the satyrs have an idiotic leer? To have the good fortune to love what is seemly and what the world counsels one to love, and to be loved in return, is a lighter destiny than to court a sailor in Port-au-Prince who will pick your pockets, wring your neck, and leave you dead in a gutter.

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I carry a heavy suitcase for a young woman—this simplest vision of things—but the suitcase is almost too much for my strength, and I am afraid I will pull my middle out of joint. The shoeshine man’s curly head, between my knees, reminds me of T., whose domesticity was clearly rooted in an early knowledge of cold and aloneness. Three days before Easter the city is festive. My shoes are shined, my suit is correct. There are many youths with long and dirty hair, dirty jeans, and white teeth. At the corner of Sixty-third Street and Madison a young man rests on his motorcycle, cleaning his dark glasses. He appears to be out of things, including the rebellion he has joined. Young women with skirts above their knees, old women with top-heavy headdresses of cloth flowers and with wounded feet, a man who has paid his tailor a fortune but walks like a duck. St. Patrick’s, which I enter at the elevation of the Host, is crowded. At the St. Regis, hair oil seems to be coming back. Pools of pinkish light stream from holes in the ceiling. I am very tired. In the old place the bartenders used to hook their wristwatches (three) around the neck of a liquor bottle. No more. I wonder if the bartender who serves me served me twenty years ago.

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On the train home I share a seat with two men I have not seen for fifteen years. They both now have their white hair, as I shall presently. They both wear glasses. One of them has an alcoholic and circulatory ailment that has given his face the colors of an extended bruise. They discuss their lawnmowers throughout the trip. “I got a double-blade, three-horsepower Ajax rotary from Warbin’s two years ago. I’ve got my money back.” “Well, I got a single-blade rotary last year, but I’m thinkin
of getting a reel mower this year,” etc. The conversation does not shift, for an hour, from the subject of mowers, excepting to go briefly to fertilizer. Warfare, love, money—the natural concerns of men—are barred from their talk. It is sincere, I expect; it is ceremonial: I suppose they dream of leaf mulchers, gasoline mixes. Their aim is probity, and yet it is the mad who, to cure the wildness of their thought, talk in such rudimentary terms.