The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (37 page)

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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.

•

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 effect on the bête noire. It could quite simply be alcohol, since alcohol is the sure cure.

•

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.

•

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 know 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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Nailles might write a reply to Tony: I found your letter addressed to God in the middle of your floor after you’d left. You must have wanted me to read it. I’ve never read a letter of yours before. I don’t understand why you feel the way you do. I don’t think I’ve ever gloated over what I’ve been able to give you. If you feel guilty about being on the receiving end of things you might, to lessen your guilt, imagine that I gloat. It’s the only explanation I can hit on. My own father was able to give me almost nothing: no affection, love, clothing, or food. He was penniless, friendless, old, and wretched. It is important to me, of course, that I have been able to give you what I lacked. When I see you drive off in a bucket-seat racing car, with matched luggage packed with new clothing, I am very content, but I did not give these things to you. There is not enough self-consciousness in my support of you to let me use a word like “give,” or “share,” or “contribute.” You are welcome to such mone
as I have, exactly as you are welcome to such love as I have, and that seems boundless. You wrote, in capitals, that the only reason you were able to get anything out of me is because you know how to handle me. This puts my serene love in terms of flattery on your part, stupidity on mine. In what way have you handled me? You answer me. When I’ve wished you good morning after we’ve stayed up late a few nights talking about sex while I had my nightcap, I’ve always made it clear that you were under no obligation to keep me company.

I do not understand why you should say that your mother and I are the people in the world you most hate, unless you feel so deeply guilty about your behavior that you are unable to blame yourself and must blame us. You say that we are the most self-centered people in the world when, in fact, our love for you verges on fatuity. Aside from erotic reveries, you are the first thing on my mind when I wake, and when I sleep I sometimes dream, lovingly, of you. I remember watching you, like a swain, while you fired Roman candles into the brook; watching you ski in the orchard; watching you ski at Stowe. Climbing a mountain with you and your cousin, I had a painful wrench at my heart and thought that it didn’t matter, because I was with my son. Night after night in Saratoga, unable to sleep, I imagined that we climbed together over the Dolomites. It is possible, I suppose, that in order to become a man one has to mutilate the carapace of one’s father’s affections. I pray that this is not so. You mention someone’s bullying you, and I wonder if there is some unself-conscious connection between the terrors of your adolescence and your feeling for me.…

But if Nailles wrote such a letter he would destroy it.

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I would not want this to degenerate into the journal of an invalid, but pain, discomfort, and anxiety have dominated these weeks, and I have a feeling that the medicine makes me dopey. I drink at eleven to still an unruly gut, and read about Ben Franklin in Paris in the 1780’s. The day is unseasonably warm. Hornets and yellow jackets fall into our soup and our cocktails. Wasps swarm on the upstairs porch. A stupid possum comes up the front steps. I think he is wounded or rabid. He is in no hurry. A small snake, marked with deep red, black, and white, lies on the stairs to the garden. Geese, snakes, wasps, the flowers in the garden all seem apprehensive about the inalienable power of th
coming winter. A. comes, and I lose four straight games of backgammon and am bored. I think this is the medicine. It is so warm and fair that we have dinner out-of-doors. Sitting on the terrace, I see an orb of light appear in the atmosphere, as large and brilliant as a full moon, only orange and green. It throws a double reflection on the haze. I rush into the kitchen and urge Mary to come out and see this mystery, but she is washing a teapot and it is difficult to get a woman away from the dishpan, even to see the millennium. When she comes out, the orb has faded, but there is still some luminous vapor in the air. T. asks me for a drink. After much talk he says that he has lost his job. Thirty-five years old, with three children. He seems cheerful, and confesses to having stolen the Help Wanted section from my Sunday
Times
. He goes on to talk about his father. That man, he says, has an unclean spirit. He bought his sons train tickets to their colleges and did nothing else. They worked as grocery clerks, hospital orderlies, waiters, etc. That man, he repeats, has an unclean spirit. I am superstitious about condemning one’s male parent. Leaving them, I have a nightcap and think of how little my father did for me. He did not even give me bus fare; but he didn’t have it, and I think his spirit was pure.