The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (45 page)

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A. comes, and I like him very much. I find him uncommonly sympathetic, and wonder if this is some form of narcissism: do I invent this sameness in our thinking? But this could be an invention of mirrors. At lunch we talk about débutante parties, which is a wrong turn to take, but later he tells me that after leaving me he had a nightmare about his father; that my claim to our equality is unacceptable to him. In a spasm of paranoia I think he is referring to his youth, his intelligenc,
his freshness of mind, but it seems that he would like to have me as an object of veneration. I believe him to be telling the truth; I cannot imagine him not being truthful. Or anything else unpleasant. We walk up the river in the sun. He is wearing sailor pants and is inclined to swing his hips, and I think people look at us as if we had been scoring, which is untrue. They are closing up the Ferris wheel and the carrousel for winter. Some camera students are photographing this autumnal commonplace. The chairs and tables are stacked on the terrace where refreshments are served. Trucks are taking the benches out of the pavilions. All that is left in the zoo is two bison and two burros. I see very little beyond the fact that I am easy in A.’s company and that the architecture on the west bank of the river is, without exception, ugly. We part the student and the teacher.

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S.’s dinner party. Thrift shop and municipal dump. The tuna-fish casserole and, for one of the guests, organic vegetables. No hooch. A. is the most important. He flirts with me. The more he flirts, the more he seems like a woman. He shifts his shoulders, swings his hips, and gives me long, bone-making gazes, but we stay within four feet of each other. Who, in this situation, is the innocent? He will walk at my side, embrace me, watch my cock stiffen, and push me away lightly, claiming that he would sooner keep his sexual exploits to the gay-bar pickups and think of me as a member of society and a father image. I don’t want terribly to score with him, but if I did I don’t think any great harm would be done to the sometimes shining and legislated world. I would sooner not, would sooner play out my straight role as father and husband, grandfather, but I don’t feel that a weekend together would compromise me at all. My claims to innocence might simply be an admission of lechery. I think we do very well at table; I think vainly that he’s probably not had so good a foil; and here, perhaps, is the charge of narcissism. If he is simply going to bump into me until I am in a state of acute erotic discomfort and then dismiss me with a tap on the wrist, the only sensible thing to do is to kick it.

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I call A. because he’s the person whose arrival I most look forward to. He wears a pink tweed with a flower in the lapel. He tells me abou
a woman who, during a lunch party, took off a shoe and caressed his genitals with her foot. He is not only homosexual; it seems a profession that takes up much of his time. He tells me that when he does his gymnastics, naked, a man—married, of course, and a father—watches him through a crack in the window shade. I dislike this tale. He seems to esteem his beauty.

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A brilliant day after the storm. I lunch, joke with Federico, walk the dogs over the little hill. It is bitterly cold in the wind. The light is going. There have been two phone calls in my absence, one anonymous, and I assume it is A. There seems no way of tempering the absurdity of this train of thought. He is probably being zipped into an evening dress by an unemployed photographer’s model. They are both giggling, and what else they are doing I do not choose to describe.

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The last day of the old year, and I mostly want out; I don’t know how to work it geographically or financially. My face is flushed with drink; I have lost either my patience or my understanding and have damaged my self-respect. We’re back in the old and, I think, despicable routines. Federico and I watch a detective show with the old dog upstairs. Mary watches an English drama in the kitchen.

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I don’t seem to want to write anything but love letters. S. comes, and we walk over the hill, which lightens my aloneness, but at dark or a little later I feel a need for love that has the force of nausea. Jokes, talk, games, are not enough. I want the sensation of love. Mercifully, we get out of the house and go to a movie, where I feel better. Up at seven to try to get gas. All the stations are unlighted and closed. There is no letter from A., and I wait for the mail.

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My instability or iridescence rises to new heights. I want to write on a sheet of paper, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” A hundred times, a thousand times. This is all aimed at the wrong customer. I will telephone. I refuse to sublimate or repress a passion under the
assumption that I am discovering a truth. “The scales fell from her eyes,” they say at the end of an infatuation that was socially unacceptable. The idea, of course, is that society is invincible, ordained, the very word of God, and if you pervert your erotic drives you make a substantial contribution to the commonwealth. I will telephone, I will telephone, etc. Scotch calms me down. I read notes for “The Art of Fiction.” E. comes over. He is having a happy romance with a fifty-nine-year-old widow who works as a guide at one of the restorations around here. We take a trip to Lyndhurst and stop by Dudley’s for a sandwich and a drink. The old cook is cleaning mirrors. He is gay but stripped of all his lures, really ugly. This must be difficult for an erotic cult that counts so on beauty. He does have pretty dishwashers. No word from A.; as I might say, Can’t you take his cock out of your mouth long enough to write a postcard? This could be the truth.

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Snow begins to fall early in the afternoon. Sometime after dusk it seems that the oil burner is gone. My car won’t start and is very soon buried. The night is cold, and even under a pile of blankets I feel the chill of the house. My heartbeat is then accelerated. I arrange to have the drive plowed so that the repair truck can reach here. I light a fire in the dining room and close the doors. The room becomes habitable but very smoky. The rooms upstairs are dark and cold. Mary speaks of the nostalgia of old rooms. I am reminded of the farm, but my memories are not pleasant. Those cold, dark rooms where my father lived. Tomorrow I leave for Iowa. My reveries are ribald and cozy. My facts, on this snowy day, are very bleak. I think A. will be in New Orleans, and I rather wish this so.

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I drink a Martini before the morning star is set. Half asleep, I see Mary’s face at its loveliest, and this is a pleasure. The images are like photographs in an album: closeup, long shot. I see her standing below me on the drive. I’ve loved her very much and I like this recollection. I wake for the first time in a month without a hard-on. I think that what I’m doing I have to do, and I hope I do it with the least injury to Mary and whoever else is involved. I cannot live without sentiment, humor, and carnal love.

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The day is very warm and beautiful. Crocuses in bloom. Mary suggests that we take a walk together. She has not done this in a long time, I mean ten years. My dearly beloved son comes in the middle of dinner to ask for money. He has not come to the house in two years for any other reason. I can hear his wife say, “Go over and ask your father for some money.” I’ve loved him; I’ve wanted him to marry and love and be loved as he has. I wanted him to have a son and to leave my domination; but now I feel that he is dominated by his wife. I wish he wouldn’t always ask me for money. I wish I didn’t know that he was ordered, commanded, to ask for money. One’s children grow away from one.

The heating plant is working and my intestinal, sexual, and intellectual tracts are cleared. I must work. I call L. and get a hard-on but I don’t say so. I split some wood, very little, but I must do this more often. I find it very pleasant. I think of girls: S. eating a candy bar in the parking lot of a supermarket; P. unpacking her own bed linen. I write an advertisement for
The New York Review of Books:
“Revolting, elderly, alcoholic novelist desires meaningful relationship with 24-year-old aristocratic North Carolinian with supple form and baroque biceps. Little gay experience but ready learner. Etc.” I can’t remember A. at all, and I rather regret this.

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Toward dark I decide to call A. No one answers the first time. He is there a half hour later. “Hello, John Cheever,” he says. The voice seems less resolute than I remember. The edge, the vigor one listens for in a man’s voice is not here. Complacency is its worst quality. “I missed you at Mardi Gras,” he says. “You would have loved it. I danced in the streets for eight hours, and then I put on white tie and danced at the Comus Ball until dawn.” I have never seen him dance and imagine him to be a little ungainly. His back is too long. I feel estranged and think that to fall in love with such a man would be a guarantee of anguish and pain. He would come home late; he would not come home at all. He would put off my passionate advances with a tap on the wrist. How one would long for a woman, even a shrew.

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And I think of L. in the morning, the lovely unfreshness of her skin. It was the light scent of a young woman who has made love and slept through one more night of her life. Her breasts are the fields and streams of my paradise. Her skin is warm and fine and young, and I mount her, but in our nearness I am keenly aware of the totality of our alienation. I really know nothing about her. We have told each other the stories of our lives—meals, summer vacations, lovers, trips, clothing, and yet if she stood at a crossroads I would have no idea of the way she would take. It is in loving her that I feel mostly our strangeness.

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On Valium for two days running, and I do feel very peculiar, but it’s better, God knows, than sauce. I do not want to return to a strait-jacket with six padlocks. A.’s letters, full of descriptions of flowers, give me a pain in the ass, perhaps because they are not throbbing with declarations of love. He may be very tactfully and intelligently hinting at the fact that there is no possibility of a relationship between us—a relationship of any sort. I somehow think that we will not meet when he comes East. Sometimes this possibility breaks my heart. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have a dozen letters to write, but I seem unable to write anything this morning.

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I think that Valium has a debilitating effect. Walking in the woods, I am suddenly very tired, very tired.

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On Tuesday I go to the psychiatrist, an amiable young man, but I think he speaks in Freudian clichés. I think my problems enforce my drinking. He claims I invent my problems to justify my drinking. I spent most of yesterday morning going over last year’s journal with the idea of giving it to him as an ultimate confession. A. promised to shower me with cards. No cards arrive. I cannot set this friendship in a pestilential Venetian twilight and conclude, as he walks away from me, that what I have discovered is my time of life. The only acceptable message I can arrive at is that our relationship illuminates his untimely youthfulness. Walking in the woods, I would like to see him; someone like him. I
short, I am lascivious. This is inflamed by drink and catnaps. The dogwood petals are falling, and the flowers from the tulip tree. Highly sexual.

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A. sends on a record (Walton-Sitwell) and a note. “For what it’s worth, for all my clumsiness and falterings, I love you.” To admit that I love and desire him is extremely painful and difficult for me, but once I have made the admission I seem to find it relaxing. I love him very much, at least I do this morning. I love him very much and am happy to say so.

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A bummer; not really bad, but not good. The director speaks three times: an exceptional man. At breakfast I am asked not to sit at a particular table. We do not play musical chairs around here, says an authoritative woman of perhaps forty, a little heavy. Her hair is neatly and recently dressed, she wears a small string of pearls, and shoes that look like a man’s dancing pumps. She represents the club, that little band that exists by closing its membership. Since there was such a group in a line-riflery company, I shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a place like this.

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I try to find some opening for my work. I don’t want the escutcheon and the night of the cats. I don’t seem able to exploit my knowledge of aloneness and confinement. I can do the hustler, leaving out anything compromising, and ending with the morgue, but the only perception is the clairvoyance of the hustler; that is, his perfect lawlessness. There is no point in my leaving here until my work is in line.

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The reform of alcoholics. This will be for a month, and I trust that I can make it. We lunch on meat and rice and Jell-O, and attend a lecture. A personable young lady lectures quite simply on attitudes, but she does mention alcohol as a source of phobias. I could follow this one. Three empty hours lie ahead of us. The magnificent mansions that have outlived their usefulness, their owners, and their incomes have becom
fortuitous. The bathroom is paved with mirrors, but who really cares? The room is vast, the reliefs of plaster
cherubini
with garlands of fruit and flowers.

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During group analysis a young man talks about his bisexuality and is declared by everyone in the group but me to be a phony. I perhaps should have said that if it is phony to have anxieties about bisexuality I must declare myself a phony.

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Fifth day. I think my drinking is of secondary importance. Then I watch a TV show, and the banality of this performance arouses my thirst more keenly than anything else so far. The director, toward whom I have some complicated vibrations, says that a healthy person can adjust to acceptable social norms. The banality of a TV show, certainly acceptable, is what makes me want to drink.

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The woman in “The Visit” (not Mrs. Loomis) would ask of the others in the visiting room, “How can you get along with this sort of people?” Sixth day. My stomach is unsettled.

My stomach squared away at 3
A.M.
, and I feel much better. Mary calls to say that if I don’t like it here she’s found a marvellous place in Connecticut two and a half hours from New York. A new tenant joins us. He’s not been detoxed, which is against the rules of the game. He has no bags, nothing but a pair of slippers for the bathroom. He looks like an archetypal loser, a goner, a dead one. It is crowding half past two, and I am uneasy. My insight into incarceration seems to have been bypassed. The balance here was all right—pleasant at times—but it seems broken by the arrival of the stray.