The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (46 page)

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Quarter past five. I would drink if I were home. I stand at the window, watching the people on the street. I am confined. They are free to come and go, but they move so casually through this freedom that it seems wasted. Most of them carry something—a carton of cigarettes in a paper bag; enough groceries to make supper for one; a leas,
at the end of which is a golden retriever sniffing the gutter. Make kaka. Good doggie. They are free, and yet there is no air of freedom on the streets. I’m confined. At least my situation is enunciated.

At around two I have a crisis about whether or not the curative force and the level of thinking in this place are correctly balanced. I am so uneasy that I nearly fall down the stairs. I come into focus after the lecture, bathe, and sleep soundly in spite of three seizures of the trots. Waking, I feel surrounded by some impenetrable wall of nervous indisposition. There is a way out, I know—a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word—but I am at the moment unable to find it. My palms are wet. My thinking is confused. A drink would help. I must wait until I find the way out.

•

The sounds of evening in New York. A baritone practices his scales and sings an aria—Italian, I guess because of the sentiment and the G-sharp. Church bells. The only dog who lives on this block has a barking spell.

•

Waking on Sunday, I realized that I could go out onto the street at ten and be met by a young woman with an extraordinarily volatile and luminous face, the enormous clubby shoes that were worn last year, and when I have kissed her good morning and been kissed she will ask if her slip shows. Knowing that all of this will be mine in two hours, I wonder if I have the courage to leave confinement and seize my natural freedom. This for “Falconer.” I put it down poorly. Standing at the window, with my palms sweating, I wonder if I will have the courage to step through this door when it is opened.

The psychologist finds alarming discrepancies in my profile, and when I state a few clear and simple facts she laughs openly and scornfully into my face. “You are mad,” she says, a remark that has been made to me by several people, including a total stranger on the plane from Chicago. It is a pleasant and profitable madness. I sleep poorly, with long narrative dreams in black, white, and gray. I seem to have left all my manuscript in Boston, and then I realize that I can’t remember the trip from Boston to Ossining or my admission to the hospital. This is
blackout. I must have been quite drunk and mad. I can’t remember the hospital at all—not a nurse, not a dish. There was the view of the Hudson, rather flat there; the doctor’s red hunting shirt; my wife and children coming in to visit. But I recall all of this with no legitimate clarity. The sweetness of freedom. Freddy the killer had accustomed himself to confinement and had not prepared himself for anything else. How sweet his cell seemed, his erratic toilet, his colored photographs of long-lost children who would not answer his letters or rendezvous with him in Klein’s jewelry store or Macy’s men’s department. The night of the cats. J. tells me about working over Pepto-Bismol pills with a nail file to make them the size of Antabuse. He stayed off whiskey for six months, but his wife was never home. It was he, sober and unrewarded, who did the shopping, cooked the dinner, took care of the children. “You have your own life in whiskey,” she said. “Grant me mine.” “But I haven’t had a drink for six months,” he said. He sipped a Martini three and a half days after taking an Annabus and vomited all over the director’s table. A nice fellow, with a sharp bark for a laugh; very pleasant to drink with all night long.

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I wake at around two from the deepest, sweetest sleep I’ve known in a year. I think I can work, here or some such place, but I am doubtful about the house by the creek. Returning to that small room with yellow walls might mean returning to all my bad habits. Don’t I have the strength, can’t I find the strength to overcome the weight and power of environment?

I call Mary at dusk. The bank has miscalculated, and we are being charged for a two-thousand-dollar overdraft. This is all my fault. The Boston statements have not been forwarded, the other statements are lost among my manuscripts, the dog has just jumped into a muddy pond, etc. She is very bad-tempered. This sort of thing provokes my drinking. It makes me afraid to return.

As the dark gathers, I see a gang gathering on the corner of Madison Avenue. They swagger in very good imitations of adults. Uncle Giovanni. Joe the King. At a signal they all start running. Later there is a searing light across the sky until I hear thunder. (“It frightens me,” says J. at breakfast. It pleases me, I think.) But the room seems badly ventilated and I cannot sleep. My thinking is alarmingly disjointed. I steal a knife
from the kitchen to peel an apple. I see the gang again. These could be symptoms of withdrawal.

•

Across the yard, she puts out two plastic dog dishes for her cocker spaniel and her scottie. She is wearing a housecoat and looks hung over. I have never seen her fully dressed, or looking as if she didn’t need or have a drink. Then I think I hear some choral music. One hears almost no music from these backyards. Knowing absolutely nothing about music, I conclude, in a scholarly way, that it must be Puccini because of the ascending and melodramatic scale of flats. I once had perfect pitch, but that was long ago. Then I hear some dissonance and decide that it must be Berg or Schönberg. The soprano then hits a very high note and sustains it for an impossible length of time, and I realize that what I’ve been hearing is the clash of traffic and a police siren amplified by a light rain.

I read Berryman on rehabilitation centers. When I wake this morning my feeling of dislocation is very strong. I am nervous; my vision is poor; I keep singing Dartmouth songs that I can’t have heard for forty years. I’m a son of a gun for beer/I like my whiskey clear and if I had a son sir I’ll tell you what he’d do/he would yell to hell with Harvard as his daddy used to do.

•

A heavy rain at five. I am a boy again, a child. I hear the rain strike the air conditioners, watch it gleam on the slate shingles in Thursday’s last light. I read, sleep, dream, wake myself with the loudness of my voice. I am riding, wearing loafers, and my loafers keep slipping through the stirrups. “Short stirrups,” said Lila. “Did you ride much in Italy?” I never went near a horse in Italy. “She still loves you,” said the woman with braids.

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I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues; I’m feeling blue all the time. I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues, can’t get the pieces on the line. I’ve got those picking-up-the-pieces blues, but the puzzle ain’t mine.

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I was sprung from the alcoholic-rehabilitation clinic yesterday. To go from continuous drunkenness to total sobriety is a violent wrench. This moment, this hour, is the sum of the not immutable past and the necessity of a future. I don’t know where it began, and I might be able to retrace this year eighteen times without mastering it. It began, I suppose, with the pantomime on the other side of the river and continues this morning with a brief salutation, orange juice, and a little cold coffee. Now the house, containing two people, is still. Laughter seems to be my principal salvation. Laughter and work. I seem unable to resurrect the months in Boston. The role alcohol played is inestimable. I seem to have lost some manuscripts. I claim not to be troubled beyond worrying that they might fall into someone else’s hands. I cannot face the shame of having lost my moorings through drunkenness. I seem this morning to have lost twenty pounds and perhaps twenty-five years. One thing is the old drag-ass I used to justify by age. Ask me to take off the storm windows, but ask me tomorrow. Eat. Drink seventeen cups of black coffee. Since I claim this to be a means of communication, I must prove it. What do I have? The escutcheon, booze—but after a century as black as unpolished basalt, onyx, or anthracite. The representation of liberty and justice. The night of the cats. The visit, still unclear. I think of O’Hara kicking the shit in his forties and continuing to work. He was about the only one.

I’ve changed violently, but nothing else seems to have changed. Looking for a good-night kiss, I find the only exposed area to be an elbow. The dogs wake us before dawn, and when I ask if there is anything I can do, the reply is distempered. Recently, she has seldom enjoyed sleeping with me. I’m the king of the mountain, but nobody seems to know it. You can do the set piece about watching the visitors leave.

Day No. 2. I’m still very uptight but I think I won’t take Valium. The set piece I’ll aim at will be on liberty. There are three points of hazard. One is the euphoria of working at what I think is the best of my ability; one is the euphoria of alcohol, when I seem to walk among the stars; one is the euphoria of total sobriety, when I seem to command time. That bridge of language, metaphor, anecdote, and imagination that I build each morning to cross the incongruities in my life seems very frail indeed.

In Russia, in the 1860’s or 70’s, one would have written, “The tiny village of X, a hundred and twenty-seven versts from Moscow, was mentioned in the encyclopedia as the place where a landowner had successfully bred a dog with a cat.” In France, a little earlier, one would have written,
“La peu que nous savons de la petite ville de B—, nous savons parce que là se trouve un homme à deux têtes.”
In my own country, in the fifties and early sixties, one would have written, “The little mill town of Pearl River was one of those small industrial communities that welcome the driver with a sign saying ‘O
LD
IN
T
RADITION
, Y
OUTHFUL IN
G
ROWTH
’ and that are covered by a single Zip Code.” Today we are, thank God, spared these euphemisms and can say succinctly, “The little village of Pearl River was an asshole.”

•

Seventh day out of stir. It will be a week at 11
A.M.
N
O
meeting last night, but I think I’ll need one tonight. Work, sandwiches. My only brother arrives at half past two to scrutinize my sobriety. We both seem rather clumsy about the facts of age. It turns out that he’s had a prostate operation, followed by a blood clot that nearly killed him. He pisses ten times a night. My digestive and urinary tracts are crippled by their encounter with institutional food, and my asshole is quite sore. Time sits with us at the table, an unwelcome stray. My brother goes into New York, looks at Grand Central, is frightened, and comes home. The phobic curse of my family, all of whom were afraid of heights, crowds, thunder, wealth, and fame. No, thank you. My daughter comes. She seems a little breezy. I read Carson’s biography, and I shall report to A. Half awake, I have a glimpse of my iridescence, or my erotic stratifications. At the lowest, a shade below the subconscious, I embrace Z. This may be the comprehension of death by the love of death. At a stratum approaching consciousness, I embrace Y at that disarmament table where my social and my erotic natures put their signatures on an honorable truce. Fully awake, I embrace X. She stands on the highest step of the stair, stands in the sunlight, calling,
“Ben tornato, caro, carissimo.”
I will draft two letters before I get to work.

•

I miss Big Brother’s telephone calls and wonder if he’s sauced. He shows in time and we go off to an A.A. meeting in an Episcopal churc
behind the Hartsdale canine cemetery and across the street from the hair-transplanting center. “Southern California,” says my companion. The church, with its mortared fieldstone walls, aimed at being Trinitarian and wound up looking like a Neapolitan grotto. “Everything but the Virgin Mary,” says my companion. So, another meeting of no great moment passes.

•

Mr. Cheever says that his knowledge of confinement has been informed by the two years that he taught at Sing Sing; by being confined, as a writer, to a typewriter and a small room; and by having spent several months in various rehabilitation clinics for chronic alcoholics.

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Twelfth day out, and I shall stop counting.

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My sixty-third birthday. I feel as well as I’ve ever felt and thank God for this. Ben can’t come; Susie will be late. Mary says, “Shit, I’ve got this big piece of meat,” etc. It doesn’t matter at all. I am very fortunate and should go to church. Yesterday I worked, spaded the peonies, won 20¢ at backgammon, spaded some more, stepped in dog shit, took off my stinking shoes, and, washing the dogs, punctured my right foot on a cultivator. Mary bandaged the wound, and I went off to A.A. I could do a scarifying description of an old man in an ill-fitting suit, celebrating his 38th year of sobriety. They put out the lights and bring a cake with lighted candles down the aisle. An unseasonably cold wind blows out the candles. We sing: “Happy anniversary to you,” etc. One might point out that he could have done as well dying of cirrhosis, but that would be sinful. Returning here, I have acute pains across my middle and crawl naked and unwashed into my warm bed, where I fall asleep almost at once. Now I suffer from excessive loquaciousness, woolgathering, “Muskrat Ramble.”

•

Mary goes on one of her protracted shopping trips. One can only overlook that which is not to be understood. A letter from A., somewhat looser than his recent correspondence. I am spared a list of the perfumes that float in his window. He seems to be back on his tease routin,
something I have seen clearly only for a moment. Read Saul. The wonderfully controlled chop of his sentences. I read him lightly, because I don’t want to get his cadence mixed up with mine.

•

Work in the garden, which is much untamed, with Federico. Buy cauliflower and bean seeds, and, later, three moribund trees. My regression involves a lively concern with the property. I don’t recall doing much. I read, make a stab at hedge clipping, eat a nice dinner, go to A.A. in Croton. The damp and cold church basement. A woman with the blazing makeup and straw-colored hair of the town whore who used to work in Woolworth’s when I was a boy. A heavy woman with as much makeup. Our heavyset Irish leader, who twice, for mysterious reasons, speaks of unmanliness. “I mean, now you can feel tenderness for a man without no guilt,” he says. I split before the confession, which seems to take place at covered tables. Watch asinine TV with my son, sleep, wake on Sunday with work to do, but I seem, involuntarily, to be obliged to observe the day of rest. The dogs dig holes in the lawn, and I swear at them. Mary swears at the vacuum cleaner. Toward the end of the afternoon, I recall what I have done, in the rectitude of this environment. I could not, yesterday, and in this environment, confess to any of this, and yet I claim to be unashamed.