The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  While I am making him some coffee in the kitchen my little son runs in with the news that there is a snake in the yard. I follow him. “There, there!” he cries. I am slow to pick them out, but then I see three lethal pit vipers, writhing in the sun. Two have lost their old skin and are brilliant copper. One is still as dark as a stick. I go to get the shotgun. The gun-shy bitch begins to whimper and bark. The hunting dog begins to bark with joy. My brother, purblind but too vain to wear glasses, stumbles over to the snakes. “I’ll tell you what they are. I know all about snakes. Our place is infested with them. I’ll tell you whether or not they’re dangerous.” Mary begins to laugh at me. “He thinks all snakes are venomous,” she says. “Garter snakes, milk snakes. Please don’t kill them,” she says. “They’re quite harmless.” Before I can clear the yard, the vipers retire into the wall. “Helen Washburn was bitten by a copperhead last year,” Fred says, triumphantly. “That’s a help,” I say bitterly. “Vipers never grow over two feet long,” Mary says, “and one of those snakes was more than two feet. And anyhow, people never die of snakebites.” The vipers are a clear danger to my beloved sons. Why should she be put into such a contradictory humor? She looks up vipers in the encyclopedia and in the snake book. She is saddened at having to admit they are deadly, deathly. It is a personal defeat.

  And in Fred’s ungainly walk there is a trace of furtiveness and haste—the hopeful gait of a man who has left a liquor store after having paid for a quart of gin with an unsubstantiated check. Will they call the bank before he gets out the door? Will bells and whistles sound, will somebody shout “Stop that man!”? He enjoys some relief when he gets out the door, but his troubles are not over. He enjoys a further degree of relief when he gets into the car, but his troubles are not over. The car floods, the car won’t start. (“I’m calling to check on the bank balance of Mr. Lemuel Estes.”) The battery, as he grinds the starter, begins to show signs of weakness. Then the motor catches, he backs out into the street, makes a right turn, and, when he feels safe at last, stops the car, screws the top off the bottle, and takes two or three long pulls. Oh, sweet elixir, killer of pain. Gently, gently the world reform itself into interesting, intense, and natural arrangements. Thomas Paine drank too much. General Grant. Winston Churchill. He is in the company of the truly great. He stops twice on the way home and, having put away nearly a pint, comes into his house with that air of blustering good cheer, that heartiness that deceives no one.

  •

  Without the lift of whiskey I wonder if I am not less than intelligent in facing my problems. I am fifty. Can I go on writing stories forever? Why not? I should think of myself in terms not of my age but of my work, which is barely half done. I think that I should move to a hotel, but then I think that I cannot leave my family; my eyes flood with tears, and I empty the whiskey bottle. I should take advantage of my maturity and not be dismayed at the loss of my youth.

  •

  I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

  •

  It is after dark—just. A summer night, stars and fireflies. The last night in June. My older son stands on the bridge over the brook with a Roman candle. He is a man now. His voice is deep. He is barefoot and wears chinos. It takes two or three matches to light the fuse. There is a splutter of pink fire, a loud hissing, the colored fire is reflected in the water of the brook and lights the voluminous clouds of smoke that roll off the candle. The light changes from pink to green, from green to red. It makes on the trees and in the heavy air an amphitheatre or sphere of unearthly light. In this I see his beloved face, his figure. I cannot say truthfully that I have never felt anything but love for him. We have quarrelled, he has wet his bed, he has waked strangling from nightmares in which I appeared as a hairy werewolf dripping with gore. But all of this is gone. Now there is nothing between us but love and good-natured admiration. The candle ends with a loud coughing noise and voids a spate of golden stars and a smell of brimstone. He drops the embers into the brook. Then the dark takes over, but I think that I have seen something splendid: this young man, the weird and harmless play of colored light, the dark water of the brook.

  •

  The first page of a new journal, and I hope to report here soon that the middle section of the Wapshots has fallen into shape. I expect that I will continue to report here that I drink too much.

  •

  The O’Hara book—he is a pro, a gifted man. There is the sense of life being translated, but I think also an extraordinary vein of morbid sexual anxiety. I would like “The Scandal” to be clear of this. I think the difference is between a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life. He is good and rough and not so lacy as me, but I hope to come to better terms.

  •

  The firemen’s bazaar. Seven o’clock. A July night. A rusted and battered backstop stands behind the circle of trucks and booths turned in against the gathering darkness like a circle of covered wagons. Parents and children hasten along the roads that lead to the bazaar as if it might all be over before they got there, although in fact they will get there before it has begun. The sumptuary revolution makes me feel old. Both the boys and the girls are wearing skintight pants, and there are many cases of ungainly and sometimes painful tightness. And in the crowd there are reminders of the fact that there are still some farms outside the village limits. I see a red-faced man, a little drunk, followed by an overworked woman who has cut her own hair as well as the hair of the four shabby children that follow. These are the poor; these are the ones who live upstairs over the shoe store, who live in the cottage down by the dump, who can be seen fanning themselves at their windows in the heat. When you leave at six to catch an early plane, these are the ones that you see at dawn, waiting by the bus stop with their sandwiches in a paper bag. But it is the children I enjoy most, watching them ride in mechanical pony carts and airplanes, suspended by chains from a pylon. Their brilliance, this raw material of human goodness. A very plain woman in the last months of pregnancy, who looks out at the scene calmly and with great pride in this proof of the fact that someone has taken her in his arms. Many of the girls have their hair in rollers half concealed by scarves. Like primitive headdresses and, in the darkness, like crowns.

  •

  Our relationship remains in suspense. I have neither the boisterousness nor the virility to make the bridge or span between these two unrelated personalities, and I experience that bewilderment which always overtakes me when some obstruction in my sexual life is felt. I cannot reach out. I am afraid I may be rebuffed. I cannot transcend these fears. I glimpse the horrors of incompatibility; the power of lovers to mutilate each other. At nine-thirty my stomach begins to heave. It is difficult to breathe. I should be familiar enough with these symptoms to put them in their place, but they overtake me with such intensity that they seem to be not a part of life but all of life. I feel racked by the visible and the invisible world. My guts are drawn with pain.

  •

  Light and shade, pleasant and discordant noises, the singing of the cleaning woman and the thumping sound of the washing machine are dealt like a series of blows. I cannot think of the stories I have to write without a sharpening of this visceral pain. I cannot invent terms or images of repose. I grant myself all the privileges of a liar, but there is no heart in my lies and inventions. There is nothing. There is neither ecstasy nor repose, there is only the forced illusion of these things. The span between living and dying is brief and anguished, and the soul of man is reflected not in snug farmhouses and great monuments but in fourth-string hotel rooms, malodorous and obscure. This is all there is. There is nothing. Tired but sleepless, lewd but alone, hopeless, drunk, sitting at the window on the airshaft in some other country: this is the image of man. I remember those midtown hotels, the Carlton in Frankfurt, the Eden in Rome, the Palace in San Francisco, hotels in Hollywood, Innsbruck, Toledo, Florence. Here is the soul of man, venereal, forlorn, and uprooted. All the rest of it—the cheering lights of morning, sweet music, the t
owers and the sailboats—are fantastic inventions, evasions, lies, vulgarities, and politenesses poorly invented to conceal the truth.

  •

  A day like autumn, the light fresh, the wind sounding loudly in the trees. My family off to the mountains, and God bless them. The best I can do in these three weeks is to work hard and pull the novel into shape. Perhaps I can go abroad in the fall. I must do something about finding a place to work. I cannot go through another winter like last winter.

  •

  We rise from sleep all natural men, boisterous, loving, and hopeful, but the dark-faced stranger is waiting at the door, the viper is coiled in the garden, the old man whispers lewdly to the boy, and the woman sits at her table crying.

  •

  So in the dark hours, awake, I think of the wind and the rain and in my arms a willing love, her dugs hardened against my chest, her hand where it belongs. The night air is fresh. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, lighting the legends on the all-night trucks. Daybreak spreads along the westbound highways, and I shall sleep, I shall sleep. I shall conquer death and anger and fear.

  •

  Rows and misunderstandings, and I put them down with the hope of clearing my head. “I think it’s too hot to split wood,” say I. “Well, I don’t,” says Mary. “If it’s not too hot for me to rake, it’s not too hot for you to split wood.” “You do your work,” say I, “and I’ll do mine.” But I am in a bad temper, and I think of the W.s all ordering one another around, working not so much to accomplish anything as to ingratiate themselves with the old king, who was trying, in turn, to ingratiate himself with immortality. At dinner I try to explain my leaving to work on the book. “I feel sorry for you,” says Mary, “your life is so miserable. I really feel sorry for you. I won’t miss you, of course. If you could only figure out what you want.” I cut some edges, but I am angry, and returning to the kitchen I say (at dark), “Can’t you figure out after twenty-five years what it is that I want? I want your love, I want to see the children grow and take up their lives, I want to do a piece of decent work.” I am shouting. Then she says, “I am going away. I will take a little apartment and live there with the children. You are torturing me to death. You are torturing me to death.”

  •

  Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fal to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples.

  •

  It is my wife’s body that I most wish to gentle, it is into her that I most wish to pour myself, but when she is away I seem to have no scruple about spilling it elsewhere. I first see X at the edge of the swimming pool. He is sunbathing, naked, his middle covered by a towel. His voice sounds coarse and unpleasant. He speaks with a slight accent—Italian, perhaps—or perhaps a piece of faulty bridgework. He hogs the best chair, gives out aggressive emanations, says nothing that is not complaining or stupid, and we seem to be natural enemies. But then, a day later, I find him sitting beside me at the table, feel his gaze on me—soft, tender, and pupilless. He touches my shoulder. Suddenly he is all courtesy, kindness, and attention, and I see him in a different light. I see that he is handsome, well knit, but soft enough to do in a pinch. I think that a variety of hints or lures are sent out. He has met me before, he says, with Y, with Z. His soft gaze follows me, settles on me, and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch. If he should put a hand on my thigh I would not remove it; if I should chance to meet him in the shower I would tackle him. But is this itchiness mutual or is it mine alone: is it only my tassel that is up, down, and sore as a boil? Does he sense this or is he thinking about yesterday’s tennis game or a check he hopes to get in the mail? I am determined not to be a supplicant, not to be compromised by my instincts, and so perhaps is he; these are the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation. But then there are the spiritual facts: my high esteem for the world, the knowledge that it is not in me to lead a double life, my love of perseverance, a passionate wish to honor the vows I’ve made to my wife and children. But my itchy member is unconcerned with all of this, and I am afraid that I may succumb to its itchiness. We are urged to take things as they come, to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I could not meet the smiles of the world. I do not like his voice, his mind; I probably will not like his work. I like only that he seems to present or offer himself as a gentle object of sensual convenience. And yet I have been in this country a hundred times before and it is not, as it might seem to be, the valley of the shadow of death. And, whatever th instinctual facts are, there is the fact that I find a double life loathsome, morbid, and anyhow impossible. So I hear in the night the lightest of rain winds, but it does not draw me out of myself, and when I hear the sound of a fine and covering rain my wish to find some peace in this ancient noise seems childish and unseemly compared to the perverse thrust in my middle. But there is some spiritual element in this drive, some hunger to be taken care of—to put down, for an hour, the intolerable burden of total independence. But I have been here before, and in the end it may be nothing, nothing. Why should I be tempted to throw away the vast delights of love for a chance shot in a shower? And I think I share this trouble with most of mankind.

  •

  A dark and rainy day, and this rain does not seem to fall calmly from the skies of my childhood. It exacerbates my discontents. At noon I drink the vermouth dregs and lose my temper. Why can’t I bring calm and intelligence to this old house, this cozy room, this gentle rain? I am uncontrollably restless. I drive into town and buy a quart of gin. This helps, but not too much, and I must be careful not to succumb to distempers. The rug and the floor are filthy. The clock is out of time. I work on an airplane model with the boy. I clean the rug. Mary helps me. After dinner I sit in the dining room with a glass of gin. I am discouraged. I am close to despair. I watch an educational program on TV in which the fugitive John Milton and his accomplice Andrew Marvell speak eloquently about the ornaments of liberty. Sitting on a pile of cushions in a dirty attic, I think I endure a new degree of discouragement, although I know that I do not. I think that I will be unable to sleep, but I am mistaken. But waking at three or four I think that I have been selling ice cream, the seven flavors of discouragement. Thinking back over my work, I can find nothing to cheer me. But I sleep and wake again full of cheer, opportunity, hope.

  •

  I take a train up the Hudson Valley on a brilliant autumn afternoon. Read, drink. Strike up a conversation with a heavy woman. Decorous. Educated as a schoolteacher, she has an accent that is prim and enlightened. She mistakes me for an Englishman and I lead her on. She is at first afraid of my intentions. Ultimately, I am afraid of hers. Sh tells me the story of her life: the fortune lost in the crash, her grandfather the judge; she ran for county supervisor on the Democratic ticket, spent a night in the governor’s mansion in Albany. I do not listen carefully, and return to my roomette. I wake at three, bare-arse, my flower stiff as a horn vis-à-vis myself in the long mirror; and I think, Should we bring compassion to the exhibitionist hiding in the bushes of a public park, his pants down around his knees, or lingering in the Y.M.C.A. shower? Is this madness or is it the perversity of mankind? The track joints beat out a jazz bass, versatile, exhilarating, and fleet—some brilliant improvisation on the ardent beating of the heart—and the wind sounds in the brake boxes like the last records Billie Holiday ever made. These blues, these blues. I wake and dress before dawn. Ohio. The country flat. The light, rising in the east, shows the western sky, black as storm clouds.

  The old lady sits down. “I will need more butter than that,” she says. Then she leans across the aisle and says, “Excuse me for speaking to you without having been introduced, but to see a happily married couple like you and your husband does my heart so much good that I have
to say so. We don’t see many happily married couples these days, do we? I don’t know why it is. My own husband is gone. He went sixteen years ago. It sounds like a long time ago, but for me it seems like a moment. He was a minister. We had a nice congregation in Poughkeepsie. He had never had a sick day in his life. He had never had a toothache, a headache, a cold, he had never had a sick day in his life. Then one morning he woke with this pain in his side. Cancer. I took him to the hospital, but he simply wasted away. I had twelve specialists. When we all knew that the end was near, they let me take him home. He was lying in bed one afternoon and he said, ‘Mother, Mother, will you help me? I want to sit in my chair by the window.’ Well, I put my arms around him to help him to the window, and he went. He went in my arms. I had seven brothers and sisters, but they’re all gone.”

  Two women come in. The waiter asks if they had a good trip to New York. “Let’s write it off,” they say gallantly. “Now we’re home. The good old Middle West.” They look out of the window at the fields, houses, pigsties, the distant groves of oak. The train blows its whistle—a diminished fifth. A mare with a foal, cows, and pigs run away from the track. All the way across Ohio and Indiana the farm animals are frightened by the train.