by John Cheever
•
I drink heavily because I claim to be troubled. We talk about the shrink at the table, and I expect I talk with drunken rancor. We go to a third-rate movie and, leaving, I cry, “Why, when I asked if the bulk of our life had not been happy, did you not reply?” “My look,” she said, “was my reply.” It may have been a sweet smile. I have one drink, one more, and sit on the stone steps. I think myself youthful, even boyish in my misery. I stretch out on the stones, sobbing, until I realize that I am in exactly the position of a doormat.
I sleep in my own bed, although this seems to be an indignity. I wake at dawn, crying, “Give me the river, the river, the river, the river,” but the river that appears has willows and is winding and is not the river I want. It looks like a trout stream, so I cast with a fly and take a nice trout. A naked woman with global breasts lies on the grassy banks and I mount her. She is replaced by Adonis, and, while I fondle him briefly, it seems like an unsuitable pastime for a grown man. I keep calling for my broad river, but they seem to have run railroad tracks through the Elysian fields, and I am given a brook with willows. I take a pill this morning, and it seems best for me to take full responsibility for everything that has gone wrong. There is no point in recounting to myself rebuffs, wounding quarrels, etc. One has come through much; one will come through this.
•
In the morning, I am quite shaky and have a flat tire. A garage mechanic who is even shakier than I struggles to change the tire. It takes him an hour, and he mangles the hubcap. When I see him later in the day, he has improved, and I suppose he has a bottle hidden among his tools. I drink Scotch at ten, two Martinis before lunch, and go off to the shrink. His mouth is a little blubbery, and he is not always successful in keeping his hands away from it. When I sit in the patient’s chair, still warm from some other breakdown, he turns the beam of his brown eye onto me exactly as the dentist turns on the light above the drill, and for the next fifty minutes I bask in his gaze and return his looks earnestly to prove that I am a truthful man. I don’t understand his methods, and, after drinking, I am not sure that this isn’t a waste of time and money. He considers me hostile and alienated, and yet, sitting among his reconstructed antiques, he seems more alienated than I. Does he know anything about music, literature, painting, baseball? I think not. When he brought up the subject of my friendlessness and I said that I had just had a very friendly weekend with H., A., and S., I thought he would cry. He explained that I had developed a social veneer—an illusion of friendship—that was meant to conceal my basic hostility and alienation. He seems, like some illusio of drunkenness, to have two faces, and I find it fascinating to watch one swallow up the other. There was a pause in the conversation, and he pursed his lips as if he had just sucked a lemon dry and asked, “What is blocking you now?” He is very sensitive and utterly humorless, and if I dared complain about his use of “meaningful” I’m sure it would wound and anger him. He wants to go over my childhood, and I’ll fire this at him tomorrow. The truth is that I am more afraid of bridges than ever, but I wonder if he has the cure. When I asked him he gave me his saddest smile.
•
I go to the shrink, and while we talk about castration and homosexuality there is some circumspection to our dialogue. I have not clearly stated that I have homosexual instincts and that they are a source of painful anxiety. I think I make too much of this. Since he offers me tentatively the opportunity of a confession, I look forward to making one, but something in his manner or the atmosphere keeps me from blurting out the fact that I am sometimes afraid of being queer. I claim to suffer no more than most men, and yet this claim may be at the root of my difficulties. I know the nature of man to be divided, paradoxical, wayward, and perverse, and yet I seem unable to live peaceably with this fact when it is applied to me. My wish to be a simple, natural, and responsive creature seems to be incurable. The shrink seems to have made the conflict obsessive, or pushed it in this direction. Lying in bed, I wonder if I can get it up when the time comes. This is absurd. I cannot evoke the fragrance, the shapeliness, the stirring in my bowels, and yet I torment myself; I charge myself with choosing a girlish boy instead of a lovely and passionate woman. It would be very easy to make out with a girl-boy, but ease is not what one seeks—although I have a sneaking suspicion that it is. All one needs is courage, vitality, and faith, and I very often have all three.
What I need is hopefulness, zeal, vigor, and deep love, and to complain to a shrink about my wife’s conduct in bed seems to be the opposite of all this. Complaining seems to be a mode of despair. I cannot bring myself to say what happened, because it would seem to jeopardize the possibility of making out tonight. I want to love and be loved, to be forthright and manly, and I won’t accomplish this by snivelling and whining in an air-conditioned consultation room with disinfected antiques. However, I do. But the shrink and I seem to be at cross-purposes. I think he works within a set of rigid and mysterious preconceptions. Who profits by concluding that Mrs. Zagreb is my mother? He accuses me of making a goddess of Mary, and I tell him that of course she is a goddess. Mary and I go to a movie, “Modesty Blaise,” which I consider expert, hilarious, and witty. I am happy and excited, and take two bourbons to calm myself; but in bed I go soft, and when I ask for some assistance it is given so halfheartedly that we part. Now perhaps we are coming into the borders of a dark country, but it may be a country of my making. I must avoid getting gin-mean.
•
I want a life of impossible simplicity. I want to make out in the peaceable gray light, either of dawn or of the rain. I want all homosexuals and other disconcerting types to be concealed from me. I want no one to suffer pain or death, to be poor or cold or humiliated.
•
I dream that a lady, looking at my face, says, “I see you’ve been in the competition, but I can’t tell by your face whether or not you’ve won.”
•
I think I return to the doctor today, and I think I have nothing to tell him. But what about the bitter quarrel on Friday night when I proposed a divorce and was accepted? What about our passionate reunion on Saturday afternoon, and what about the fact that I was impotent on Saturday night? What about the fact that I seem to be at sea? This morning, Mary is very brisk and goes off to get the maid before the maid will be ready. But what harm is there in this? I feel, on Monday morning, very sad. If I have been mean, I cannot remember my meanness, because my recollections are damaged by alcohol. I want to love and be loved, and the curtness I imagine myself to receive wounds me deeply. But that I am so easily wounded seems to be where the trouble lies.
•
I would like to come clean on the matter of homosexuality, and I think I can. I think I can see clearly the history and the growth of my anxiety. There was the clash between my instincts and my pleasure, my mother’s spectacular ambivalence and my father’s fear of having sired a fruit. The climate was anxious. In my determination to become a man, I felt it was my duty to respond to females. My responses were natural and strong, but they were at times short-circuited by this concept of duty. Homosexuality seemed to me a lingering death. If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol. In order to prove my maleness, I resorted to such absurd strategies as not letting my eye rest on the woman’s page in the morning Times. But now I seem to see it clearly. Homosexuality is not, as I live, an evil. The evil is anxiety, an anxiety that can take on all the shapes and colors of hopeless passion. I trust I will not have to prove this in practice, and at this point some vagueness enters my thinking. But I consider now that if I did bounce L. it would not be the abdication of my character and the destruction of an old friendship.
•
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind. Would Hammer be one
of those men who, having made an unhappy marriage, lack the vitality and the intelligence to extricate themselves? His only emotional life is the invention of blondes. His only sexual life is jacking off. He takes his blondes aboard ships and planes; shows them the splendors of Paris, Rome, and Leningrad; orders them four-course meals in restaurants; deliberates over the wine; takes them for walks; writes them checks; buys them jewelry; and falls asleep with their fine, stiff pubic brushes against his naked hip. He is very careful to brush his teeth and shave before making love. Would Mrs. Hammer say,” You’re a doormat, you’re a henpecked doormat, and don’t try to blame me. I’ll bet you’re the kind of man who thinks that someday, someday, some slender, well-bred, beautiful, wealthy, and intelligent blonde will fall in love with you. Oh, God. I can imagine the whole thing. It’s so disgusting. She’ll have straight hair and long legs and be about twenty-eight, divorced but without any children. I’ll bet she’s an actress or a nightclub singer. That’s about the level of your imagination. What do you do with her, chump, what do you do with her beside tying on a can? What is a henpecked doormat up to? Do you take her to the theatre? Do you buy her dinner, jewelry maybe? Do you travel? I’ll bet you travel. That’ your idea of a big thing. Fourteen days on the Cristoforo Colombo, tying on a can morning, noon, and night, and drifting into the first-class bar at seven in a dinner jacket. What a distinguished couple! What shit! But I guess it would be the Flandre, some place where you could show off your lousy French. I suppose you drag her around Paris in her high heels, showing her all your old haunts. I feel sorry for her; I really do. But get this straight, chump, get this one straight. If such a blonde showed up, you wouldn’t have the guts to take her to bed. You’d just moon around, mushing her behind the pantry door, and finally deciding not to be unfaithful to me. That’s if the blonde showed up, but no blonde is going to. Did you hear me? Hear this! No such blonde is going to show up. There isn’t any such blonde. You’re an old man with a five-tooth bridge, bad breath, and a hairy belly, and you’re going to be lonely for the rest of your life. You’re going to be lonely for the rest of your life.
“Well, why don’t you say something? Cat get your tongue? Sticks and stones? Why don’t you say something? I suppose you think you’re saintly to take my abuse quietly. I suppose you’re turning the other cheek. Well, if there’s anything that can drive a good woman to drink and fornication it’s having to live under the same roof with a bloody phony saint. And a big drink is what I’m going to have as soon as I get home.”
•
To be stymied sexually, wherever the blame may lie, usually means that I am stymied in my ability or willingness to tell stories. And it seems, this morning, that I have spent half of my married life in such a condition. There are the stories and characters I have invented to relieve myself of some of this—Betsey, Melissa, “The Chimera,” “The Music Teacher”—there are hundreds of pages dealing with the lovely woman from whose face the light has gone. H. says that all the fault is mine, and I will willingly take much of the blame, but I would be a fool to take it all.
•
Somewhere in the turnings of sleep I seem to recuperate, seem to bask in the feeling of love again—limber, able, and cleanly. The woman is Barbara, someone I have never seen, and she seems spread out beneat me like a sheet. I seem to hear the voices of my three children, clear and tender. Now when I summon up my girls they arrive willingly. Narcissus has vanished. I think this is a disappearance, not a repression.
•
Mr. Hitchcock, on the other hand, took each morning a massive tranquillizer that gave him the illusion that he floated, like Zeus, in some allegorical painting, upon a cloud. Standing on the platform waiting for the 7:53, he was surrounded by his cloud. When the train came in he picked up his cloud, boarded the no-smoking coach, and settled himself at a window seat, surrounded by the voluminous and benign folds of his tranquillizer. If the day was dark, the landscape wintry, the string of little towns they passed depressing, none of this reached to where he lay in his rosy nimbus. He floated down the tracks into Grand Central, beaming a vast and slightly absentminded smile at poverty, sickness, the beauty of a strange woman, rain and snow.
•
It is early autumn. The leaves are not brilliant, but have enough color to make the wooded hills seem lambent, rising. It is the double meaning of light. On the summits of the hills, doom-crack missile-launching stations bloom like mushrooms. Aurora gloria. I count only three fishermen on the banks of the river, abandoned by its sturgeon, shad, shellfish, mallards, and swans. The paper says that raw excrement from the city travels on the tides as far north as Yonkers. The tide is out, revealing, like a fallen sock, the river’s shank. I pound around the streets, not quite free from a sense of economic and sexual contest, but hopeful.
•
“We used to do things together,” he said. “We used to do so many things together. I mean we used to sleep together and skate together and ski together and take walks together and sail together and once we watched the World Series together. Remember? That was when we lived in the house on Pine Street. I came home early in the afternoons, and we drank beer and watched the World Series. That was the year Sal Maglie pitched for the Dodgers. Now we don’t do anything together.”
•
“You’re so unhappy,” she said, “that—I suppose—you have to be cruel.”
“I’m not cruel,” he said. “You really can’t call me cruel. I always feed the cats and the dogs. I always put seed in the bird-feeding station.”
•
Autumn leaf fires. The cook is drunk. Children make a barricade of leaves. Frost has slaughtered the begonias.
•
To confront, with forgiveness and compassion, the terrifying singularity of my own person.
•
I spend a lot of time these days writing funny letters to the dying. “Charlie only has two more weeks to live. He doesn’t know it, and he’s still alert, and if you had the time to write him a letter I think it would cheer him up.” “When I pushed Hazel’s wheelchair onto the terrace this morning she said that she’d love to hear from you. She’s failing.” “Eleanor has lost her sight but she still likes to be read to, and I’d love to have a letter from you to read to her.” Etc.
•
The high polish of these splendid autumn afternoons puts me at a loss. I don’t like to return to the office, and I seem to have no chores around this place. Walking alone can be a bore. The Ralph Ellisons stop by, having returned from Oklahoma City. He speaks of the Negro slums, now demolished, in lyrical terms. A source of vitality, music, violence, and sex. He has returned to all his old haunts—drugstores, cousins, friends, and saloons—and found this review of his past a deep kind of discovery. “It was wonderful,” she says. Thank you. I am, like Z., obsessed with my unhappiness, and seeing how easy they are with each other deepens my misery.
I read some “Lolita,” which seems to me a little putrescent. Here is the inalienable fascination of perversity—known, I think, to all men. At dinner we talk about Horace Gregory, and the conversation seems warm and easy. I should bring more warmth and patience to the table. But something goes blooey, and I am too drunk to recall the collision. I say, foolishly, that I have done her a favor. Mary says that she hates to have me do anything for her or the children because I gloat over their dependence upon me. She says that I gloated over driving Ben to work this summer and that I reviled Susie for her extravagances. I don’t think I really gloat, but it can be observed that she thinks I do. This would explain why she is unwilling to let me get her a cup of tea when she is sick, why she is unwilling to spend my money. Things worsen and grow ugly. I ask what kind of a woman is it who, being approached tenderly, says that she has to put the potatoes in the oven? She says that she can’t bear to be gentled by an impotent man. I ask her what made her think I would be impotent, and she says, “You’d better be careful, you’d better be careful.” I go upstairs and watch an old movie. We meet in the b
athroom, where I ask for some gesture or token of love, some glance, and she makes a face. Then, in a rage, I shout at her in full voice, “You cannot make a grimace when someone asks for love.” Just before dark I take her in my arms. I am sick with a need for love. She lets me hold her for a few minutes. I say that I will promise never to shout at her again if she will promise not to make faces at me. She says that she will make faces at me when she is provoked. The worst of it is that my son must hear this abuse, as I heard my parents quarrel when I was a child. I think I and my drunkenness are not completely to blame. Her attitude toward me does not seem to parallel the facts, to shift and change as events shift and change. She seems prejudiced, and her prejudices seem to come from a time of life before we met. I do not often gloat over things done. When she speaks of my impotence I say that I am not impotent with other women. This is a damned lie, since all I’ve done is neck with other women. I love her; she is really all I’ve ever known of life, but I think that to be independent would not kill me, although there is the problem of drunkenness. I cannot ask for forgiveness—who is there to forgive me?—but I can make an effort not to shout within my son’s hearing. I cannot judge whether or not I’m drunk, but any resolve to drink less would be hypocritical. I am now, at ten o’clock, thinking of a gin bottle. I wish to be loving and simple and loved, and I will remain hopeful.
•
Shaken with liquor, self-doubts dimmed slightly by a Miltown, I board the nine o’clock. I am in misery. Every man on the train seems richer, more virile and intelligent than I, and there are no beautifu women. The man in front of me seems to be a Magyar; an identifiable racial type. The skin is dark; the eyes are brown; he is bald with a thin fringe of gray hair, and he has the kindly smile of an old friend, who is dead. He does not resemble my friend at all, but he seems to have the identical smile, as if this expression—this transparency—were a quality of light and existed independently of one’s features. I am shaky and constipated. I get a shoeshine and decide that I am too far gone to sit in a barber chair. Walking and air will help, and I start pounding up Madison Avenue. I notice mostly that the girls are pretty and that the bars I pass are shut. I admire Breuer’s new building and go to see P.’s sculpture, which I find less vigorous and exciting than I had hoped. Then down Madison Avenue I pound, and you may have seen me at quarter after eleven, trying the door of each bar I passed and finding them all locked, the night-light burning, the bottles behind bars. I go all the way back to the Biltmore to find an open bar, and then wonder, Will my shaking hands be able to get a glass to my mouth? I manage, and after two drinks am well enough to sit in the barber chair. I am recognized; I speak Italian; I observe that in the forty years I have been coming here half the barbers have died. I discharge my duties at the Century and take a bus downtown. This is the first time I have ridden a bus in many years and I seem, through inexperience, to suffer a form of sexual nakedness. Glancing into the eyes of a strange woman, I am provoked. I jog home on the local, falling asleep over a copy of Life. Businessmen sleeping on trains appear, whatever their condition may be, discouraged, helpless, and lost. There is a pretty girl across the aisle, and I seem to inhale her. I can’t see enough of her, and she makes me both happy and languorous. I go to bed at half past eight and have a horrendous dream in which Mary is made president of the college. There is a hint of ruthlessness here. I remember watching her father seize a position of power. I retaliate by having a homosexual escapade, unconsummated, with Ronald Reagan. Walking on Madison Avenue, I had been tormented with the thought that my sins would be discovered, although I claim to have committed no sins. My children will vilify and disown me, my loving dogs will bark at me, even the cleaning woman will spit in my direction. Where is mercy, where is forgiveness? It is everywhere.
