by John Cheever
•
Thunder wakes me at midnight. I go from room to room, closing the doors and windows. A bolt strikes close to the house. I smell cordite. What will we find split in the morning? The birch, the tulip tree, the ash? The dogs are frightened, the lights go out. I mount my beloved, and off we go for the best ride in a long time.
•
I cannot describe the Mass without describing my friend, and I cannot describe him in these pages. He was genuinely volatile, eccentri, capable of great physical and intellectual velocity. He never spoke to me of his conversion to the Church of Rome. I cannot guess at his motives. He is buried outside the gates of that city, and the Mass yesterday was performed without his remains and without his widow, who is in London. The architecture of the church was contemporary and highly decorative along lines that in their conspicuous simplicity seemed Oriental to me. What I mean to say is that the usual threadbare iconography of Christendom—the worn carpets, the tarnished vigil lights, the vestments from Brussels—were all gone. Behind the chancel was a rotunda of pale-yellow marble. All the colors or the lack of color was what one finds in a Shinto shrine. An enormous figure in an attitude of blessing hung behind the altar. The three priests faced the congregation. One wore white robes, one’s robes were ornamented with fishes, and the third’s with a new moon and a cross. In spite of all this elegance, the architect had miscalculated acoustically, and I couldn’t hear the Epistle, the Gospel, or the eulogy. The Mass was in English, but I thought it beautiful—a full choir and organ thundering in with the responses. But what one thinks is what it must have cost—one sees Mr. F. on the telephone talking with the priest. “He was a very brilliant associate and we would like a suitable ceremony.” “Organ?” “Yes.” “A full choir will come to a thousand.” “Money, under the circumstances, is of course no consideration, and we will of course make a substantial contribution to the church.” “Would you like one, two, or three priests?” “Three, please.”
We were a small congregation—really a handful—but he was never a man with a circle of friends. We seemed outmaneuvered by the richness of the church, and surely we were outnumbered by the choir.
•
Happy, happy, happy. I spend the afternoon boiling lobsters, swim, suffer a mild seizure of gin nastiness, plan to take Federico fishing, but we can find no plugs, and the bait store is closed. I see S. tomorrow, but, since Mary is yielding, I have no wish or need for clipping and kissing behind pantry doors. A brilliant day.
•
So we see once more the serene novelist whose antics have bored us for ten years. He is left alone from noon until dark and goes to pieces. He reads, misreads, drinks, snoozes, repeats vulgar and stupid anecdotes at great length, and is contemptible. I must do better.
•
E. comes over, and we tell each other the stories of our lives; two men of fifty-eight in an empty house. The talk drifts toward money. This does not annoy me as it did. I remember little of what was said. Beautiful, beautiful D. is now sixty years old and proud of the fact that she has been screwed by at least a thousand men. I think of swimming, but I am lame from pushing the mower—this is unusual—and feel tired. The sulfa drug I take seems soporific. I eat a cheese sandwich and a piece of melon in the twilight, take a bath, and go to bed before the stars are out. I wake—I don’t know the hour. I am soaked with sweat and shiver convulsively at any touch of the night air; but there is some serenity to this condition. I am sick and I am calm. I dream that some maid is driving nails into the highboy. I explain to her that it is three hundred years old (a lie). “Well, it’s about time you threw it away,” she says. I see my family—Susie, Rob, Ben, Linda, Mary, and Federico—and how much I love them, how perfect is my contentment! This seems to be not love but a perfect equation in which light is exchanged. And, half asleep, I think I see some way of getting back into my work. It is the old image of spatial arrangements—not tables and chairs but abstract form. The light is sombre but not dim, not soft, a strong, pure gray light. By moving the forms, by changing the spaces between them, something seems to be accomplished. A voice from somewhere says, This is neither erotic nor spiritual. I see a rock pool in Maine, filled at high tide. I wonder if there is any erotic cause for my excitement. I think not. The pool seems beautiful and serene.
•
Make love in the meadow; me not peerless. I scar my naked hip on a wild rose.
•
Thunderstorms, polished air; the light seems honed, buffed, and, late in the day, strikes from a low angle. I swim at around four, but the poignance of a swimming pool in September seems to have lost its legitimacy for me. The pool is real enough and is the crux, the trut of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun and I lie naked on them. Happy, happy.
•
A story by Hemingway, most of which involves a young man’s four-hour fight with a thousand-pound broadbill. Just as they try to gaff the catch the line breaks. There is courage, endurance, and blood, and the young man’s character is formed in the rigors of the contest. There is the old four-stress cadence—“We lived that year in a house on a hill”—sometimes beautiful and sometimes monotonous. I remain mystified by his suicide.
•
The place where they all went. This could be a dream. Who are they? Old girlfriends; barmen; barbers; the friends you make on beaches, on boats, in the army; maids; gardeners; clerks; salesmen; backgammon, football, Softball, and bridge partners; all those for whom you felt intensely, briefly, and who have vanished, who, for all you know, might be dead. They are not. They live, those hundreds, on a key between the inland waterway and the Gulf of Mexico, a place that has to be reached by boat. Why have they, so to speak, given up; why have they retired; why have they stopped mixing drinks, cutting hair, cracking jokes, writing books and poetry, teaching school, meeting lovers, dancing, raking leaves; why have they stepped out of that landscape where they seemed to belong? They don’t seem to know, or if they do they seem unwilling to say so. They are not terribly old or infirm. They are mostly in their early fifties. Their smiles are still friendly, a little retiring these days, but they still have the gift of making a most casual exchange—setting a drink on the bar—seem immediate, friendly, and absorbing, the citizens of an easygoing planet. Why did they all go away?
•
Rain in the night. Three A.M. Very fucky but no cigar. At nine we go up the hill to see the night-blooming cereus perform.
•
Today gloomy and humid. I walk the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond, and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.
•
My routine has been to write a page or so on “Artemis”—no more—and mix a drink at ten. This means, since I cannot write and drink, that my working day is very brief. Now, for the first time in more than a month, I have a desk, a lamp, and a place where I can keep my papers. I’m back in a summery country.
•
There would not be much point in describing these last days. On Tuesday we were lovers and on Wednesday warriors. I am told that I am an insane shit, that even when I am loving I am a shit. She is planning to leave, which will be the second time this week. What I will forget and never mention is what I heard at dinner. “What is worse for a woman: to marry a man with a bad prostate or to marry a homosexual?” But where does this venom originate? I might say that she dislikes men, but I know this isn’t so. She hates me much of the time, but naturally I can’t understand why anyone should hate me.
•
I spend all of the daylight hours immersed in my morbid and clinica
l obsession. I seem toward dusk to muster a little reason. Mary goes into town to a party, and Federico and I have a pleasant evening together. Should beautiful women read telephone directories on TV I would watch them. Mary returns and I kiss her good night, which is a step, however small, in the right direction.
•
So I think work, work, work—that will be the solution to all my problems. Work will give meaning to my unhappiness. Work will give reason to my life. Twenty minutes later my mind strays to the gin bottle, and I will presently follow.
•
When I get the mixture right, as I seem to have done last night, my gratitude is immense, my gratitude is spiritual. Work, work, work, I say, love, love, love, and I can rewrite the first of “Artemis” or sketch in the remaining narrative. Thinking of the booze fight, I seem willing to settle for this battlefield rather than go to a dry-out farm. It is a battlefield, and I’ve been advancing and retreating for fifteen years. The last weeks have seen many losses, but today the enemy seems quiet or occupied on some other front.
•
I am disappointed in “Artemis,” disappointed and at times frightened, but I think, later in the day, that I can bring it off. It lacks density and enthusiasm, and my search for another method, a new method, has not been successfully completed. Keep trying.
•
The first word I hear on Christmas day in the morning is “shit.” I think perhaps I should have an affair with a man. I will go to X and say, “I’ll let you have me,” and he will laugh and say, “You’re twenty years too late. You might, you just might have passed twenty years ago, but now you’re nothing but a potbellied old jerk.”
•
And so we celebrate the birth of Christ. Let man receive his King.
THE SEVENTIES AND THE EARLY EIGHTIES
The first day of the new year. No toothache, and I wake feeling very happily horny. I trust the year will end this way.
We walk to the F.s’, where we are shown home movies of the Cairo bazaar and where much that is said seems to have been said before. My little camera is my memory, etc. Later, just before dark, I go to see S., a pleasant woman, with an open fire, who gives me whiskey. A drunken scene, for which I am heartily sorry.
I claim again that the Sunday Times derails me. Shovel snow, walk the dogs over the hill. Mary’s sister calls and when I say she’s in Chappaqua she says, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Did they let her come home for Christmas?” “Chappaqua,” I say, “is the next village.” “Oh,” says she, “I thought it was a rest home.”
•
Drinking with R. and S. and M., I seem to glimpse—no more—the fact that I can be difficult, ungainly, prone to flare up at trifling misunderstandings. I think of my brother, examine what I remember of his conduct and misconduct, since the end of his marriage resembled in some ways mine. He drank too much, and so do I, although I will not end up in a hospital. He seemed morbidly sensitive to any sort of discrimination. I remember his stamping off the playing field. When I asked him what was wrong he said that P. was cheating. We were playing touch football, bluff was half the game. Sorehead. I trust I don’t do this. He would punish his wife by refusing to speak to her for a week or two. He merely punished himself, of course. We have the same blood, the same memories, and make, I suppose, the same mistakes. Who, after all, is that man who puts a dime in the lock of the public toilet and in this privacy drinks from a flask of vodka? It is I. When? Las month, last year, six years ago. I seem to have changed more than the airport. The imitation orange drink still geysers in a sort of glass showcase. The coffee is weak. The cock drawn on the toilet door seems a size smaller than it did last time. My hair is gray.
Are these the accents of contempt or is this my morbid sensibility? For example, I mix drinks and ask her to join me. “I have to wash the spinach,” she says. The voice strikes me as unnatural, unwarm. I do not, of course, check on the truth of this. Once I said, “Let’s fuck,” and she said, “I have to find the baking potatoes.” “I’ll find the potatoes,” I said, and I did, but when I returned to the bedroom she had dressed. Saturday night, I suggested again that she join me. I want someone to talk with, but I also feel that the sound of conversation might relax my son. Hours pass when the only voices one hears are electronic. To this invitation she says, “I have to go to the bathroom.” “Well, won’t you join me after you’ve been to the bathroom?” I say. She does, but she holds a book in front of her face. I talk about Lorca, whose poetry she is reading. “I will not be lectured about a book you have not read,” says she, leaving the room. I did not intend to lecture her, but perhaps I mistook my tone of voice. Later—and I may now be as my brother was, moved in the stumbling and ungainly way of gin, half deaf, half blind, responding to some blow that was dealt so far in the past it can’t be remembered—“I won’t listen to your shit.” The raised voice will be heard by my son, and my good intentions have come to nothing. I climb another flight of stairs and watch something asinine on TV.
She is, to say the least, laconic this afternoon. At dusk, she takes the dog for a walk, the first in months. She returns at dark. She is excited. “I saw Josephine, I saw Josephine for the first time since Christmas, and I didn’t have an apple or some sugar for her.” Josephine is a lonely and unridden horse, owned by the superintendent in the next place. Now it is dark and cold, and Josephine’s corral is perhaps a mile away. Mary takes an apple and some sugar and goes off into the winter night. Can I, having dived into the pond in October to pick some water lilies, claim that she is eccentric? I am pleased to see that she is moved and excited, but there is an unpleasant trace of skepticism in my thinking. Later, on TV, a polar bear is murdered. “They’ve shot the mother polar bear!” she cries; and she cries, she sobs. “They’ve shot the mother polar bear!” And I think that perhaps I should go on TV, that if I approached her through the tube on the shelf above the sink I might win her interest and her affection, but I would have to b disguised as a mother polar bear, or some other wild, innocent, and wronged animal.
•
I think of my father, but nothing is accomplished. The image of him is an invention, not a memory, and an overly gentle invention. There was his full lower lip, wet with spit; his spit-wet cigarette; his hacking cough; the ash on his vest; and the shabby clothes he wore, left to him by dead friends. “Let’s give Fred’s suits to poor Mr. Cheever.” I find in some old notes that my mother reported that he had, just before his death, written a long indictment of her—as a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and a woman. I never saw the indictment. I suppose, uncharitably, that the effect on her would have been to fortify her self-righteousness. She had worked so hard to support a helpless old man, and her only reward was castigation. Sigh—how deep were her sighs. I have no idea of what their marriage was like, although I suspect that he worshipped her as my brother worshipped his choice and as perhaps I have worshipped mine. In my brother’s case there was, I think, that rich blend of uxoriousness in which praise has a distinct aftertaste of bitterness, not to say loathing. I think that Mary was wounded years before I entered her life, and who is this ghost whose clothes I wear, whose voice I speak with; what were the cruelties of which I am accused? She may look for another lover; I certainly do. Are we, lying in our separate beds and our separate rooms, only two of millions or billions who wake a little before dawn each morning thinking hopefully that surely there is some man or woman who would be happy to lie at our sides? Happy for cheerful kissing, fucking, jokes, the day to come. I suppose we outnumber the felicitous by millions, and I must say that had I been given a loving and uncomplicated woman I might very well have run.
•
The terrifying insularity of a married man and woman, standing figuratively toe to toe, throwing verbal blows at each other’s eyes and genitals. Their environment is decorous, a part of their culture. The clothes they wear are suitable for this part of the world, this time of year, this income bracket. There are flowers (hothouse) on the table (inherited). Children sleep
or lie awake in upstairs bedrooms. They seem as well rooted and native to this environment as the trees on th lawn, but at the height of their quarrel they seem to stand on some crater of the moon, some arid wilderness, some Sahara. Their insularity is incomprehensible. This is an abandoned place.
•
I read the three stories and don’t much like them. Phony modesty, perhaps. I’ve never much liked my work. The point is not to count my losses but to exploit what remains. I pick up “Crime and Punishment” and exclaim with pleasure over the opening sentence. Halfway down page 3 I close the book and watch TV. So the great books drop from our hands. Skating, I swing my arms, swing back happily into my youth, my childhood. The black ice on Braintree Dam, through which you could see the grasses. The instant the sun went down, the ice made a sound like cannon. And I think of the green valley of the Rorty and the hum of wild bees in the hall of the ruined castle. The sound was so loud you could hear it from the banks of the stream. I was thankful that I had heard nothing so romantic earlier in life. Mary swam in the stream, and the water seemed to magnify the size of her backside. My knees buckled.
•
Palm Sunday. Federico and I go to church. During the years that I’ve said my prayers here the priest’s hair has turned white and his eyeglass prescription has been strengthened. J.L. smells of hair oil and toothpaste, a clash of scents. S. seems not beautiful, not at all, but she seems this morning to remind one powerfully of how beautiful she must have been thirty years ago. I remember, years ago, that she cried during the service. Why? The priest, a pleasant fellow, embraces me. I put the palm frond behind the clock, and my house seems truly blessed. I think of the swan, the gorilla, and other monogamous species. It does seem possible on this splendid afternoon that a man and a woman can love each other passionately until death do them part. A lovely hour in bed. Thank God, thank God, thank God, is what I say on waking. Thank God.
