by John Cheever
•
Very sticky. I am given such a harrowing glance at dinner that I am nauseated. Why can’t I bring this distemper into focus? Once, as I bent down to kiss her good night, she gave me a look of such revulsion that I felt ill. But I seem unable to bring to my feelings and my conduct as clear and strong a light as I would choose. With a disposition made up of suppurating wounds and miraculous cures, I seem unable t distinguish the force the past plays in my reactions. Am I nauseated because of something Mother did or is my nausea the reaction of a healthy man to a situation dominated by sickness? There is, of course, also the problem of drink. I clip the hedges and feel better. I watch with great interest a vulgar TV show. Waking, I ask if she would like me to meet her at the garage. Tears and hysteria.
I sit on the terrace, watching the clouds pass over, watching the night fall. What is the charm of these vaporous forms, why do they remind me of love and serenity? But look, look. There is no glass in his hand. Is it under the chair? Nope. Is it hidden in the flower bed? No, no. There is, for the moment, no glass within his reach.
•
My cruel addiction begins sometimes at five, sometimes later. Sometimes before daybreak. On waking, I want a drink. I imagine that the water glass on the table beside my bed is filled with whiskey. Sometimes there is ice, sometimes none. To entertain myself, I then take one of my imaginary girls for a trip through some city. These excursions are highly educational. In Tokyo we go both to the National Museum and the Museum of Asiatic Art. We spend several days in Luxor. I’ve not seen H. in two years, and I find her hard to summon. I’ve not seen S. for two weeks, but she is usually with me these days. We are lovers; we joke; she bakes corn bread for breakfast. All through this tourism I am aware of the glass beside my bed, filled with imaginary whiskey. Things worsen at around seven. Now I can think of nothing but the taste of whiskey. Orange juice and coffee help a little, and I sit at the table sighing as my mother used to sigh. Also my brother. I can’t remember my father sighing. I sigh and sigh. At about half past nine my hands begin to shake so that I can’t hold a paper or type correctly. At around ten I am in the pantry making my fix. Then my shaken carcass and my one-track mind are miraculously joined, and another day begins.
•
Yesterday my hands shook so that I could not type. In the morning I drank half a bottle of Courvoisier, there being nothing else in the house. In the afternoon I drank more than half a bottle of Bushmills. Early to bed without another drink, but there wasn’t much left. This morning—a brilliant day for the first time in weeks—things are bette, but I suffer from a slight psychological double vision: a melancholy at the edge of my consciousness that has no discernible imagery. It is rather like a taste. I claim there is some connection between my need for drink and my need for love of some sort, and I’m determined to put it down, however clumsily.
This may be a neurotic condition, some injury done in my childhood. The situation has gone on for many years. Mary responds periodically, but then, in the twinkling of an eye, and for no discernible reason, we enter the galls and barrens and stay there for months. I am not allowed a kiss; I am barely granted a “good morning.” This is acutely painful and is not, I think, the lot of every married man. There is the love I bear my children, but this, of course, has its limitations. The need for love is a discernible form of nausea, an intestinal pain. I cure it by imagining that I am with S., although I have not seen her for six weeks. There are three reasons here—I am older than her father, shaken with drink, and afraid of trains. Perhaps I can see her in the fall. S. is too young and Y. is too old these days. I embrace strangers until their bones crack. Thus I embraced T. in the corridor in Moscow. There is more despair than ardor in these demonstrations. I have gone away, hoping that this would improve when I returned. It sometimes does, but seldom. I have thought of taking a mistress, but they are not easy to come by, and I am timid. I claim that my timidity is exacerbated by the situation. After a particularly bitter quarrel twenty years ago I stood in the garage, sobbing for love. We have no garage here, but otherwise the situation is the same. I don’t divorce, because I am afraid to—afraid of aloneness, alcoholism, and suicide. These rooms, these lawns, and the company of my son help to keep me alive. I cannot discuss these matters without provoking a venomous attack on my memory, my intellect, my sexual organs, and my bank account. I mean, I suppose, by all of this to justify my having humped the wrong people, but in some lights—the lights of day—I seem to have had little choice.
•
S. has, I know, a farm in Vermont and so I summon this. There is snow on the ground, but the paths are shovelled. It is dark. I am leaving. This is a heartbreaking separation. She is crying. But since I’m making the whole thing up, why don’t I invent an arrival instead of a departure? I do. There is still snow on the ground; it is still dark. I come up th walk, carrying a suitcase. She greets me passionately. A fire is burning. It is I who cut the wood. We go directly upstairs, undress, and bound into bed. Then we dress and go back to the fire and have—this I’ve been waiting for—several drinks. Whiskey, I think. The conversation is about the progress I’ve made in my work. My depressions are over. I’ve come into a new way of life, a new cadence, a new enthusiasm. We go into the kitchen, and I talk about my work while she cooks calves’ liver and bacon. What do I look like? My hair is white, my abdomen is flat, my back is straight. I am sixty-five, she is twenty-eight. After dinner we drink a little more whiskey and go to bed. It is snowing. I don’t screw again, because once is all I’m up to these days. “Once is enough, darling,” says she. In the morning, of course, she makes corn bread. I go to an outbuilding, where I work serenely until past noon. When I return, I find a note saying that she has gone to the village for groceries. I have a drink, a large Martini. When she returns I help bring in the groceries. After lunch we take a loving nap. Then I drive to the village and get the mail. Checks, love letters, honors, and invitations. I shovel the walks until dark, when we have the cocktail hour. Roast beef for dinner.
•
My daughter throws up her job and follows her husband to San Francisco. This pleases me intensely. Mary is in a loving spirit, and all is meadows and groves. B12 seems to help, although, as they say, one has to help oneself. After the shot I feel that the craving has diminished, and I run upstairs with the gin bottle to show her how little I have drunk. I seem to have forgotten that there was another bottle. For at least half a day I am convinced that all my problems can be traced back to a vitamin deficiency. Now with B12 I will be able to board trains, cross bridges, drive across the country. Mary is tender and loving these days, and why speculate on the fact that this might not go on forever? I do not drink after dinner for two nights and have two mornings of feeling like a man. I do not seek it for long, but how wonderful it is to see at least a vision of wholeness, including some mountains.
•
After planning to visit A.A. for twenty years, I finally make it. The meeting is in the parish house of the Congregational church. This is new building—by that I mean that the architecture is mildly unconventional. The main room is very high-peaked, with rafters, and globe lights are suspended from long rods—a little like the traffic lights at a busy intersection. The table where we sit, however, is lighted by candles. We are fifteen or twenty, come to confess the vice of drinking. One by one we give our first names and confess to being alcoholic. But the essence of the meeting, and there must be one, escapes me. It seems neither sad nor heartening. One woman describes the neglect her children endured when she was drinking. One describes a five-day binge in which she locked herself into a room and did nothing but drink. This was after her husband, a mischief at the local parties, blew off most of his head. The man beside her describes his binge—six months. He came to in the county mental hospital. Three of the confessors have been in mental hospitals, and one of them is still a patient. I suppose he’s furloughed for the night. The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am somet
imes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink. I don’t mention my visit to the Kremlin, but this is what I mean. We stand and recite the Lord’s Prayer. I am introduced to the chairman, who responds by saying that we do not use last names. Perhaps I am imperceptive from having drunk too much, or perhaps the meeting is as dreary as I find it.
I’m not cured but I’m definitely better. At ten o’clock I still know where the bottles in the pantry are, and what they contain.
•
Another morning when I seem to see the mountains, seem at least prepared to see them. I don’t know if this is blessedness, luck, or B12. Yesterday’s fine morning was countered by an equally squalid afternoon. I don’t know why. Bad Scotch, the humidity, some chemical instability in my lights and vitals that makes the lows equal the highs.
•
I want to sleep. I seem to make the remark with some serenity. I am tired of worrying about constipation, homosexuality, alcoholism, and brooding on what a gay bar must be like. Are they filled with scented hobgoblins, girlish youths, stern beauties? I will never know. I desire women and sometimes men, but shouldn’t I exploit my sensuality rathe than lash myself until I bleed? I will never, of course, be at peace with myself, but some of these border skirmishes seem uncalled-for.
•
Vodka for breakfast. Mary mentions her mother for the third time in thirty-five years. “I wanted a Teddy bear for Christmas, and she said I was too old. She pronounced ‘doll’ with the same terribly Massachusetts accent you have.” So we are people we have never met.
I read “Moll Flanders” with diminishing interest. Mary makes and addresses cards. “I shall now take a little rest,” says she, wearily. “After that, I will decide what work to do for the rest of the afternoon.” She sacks out for two hours. The afternoon is gone. She walks the dog, feeds the horse, and cooks a good dinner, but the atmosphere, so far as I’m concerned, is lethal. Now and then I lie down with what seems like an emotional fatigue, ready for the next round. I watch TV with Federico to distract myself, to enjoy his company, to stay away from the bottle, and to allay the peculiar stillness of this place.
•
I think of the ruses and maneuvers I have used to stay away from the bottle. I have painted the kitchen. I have painted the porch. I have painted a bedroom. I have raked leaves on a windy day, scythed a field, sat in the balconies of movie theatres watching bad pictures, watched TV, walked, cut grass, cut and split wood, made telephone calls, taken massive shots of vitamins and three kinds of tranquillizers, but the singing of the bottles in the pantry is still seductive.
•
I wake with a bleeding nose and think that the Godhead is continence, common sense, and work. I wish I could harness, channel, and exploit the love I feel for my son into industriousness and temperance. I remember walking the road in Saratoga on a winter night, thrilled by my conviction in the Divinity.
•
The gin bottle, the gin bottle. This is painful to record. The gin bottle is empty. I go to the post office and stay away from the gin shop. “If you drink you’ll kill yourself,” says my son. His eyes are filled wit tears. “Listen,” say I. “If I thought it would benefit you I’d jump off a ten-story building.” He doesn’t want that, and there isn’t a ten-story building in the village. I drive up the hill to get the mail and make a detour to the gin store. I hide the bottle under the car seat. We swim, and I wonder how I will get the bottle from the car to the house. I read while brooding on this problem. When I think that my beloved son has gone upstairs, I hide the bottle by the side of the house and lace my iced tea. He practices his driving in a neighborhood I’ve never seen before. These are the hills above the river. The houses are, without exception, small, and close together, and are, without exception, neatly painted and maintained with conspicuous love. Even the wax tulips in the window boxes, the parched lawns, seem produced, tended, and enjoyed with a deep sense of love. Children play games in the street. There is a shrillness to their voices, which seems to heighten as it grows dark. People sit on their porches watching the end of the day—a much more civilizing performance than the double feature at the drive-in, which costs two dollars anyhow. They call on one another wearing yesterday’s clothes, torn slippers—the recognizable costumes for this time of day. “From the way the children scream,” says Federico, “you’d think I’d run them down.” So we drive back in time to turn on the car lights. I watch a Greta Garbo movie with wonderful dramatic situations, confrontations of greed and lust, and in the end this woman, whose beauty has been cataclysmic, is a streetwalker, her brain addled with Pernod. All this because of a broken heart. Indeed, she sees the man for love of whom she has been destroyed cheered by crowds. He offers to help her but she seems not to recognize him, and when he has left she mistakes a bum in the café for Jesus Christ and gives him her last souvenir of love, a ruby ring. This is the color of blood, the caption reads. You died for love. There is no walkaway shot, no rain at all. We go out on the bum discovering that the ruby is genuine. Here is a grand passion—romantic and erotic love shaping a life—and am I wrong in thinking that such passions are no longer among us?
•
The sun shines, and I feel much better. Yesterday, overcast until five, was a bummer. I am, between the hours of eight and six, the only man on these crowded streets who has short hair. At six or a little later, four or five other shorthairs appear. What do they represent? The youn seem to be clerks, tellers. The others are middle-aged and have their hair cut as it has always been cut. In the restaurant there is a man with a shaven head, dressed completely in finished black leather. On the street I glimpse a man in jeans who appears to be cruising. At the table on my right is a family. The woman must have been pretty and is pretty no more, but she carries herself well and has her self-possession. He is perhaps fifty, and there is no trace of what he must have been as a young man. They order a moderately priced meal. They have either agreed or been taught not to ask for the filet mignon. Spaghetti and meatballs; the tuna-fish casserole. They say almost nothing to each other during the meal, but they seem not in the least uncomfortable. The daughter is pretty, but I can’t see the fourth member, the son, until they leave the table, and when they do leave I see a cruelly crippled spastic whose smile is broad and maybe convulsive or maybe genuine. Make him twenty. Many of the other customers are women with children. Does Daddy teach a seven-o’clock class? On my walk back, I see that some of the classrooms are lighted. On the steps of the old state capitol a man plays a guitar. Beside him is an empty milk container. Two young men with their arms around each other frisk off to the East. Gay Liberation is electing its officers at the other end of town. Do they have a president, a secretary, and a treasurer? But on this late summer night (hundreds of women walking out to the parking lot, leaving the movies, opening the bedroom windows, will say that it smells like autumn), the rightness of men and women seems invincible, seems affirmed by the neon light over the billiard hall, the music from an open door, the stars, the elms, the moon, the river. There seems on this night, at this hour, no possibility, no excuse for those spatial loves moved by mysterious seismographic shifts from the past. Tonight, no men lie in one another’s arms.
•
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.
•
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.
