The Journals of John Cheever

by John Cheever

  •

  I call A. because he’s the person whose arrival I most look forward to. He wears a pink tweed with a flower in the lapel. He tells me abou a woman who, during a lunch party, took off a shoe and caressed his genitals with her foot. He is not only homosexual; it seems a profession that takes up much of his time. He tells me that when he does his gymnastics, naked, a man—married, of course, and a father—watches him through a crack in the window shade. I dislike this tale. He seems to esteem his beauty.

  •

  A brilliant day after the storm. I lunch, joke with Federico, walk the dogs over the little hill. It is bitterly cold in the wind. The light is going. There have been two phone calls in my absence, one anonymous, and I assume it is A. There seems no way of tempering the absurdity of this train of thought. He is probably being zipped into an evening dress by an unemployed photographer’s model. They are both giggling, and what else they are doing I do not choose to describe.

  •

  The last day of the old year, and I mostly want out; I don’t know how to work it geographically or financially. My face is flushed with drink; I have lost either my patience or my understanding and have damaged my self-respect. We’re back in the old and, I think, despicable routines. Federico and I watch a detective show with the old dog upstairs. Mary watches an English drama in the kitchen.

  •

  I don’t seem to want to write anything but love letters. S. comes, and we walk over the hill, which lightens my aloneness, but at dark or a little later I feel a need for love that has the force of nausea. Jokes, talk, games, are not enough. I want the sensation of love. Mercifully, we get out of the house and go to a movie, where I feel better. Up at seven to try to get gas. All the stations are unlighted and closed. There is no letter from A., and I wait for the mail.

  •

  My instability or iridescence rises to new heights. I want to write on a sheet of paper, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” A hundred times, a thousand times. This is all aimed at the wrong customer. I will telephone. I refuse to sublimate or repress a passion under the assumption that I am discovering a truth. “The scales fell from her eyes,” they say at the end of an infatuation that was socially unacceptable. The idea, of course, is that society is invincible, ordained, the very word of God, and if you pervert your erotic drives you make a substantial contribution to the commonwealth. I will telephone, I will telephone, etc. Scotch calms me down. I read notes for “The Art of Fiction.” E. comes over. He is having a happy romance with a fifty-nine-year-old widow who works as a guide at one of the restorations around here. We take a trip to Lyndhurst and stop by Dudley’s for a sandwich and a drink. The old cook is cleaning mirrors. He is gay but stripped of all his lures, really ugly. This must be difficult for an erotic cult that counts so on beauty. He does have pretty dishwashers. No word from A.; as I might say, Can’t you take his cock out of your mouth long enough to write a postcard? This could be the truth.

  •

  Snow begins to fall early in the afternoon. Sometime after dusk it seems that the oil burner is gone. My car won’t start and is very soon buried. The night is cold, and even under a pile of blankets I feel the chill of the house. My heartbeat is then accelerated. I arrange to have the drive plowed so that the repair truck can reach here. I light a fire in the dining room and close the doors. The room becomes habitable but very smoky. The rooms upstairs are dark and cold. Mary speaks of the nostalgia of old rooms. I am reminded of the farm, but my memories are not pleasant. Those cold, dark rooms where my father lived. Tomorrow I leave for Iowa. My reveries are ribald and cozy. My facts, on this snowy day, are very bleak. I think A. will be in New Orleans, and I rather wish this so.

  •

  I drink a Martini before the morning star is set. Half asleep, I see Mary’s face at its loveliest, and this is a pleasure. The images are like photographs in an album: closeup, long shot. I see her standing below me on the drive. I’ve loved her very much and I like this recollection. I wake for the first time in a month without a hard-on. I think that what I’m doing I have to do, and I hope I do it with the least injury to Mary and whoever else is involved. I cannot live without sentiment, humor, and carnal love.

  •

  The day is very warm and beautiful. Crocuses in bloom. Mary suggests that we take a walk together. She has not done this in a long time, I mean ten years. My dearly beloved son comes in the middle of dinner to ask for money. He has not come to the house in two years for any other reason. I can hear his wife say, “Go over and ask your father for some money.” I’ve loved him; I’ve wanted him to marry and love and be loved as he has. I wanted him to have a son and to leave my domination; but now I feel that he is dominated by his wife. I wish he wouldn’t always ask me for money. I wish I didn’t know that he was ordered, commanded, to ask for money. One’s children grow away from one.

  The heating plant is working and my intestinal, sexual, and intellectual tracts are cleared. I must work. I call L. and get a hard-on but I don’t say so. I split some wood, very little, but I must do this more often. I find it very pleasant. I think of girls: S. eating a candy bar in the parking lot of a supermarket; P. unpacking her own bed linen. I write an advertisement for The New York Review of Books: “Revolting, elderly, alcoholic novelist desires meaningful relationship with 24-year-old aristocratic North Carolinian with supple form and baroque biceps. Little gay experience but ready learner. Etc.” I can’t remember A. at all, and I rather regret this.

  •

  Toward dark I decide to call A. No one answers the first time. He is there a half hour later. “Hello, John Cheever,” he says. The voice seems less resolute than I remember. The edge, the vigor one listens for in a man’s voice is not here. Complacency is its worst quality. “I missed you at Mardi Gras,” he says. “You would have loved it. I danced in the streets for eight hours, and then I put on white tie and danced at the Comus Ball until dawn.” I have never seen him dance and imagine him to be a little ungainly. His back is too long. I feel estranged and think that to fall in love with such a man would be a guarantee of anguish and pain. He would come home late; he would not come home at all. He would put off my passionate advances with a tap on the wrist. How one would long for a woman, even a shrew.

  •

  And I think of L. in the morning, the lovely unfreshness of her skin. It was the light scent of a young woman who has made love and slept through one more night of her life. Her breasts are the fields and streams of my paradise. Her skin is warm and fine and young, and I mount her, but in our nearness I am keenly aware of the totality of our alienation. I really know nothing about her. We have told each other the stories of our lives—meals, summer vacations, lovers, trips, clothing, and yet if she stood at a crossroads I would have no idea of the way she would take. It is in loving her that I feel mostly our strangeness.

  •

  On Valium for two days running, and I do feel very peculiar, but it’s better, God knows, than sauce. I do not want to return to a strait-jacket with six padlocks. A.’s letters, full of descriptions of flowers, give me a pain in the ass, perhaps because they are not throbbing with declarations of love. He may be very tactfully and intelligently hinting at the fact that there is no possibility of a relationship between us—a relationship of any sort. I somehow think that we will not meet when he comes East. Sometimes this possibility breaks my heart. Sometimes it doesn’t. I have a dozen letters to write, but I seem unable to write anything this morning.

  •

  I think that Valium has a debilitating effect. Walking in the woods, I am suddenly very tired, very tired.

  •

  On Tuesday I go to the psychiatrist, an amiable young man, but I think he speaks in Freudian clichés. I think my problems enforce my drinking. He claims I invent my problems to justify my drinking. I spent most of yesterday morning going over last year’s journal with the idea of giving it to him as an ultimate confession. A. promised to shower me with cards. No cards arrive. I c
annot set this friendship in a pestilential Venetian twilight and conclude, as he walks away from me, that what I have discovered is my time of life. The only acceptable message I can arrive at is that our relationship illuminates his untimely youthfulness. Walking in the woods, I would like to see him; someone like him. I short, I am lascivious. This is inflamed by drink and catnaps. The dogwood petals are falling, and the flowers from the tulip tree. Highly sexual.

  •

  A. sends on a record (Walton-Sitwell) and a note. “For what it’s worth, for all my clumsiness and falterings, I love you.” To admit that I love and desire him is extremely painful and difficult for me, but once I have made the admission I seem to find it relaxing. I love him very much, at least I do this morning. I love him very much and am happy to say so.

  •

  A bummer; not really bad, but not good. The director speaks three times: an exceptional man. At breakfast I am asked not to sit at a particular table. We do not play musical chairs around here, says an authoritative woman of perhaps forty, a little heavy. Her hair is neatly and recently dressed, she wears a small string of pearls, and shoes that look like a man’s dancing pumps. She represents the club, that little band that exists by closing its membership. Since there was such a group in a line-riflery company, I shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a place like this.

  •

  I try to find some opening for my work. I don’t want the escutcheon and the night of the cats. I don’t seem able to exploit my knowledge of aloneness and confinement. I can do the hustler, leaving out anything compromising, and ending with the morgue, but the only perception is the clairvoyance of the hustler; that is, his perfect lawlessness. There is no point in my leaving here until my work is in line.

  •

  The reform of alcoholics. This will be for a month, and I trust that I can make it. We lunch on meat and rice and Jell-O, and attend a lecture. A personable young lady lectures quite simply on attitudes, but she does mention alcohol as a source of phobias. I could follow this one. Three empty hours lie ahead of us. The magnificent mansions that have outlived their usefulness, their owners, and their incomes have becom fortuitous. The bathroom is paved with mirrors, but who really cares? The room is vast, the reliefs of plaster cherubini with garlands of fruit and flowers.

  •

  During group analysis a young man talks about his bisexuality and is declared by everyone in the group but me to be a phony. I perhaps should have said that if it is phony to have anxieties about bisexuality I must declare myself a phony.

  •

  Fifth day. I think my drinking is of secondary importance. Then I watch a TV show, and the banality of this performance arouses my thirst more keenly than anything else so far. The director, toward whom I have some complicated vibrations, says that a healthy person can adjust to acceptable social norms. The banality of a TV show, certainly acceptable, is what makes me want to drink.

  •

  The woman in “The Visit” (not Mrs. Loomis) would ask of the others in the visiting room, “How can you get along with this sort of people?” Sixth day. My stomach is unsettled.

  My stomach squared away at 3 A.M., and I feel much better. Mary calls to say that if I don’t like it here she’s found a marvellous place in Connecticut two and a half hours from New York. A new tenant joins us. He’s not been detoxed, which is against the rules of the game. He has no bags, nothing but a pair of slippers for the bathroom. He looks like an archetypal loser, a goner, a dead one. It is crowding half past two, and I am uneasy. My insight into incarceration seems to have been bypassed. The balance here was all right—pleasant at times—but it seems broken by the arrival of the stray.

  •

  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.

  •

  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 go
od 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.